I’m not going to sit here and tell you I know exactly what’s going on with the plot.  I think Tony really was shot.  And the scenes in Orange County were a coma dream.  Loved all the family stuff, especially with A.J.  It always seems that somebody runs the family and somebody is left out.  Somebody’s an angel and somebody’s a fuck-up.  Somebody feels on the pulse, somebody else is completely out of touch.  Can’t say I haven’t felt I’ve been on the losing side of that equation.  But what stunned me last night, what I wasn’t fully prepared for, was the MUSIC!

In order to make Tony better the doctor said to play him some of his favorite music.  Didn’t even register with me.  They’d play some Frank, some middle of the road crap, that’s how TV is.  They either play stuff completely out of touch or stuff so new that a label or music supervisor insists upon that doesn’t resonate AT ALL!  But when Carmela inserted a CD into the boombox Christopher had purchased, what came out of those speakers was legendary.  Not hip.  Not passe.  But what probably truly WAS Tony’s favorite record.

And you wonder why the classic rockers can still tour.

My only complaint was it was the studio version.  And everybody knows it was the live take, from "Made In Japan", that burned up the airwaves in the summer of ’73.  You can tell the difference by the little changes in the intro riff played by Ritchie Blackmore.  He throws in a little change that HOOKS you.  And then there’s the ENERGY!  Oh, the studio take of "Smoke On The Water" is great, but the live version is SPECTACULAR!  Simple, yet so POWERFUL!

It’s this tiny little Sony boombox that doesn’t appear to have enough power to broadcast Norah Jones to the other side of the room.  I wasn’t expecting it.  But then it began.  A riff more famous than "Purple Haze".  The pure essence of rock and roll.

We all came out to Montreux
On the Lake Geneva shoreline
To make records with a mobile
We didn’t have much time
Frank Zappa and the Mothers were at the best place around
But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground

There are fiftysomethings with 4,000 square feet and Benzes in the driveway who can recite EVERY WORD!  This song, this MUSIC, means more than all of their accoutrements.  It’s IN THEIR DNA!

Oh, I knew "Hush".  But at this point, I was deeply into Frank.  I was listening to "Peaches En Regalia".  But the VERY FIRST TIME I HEARD SMOKE ON THE WATER ON THE RADIO, in my hand-me-down ’63 Chevy convertible, I was ENRAPTURED.

And they didn’t overdo it.  It wasn’t a Cameron Crowe movie.  With endless famous tracks illustrating how connected the filmmakers were.  So I wasn’t expecting the other surprise.  "American Girl".

Sure, Tom Petty ripped off the sound from Roger McGuinn.  But I wish today’s rockers would rip off the masters of yore.  Still, that guitar didn’t sound so much like theft as an HOMAGE, to a time when we were still ALIVE!

I don’t know how Tom Petty does it.  So simply, yet so right.

I have no illusion hanging with Tom I’d connect, his background seems so different, his speech is so laconic, but when he’s singing he seems to be coming from EXACTLY THE SAME PLACE!  Maybe we were all coming from the same place.  One of both disillusionment and hope.  Deep Purple and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers were not from the first wave, they were not contemporaries of the Beatles.  They were SEVENTIES ACTS!  That decade has been reviled, but that’s the music of Tony Soprano’s generation, when AOR ruled.

Carmela pushes the button on "American Girl" and waxes rhapsodic how that track was playing all weekend that summer at the beach, when Tony rescued Charmaine in the surf, when she tugged on his hair, when he still had hair.

The music brought it all back.  Music that was an integral part of our lives.  Emanating out of Camaros.  Vegas even.  The radio rode shotgun, it kept us alive.

And just maybe, this music will keep Tony Soprano alive.  We’ll have to watch and see.