I’m not going to sit here and tell you I know exactly what’s going on with the plot.\u00c2\u00a0 I think Tony really was shot.\u00c2\u00a0 And the scenes in Orange County were a coma dream.\u00c2\u00a0 Loved all the family stuff, especially with A.J.\u00c2\u00a0 It always seems that somebody runs the family and somebody is left out.\u00c2\u00a0 Somebody’s an angel and somebody’s a fuck-up.\u00c2\u00a0 Somebody feels on the pulse, somebody else is completely out of touch.\u00c2\u00a0 Can’t say I haven’t felt I’ve been on the losing side of that equation.\u00c2\u00a0 But what stunned me last night, what I wasn’t fully prepared for, was the MUSIC!<\/p>\n
In order to make Tony better the doctor said to play him some of his favorite music.\u00c2\u00a0 Didn’t even register with me.\u00c2\u00a0 They’d play some Frank, some middle of the road crap, that’s how TV is.\u00c2\u00a0 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!\u00c2\u00a0 But when Carmela inserted a CD into the boombox Christopher had purchased, what came out of those speakers was legendary.\u00c2\u00a0 Not hip.\u00c2\u00a0 Not passe.\u00c2\u00a0 But what probably truly WAS Tony’s favorite record.<\/p>\n
And you wonder why the classic rockers can still tour.<\/p>\n
My only complaint was it was the studio version.\u00c2\u00a0 And everybody knows it was the live take, from "Made In Japan", that burned up the airwaves in the summer of ’73.\u00c2\u00a0 You can tell the difference by the little changes in the intro riff played by Ritchie Blackmore.\u00c2\u00a0 He throws in a little change that HOOKS you.\u00c2\u00a0 And then there’s the ENERGY!\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, the studio take of "Smoke On The Water" is great, but the live version is SPECTACULAR!\u00c2\u00a0 Simple, yet so POWERFUL!<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 I wasn’t expecting it.\u00c2\u00a0 But then it began.\u00c2\u00a0 A riff more famous than "Purple Haze".\u00c2\u00a0 The pure essence of rock and roll.<\/p>\n
We all came out to Montreux There are fiftysomethings with 4,000 square feet and Benzes in the driveway who can recite EVERY WORD!\u00c2\u00a0 This song, this MUSIC, means more than all of their accoutrements.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s IN THEIR DNA!<\/p>\n Oh, I knew "Hush".\u00c2\u00a0 But at this point, I was deeply into Frank.\u00c2\u00a0 I was listening to "Peaches En Regalia".\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n And they didn’t overdo it.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t a Cameron Crowe movie.\u00c2\u00a0 With endless famous tracks illustrating how connected the filmmakers were.\u00c2\u00a0 So I wasn’t expecting the other surprise.\u00c2\u00a0 "American Girl".<\/p>\n Sure, Tom Petty ripped off the sound from Roger McGuinn.\u00c2\u00a0 But I wish today’s rockers would rip off the masters of yore.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, that guitar didn’t sound so much like theft as an HOMAGE, to a time when we were still ALIVE!<\/p>\n I don’t know how Tom Petty does it.\u00c2\u00a0 So simply, yet so right.<\/p>\n 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!\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we were all coming from the same place.\u00c2\u00a0 One of both disillusionment and hope.\u00c2\u00a0 Deep Purple and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers were not from the first wave, they were not contemporaries of the Beatles.\u00c2\u00a0 They were SEVENTIES ACTS!\u00c2\u00a0 That decade has been reviled, but that’s the music of Tony Soprano’s generation, when AOR ruled.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The music brought it all back.\u00c2\u00a0 Music that was an integral part of our lives.\u00c2\u00a0 Emanating out of Camaros.\u00c2\u00a0 Vegas even.\u00c2\u00a0 The radio rode shotgun, it kept us alive.<\/p>\n And just maybe, this music will keep Tony Soprano alive.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ll have to watch and see.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not going to sit here and tell you I know exactly what’s going on with the plot.\u00c2\u00a0 I think Tony really was shot.\u00c2\u00a0 And the scenes in Orange County were a coma dream.\u00c2\u00a0 Loved all the family stuff, especially with A.J.\u00c2\u00a0 It always seems that somebody runs the family and somebody is left out.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-5S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/em><\/p>\n