The last year has been a sad one in music. Amy Winehouse, Bert Jansch, Andrea True, Keef Hartley, Don Cornelius, Whitney Houston, Ronnie Montrose, Dick Clark, Levon Helm, Donald Dunn, Adam “MCA” Yauch, Donna Summer and now Robin Gibb have passed away. It is truly sad to lose these great talents, but sadder yet is to see persons that have helped write the soundtrack to your life to be silenced forever.
Forever? …not really – we have their music and video, now digitized, to keep with us, however sappy that may sound. For me, however, it’s not their passage that bothers me, but it’s the passage of something more tangible, my life. Each death is like minutes of the clock, ticking by one soul at a time.
I caught my father, shortly before his death, crying at the passing of a singer named Marion Hutton of the Modernaires. The Modernaires were the featured vocal group of the Glenn Miller Band for many years. On that day, my dad, played records that featured her beautiful, sassy voice. I remembered him, through his tears, muttered several times something about “memories and lost time”. I’ve always regarded that phase as the rant of a sad, old man, but it has just now occurred to me what he had been talking about all along. It not so much that she represented his youth, but that, perhaps, that music and living are so intertwined, that you cannot have one without the other.
So, goodbye Robin Gibb, you’re voice will always be with us as we carry on with this thing called life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBMriOspUvA
