Driving long distance maybe fifteen years ago, i'm getting sporadic reception of CBC radio, it comes in clear at a point where they have some musician type explaining various things about opera and its composers, music, etc ... CBC always had lots of classical music programmes, so much that to demonstrate an eclectic flavour they named one Definitely Not The Opera .... you'd get people grinding on for an hour about what Beethoven did/thought during a specific week in 1813, stuff like that, sometimes interesting, sometimes not ..... but this guy was good, interviewer couldn't get a question in edgeways, he just motor-mouthed on with the most fascinating details on relationships between styles of music and between musicians of various epochs, positively zippy, for one thing he showed the 300-year old aria from an italian opera in a sobby 50s country song, maybe a Hank Williams, can't recall, but just up and sang bits of them both, alternating back and forth, this was no recording, and he stopped in the middle of one just long enough to explain what 'aria' meant, well enough that i remembered it for maybe a year, which is something, and then he slipped straight back into the song, no music, pure voice only, and he sang it like he knew how, and made it very beautiful too, this was quality stuff .... and all through this, he is breaking back into prose, telling great stories on musicians but without names of the living ones, sense of humour combined with sense of honour, or sense of survival maybe .... his main proposition was that 60s and 70s rock stars were not near the bad boys that 1700s composers had been, and he supported it well ... and he's still breaking into bits of old italian music, german, french, Pink Floyd, whatever ..... anyway, the half-hour is over pretty quick, and the interviewer pretty much has to shut his mike off, you can tell, and you can see him shaking his head in wonder as he says well folks, this has been CBC radio and you getting talked/sung at by -
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Meatloaf
... before this i never knew of the man really, just knew a couple of songs and thought his nick amusing, but now i would go out of my way to see him live |
