Three Beautiful Things 03-10-2024: Recharging My Energy, Songs of Bill Davie, Post-Concert Trance

1. I treasure the time I spend in big cities whenever I get the chance to pay one a visit. That said, I also have a limited amount of energy to spend driving, riding, walking, gawking, drinking, dining, and enjoying the amenities of, say, Seattle, and I used up quite a bit of that energy on Saturday -- I was out and about for over twelve glorious hours!

So this morning, I poured myself one cup of coffee after another, worked on word puzzles, ate the generous portion of the Taste of Africa dish I didn't eat last night (it was a terrific breakfast), lounged around and got cleaned up.

I recharged my batteries. I got refreshed. I slowed things way down.

2. The primary reason I made this trip to Seattle was so I could attend a benefit concert to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Bill Davie and I have a long friendship, extending all the way back to 1977 and over these years I've heard him perform his songs in multiple venues in Washington and Oregon, hosted two of his concerts in my home in Eugene, and I tuned in Tuesday evenings when he was able to perform online -- you might remember his Treehouse Concerts.

Bill has had MS for about ten years. He can no longer play the guitar. 

One of his fellow musicians, Mike Buchman, had a brilliant idea. 

To keep Bill's music alive and to raise money for the MS Society, he organized the concert I attended today. It featured twenty musicians, all longtime friends and acquaintances of Bill's (oh! and one duo featured his nephews), each performing one of Bill's songs. The concert ended with the entire company of musicians joining together, with Bill singing lead, to get the audience to sing along and perform Bill's song, "Where Will We Go?"

The concert stirred and moved me. I marveled, not only at the superb performances, but at Bill's mind boggling range of songs, the vast variety of rhythms, moods, explorations, styles, and insights that drive his catalog. Bill's songs can be tender, loving, surrealistic, pointed, funny, and fun. They are expertly crafted, full of surprises, and always engaging. 

I'm writing this blog post on Monday evening. 

Earlier today I drove back to Kellogg from Seattle and the long stretches of I-90 helped stretch my mind.

My mind wandered back to the spring of 1974. I was enrolled in a Modern Literature course at North Idaho College. We'd been assigned to read poems by W. B. Yeats.

Yeats visited me today somewhere, say, where Moses Lake is, and he kept repeating to me his two lines at the end of his poem, "Among School Children":

        O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

        How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I suddenly realized that for the over forty years that I've been listening to Bill Davie perform, Bill and his songs were unified to me. He was his songs. His songs were Bill. For me, the way his hands moved, the way his songs took over his body, his facial expressions, his stories, wise cracks as a performer, were all inseparable from his songs. How could I know the singer from the song? I couldn't. Bill the singer and Bill's songs formed a unity.

This afternoon that unity did not exist. 

I heard Bill's songs, but not Bill the singer, the performer.

It was a profound experience. 

The songs suddenly had a new life, infused with the power of other singers and players, and every one of those songs vibrated with fresh vitality and vigor.

Yes, I missed being able to watch Bill perform them. I love witnessing the unity of singer/writer and song.

But without Bill to animate those songs, hearing those songs performed by twenty other musicians, gave me an even deeper sense of how strong Bill's songs are, that other dancers can dance them, other singers sing them, and his songs' power drives these other performers to convey their brilliance in ways I hadn't imagined before. 

3. After this stirring and moving two hours or so of absorbing Bill's songs, I wanted time to myself. Peter and Kris, two longtime friends from Whitworth whom I got to sit with during the concert, had other engagements that evening.  I was content to leave the concert hall, wind my way through the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Tunnel, across the West Seattle Bridge, and back to my room to relax, stare, think, remember, feel gratitude, rest, and let the beauty and emotions of what I'd just experienced wash over me, trusting that I was not alone, somehow knowing that the performers and the other 150 people in the audience today were, no doubt, in their own ways, also in some kind of trance along with me.