Listening My Way Through

On the magic of listening, spending an early summer night with Paul Simon, obnoxiousness and trying to transcend through music

Every once in a while, I like to write a more personal essay about some aspect of music: collecting it, listening to it, loving it, for three examples. The below combines these aspects in a kind of meandering way but I like the idea of letting my thoughts play out in the paragraphs and telling a bit of where my head is at.

I hope you enjoy it and find it interesting, and that you’ll also share your thoughts on it.

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Listening My Way Through
By: Robert C. Gilbert

I guess you could say that I have a good memory. Numbers, dates, melodies and lyrics take up substantial real estate in this noggin of mine. It’s part of a life of the mind, engaging and indulging the natural curiousity while fighting against complacency. Of course, music is the primary focus here but it can also be found in my to-be-read pile that consistently hovers around 60 books, reading the newspaper (sometimes more than one) each day and always trying to keep on top on the Substack publications I am subscribed to.

Substack wasn’t an ongoing concern five years ago and books only became an obsession about 15 years ago. Movies have been on-again, off-again for decades and newspapers have been a daily companion well back before the start of the millennium. Music, of course, has been around the very start of this existence.

There is something to be said in acknowledging that the sounds that were heard when one was young are often the ones that remain favourites throughout life. It checks out for me. Everything about music when I was young seemed to be writ large. The album covers which pictured what to expect of the music, the back covers which provided an alternate visual motif, sometimes bursting with information about its contents or simply including another picture or pictures to savour.

The relay of the music from the grooves of my father’s vinyl records to the stylus travelling through the tonearm to the turntable cable connected to the amplifier going through wires branching out to the speakers seemed to manifest a sound that as I try to recall it was vivid and alive. Earth-shaking really and the spark for, as I wrote last year, what I call my search for “pure sound.”

But that was only part of it. There was also that the size of my father’s record collection was (and still is) modest—about 100 LPs or so—which meant that there was repetition to our listening. Albums like Elvis Presley’s Elvis is Back!, Gordon Lightfoot’s Cold on the Shoulder and The Mills Brothers’ Great Hits became part of the daily soundtrack.

They weren’t just albums but artworks to study and understand deeply, not only in what the relationship of the music could be to me but figuring out how it worked, what made it click, why it was good or to adopt the terminology of Robert M. Persig, why it had quality.

I suppose it is inevitable that the vividness of youthful experience dulls with age, not neccessarily the memory of it but as the same experience plays out in present day.

For me, it could be that much of my listening done during the day—especially workdays—is through streaming on my phone and that in the evening, as I hunker down in my record room to play albums, growing tiredness leads to my tinnitus acting up even as I have gotten used to that white-noise hum.

That doesn’t diminish the drive to gulp down music, new and old that is new at least to me as well as the vast compendium of my collection, but it leads, at times, to despair when what I am hearing just floats by.

That happens. Not every piece of music sets one’s heart aflame or leads to deep revelation or to the opening of a new door to musical consciousness but when it doesn’t, is it a fault of the musician or musicians or is the fault mine?

I wonder sometimes if it is the latter. Much of my listening is done while I am working or writing or reading—another hobby where I feel the demand to dedicate as much time as possible. I am not a fan of silence, especially as it is an unwelcome invitation to the hiss of my tinnitus to take centre stage. Of course, listening to music is what led me to get tinnitus in the first place.

The rather cramped, shambolic milieu of my record room.

The question then becomes whether all of this listening is purposeless. Does the need to blanket the full day with music render it all about as rote as brushing one’s teeth each day—it happens at some point but there is nothing about the act that distinguishes one instance from the other, leaving no imprint of it ever having taken place.

I don’t think this. At all. But with a collection that is many, many times bigger than my father’s, there are crate-loads of recordings that I only become familiar with in a cursory way.

Streaming is this amnesic consumption on an industrial scale. The ease of going from one album or song to another, skipping whenever one gets bored or restless, reduces music listening to scrolling from one TikTok video to another and then another, numbing the brain in the process.

At the very least, owning something connotes an intention to strive to engage on a deeper level with a piece of music even if that may take place at some amorphous time at the future.

A counterculture has been growing around the ownership of physical media, the reality sinking in that anything available on streaming services could be taken away at any time without warning. A growing exasperation with AI slop anytime, anywhere is surely a factor too. Streaming is, yes, kind of evil but it’s also, you know, fun. Creating playlists. Playing fast and loose with the accepted rules of genre and what music belongs together. The portability of favourite songs and albums so that walking becomes an opportunity to create impromptu montages that transforms everyday life into cinema.

It can be a way to further music appreciation but here, it helps to have the foundation that only a lovingly crafted and selected record collection can provide.

I’ve been wondering about this in the days after taking in Paul Simon’s return to Toronto as part of his ongoing A Quiet Celebration tour—I wrote about catching one of his three Massey Hall shows when he swung past TO last year. This time he was at the RBC Amphitheatre along the shore of Lake Ontario.

Taken while reading and waiting to hear Paul Simon on an early summer’s evening.

I went solo. I talked to a gregarious gentleman who walked by as I was reading a book to pass the time before the show started. As he returned to his seat, both of his hands full of refreshments, he wanted to know more about what I was reading: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. When I shared how much I liked it, he took out his phone to take a quick shot of the cover. I hope he gets a copy to read it himself. He, in turn, recommended to me the mysteries of Jørn Lier Horst which I hope to check out.

What a pleasant, unexpected moment of mutual cultural discovery. That doesn’t happen a lot or, at least, not to me, particularly when I am out and about. It’s more like the banter that started once a group of hipsters, all mustached and full of opinions, took their seats behind me. They opined that Pet Sounds isn’t all it is cracked up to be and not as good as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

I may be inclined to agree here but then the talk turned to singling out a skippable song on the former which, when none was forthcoming, turned to the latter where the answer offered was ‘Mean Mr. Mustard,’ a bad omen as the evening unfolded.

As with last year, the first part of the Simon concert was dedicated to Seven Psalms, his philosophical song cycle on God, life and the meaning of it, and facing its end. Pretty heady stuff for those at an outdoor venue on one of the first evenings of summer. Concertgoers were still arriving when Simon began and it is uncertain how many were expecting to be first presented with a spiritual work.

It was hard not to feel dismayed as many choose to go grab a bite or a brew or silently count down—Simon had begun the show by announcing that Seven Psalms was a 33-minute work—until there was the chance to hear a hit. The hipsters behind me, at the very least, conceded that ‘The Lord,’ the opening psalm, was worth hearing but it would have been preferable if they would have let everyone around them decide that for themselves.

At Massey Hall last year, the dictate was that if you wanted to leave during Seven Psalms you could but that you wouldn’t be allowed back in the hall until intermission. At the Amphitheatre, that wasn’t possible but there should have at least been the suggestion for everyone to sit and take in the work.

Simon is now 84, his voice a little shakier than it was last year but no one else from the sixties explosion has been more resolute to not coast on past triumphs or to continually interrogate what he wants to sing and how he wishes to express that in song and music. That’s all to say that attention should have been given by all as he offered Seven Psalms, a work I like more each time I hear it.

Some hits did come in the show’s second half as did obnoxious behaviour as one of the hipsters decided to sing the refrain from ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’ with exaggerated bravado and roll on the last syllable of “slidin’” each time it came up in the performance. He spoiled portions of the setlist, including announcing Simon would sing ‘Homeward Bound’ next, nattered on about Johnny Ace during the show’s highlight ‘The Late Great Johnny Ace,’ Simon’s tribute to three Johns: Ace, Kennedy and Lennon, and mistook an affecting version of ‘Father and Daughter’ from Surprise for ‘St. Judy’s Comet’ from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon and as a final act, lustily sang on the show closer, ‘The Sound of Silence,’ ensuring that the tone deafness on display was both figurative and literal.

By then, I had moved to the railing in between the first and second set of seats and cupped both hands to my ears toward Simon so I could hear each word as he sang them.

Why harp on these things? Good question. I believe in live and let live but still, music is a sacred thing and while I believe that enjoyment should be expressed in a broad, ecstatic way, there’s a difference between what one does in the comfort of one’s home and when one is surrounded by thousands of other people.

The hope with the latter is that everyone spontaneously joins together, conscious of the specialness of the moment, to express a feeling of oneness. It may not have been there during the Paul Simon show but it was definitely there 14 years earlier when I was at the same venue, then called the Budweiser Stage (corporate sponsorship never goes out of style), for the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour as all lustfully joined in on the chorus of ‘Help Me Rhonda.’

That was music that was also foundational when I was young and I began to collect albums. As my collection grew exponentially the older I got and the more disposable income I had, the chance to truly understand each recording got slimmer.

The compulsion to collect has led me to adopt some rules to guide my listening: no more than one recording by an artist on any given day and after three to four listens to a new recording, I wouldn’t revisit it for about a year. Part of that was to keep up with what I was buying but part of it was also the fear that familiarity would dull that jolt of electricity when hearing something really good.

There was a kind of perverse joy in letting years or even decades (oof!) lapse and not listening to an album. Not it all seems a bit silly as do some of the rules I followed for so long.

Is the purpose of listening to music to attain and sustain pleasure, to educate oneself, to challenge one’s definition of music in the hopes of continually broadening it, something else or a combination of a whole bunch of different things?

I think there are many reasons to do so but the ultimate reason has to be pleasure. It should feel good. And if that means hearing certain albums or artists more than others, sometimes to the point of obsession, is that cause for shame or an admission of weakness?

The answer to the question is no. My recent need to cling to familiar, favourite music has been partly the result of exploring Madfish’s box set of almost everything that Laura Nyro recorded and emerging an even bigger fan of hers that I was just months earlier and I was already a devoted disciple of Laura’s.

Her music provides the kind of comfort and consolation I need as I roll with the challenge that many here on Substack also roll with: blessed with a day job and cursed with the need to balance that with a side gig. That desire, for me, is existential—cultivating and nurturing a creative life is essential. And as that needs grows, hearing the songs I know every which way is a way of putting out into the world the belief that I will get the opportunity to do the projects that I so desperately wish to do.

Time and patience are needed here as well as grit to do whatever can be done to create one’s luck. On Todd Rundgren’s ode to Nyro, ‘Baby Let’s Swing,’ he sings at one point: “how I love to shuffle / baby let’s swing / now I love to shuffle / ever since I heard you sing.” What a direct example of how music can move from the performer to the listener, offering the license to transcend.

It serves to remind that one of Elvis Presley’s showstopping numbers from the seventies was ‘The Impossible Dream’ from Man of La Mancha. Its refrain is simple: “to dream / the impossible dream.” For me, I guess that means that to listen as hard as I can to music is a way to help me to get where I want to go.