There are moments you never forget. One of these was at Paul McCartney’s concert in Tel Aviv, some years ago. I was standing on the grass in the park with several tens of thousands of Beatlemaniacs and my immediate family, but for one second it was as if I was the only one there.
I was the kid who was amazed to know how many John Lennon songs he knew from the radio, when he was murdered when I was 11 years old, and until I started buying “The Beetles” records. Later, I immersed myself in the recordings and stories of Yoav Kutner and his “Mysterious Magic Journey”, every Friday at three , with a rebroadcast on Saturday at two (just before I transferred to network B to hear “Shirim and Sha’ir”).
I was the boy who wanted to sing “Michelle Yufti” to the most beautiful girl in the class, and the one who indulged in the heartbreak caused by unrequited youthful love to the tune of “For No One” (yes, when you go back to the eighties, even in your imagination, you have to translate the names into Hebrew, although sometimes you end up in strange places, with Bands like “Bereshit” or “Orchestral maneuvers in the dark”). Then I realized that there is no greater disaster than someone who leaves you, not for another man but for the voices in her head.
In any case, the story is not about Sir Paul, nor about the Beatles (the performance was in the current millennium, so you can switch to foreign) but about me. On the way from the bar to the place where my family was standing in full force – including the one who was really little at the time, on such an evening I wanted everyone around me – while holding a plastic cup with a beer in each hand, here in front of the first words that opened the show (we’ll go back to translating): “You say yes, I say no”, the tears flowed down my cheeks as if a dam had broken in my eyes.
This is how a 40-year-old man stood, dripping salty tears into glasses of dirty beer and because he is determined to hold onto them, he can’t even wipe his eyes.
I was reminded of this this week at the gym. I think I’ve already written here before about my fondness for electronic dance music, trance, techno – and I really have no intention of starting to sort out terms that were invented when I was too old to keep up with new musical or narcotic trends. In any case, we are dealing with music that is heard in clubs and nature parties.
I don’t usually listen to this music when I’m lying on the sofa in the living room, but when I’m trying to cover a distance on the treadmill and gulp another gulp of air to deliver some oxygen to the brain, there’s nothing like this music. The combination of the effort that takes the body to the limit, with very clear beats and the instrumental melody that connects them, make this music, so slandered among “in the know”, something that makes me transcend.
And yet, compared to her eternal fame McCartney won while he was still alive, because in the case of dance of its kind, it is something that gives momentary pleasure but does not stay in the mind for even one minute. The line from the song “A Day in the Life” from the end of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club” (yes, we went back to the translation), to say: “But even though the holes were round and small, they had to count them all: no one knows how many holes it takes to fill Albert “Hall” has become in my eyes a riddle to which I will never get the answer. A bit like Dustin Hoffman in the movie “Rain Man”, who keeps asking over and over: “Who’s on first base?”, even when his brother (in the movie, Tom Cruise) shakes him and screams in his ears that it’s not about in a riddle
Well, compared to the immortality of that line, which goes with me in the back of my mind like a believer carries with him a small book of Psalms, the dance goes by in a second: already in the stretches after the workout I long to listen to something much calmer.
If you like, it’s a bit like the difference between sex and porn: both will seemingly bring you to the same destination, but between them passes the whole difference between the peak of emotion and the peak of emptiness. Want another example? Like the difference between cooking at home and Walt.
But sometimes I wonder if there is another difference. A few months ago, I heard one of the presenters at Galgaletz say “And now nostalgia: Noa Kirel from the beginning of the road”. If my memory serves me well, she was referring to a song that came out in 2015. I listened and wondered if even the performer herself dreamed of creating a classic or just a hit, like a reality TV refugee – Gets the minutes of fame and fades away in favor of the next in line.
After all, in his time, that is, in their time, there were also those who considered even the Beatles to be a hit machine and nothing more, and not only them: a friend once told me that his father used to wake up the family every morning to the sounds of classical symphonies, just not Mozart’s “because we don’t listen to pop in this house !”.
So it’s true that Mozart’s “Pop” is heard even 250 years after “his first single came out” and that even the Beatles turned 60 this year (as a band, the two survivors are already quite elderly), which makes them classics, but who knows? Maybe a day will come when they will still be talking About the kind and talented Noa Kirel like about Eric Einstein.