Published The Advocate, January 28, 2006
Gerry Humphreys died late last year and the memories of my youth came tumbling back. It hardly mattered that no-one else on the Coast had heard of Humphreys or knew he was the lead singer of the 1960s’ Melbourne band, the Loved Ones. It’s my nostalgia. Music has a remarkable power, possibly matched by the sense of smell, to bring rushing back in time and place the age when a particular song filled our lives. The soundtrack of my youth - the Loved Ones and The Kinks - were the first albums I bought on vinyl. As if yesterday, I can remember Humphreys’ screaming Everlovin’ Man on the Top 40. His death prompted me to buy the Loved Ones’ Magic Box album on CD to replace the badly scratched original. And then Santa brought me an iPod. For those over 60, an iPod is a brand of MP3 device for storing and playing your favourite music. I emailed 55 people to ask if anyone knew what the characters M-P-3 meant and five responded: all bar one was under 25 including one female. The older exception was a man in his 30s whose kids keep him abreast of digital technology. They told me MP3 was shorthand for the Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer-3. You didn’t need to know that. Instead, think of how Gillette keeps adding layers of blades to its razors without increasing the size. MP3 technology manages to squeeze 120 songs onto my iPod, which fits snugly inside a clenched fist. It is unlike me to be so up to date with technology. I would have been buying shares in piano rolls just as gramophones were invented, or hoarding bottles of Tipp-Ex correction fluid when computers appeared on the market. I uploaded the best songs from Magic Box onto the iPod and have since accumulated about 40 other tracks from my CD collection, or about two and a half hours’ worth so far. As I grow older I am increasingly affected by songs in a minor key, not to the sobbing stage, but for example the sad and beautiful Irish music sung by Enya always brings me down. So there is no Enya on my iPod but there are lots of bouncy marching songs such as Pleasure and Pain by the Divinyls and, with a copy deadline looming, I am sitting here listening to Friday on my Mind, by The Easybeats, and tapping my foot. Some MP3s can store 20,000 songs and replay them in any order although the pint is beyond me since you cannot possibly live long enough to hear them all. I intend to take the iPod to the grave playing in my ears. It has already come in handy for compiling the music I would like at my funeral rather than risk people who think they know me choosing My Way. There are three songs and the finale is a Van Morrison song that contains the cheery refrain: My momma told me there’d be days like this.
