Great Gig in the Sky?

Ok Nick Drake. I get it. You were a fantastic musician with a really fucked up personal life. You were shy to the point of being dysfunctional in a profession where shyness is preyed upon. I still love your music and I still wish you could have written more. Some of the songs on "Five Leaves Left" make me want to sit down with you at a coffee shop or something and ask you how you think things are going to turn out. I want to ask you whether it's alright with you for me to play "Day is Done" at my funeral.

I want to ask you if God exists. You'd be an interesting person to hear the ultimate truth of existence from. You clearly weren't convinced about the afterlife when you wrote "Day is Done," but since then you have actually gotten the answer.

I hope that on whatever plane of existence we ascend or descend to after we die, if any, there is a concert hall where all the great musicians of history get together and play the material they've written in the years after they died, and some renewed versions of their earthly material.

Marvin Gaye would perform "God is Love" in a completely different way, slowing it down and choking and wincing a little bit every time he sings the word "father." It would make the transition into "Mercy Mercy Me" sound simultaneously labored and obvious. The ecology will reach a different level of nostalgia for the audience as they recall the world as they knew it.

Jeff Buckley could derive new meaning from every single song on "Grace." He'll climb on stage with his father and just let loose. Maybe his father will add some sweeping harmonies with his voice, filling in the massive and gorgeous chords that Jeff always left slightly open. I'm sure John Bonham will be happy to play drums if they can pull him away from his conversation with Buddy Rich. Maybe halfway through the performance Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen would join Jeff on stage so that they could do "Lilac Wine" and "Hallelujah" with unimaginable power. More likely, however, they would just let the structure crumble and call upon the communal spirit of music that connected them all in the first place until everyone in the hall couldn't help but cry. It will be a tough performance, considering that many of the questions that Jeff poses about our spiritual origins and destination on "Grace" will have been answered (sooner than he could have guessed). If that is the case, I'm sure Jeff will agree that there's no better time to ask some new questions and search the fretboard for the answers.

I could write a book about this. I had better stop before I get in too deep.

I'm sitting in Open Eye trying to think of a reason to get out of this chair.