February 20th – We've been here before, I know, but I still
think it’s worth revisiting. I’m something of a rocker. Yes, I have an eclectic
taste in music but, at heart, my one safe harbour is in rock… Is that because
I’m secretly very angry about a lot of things? Don’t think so, rock just does
it for me. Anyhow, with that as the flat-bed I have to admit that even withy my
left-field idiosyncrasies one of my all-time
favourite bands is Bruce Hornsby and the Range.
Don’t quite know how you classify
their music…it’s a bit like Barclay James Harvest (BJH) – another of my top 20
bands – they are neither rock nor pop, not MOR or that terrible phrase
‘light’…FM, there’s a way for your musical back-catalogue to be remembered: -
Cut to c/u of sun-glass wearing,
tight jean donning, long-hair styling rock musician with nearby girl fan.
“Yeah, babe, you recognised right, I
was in bands in the (fill in your own decade). What sort of stuff did we play? You
mean you don’t remember?” He laughs forcibly. “Well…we were light…we played
light…we were a light band.”
That’d bring the fans flocking.
One handle on Bruce Hornsby’s style
could be gleaned from the fact that, on this day in 1990, they won the ‘Best Bluegrass
Recording’ Grammy for their recording, ‘The Valley Road’. Bluegrass ?
Hmm...not sure if that quite fits; but in fact does it need to? We humans have
this sometime annoying desire to categorise everything, just like we do with novel
genres and political allegiances. We have to be able to pigeon-hole everything
we come up against in order for it to make sense to us, to not threaten us.
Well, whatever category you want to
put him in, what can be said without equivocation is that Bruce Hornsby (and BJH
for that matter) has/have an ability to create both imagery and yearning at the
turn of a chord; only the musically dead would fail to recognise that. He’s one
of the reasons I write, not because of what he writes but because of the emotion
that flows through his work. Even though my literary efforts are piffling by
comparison with the likes of Mr. Hornsby and BJH they are part of the fire and
drive within me that make me want to write; to make a difference…and isn't that
what music should do?
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