I don’t really care for Pink Floyd, same thing with Steely Dan. I don’t much care for cocaine either, so maybe that explains it. Anywho even though I never liked Floyd I knew plenty of people who did and they were nice humans to be outdoors with, to eat ice cream, and too fuck. So I always kinda felt bad about hating Pink Floyd.
I almost liked the song, Comfortably Numb one time. Almost. I was sitting in a stolen van in Ohio… I think, or maybe it was Pennsylvania. I was waiting for my friends to come out of the bank. It was summer and fucking gorgeous. Comfortable Numb comes on and I’m like “Ahhh hey this is pretty nice!” and just then it breaks into the whitest fucking guitar solo I’d ever heard. I was a like an SNL parody of an over the top early 80’s guitar solo. Just ruined it. Like grudge fucking a cardboard cut out of Britney Spears in a Ross (dress for less). I shoulda known better.
Then last week I heard this version - I guess in was in that Departed- Leo DiCaprio - Jack Nicholson - Matt Damon movie. The song doesn’t seem that great Its got Van Morrison singing but he’s not, thee Van Morrison, that used to bed you down and slaughter your heart. He’s no longer the Astral Weeks Van Morrison. But there is something here when he belts out this terribly written stoner horseshit. He just pounds it. So I first listened to this song a couple week ago for some reason and honestly I didn’t think much of it. It was live and the levels were a bit off. And it sounds like Van Morrison was flat and just braying. But then today I was sweating in a parking lot of a Target in Miami and the song started playing in my head - just out of the blue when Van Morrisson sings (6:30 on the track)“When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,” and it stuck right in my chest. I almost burst out weeping. I thought of an old friend. Jesse’s funeral was almost a year ago - and it wasn’t some maudlin sadness. It was roaring moment - roaring joyfully into the void of bullshit.
Maybe the reason the song hit me so hard was that Van Morrisson could take some tired pop crap and make it not suck. And thats what good friends do - they make it not suck - all the terrible and mundane moments - they make this old pile of shit worthwhile… they make you laugh like hyena’s and weep like drunken shoe salesmen.
Like the first time we did acid and we’d wandered down to a 7-11. and then when we were leaving I muttered to Jesse,
“That went allright.”
“Really?!” he chuckled, “Dude we just stood in a 7-11 for 45 minutes and laughed at all the candy! The clerk locked himself in the bathroom!”
and I guess somewhere crying in a suburban Target parking lot, a great weight was lifted off my shoulders.