Post by nowheregirl on Apr 20, 2007 18:42:20 GMT 1
I found this at www.theage.com.au
Imagine touring the world for a song
Warwick McFadyen
April 21, 2007
SOME gigs are tougher than others. Any instrument will tell you that. But this tour is the toughest of them all. I only have to play one song, so it's not as if I'm going to forget it. Truth is I'm only a one-hit wonder. Imagine. A world tour all for the sake of one song …
I have one man to thank for this, and he's dead. Assassin's bullet from a fan. Imagine that. John Lennon was his name. He bought me in 1970. My guess is that it was to cheer him up a bit. His group the Beatles had just split up. I'm nothing grand in the piano stakes, just 88 keys on a brown upright. A few months after I went to Lennon's Berkshire studio, he conjured up a simple melody with a simple lyrical philosophy. "A brotherhood of man, sharing all the world." It's slow and steady four-four rhythm with no more than half a dozen chords. Not your Mozart, not even your Randy Newman. It turned out to have more than one lease of life, which is more than its composer had. Lennon was shot dead in 1980. The song was a hit on first release in 1971 and then again after his death. Now it is an anthem of hope.
This is where my world tour enters the scene. Pop star George Michael bought me in 2000 for $US2 million, which was a record for pop memorabilia. He and his partner, Kenny Goss, who runs a Texas art gallery, came up with the idea of touring me to promote peace. All I have to do is play Imagine. C, Cmaj7, F, C (add9), C, Cmaj7, F and so on. Simple. And yet, something magical has been occurring between the chiming of hammer on steel and the bones of the listening ear. People are being moved. Maybe it's the places where I'm playing. They are the centre stage for immense grief and turmoil of the soul.
Assassination, execution, massacre, imprisonment and torture. These have been motifs and the raison d'etre for their being known throughout the world. My first stop was Ford's Theatre in Washington where Abraham Lincoln was murdered in 1865. I have been to Dealey Plaza in Houston, Texas. US President John F. Kennedy, was murdered there in 1963.
His death sent America into convulsions of grief that rippled through the nation for years.
Next week there are plans that I play in Oklahoma City at the site of the federal building in which 168 people died during a bombing in 1995; then back to Texas to the former compound for the Branch Davidian sect at Waco where 80 people died; then to Columbine High where a dozen people died at the hands of two teenagers with guns. I guess now I will be going to Virginia as well. A European tour is also planned. Places include the Tower of London, Auschwitz in Poland and then back to England for the site of the London terrorist bombings of 2005.
Being outside venues, the acoustics are terrible. In a paradoxical way, it's only a small point because it is the dichotomy of the circumstances then and now that is the chemistry of the exercise. At these places of unimaginable loss and grief, I have come, a simple hazelnut upright piano, and brought into the air the sounds of a simple message: in dreams, we hope. An organiser of the tour, Caroline True, has said people have come from quite far to see me. "We are not being political or opinionated, we are just spreading the image of peace," she has said. Peace needs an image, and what better image than a simple piano? Call it optimism of the soul, unplugged. I know the ghosts of Auschwitz will disagree. All 1.5 million of them. But then the survivors might find a beauty. The late Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert spoke of "chords of light". Perhaps that's what I'm bringing to these places.
There is no harmony in evil. But if those who follow the spectral victims down the years cannot touch the keys to give form to the human spirit, then all is lost. Music is the great balm of the cosmos. It transcends frontiers. Lennon may have composed the melody to Imagine on my keys but after that it has floated around the world a thousand times, landed on the shoulders of singers and listeners alike. Its highest profile in recent years was probably when Neil Young sang it on a television concert broadcast worldwide after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
But I have a confession for an old piano: after the last trace of the song fades away, a faint discordant clash of notes rises. And there's a whispering refrain: "This tour is never-ending."
The piano was speaking to Warwick McFadyen.
Imagine touring the world for a song
Warwick McFadyen
April 21, 2007
SOME gigs are tougher than others. Any instrument will tell you that. But this tour is the toughest of them all. I only have to play one song, so it's not as if I'm going to forget it. Truth is I'm only a one-hit wonder. Imagine. A world tour all for the sake of one song …
I have one man to thank for this, and he's dead. Assassin's bullet from a fan. Imagine that. John Lennon was his name. He bought me in 1970. My guess is that it was to cheer him up a bit. His group the Beatles had just split up. I'm nothing grand in the piano stakes, just 88 keys on a brown upright. A few months after I went to Lennon's Berkshire studio, he conjured up a simple melody with a simple lyrical philosophy. "A brotherhood of man, sharing all the world." It's slow and steady four-four rhythm with no more than half a dozen chords. Not your Mozart, not even your Randy Newman. It turned out to have more than one lease of life, which is more than its composer had. Lennon was shot dead in 1980. The song was a hit on first release in 1971 and then again after his death. Now it is an anthem of hope.
This is where my world tour enters the scene. Pop star George Michael bought me in 2000 for $US2 million, which was a record for pop memorabilia. He and his partner, Kenny Goss, who runs a Texas art gallery, came up with the idea of touring me to promote peace. All I have to do is play Imagine. C, Cmaj7, F, C (add9), C, Cmaj7, F and so on. Simple. And yet, something magical has been occurring between the chiming of hammer on steel and the bones of the listening ear. People are being moved. Maybe it's the places where I'm playing. They are the centre stage for immense grief and turmoil of the soul.
Assassination, execution, massacre, imprisonment and torture. These have been motifs and the raison d'etre for their being known throughout the world. My first stop was Ford's Theatre in Washington where Abraham Lincoln was murdered in 1865. I have been to Dealey Plaza in Houston, Texas. US President John F. Kennedy, was murdered there in 1963.
His death sent America into convulsions of grief that rippled through the nation for years.
Next week there are plans that I play in Oklahoma City at the site of the federal building in which 168 people died during a bombing in 1995; then back to Texas to the former compound for the Branch Davidian sect at Waco where 80 people died; then to Columbine High where a dozen people died at the hands of two teenagers with guns. I guess now I will be going to Virginia as well. A European tour is also planned. Places include the Tower of London, Auschwitz in Poland and then back to England for the site of the London terrorist bombings of 2005.
Being outside venues, the acoustics are terrible. In a paradoxical way, it's only a small point because it is the dichotomy of the circumstances then and now that is the chemistry of the exercise. At these places of unimaginable loss and grief, I have come, a simple hazelnut upright piano, and brought into the air the sounds of a simple message: in dreams, we hope. An organiser of the tour, Caroline True, has said people have come from quite far to see me. "We are not being political or opinionated, we are just spreading the image of peace," she has said. Peace needs an image, and what better image than a simple piano? Call it optimism of the soul, unplugged. I know the ghosts of Auschwitz will disagree. All 1.5 million of them. But then the survivors might find a beauty. The late Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert spoke of "chords of light". Perhaps that's what I'm bringing to these places.
There is no harmony in evil. But if those who follow the spectral victims down the years cannot touch the keys to give form to the human spirit, then all is lost. Music is the great balm of the cosmos. It transcends frontiers. Lennon may have composed the melody to Imagine on my keys but after that it has floated around the world a thousand times, landed on the shoulders of singers and listeners alike. Its highest profile in recent years was probably when Neil Young sang it on a television concert broadcast worldwide after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
But I have a confession for an old piano: after the last trace of the song fades away, a faint discordant clash of notes rises. And there's a whispering refrain: "This tour is never-ending."
The piano was speaking to Warwick McFadyen.
