Afflicted

I get addicted to songs quite easily. I'm addicted to cigarettes, bad relationships and swinging through the extremes of self-image as well. Not to mention any combination of maida and meat. Music is by far my healthiest addiction. I normally draw the curtains, shut the door, put on my head set and perform in front of the mirror for hours. H-O-U-R-S. Entire relationships and life scenes are enacted or minutely dissected through these performances; for me they serve as a private cathartic release. My silent scream. The head set and the self-imposed captivity make it that much more solitary and personal an experience. It's my time out from the world. Or rather my time in to my world. Dancing and performing, or sometimes just sitting back and listening whilst my mind soars, is my favourite hobby. Each phase of my life can be best identified by me through a certain set of songs. I sometimes grow to be very attached to these songs, even though after a while I know I've overdone it. Even though I know my friend's dad's funeral is not the best place to go inquiring about my favourite CD. Before you go judging me suffice to say I lent it to her because a song on it was very very very very dear to me, because I thought it would lift her spirits out of the abysmal depths of depression as it did me and I inquired about the CD because she was leaving town the next day for a year to live in a village and I was leaving for England a few months later. I was also still depressive and yes, completely inappropriate. Bad move. Because the CD was never restored to me, she lambasted me instead of abandoning me which I'm ever grateful for because to lose the CD and her companionship in the same day would have been too much for me to handle. Bad move still, because despite my belief to the contrary, life still managed to carry on. Though at the time I was behaving like a heroine junkie in withdrawal. I kid you not when I say I get addicted to music.

This song? I searched high and low for it. On every DC++ network, on Limewire, on MP3.com, on iTunes, at the Virgin Record Store and then on Youtube, everywhere. It's a 10 minute live version of 'Blues Power', I had it on a CD called 'Eric Clapton: Stages' and he'd performed it while he was still with Derek and the Dominoes. I am crazy about Clapton despite the fact that my favourite songs of his date back to either JJ Cale or Albert King or Muddy Waters. Doesn't matter, his ingenuity lies not in his composing but in his ability to play the guitar and no song demonstrates that better than this version of 'Blues Power'. If you're like me who is easily impressed by either strong guitar riffs [think Lynyrd Skynyrd 'Freebird' or Led Zeppelin 'Dazed and Confused'] and a good drum and bass beat [again 'Dazed and Confused'], then you'll love this song. Nowhere near as much as I did. I had my reasons to love the entire record. It had 'Bell Bottom Blues' as well as 'Well Alright' and I was recovering from yet another break-up. A non-break-up. Recovering from not having dated someone which took me a year. And it takes me less than a month to recover from people I have dated and loved dearly. Go figure. So 'Blues Power' became my constant companion. I'd awaken for college at 7:30 am and the song would start playing on an infinite loop. I'd then slip it in to my disc man take it to college and it would rescue me from rather torpid lectures and lunch break conversations. It was with me on the auto ride home and with me when I'd reach home, roll my joint, switch off the lights and lie back. It's not a depressing song by the way, it has these riffs that shoot through your body like an electric current, it's impossible to not feel 'charged' after listening to it. I always thought it was the drugs, I was close to smoking a billion joints a day at the time. But delightfully, I was wrong. And I wasn't entirely depressive, I was in denial about being hurt and was far too busy acting in plays and winning quizzes at the time, but the song would somehow help me connect to the mental maladies I bore within me and reflect upon how best to chart my recovery. I think this song was my mental crutch.

I never found the record because I didn't know the name of the CD. That's how blindly I was in love with the song. Nothing else mattered, I was incapable of taking cognizance of anything, anything at all. This relationship lasted a year. I mean the infinite loop relationship; then I gradually slowed down to listening to it just once a day. And two years after I first heard 'Blues Power' live at the Fillmore 1967, I passed on the CD to my friend who I felt needed the same healing as I had. Her father wasn't dead then or threatening to die, she was recovering from a relationship that ended rather bitterly after five years. She could never relate to the song, the ingrate, because she doesn't like Clapton. Despite that we're still friends and that's a reflection of my magnanimity more than hers. :D By then I was back to being hooked on to 'Dazed and Confused' and some Santana records. When loneliness and a yearning to connect back to
the days gone past took over me in England, that's when I started to look for this record rather frantically. But to no avail. I eventually gave up and found a few other, meaningless musical affairs until www.finetune.com. It works exactly like www.pandora.com , except you can build your own play list and it has the song. It has it! It's been 4 days since I found it and life's been looking up ever since. During my two year long search I'd found many versions of the song, none of which I liked or were even remotely capable of sating my hunger for it. And then instead of 'Stages' I find that the same version is on 'Derek and the Dominoes: Live at the Fillmore CD1'. If only I had known earlier. I guess I don't just love this song, it's a junoon. Even though I don't have the patience or the ability to listen to it ad nauseaum (some of my cheap thrill musical affiars in its absence have come to mean a lot to me) I do stay awake till 3 or 4 in the morning waiting to hear the song on my playlist. Thing is on finetune there are only so many songs you can skip in a list after which it flashes the message 'You're Gonna Have to Listen to Some of Them' and you press on the button that says 'Whatever' to make it disappear. I like the cheeky bastards who designed the site. You can only add 3 songs from an artist, none of them can be by The Beatles because the rights to their music are lorded over by a maniacal fiend called Michael Jackson and lastly you can't control the order in which the songs come. I'll buy it the day my credit card bills are paid. But for the time being I rather enjoy the difficulty in being able to listen to it. It allows me to not glut my system with it which I know I will if I owned it, this way my consumption of the song is automatically rationed. Do check it out if you are even modestly swayed by my case for it. It'll go brilliantly with this wet Delhi weather.