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In Memoriam

Music and Loss

By John Groom

September 2004

Psychobabble is a column to explore the twilight zone of hi-fi. That strange place where the improbable meets the impossible, the fussy meets the obsessional, and the physical meets the psychological.

It was a good funeral. Well, it was as good as such things can be. Andrew was at least known to the minister, a rare thing at funerals nowadays. Don’t get me wrong, Andrew was no saint, he simply had a contract to mow the church lawns.

The service was short. They do these things back to back. The widow was surprisingly articulate as she spoke of her late husband as a ‘big man’. We sang the 23rd Psalm; you remember… the Lord is my shepherd, etc. The minister gave us hope and we finished with some of Andrew’s favourite music that he played in the pick-up. Before the hearse pulled away for a private cremation, we sprinkled a few tears and petals over the coffin.

Unlike Andrew, there was no clear public funeral when Cool Blue recently disappeared from the airwaves. There certainly has been grief and protest. A station so dedicated to bringing blues, jazz and alternative music to the public. A station with no news, no dj, few adverts and no talk back. A station that treated you as an intelligent listener. It has left a real gap.

I rang the receptionist at the radio station before it closed. I had so many questions. Yes, it is definitely gone, though you can still get it on the web (www.r2.co.nz). No, there are no plans to broadcast it on a different frequency. She was insistent that it was only ever experimental, and would now be a rap music frequency. Apparently it had lacked advertising support. I found this strange as I had made three attempts to contact them to promote my own business without them getting back to me.

I felt insulted when she suggested that perhaps I would enjoy the Coast station on Auckland 105.4. It plays the ‘music that other stations don’t play’ i.e. golden oldies. Don’t get me wrong; I have been trying it, but there is only so much Neil Diamond that I can take. Through gritted teeth I told her I had found it ‘an under whelming experience’. (Anyway the music is heavily compressed in the transmission process.)

I know, I was getting bitchy. This has not been a good month for me, with two losses to deal with.  The radio can be a good companion and touchingly some of the best sound that I ever heard from Cool Blue was on a Tivoli portable called the Pal.

I think that music is an important mirror of who we are. Commercial radio offers a distorted mirror, unless we are young, concerned with the complexities of first loves, or want our listening disrupted with advertising and opinion. Jazz, blues, classical, religious, ethnic and even folk music, reach a different part of us. They draw on older and deeper roots that feed the heart, spirit and soul. They are a fuller and more accurate mirror of what it is to be truly human.

It is time to move on, and for music I have moved back to the tried and true National Radio. Moving on from Andrew’s death is more difficult. He was a music lover and like a lot of parents of young children his stereo had gone into storage when the two lively boys appeared. His pick up became his sanctuary and a place he could play his music. I can only hope that when he died suddenly, colliding with a truck on a sharp corner that he was playing one of his favourite tracks.

For my withdrawal symptoms from Cool Blue I can always go to the web. Filling the gap left by ‘big’ Andrew will be more difficult.

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John Groom is a psychologist working in private practice on Auckland's North Shore. John has over three decades experience in both hi-fi and psychology.