The Session #9 - Beer & Music

It's that time again - time for another installment of The Session. The Session is a collaborative beer blogging effort with a rotating theme, and host blog, each month. This month's theme is Beer and Music - two of my favorite things! This month's host is Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey. Please visit his blog for a roundup of all of the related entries for the month.

For me, songs are like audible time capsules. I hear a few bars and I’m transported to the time and place I found myself when I heard that song for the first time. I was in my big brother’s room when Billy Joel’s “It’s still rock and roll” first blasted through the speakers and into my head. That was what, 1980? I would have been 8 years old. To this day, that song takes me back to that room, at that moment, with my brother Dave. I lost my brother several years later in a car accident, so that song is like a virtual reunion, of sorts, for me. It connects me with him.

Then there are those times when a song can take me back to the most random moments I’d likely never recall otherwise - indiscriminate snapshots in time, put to music. Play John Cougar's (this was pre-Mellencamp) “Jack and Diane” and I automatically think of riding in my uncle Jim’s convertible MG to the local hardware store when I was about 10 years old. Nothing special about the trip, really – it just rushes back every time I hear that acoustic guitar lick. You know the one.

Music has an uncanny ability to encapsulate moments in time and store them somewhere in the mind, only to recall them again each time the song is heard. Like a musical keyword in the mind’s version of Google or something. Many of the musical “searches” I perform in my own mind take me back to moments shared with others – mostly friends and family, but sometimes just random people I don’t recollect except that they were present - faceless ghosts from the past, listening to music and often times …drinking beer. Beer is frequently the “related content” in my mind’s musical search results.

Like a song, beer connects. People agree and argue over a beer. People laugh and cry over a beer. People celebrate and mourn over a beer. With all of that emotion so closely tied to a beverage, it is bound to create some serious existential ties over time. Beer, having the power to unite and to divide, has been a corollary factor in many of the world’s great (and not so great) moments. In this, it shares many traits with music. Both are evocative in their own way. Maybe this is why beer and music have, I’d wager, been closely aligned throughout modern (and even pre-modern) history. Combine the two and you have a powerful sensory experience with remarkable staying power – the moments memories are made of … that is, as long as you don’t drink too much.

One of my fondest music and beer memories happened maybe 10 years ago. A well-known guitarist named Stanley Jordan was performing a concert at a local venue here in southern Illinois. Jordan, by the way, was known for his unorthodox playing style – he “taps” the strings with his picking hand near the base of the neck, creating a harmonic, piano-like resonance that sounds like multiple instruments at once - an impressive performance if you ever get the chance to see it, I’d highly recommend you go. Before the concert, several of us got together and enjoyed a few drinks. One, in particular, stood out to me and I have had a connection with this beer, and this night, ever since.

This is why I contend that the combination of good music and good beer can often create the strongest of memories. The beer was McEwan’s Scotch Ale. Ten years ago or more, my palate wasn’t as experienced as it is now, but I knew a pretty good beer when I tasted it. McEwan’s quickly became one of my favorite beers and I’ve enjoyed it to this day, not because I believe it to be the best I’ve had (I still think it’s pretty good stuff), but because it evokes so many fond memories of Jordan’s finger-tapped version of “Eleanor Rigby” and “Stairway to Heaven,” good friends and a perfect night of beer and music.

Two things that stir the heart and the soul like no other – beer and music. I’m grateful for the blessing of both, and when they’re combined I believe we see a small glimpse of what heaven might be like – albeit in very limited, finite fashion. I’ll take it, for now.