Over 20 Years Since The Julius Wechter Tribute!

Oh, I know the feeling...an online friend is flying into town Monday, and it's been 24 years since we last met in person! It's one of those things--it feels like yesterday, but also feels like a lifetime ago, and both of our lives have changed a lot since then. I also have a major high school graduation milestone this year (and funny that I mention it, since today is almost to the day that was our last day of high school--it was either June 2nd or 3rd).

And does Rise feel like it's 42 years old? It still seems like a "new Herb album" to me, for whatever strange reason...
 
It's all "perspective." Or more specifically, the "ratio of time to perspective relative to life lived so far."

Somewhere a few years ago I read piece on the subject of "Your Life's Historical Perspective" which was either a college or even "high school" article that struck me worthy of being a "Psychology Today" piece at the time (and even more so today).

It basically posited that your perspective is based on your own lifespan. Like Rudy, I consider "Rise" a "new" Herb song even though it occurred at the end of ONLY the first third of his own career.

To put this theory in "perspective" (pun intended), this is because (in my case) I discovered Herb in 1972 at age 12. Herb's "storm" started 10 years prior in 1962 nd ended only a short time prior (in 1969, despite Summertime only a year prior to my "discovering" Herb). He continued to put out music almost every year until he hit it big again with "Rise" ten years after the end of his prior "super-star" period. At that point in my life, he was a superstar for nearly half my life and was "huge" again when I was just 19.

My parents obviously had a different perspective as children of Big Bands and the birth of Rock and Roll.

You can apply this "ratio of time to perspective theory" to almost anything -- movies, politics, music, TV, etc... Even today I chat with people from the new wave era and realize it has been decades since they played or recorded (though some are still active on a much smaller scale).

Perhaps the draw is the feeling of nostalgia that grows as we get older and can relate less and less to what is "current." Everyone's experience depends on the perspective of where they were and where they are at a given point in time, relative to the grand sweep of time.

Not to get too philosophically Kafka-esque, but perhaps life is just a "running-through of your memories" at your dying moment...

And on that depressing thought, I'll leave you here and continue to get caught up on the posts here that I've missed over the last week or so...

--Mr Bill ⚰️🪦
 
There was this older friend of mine, he was actually the grandfather of a girl I dated for a while. He used to stop by the parts store on a pretty regular basis and we'd visit. He was the one who first enlightened me to that whole perspective thing. We were commenting on how fast time seems to go, and he said "wait till you get to be my age" and I asked him what he meant by that... he said "When you're ten years old, a year is a tenth of your whole life so it seems to take forever to go by. But when you're 88 like me, a year is only 1/88th of your life so it seems like nothing."

He's been proven right over the years. Now that I'm in my 60s, I don't even fret about winter coming on anymore, because I know in the blink of an eye it will be spring again.

Since I was in the music business all those years, I used to pride myself on staying up to date on the current trends and I found that I liked current stuff long after a lot of my friends had lumped everything new into the "that sucks" pile. But in more recent years I find it harder and harder to like the current stuff. There are still a few things that appeal to me but they are becoming fewer and farther between. I still recognize a name from the top ten now and then but not too often anymore.
 
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