ZZion: переводы

→I believe in fate. Those few minutes of television changed my life. The Mahavishnu Orchestra did so much more for me than just shape my musical tastes. It showed me the importance of shooting for excellence in all endeavors and the need to dedicate myself to true and certain goals. It taught me nothing was beyond my mortal reach as long as I was passionate enough to follow through.

→When you are young you don't take the time to analyze the consequences of your hopes and wishes. Had I been born three years earlier, I would have been drafted into the army and would probably have been hiding in a rice paddy in South Vietnam or washing dishes at a downtown Montreal restaurant instead of watching the Mahavishnu Orchestra on TV that night.

→Through my fascination with the Mahavishnu Orchestra I learned about Miles Davis and John Coltranу and of all those that came before them. Music is the sum of all music that has come before it. The MO has added to that equation exponentially.

→The next day I ran out and purchased my first Mahavishnu Orchestra album. I put Birds of Fire on my turntable. Hearing this album led to the real beginnings of my self-discovery. Several days of research would further tell me that the MO had been around for a couple of years and the musical movement that spawned it had been too. I had missed it all by about three years. I have been trying to catch up ever since.

→This was unlike any rock music I had ever come across. It was unlike any music 1 had ever heard! The overwhelming power of it all quickly threatened to incinerate my tiny TV. The frenzied crowd on the screen was in danger of mass hyperventilation. The expressions on the band members' faces betrayed a great passion. The music was just short of organized chaos. Yet, somehow it was amazingly beautiful. My visual and aural senses were overloaded. My heart raced. I had to stand up and pace. No sleep that night.

→I was quite used to seeing bedraggled, long-haired hippies. Part of me actually wanted to be one. But I had never seen a violin in a rock band.

→The guitarist was playing this huge electric guitar that had two necks. His hair was cropped short. He was dressed in white and looked holy. The drummer was wildly flailing away. He lost his drumstick, but continued to play away without missing a beat. The keyboard player was all hunched over and grimacing. The bassist was playing an instrument you could see right through. The band also featured a bedraggled-looking, long-haired hippy playing an electric violin.

→Barely awake late one night, I had half an opened eye on my television. What was supposed to be just another rock band on ABC Television's In Concert show appeared on the screen. The weirdly named Mahavishnu Orchestra was new to me. But, within seconds its music grabbed me, shook me, and threw me to the floor. I had never seen, heard or felt anything like that.

→At first, as with all of my friends, I gravitated toward the rock music of the day. I loved the Beatles, of course, but they had already broken up. My record collection was filled with the likes of Black Sabbath, Ten Years After, The Who. Hendrix and Deep Purple. I went to rock concerts to see Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Eric Clapton. Elton John and scores more. I learned how to discern what I believed to be good music from bad. My taste began to define my id. Or, so I thought.

→My self-identity, as I believe happens with many others, first began to crystallize when I discovered the joy of music. I had no God-given musical talent myself. But I was just as important as any musician. I was a listener. I knew how to receive. I was at the other end of the most powerful communication there is.

→Up to that pivotal year, inexperience - the disadvantage of youth -prevented me from having a fuller understanding of the world around me. I was nothing more than an unengaged, dispassionate observer. No purpose had yet been given me.

→In 1973, when I was 16 years old, I discovered that some grand mistake had been made. 1 had been born too late for my own life. I was the victim of a slight tweak in divine calculation, delivered on this earth three years later than the master plan had called for. In terms of the history of the universe, this cosmic blunder represented less than a nanosecond. But to me, it may as well have been a millennium.

→Born Too Late