Friday, April 9, 2010

:Classical derangment

Tonight I was listening to KRFC-FM on the radio. Thor has a regular show, and I've expanded from listening to him and his collaborator into listening during the whole week. Togight Lyle Allen does the regular show in the hours before midnight. He has a quirky style. He likes it when his fans call up and chat with him. He told everyone to go to his Facebook page to see his dog, so I did.

After Allen's show, the KRFC overnight mix comes on---a randow shuffling from pre-made CDs of heterogeneous genre that the station airs in the overnight hours when they have no regular show. The mixes can get old, if you hear the same one over and over, as I did a couple years back. But tonight's mix was new to me.

As the shuffled songs played on the radio, I busied myself with pre-bedtime chores, filling up my Nalgene and arranging things in my room for a hike I'm planning tomorrow. As I was laying things out, and cleaning up, I noticde that the radio is playing "Tangled Up in Blue"---not the Dylan original but a contemporary slackerish bluegrass cover version.

Mayble it was because I hadn't hear the song in any form in a while, but the freshness of the cover compelled me to listen a bit, and to anticipate certain of my favorite lines.

The singer was about to get up the line "She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an Italian poet from the Thirteenth Century." I've always liked that particular line.

But that's not what the singer sang. Instead he sang, "...written by an Italian poet from the Fifteenth Century."

My thoughts came to a screeching halt. You could have knocked me over. I'm thinking: Fifteenth Century? Are you kidding me? That's two hundred years off! You just changed the whole meaning of the song!

Later through Internet research I determined he might have meant Ludovico Ariosto, although his most famous work did not appear until 1516. It must be a bluegrass thing.

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