Butthole Surfers -The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'gitche gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came earlyThe ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T'was the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west windWhen suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya
At seven pm a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good t'know ya
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund FitzgeraldDoes any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searches all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughtersLake Huron rolls, superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November rememberedIn a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call 'gitche gumee'
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come earlySongwriters: Gordon Lightfoot
Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Classical Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist
via OpenCulture
What did Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly author Philip K. Dick, that visionary of our not-too-distant dystopian future, listen to while he crafted his descriptions of grim, psychologically (and sometimes psychedelically) harrowing times ahead? Mozart. Beethoven. Mahler. Wagner.
Yes, while looking textually forward, he listened backward, soundtracking the constant workings of his imagination with classical music, as he had done since his teenage years. As Lejla Kucukalic writes in Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age:
After graduating from high school in 1947, Dick moved out of his mother's house and continued working as a clerk at a Berkeley music store, Art Music. "Now," wrote Dick, "my longtime love of music rose to the surface, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera" ("Self-Portrait" 13). Classical music, from Beethoven to Wagner, not only stayed Dick's lifelong passion, but also found its way into many of his works: Wagner's Goterdammerung in A Maze of Death, Parsifal in Valis, and Mozart's Magic Flute in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
At his Forteana Blog, author Andrew May credits Dick with, given his pop-cultural status, "a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music." He cites not just Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in the introduction to A Maze of Death, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in Ubik, or the part of The Game-Players of Titan where "a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria," but an entire early story which functions as "(in my opinion) a pure exercise in classical music criticism." In 1953's "The Preserving Machine," as May retells it, an eccentric scientist, "worried that Western civilization is on the point of collapse, invents a machine to preserve musical works for future generations" by encoding it "in the form of living creatures. Unfortunately, as soon as the creatures are released into the environment, they start to adapt to it by evolving into different forms, and the music becomes distorted beyond recognition."
Though no doubt an astute speculator, Dick seems not to have foreseen the fact that our era suffers not from too few means of music storage but, perhaps, too many. None of his visions presented him with, for example, the technology of the Spotify playlist, an example of which you'll find at the bottom of this post. In it, we've assembled for your enjoyment some of Dick's favorite pieces of classical music. The songs come scouted out by Galleycat's Jason Boog, who links to them individually in his own post on Dick, classical music, and May's writing on the intersection of those two cultural forces. Listen through it while reading some of Dick's own work — don't miss our collection of Free PKD — and you'll understand that he cared about not just the anxieties of humanity's future or the great works of its past, but what remains essential throughout the entire human experience. These composers will still appear on our playlists (or whatever technology we'll use) a hundred years from now, and if we still read any sci-fi author a hundred years from now, we'll surely read this one.
The 11 hour playlist (stream below or on the web here) includes Bach's Goldberg Variations, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Fidelio, Mozart's The Magic Flute, Wagner's Parsifal, and Mahler's Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection). If you need to download Spotify, grab the software here.