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septembersghost · 1 year

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I literally can't listen to Unchained Melody without fucking sobbing

this won't help because it's a you-had-to-be-there kind of story, and possibly you also have to know my dad, but imma tell it anyway - one time when i was a kid, and visiting him in the summer, the righteous brothers version of that song came on the radio in his truck. and i had just seen the movie ghost for the first time (which my mom regretted because she felt i was too young for it, but it was one of her good friend's favorite movie), and it had low-key freaked me out. not patrick swayze or demi moore or whoopi of course, but the malevolent spirits that, like, tear ghosts away? (i've seen it since, but it's been a loooong time.) anyway, i associated the song with the movie, so i asked him to turn the station. or maybe i had a tape with me, i subjected him to my music however i could haha. we were going to the grocery store. we shop, we get out to the parking lot, and he's going to take the groceries out of the cart, and he acts like he's going to ask me to do something, and instead launches into this very loud, very dramatic rendition of unchained melody. in the parking lot. my dad is a boisterous, gregarious (and can be confrontational) person (and my mom is a great people person, how they got a painfully shy introvert as a daughter is anyone's guess), and he loves to sing. at a volume. he's filled in for the cantor at shul. he never quite understood my stage fright with my own singing, and tbh a big dose of that fearlessness really would've helped me. but imagine being, idk, at most ten years old, and your dad is like, "ohhhhhhhh myyyyyy LOOOOVE MY DAAARLIN' i've hungered for your TOUUUCH a long, lonely tiiiime. TIIIIIIIME GOOOOOES BY so sloooowwwly and time can do so much, are you STILL *MIIIIIIIINE*?" deranged behavior. but i was basically crylaughing. and i'm like, what on earth, why would you do it that way? and he's like, it was good enough for the king 🤷🏻‍♂️

years pass and i somewhat forget about this, and didn't know the reference (i got the elvis part, but not the specific moment), and at some point as a young teenager, for who knows what reason, i run across the performance from june 26, 1977. as previously mentioned, i was an elvis dabbler growing up as far as the hits go, but didn't know a lot of specifics. his presence was always there in a diaphonous way. so this is...somewhere on the internet in low quality (not youtube! i looked it up, it didn't exist yet? maybe it was a fansite, this would've been around the time a little less conversation was remixed and having a moment), in the middle of the afternoon at my desk in my room after school. i can still picture that room, my chair, the bookshelf. (funny how certain moments are like that - music tends to cement things in my mind more than anything else. there's this lyric from a song called "this is one of those moments" in yentl - i will always remember this chair, that window, the way the light streamed in...). there's no real reason for me to have recall of this, but i do. in the intervening years, unchained melody had remained this hilarious, somewhat embarrassing, image of my father. and this video just...almost hurts too much to look at, it's so heart-shattering. it just had me in tears. and i thought...this isn't something i can delve into right now, and i put it away, as if it went into a box on a shelf in the attic of my head. and he sort of resided there. waiting for the day when it was time to take him down and understand. suffice to say, obviously, he's not waiting up there anymore. he's in the heart chamber now.

it's such a tremendous and yet tremulous performance, it's almost like something in him so incandescent had to blaze forth, had to give that, had to prove it, had to exude the full beauty of his voice, had to be able to smile at that audience in spite of everything. it's very near...how to phrase this? transforming it into a sacred song, it's like he made it gospel. because he had to.

the conclusion here being, yes, same. it breaks me. but the little girl in my memory can still also hear my dad and the giggling, and i don't actually think elvis would mind that part. i think it might make him smile in that same way. so maybe we can hold close to a bit of both. god speed your love to me.

#sorry for random personal anecdotes lately #anonymous #letterbox #elvis presley #bubble wrap around my heart #unchained melody #*#i was a dreamer

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