A Rock and Roll Coincidence


I won't wax poetically about the inimitable LeCompt, as I've already given them enough praise (I believe I've called them the "best bar band in the universe") but last night, after a frantic and late entrance -- they had already played an afternoon gig in Philly-- they started with a mellow and weird psychedelic set, and while they were playing "Down By the River" I told my cousin that my kids liked this song because they were intrigued as to why the narrator "shot his baby," and I then told my cousin that I had been playing "Space Oddity" to my kids on my guitar because they liked the space theme and then-- and it couldn't have been ten seconds after I said this-- LeCompt launched into an amazing cover of "Space Oddity" . . . which is pretty coincidental, because nobody covers "Space Oddity," but they did it, complete with space vocals and guitar, but I didn't make too much of this very strange coincidence because I once read something by a statistician who pointed out that the very fact that we are alive and process stimuli every second-- which adds up to a million events a month or so- and the fact that we are constantly on the lookout for patterns means that we will discover a one in a million coincidence fairly often, but it is foolish to assign meaning to it because that means we must also assign meaning to all the non-coincidences that happen to us-- all the songs I've mentioned that bands don't suddenly start playing moments later . . . and while this does ruin the fun, it doesn't mean I still can't enjoy the coincidence (and sorry the sentence is late today, but it was a late night).

5 comments:

  1. I assume you aren't referring to the song "Major Tom (Coming Down)" by 1980's German pop artist Peter Schilling but instead mean the song "Space Oddity" by David Bowie. If, on this blog, you are going to quantify emotion and sap the fun out of eerie coincidence with boring science, at least fall back on sterling precision in the sentences you create. Not knowing the name of the song around which your post centers undoes whatever point you were trying to make. A lot of people simply won't be able to navigate past that egregious, repeated error.


    And 5 points to anyone who can tell us why David Bowie changed his named to David Bowie.

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  2. real name dave jones....not to be confused with davie jones...bowie a type of knife that he had, and jim bowie, here of his from alamo

    thanks wikipedia

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  3. forget the coincidence angle, what you got in that moment was your life like a movie. you mentioned something and the band was the soundtrack of your life. that's just awesome.

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  4. i'm appreciating the awesomeness.

    and igor, you probably call "teenage wasteland" "baba o'riley," you elitist bastard.

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