Styx vs. Monkees: A never ending conflict

Ok, I did watch the fan produced ending for How I Met Your Mother today and if you had shown that to me yesterday and told me that it was the real ending I would have thought, “Aw, what a sweet ending.” It would have been a happy ending for everyone, or at least Ted. You still have to figure out Barney and Robin and Marshall and Lilly but you could make them all happy in the end. In a sense I like the fact that they did not make it nice and neat because life is certainly not and neither has been Ted’s life. But that said, the more I watch the original ending the more it seems totally off. That is what happens when you are writing to scenes filmed by child actors seven years ago. At some point you can accept that you should change plans.

Anyway, I wanted to tell the story tonight of how I am a hypocrite in general and especially when it comes to music. If I am nice this is just an example of how I can be a bit of an arrogant snob but at worse it shows some of the lesser side of my personality. Either way it is a pretty fun story.

So a few weeks ago someone asked me if I wanted to go see Styx in concert and my response was a) laughter and b) “why would you want to see a band without their lead singer and where half of the band is dead.” Now let me start by saying that I really like Styx. I actually owned Kilroy was Here on cassette. They are a Chicago band and two of the band members lived in the suburbs in the same neighborhood as kids from my high school. Hell, when my sister was in high school the school won a radio concert which gave the students free tickets to see Styx. I can’t say that they are my favorite band of all time but I did grow up on their music.

But with all that I have no desire to see them in their present form. Dennis DeYoung is no longer the lead singer because the rest of the band hates him and it is hard to think of Styx without him. Tommy Shaw is still a good guitarist and probably worth seeing but it isn’t Styx. It’s Tommy Shaw, one or two of the other original members, and a bunch of other guys filling in roles. I didn’t want to spend money to see the show. I didn’t care that it would be silly fun. I pretty much shot it down as the dumbest idea I had ever heard and that was before I found out it was a double bill with Foreigner.

Fast forward a few days and I check my email to see that Ticketmaster has let me know about the latest shows scheduled for Kansas City (most likely on the hope that I would start buying tickets again as I believe that my moving resulted in a significant hit to their profit margin). In the email I found out that the Monkees are playing at the Uptown Theater. Not only was I getting ready to buy concert tickets I was ready to buy plane tickets, get a hotel room, and then camp outside the front door of the Uptown for a week ahead of the show so I could be in front of the stage. Oh, and while I was camped out there I would be getting signatures for my petition for the Monkees to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Of course this makes absolutely no sense. Davy Jones died a few years back so it is clearly not the Monkees of old. Even with Mike Nesmith there we are missing the heart of the band and everyone is older and let’s face it, they never played their own instruments to begin with so it is not like they have gotten any better. But it’s the Monkees! I grew up on their music. It would be a lot of silly fun.

So I’m a hypocrite. One band from the seventies reunites and I consider it a personal affront that it would even be suggested that I see them in concert. Another band from the sixties, one that was created solely for a television show, reunites and I am willing to travel across the country to see them play at a venue that is conveniently located across the street from a place where you can sell your blood plasma. If I was internally consistent I would probably be a lot easier to live with.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Nothing makes life better than a new Drive By Truckers album.

The Sense of an Ending

It will probably surprise some people to discover that I did not watch the finale of How I Met Your Mother last night. That will be slightly less surprising when I provide my excuse that I was on a plane at the time as “I’m on a plane” is basically my default state of being at the moment. However, I have read the reactions and watched the last scene and felt that I must provide my thoughts on the ending of the television show that most paralleled my life.

Let’s talk about the parallels. The show debuted in 2005, just under a year after I started the blog so when Barney talked about nobody reading his blog in the first season I totally got the joke. The characters were a few years out of college and five years younger than I am. I was a few years out of grad school and most people would be generous in saying that my social and emotional immaturity would make me five years younger than I actually am. The main characters seemingly lived at a bar, drank Red Dragon shots and lived in a world of in jokes and bad decisions. It was my life in a nutshell.

I should also note that I stopped watching the show weekly in the spring of 2011, which not coincidentally is when I stopped blogging regularly. The fact that I decided that the show that I once threatened to sue for stealing my life story had gone on too long at the exact same time that I got married is an interesting sidebar. It wasn’t that we disliked the show; it is just that the schedule of our lives had grown too crowded. I still kept up on the show by online reviews and have bought all the seasons on DVD so one day I will catch up. From what I can gather is that the three things that people are most upset about are 1) Barney and Robin break up, 2) we meet the mother only to have her die and 3) Ted ends up with Robin. I’ll go through these one at a time.

Barney and Robin’s marriage falls apart: I will admit that this is something that I am not really happy with especially given that the past several seasons were dedicated to getting the two of them together as a couple and having Barney mature into a better version of himself. I remember the season where they first started dating and you could see that as a storyline and I truly wanted it to work. I was more upset when they broke them up the first time than most people because I just thought they made a great couple and were treading water apart. The fact that their marriage ends, Barney returns to being a player but finally gains his center by becoming a dad as a result of his one night stands ends the story of Barney on a bit of a sour note. But, to be honest, I can easily point to so many friends who had seemingly gotten their lives back on track only for them to derail and then find themselves again in a simpler way.

We meet the mother only to find out that she has been dead for six years: To be honest this was not a complete surprise. I read a review of an episode from a few weeks ago that made it pretty clear that the mother had died and I know that years ago that was one of the predominant theories about the mother. Once it became clear that the mother was a character that we had never met one of the few ideas that made sense was that Ted was telling them the story about how he met their mother because she couldn’t tell them herself. It seems strange for a sitcom and when the show started I would never have assumed that ending but now I can understand it. Maybe it is because I look at my list of Facebook friends and see several who have died over the past few years. As you reach middle age the idea of one dying young goes from being a bad Billy Joel song to a horrific truth.

That said I understand that one could be in one of two camps here. The first is that this is a total rip off. The entire show was about how he met her and the moment she is introduced she is killed off screen. That is tonally dissonant and in watching the last scene the entire conversation with the kids where this is revealed feels completely wrong (and not just because of Ted’s makeup). If you viewed finding out who is the mother to be the pinnacle of the series then this was a total gut punch of an ending.

On the other hand, I stopped thinking about the importance of the mother years ago once they decided once and for all that it wasn’t going to be Victoria. Who Ted totally should have married in season one like they had planned if the show had only lasted thirteen episodes and we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. Instead the story was about Ted’s journey and finding out who he was and what he needed to be happy and yes, in the end, the story was always about Robin. He started the story with how he met her and ends with getting permission to try one last time.

Ted ends up with Robin: For as much as I question the last scene having it close with Ted holding up the blue French horn outside Robin’s apartment is one of the best ways to end the series that I could possibly imagine. And in this case, and the last example of the parallels between my life and this show, I am completely biased.

Twelve years ago I saw a girl in a bar. After meeting her I told my buddies that I would marry her. At the time it didn’t work out. We never even dated. We liked each other but were in different places in our lives with different goals and dreams and while I always thought that she was “the one” it was never right. Years passed. I drifted away and went on adventures and had a serious of relationships that could be alternately called comical, farcical and fictional depending on your point of view. Then one day, six years after I first met that girl in the bar, she emailed me and I decided to raise the blue French horn to her window one last time.

Kim and I celebrated our three year wedding anniversary last week. Sometimes you end up with “the one” though the journey is never the one you expected it to be. All my best to Ted and Robin and to quote a much wiser man than I, “Fair play to those who dare to dream.”

The five random CDs for the week (and yes, back to blogging regularly)

1)      Big Head Todd and the Monsters “Beautiful World”

2)      Josh Rouse “Under Cold Blue Stars”

3)      Beausoleil “La Danse de la Vie”

4)      Jay Farrar. Will Johnston, Anders Parker, Yim Yammes “New Multitudes”

5)      Sting “The Soul Cages”