A mix tape with meaning

I lived for the movie Almost Famous when it first came out. The second time I saw it in the theater I got the chills when Stillwater was taking the stage for one of their concerts.

The move spoke to me like very few had before. The love with which Cameron Crowe had written that script shone through. The characters he crafted from people he'd known and his obvious love of music touched me.

The entire movie could be summed up for me in one tiny line: "They don't even know what it means to be a fan. You know, to truly love some silly little piece of music or some band so much that it hurts."

I knew that feeling. No matter how often I tried to explain my love of the Beatles I always fell short. The band was more family to me than much of my family and their songs were the ones to get me through all my life's crises.

A dear friend of mine had a wondeful habit of making the most amazing mix tapes of which I was often the lucky recipient of copies. His most recent experiment at the time was mixing chunks of text from Almost Famous with songs.

There were some sound control issues between the text and the songs, but on the whole it was a perfect tape featuring some of the best quotes from the movie as well as some of the finest songs from both in the movie and out. Led Zepplin, America, The Who, Elton John, etc.

I loved making my way through the tape... each quote was revealed and had the perfect song to follow it. Then I got to my favorite, the line that describes everything I'd always felt about the Beatles. The song that followed, John Lennon's Imagine.

Something so simple could wrap up what I felt so strongly, so perfectly. I cried at the beauty of it. Ever since, that line and the song have been intrinsically connected. I can’t hear one without hearing the other.

Although tape recorders have become a thing of the past and I no longer have access to one, I still have that tape.