{"id":964,"date":"2010-05-27T19:48:12","date_gmt":"2010-05-28T01:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=964"},"modified":"2010-05-30T16:13:43","modified_gmt":"2010-05-30T22:13:43","slug":"song-of-the-day-funeral-for-a-friend-love-lies-bleeding-by-elton-john","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=964","title":{"rendered":"Song of the Day – “Funeral for a Friend \/ Love Lies Bleeding” by Elton John"},"content":{"rendered":"

Man, what a song<\/a>.\u00a0 And as Wikipedia has just told me<\/a> (as it sat on my shoulder and whispered into my ear like it were some sort of bird) that majestic and awe-inspiring intro was actually played by David Hentschel.\u00a0 But anyway, the first part, the “Funeral for a Friend” part is what a young Elton John figured was music appropriate to be played at his funeral.<\/p>\n

And man, that Honkey Cat can put the “fun” into “funeral”!<\/p>\n

Possibly even the “funk” into “dysfunctional”, but let’s not go overboard.\u00a0 I’m not even going to mention that version of “Rocket Man” that William Shatner did.\u00a0\u00a0 Actually… I just mentioned it.\u00a0 Well, I’m certainly not going to link to it.\u00a0 Fuck you.\u00a0 You can go find it yourself.<\/p>\n

So, this song first came to me in the early 90s when I was just getting into “Classic Rock”.\u00a0 I heard the whole 11-minute thang on the radio at night coming back from Medicine Hat for a work road trip.\u00a0 Those were drinking days.\u00a0 I was probably convalescing from a mild case of alcohol poisoning.<\/p>\n

I bought a VHS tape with an Australian concert that Elton John had performed in the 80s.\u00a0 The quality of this tape was fucking atrocious, and I couldn’t even get a good enough audio signal to Mikeify the audio when I tried years later.\u00a0 The performance was part of his 80s “comeback”, and he was dressed like Mozart… puffy white wig and all.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Elton was much more interesting in the 70s.\u00a0 That statement is true for most musical artists of the time… just replace “Elton” with the artist or band’s name and you get the idea.<\/p>\n