It happened more frequently to me as a kid, but still sometimes now: I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, wondering what woke me up. Then some part of my auditory memory comes online and plays back the sound that woke me up, and I process the sound consciously: something large fell on the floor in the kitchen. I get up to see and Dipsea has knocked something off the counter onto the floor. Again, this is pretty common for me. But something different happened to me this last backpacking trip, a bit of a twist: I went to sleep on the bank of the Rubicon River in Desolation Wilderness (near Lake Tahoe, CA), near the rapids, so it was loud. I went to sleep quickly but awoke with a start in the middle of the night: the sound of the rapids had disappared. And for maybe 3 seconds or so after waking up, I still couldn’t hear them. Then I *listened* for them, to see if maybe they were just quieter, and I could hear them again. What happened? Had one part of my brain filtered out the sound (in order to listen for other, more irregular sounds)–and then another part of my brain noticed that the sound of the river was missing?
While hiking I noticed that, if I hum or sing or tap a rhythm, I can pretty much shut out the entire landscape as I pass through it (which is something you want to do for some stretches of Desolation Wilderness). When I walk long distances I don’t fight the earworms: they come and–if they’re walkable–they stay. The bass line / bass solo for ‘Le Freak’ (c’est chic) is a great example of an earworm I can hike on for hours. ‘76 Trombones’ works for me, too–as a solo hiker. ‘Road Runner’ cartoon theme song not good. But this trip: wow, I never thought I would get ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ stuck in my head. I was first exposed to Queen Night at the Opera as a nine-year-old: I liked the song ‘Killer Queen’ so well that I memorized it. But ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’–that was too complex and strange and, well, really, too dark a subject for a nine-year-old. So as a kid I would skip the track, and as a result only heard the song occasionally. As an adult, I remember snippets of it (and of course Wayne’s World) but had never tried to assemble the whole production from memory. For some reason, on this hike, I missed Camper Flat, China Flat, and was all the way over Mosquito Pass before I realized what happened: 6 miles and two hours later, I could sing the whole thing all the way through (complete with guitar solos). The biggest challenge for me was: what comes after ‘Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening’: was it ‘Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Figaro’? Or was it ‘Mamma mia, Mamma mia, Mamma mia, let me go’?
How do you explain Freddie Mercury’s writing this song? Some say he was working on four songs simultaneously and got writer’s block when he started trying to write the choruses: so he just rounded up all the disparate verses into a single song. Others say that he was drunk and accepted a bet from a friend: that no song with the structure A-B-C-D-A could ever make it to the top of the UK pop chart.
And yes, I checked: Bohemian Rhapsody only costs $.99 on iTunes (although it should really be $3.97).
