Falling down rabbit holes - The Wizard of Ahs: Nick Beggs - part 1

Since no one reads here anyway, I'm just going to post this work in progress until I can get to it again. The top half is the good part. 

I posted this comment at a youtube video. 

 @ricoF  I agree about Nick's basslines having that special something. It goes way beyond words to describe, but it feels like making love through sound. True love, the kind that holds your soul in their own. And is deeply sensual as well. 

It is deeply sensual in the way it touches the inside of you in an emotional way carried by the way the sound touches your ears and body. There is a fundamental difference in the way the lower frequencies affect the way we hear and feel that is more visceral and less mental. Not that I don't love good guitar especially in the way David Gilmour could make his "sing" giving the soul wings to fly into the ether. But the bass is more primal and operates on a more instinctive level. Nick would call it guttural. Which is what makes Nick's bass so phenomenal. 

He, like others I admire or respect like Bobby Kennedy, are often touched by tragedy and must deal with the suffering in such a way as to turn it from a poison to a medicine, or as the Japanese do with broken bowls or cups by using gold to repair them thus ennobling the scar of their ordeal. 

Hm, what's my point? Just that Nick Beggs is a really decent person, plays a mean bass, and is a prime example of being a good human being. 

This can be seen in what became Kajagoogoo both with Limahl in 1983 and the White Feathers album and in the following year without Limahl on the Islands album. Given the zeitgeist of the '80s New Wave British pop bands of that time Nick's energy is unmistakeable. 

I'm not sure how it happened but sometime during the week of Thanksgiving 2021 I found myself watching a YouTube video of clips of '80s music hits. How I came to watch it I have no clue. But as a result I watched a video of Too Shy. It was the only American hit they had and I had no idea what their name even was. Had I known it was Kajagoogoo I'm pretty sure I would have remembered that. Nevertheless, the moment I heard that baseline I was back in the '80s when I was instantly hooked. Not to the point of becoming a fan of the band and getting their albums, but enough to sear it memory for all time. I also learned that it's "too shy shy" and not "too zsa zsa". While I didn't think much of the song itself, that bass was an instant attraction. 

So now in the age of YouTube I promptly fell into the rabbit hole of Kajagoogoo and into the world of Nick Beggs. It's been quite a wild ride. It is the third one of these I've been on. The other two were with Pink Floyd in 2008 and Prince in 2018. But there is something very different this time, something far more significant in how it speaks to me and the impact it is having on my own life. 

Interestingly, not too long after this journey began around Thanksgiving I serendipitously came across an over-the-air broadcast of a PBS documentary about Pink Floyd that circled around again to Roger Waters talking about how his mom was an educator who's orientation was to prepare students for a life that starts in the future. But his experiences with Floyd led him to the realization that life starts at "dot" and your in it and that at any time you could take up the reins and drive it yourself. That's actually a lot easier said than done and harder still for women in a patriarchal society, not to mention the kind of ambition one needs to have to even think that way. Still, he is absolutely right. 

The issue for me is figuring out how to do that given the circumstances and experiences of my own life. Then comes along Nick Beggs and Kajagoogoo dropping into my world from straight out of the blue as if to show me how through their experiences. And in the process get to know them, mostly Nick because he's the most public figure having a musical career with his bass and Chapman stick. 

Anyway, I'll have to get back to this later so I can link it back up with the title of the post which started out as:

"The Way does not enlarge the man; the man enlarges the Way. Nick Beggs: An exemplary human"