why don't i know the song?

'Rick, that song on the radio, what is it?' 'what song? i can't hear it. (tinitis first off and if i could, i wouldn't know what it is anyhow. the real problem: i know next to nothing about about the history of music. big time songwriters ladder-up the Bunyan shoulders of beloved predecessors, right? you can tell from the interviews. 'oh, yeah. when i heard ______________ for the first time, i knew, deep down, that i had to...' so they listened. they got it. they danced on the hum wire of the artist-to-artist umbilical chord, birth by proxy. when a 'new' song shivered out of them it was often a tip of the hat to bygone music warriors. when something familiar reaches my ears i recall neither the name of the tune nor the artist or worse, the wrong name and the wrong artist. i stroke my chin as i watch earnest fans bump, grind and sing, word/melody perfect, along with the tunes blasting in a bar or on the radio or in ear buds and i'm flabbergasted. how do they know this shit? as if they ARE the song, reliving the exact time and place when it first hit the heart, replaying the timeless camaraderie of 'hey, we were there, you n me babe, right? remember?'. the smarm that creams over the tune choices for weddings, start-up relationships and the death of loved ones. but for me it's a wash. i can't make out the words for the life of me. i wish i could, i do, but tinitis combined with the study task it would take to educate myself would turn it into a homework assignment. listen to the tune, absorb it, master it, memorize it. i don't. i can't. i like to hear from someone else about a song. about how it was recorded, why it was written and why it holds meaning for my friend. but that's the end of it. it is my beer allies, my co-wokers or even total strangers that compel me to write music. it's their stories, failures, troubles and love labors lost that appeal to my vampiric stenographer. it's them, my pals, not the famous, that get me. and also movies as shortcuts to actual life. 'be here to love me' (the doc about Townes Van Zandt) became the inspiration for a tune i dedicate to him even as i know next to nothing about his music or lyrics. and another thing? i 'see' picture-scapes when i write, sound track hallucinations. (it's always been like that, starting in college when i dropped acid, locked myself in a tower with an upright, closed my eyes and improvised whatever cerebral celluloid flickered by on the eyelid screen.) i guess you could say that basically i write out of my ass, not from a music hall-of-fame or r+b or folk or rock or punk throwbacks. not because Cole Porter wasn't a true genius, or Joni Mithcell can say love like Eskimos can say snow in 10,000 ways. ok, i do know a little about a few of 'em, my own particular music heroes. still, with rare exception, i don't know the tune, the singer, the genre or the words. it seems not to matter all that much. Nick Cave put it this way: 'there's a song walking down the street and if you don't shake it's hand, somebody else will'. it is like that. i'm like that. still, it haunts me, my weak excuses for not knowing those who's work came before and thus i enable my part-time self image as a charlatan.