“We just wanted to go to the movies!!”

Is what the lady said as the news hounds interviewed her and the other survivors of that midnight madness at the movie theater over in Aurora. Surely someone will be asking at some point “What were you doing when…”. I know what I was doing….

Sitting up in the middle of the night thinking random thoughts about the life and times (for starters…)

Maggot Brain had come on and the tv was tuned to some news channel with the sound muted. My eyes kept getting drawn the blue and red flashing lights on the screen. My brain was not processing what they were sending though. My ears had preempted all programming as Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” faded in building in volume.

The version I was listening to was not the familiar one most people have heard. This was a 14 minute version from another album where they played it live. (Funkadelic Live Meadowbrook, Rochester, Michigan 12th September 1971). Not a bad sounding recording my ears were saying – but my eyes kept cutting in…

At some point I I turned on the closed captioning on the TV to discover hell had revisited earth yet again…and the music played building to a crescendo of guitars as I read the news…

Wildly estimated body counts started coming in as the drummer got some…

Somehow the music added the perfect context to the event. Hard to explain. and I was thinking to myself, they only wanted to see a movie…crazy. And the music fit perfectly. Check this out…