My father’s funeral was, as you can imagine, a pretty traumatic experience and not one I like to think too much about. Someone assembled a video photo collage of my father, showing pictures of him from when he was a baby all the way up to a month or two before his death. The soundtrack was two of our favorite songs—Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind”. Let me tell you, watching your father repeatedly move through his life in photographs is a sure way to make sure you never want to listen again to the songs that were the aural background of the experience.
I was thinking about this the other day as I stared at the box set of Led Zeppelin’s complete works, considering ripping the CDs to MP3s. I inherited the discs from my father, and I’m often reminded how much I love their music when I hear the odd song on the radio or in a TV commercial, but I can’t bring myself to rip the damn things for some reason. Mostly because of the funeral associations. And it struck me—we went about choosing the music for his funeral all wrong.
I’m going to leave precise instructions that my favorite songs not be played at my funeral. Don’t play them at all, anybody, for, like, a year after I die! I have a much better idea.
Here are the 3 songs you are to play at my funeral: “MMMBop” by Hanson, The Chicken Dance song, and, please, please, play “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. I was taunted by that song my entire goddamned childhood. Most people say they would kill Hitler if they had a time machine, but I would make sure Three Dog Night died in a bus crash before working on fixing more important missteps in history.
