Something About Alice Coltrane

Ok, so she's John Coltrane's wife. By that, I mean that I think that if you didn't know anything about her and you came across her records (or just her name, for that matter), you might think, "I didn't know Coltrane had a wife!" Or, "who was this woman married to Coltrane?" Which is probably, in some ways, the perfect question to ask. Who was she? Why did he marry her or she him? What does her music have to do with that marriage? What does the marriage of the higher order spiritual soldier of interstitial (I thank my grad school buddy, Fitz Fitzgerald for that word) spatial species (him) to a master mistress player queen of harp, piano, organ, strings, and divine-ated concept mean (her) for the world of music? Is music greater than the world itself? Is music the most divine expression of the greatest world there will ever have been?

-----

But, you know, she isn't anyone's wife. Her being a "she" doesn't give anyone the authority to "marry" her off to anyone and have this marriage define the "she" that is her. Or maybe she's a wife but we don't get to know anything about what her wifeliness is because no one but one man - which isn't us -- is married to her. Meaning, the wife part isn't ours to assess, isn't ours to imagine, is only ours to project. So what we then get is the music part, the everything that are her endless sound. But it is interesting, too, because Alice seems to have never presented herself without the "wife" part, and not just by using the name "Coltrane". She seems to have always presented this aspect of herself with pride, this wifeliness, this timelessness that links her to the name "Coltrane", because she and he were family, the familar, and their music is each part of a familial and existent world, a world of the beyond of music, a world of the beyond of spirit where the music they made is the music that seeks the spirit beyond the spirit, the light that shines behind the light that shines, the cloud whose unknowing is that by which what the world has become undone and remade in an image of absolute light, a room inside, a passageway to the immediate melody of the highest of all worlds.

-----

I am already terrified to write about this subject. Mostly because I don't want to go anywhere besides into the heart of the sunrise that is the music of Alice Coltrane. But the heart of the sunrise (Yes lyrics -- "Love comes to you and you follow / Lose one on to the heart of the sunrise") is where the terror lies, not because love hurts, but because fire hurts, and if love is fire, then love is the fire that burns me with the promise of tomorrow. And the promise of tomorrow is the utter inferno of today.

-----

It isn't easy to find all of Alice Coltrane's records. Her complete discography is listed here, on her website. I have a few "easy-to-gets" -- A Monastic Trio; Ptah, the El Daoud; Journey in Satchidananda. I have a couple "stumbled-upon-can't-believe-I-founds" -- Huntington Ashram Monastery, Universal Consciousness. I have one "I-have-never-seen-this-before-and-won't-again" -- Lord of Lords. I owned Transfiguration for a time, but the organ solo on "Leo, Part One" and "Leo, Part Two" was so intense I thought that just having the record around would burn my house down, if not a sharpshoot a pure bullet hole of love in my heart, so I sold it back and I hide my eyes when I go to the store and see her face staring off to the side as she sits at the organ on the album cover, not because I am ashamed, but because I know she will have never been ashamed of anything, and that she would speak to me with a soft ecstatic compassion and know that if I didn't ever understand, that my not knowing this would harm nothing but the sun, and not even the sun, but the sum total of my inner image of the sun. (One afternoon, as Leo, Part 1 became Leo, Part 2, the organ that filled the stereo and then the bedroom and then the hallway and the closets and the living room and kitchen and doorways and doorframes and windows all around with the flames of fury, the flames of impossible and essential loss -- one afternoon, I think I learned that it might take me 30 years to hear what I was hearing and beat back against the flames with my own mind. That same afternoon I brought the record back to the record store with a promise to remember my development of that single moment, my mind half-melted and half mettled.) There's a record with Carlos Santana, Illuminations (I won't give a link to it because I protest Carlos in the name of Alice, my contribution to what she contributed to everyone) -- I have never trusted dear Carlos when it comes to improvisation, but that's why I'm me and Alice is Alice. World Galaxy can't be found anywhere (I mean, conveniently or within a reasonable price for a record whose reason transcends that of all musical economies). Perhaps it is lost so that we can imagine it, and only misimagine it. First, though, let's go here to lose what we have so as to rebuild our imagining:

-----

The thing I always immediately think when I put on Journey in Satchidananda is that that is one deep well of feeling, and at the bottom of the well is where every sound begins, and the sky is where every sound arises, and the sun is where each sound separates, and the All Knowing is where listening creates the sound that begins, that has arisen, that will separate, that will return. The first track of the album begins with a bass figure from the bottom of the earth, a simple figure that you can immediately recognize as part of the known world, and then the otherwordly ancestry spiderweb of the tamboura falls across it, a shaft of piercing light through a window, and then Coltrane's harp comes into the thick, begins the pure thinking that is surrounded by a sea of percussion, sailed upon by a saxophonic melody, a deepest feeling that is the blissful consciousness of satchidananda. We are on the journey within this bliss, and every harp note plucked and picked and rattled by Alice is the sound of this bliss explicitly named and framed before our vanished eyes. We see only what we hear, which is what we feel, which is where we go and how we have gotten there.

-----

I imagine it must have been strange for her, making her own way, after being so close to the giant that Coltrane always was. But I don't think I can imagine it right, because partly what I can't imagine is Alice herself, with everything she thought about music and everything she heard music to be. The music that is hers is music that can only be heard as its own music. It is jazz because the music she made is meant to deepen the well, sweeten the water that is jazz, but it isn't jazz out of the convenience that instrumental, improvisational, African-American music is jazz. I imagine it must have been strange for her in that she seems estranged from everything but the Lord of Lords, the holy night that is the top of a lonely mountain and the lightning flash that composes the terror of the oldest world we have ever known.

-----

Universal Consciousness -- first off, how can that be an album title? Sure, they are just words, and words can be the title of anything, but the that begins with the meaning, which is tendered heavily, a price to be part of paying as being part of the universe that encompasses our consciousness. Alice Coltrane's concept of the conscience -- the inner knowledge of -- the thing that makes us us and not us in being beyond us -- shines, radiates, remembers, inculcates, calculates....

-----

The record begins with something that seems like the sound of what would lie on the outskirts of the world, as if these sounds could only be heard in a very specific place, a place that, paradoxically, one could only get to through hearing these sounds. There are a quartet of violins that squeal a punctual and punctuated melody interspersed with panicked and wracked nerve percussion, like jazz and like what jazz would be if the jazz were religious and sun baked in the religion of a sea-swept world, with only the sea to guide us further away from the universe that drags us, stone-henged, back to the mundane earth.

By the time we get to "Oh Allah" (above), the violins hover over us like a cloud of credible proof that there is something about all of this, a spirit that is the body, a soul that is the flesh. Alice uses this intro to set up one of those organ solos that she makes, over bass, drums, and air and wind -- I don't know how to describe one of her organ solos other than it sounds like wind blowing through stiffer wind, like water flowing through stiller waters, and this doubling of form with another form is the forum that allows her to flow through everything. But her playing, too, aggressively pursues the highest calling, its as if it can only always ascend in a way so as to open the sky and burst through it with the flames that are the meaning of the deepest cracks in the deepest earth.

-----

Alice Coltrane was as heavy as a bright sky that fills itself with the possibility that you are part of its delicate fabric, the clouds that remember the sea.

-----

The heaviest of her records is Lord of Lords, a heavy set of heavy-set tracks. "Going Home" (listed here --

)

is almost just like "Oh Allah" in that the main content of the 10 minute piece is a wonderfully distended and swelling organ solo, like waves that rise and crash against a set of cragged rocks hundreds of feet tall. Each note that Coltrane plays seems itself hundreds of feet tall, and when there is no organ, there are choruses of strings and voices stretched across the window of the sky, taut and tight and open and emptying everything out of sound but ringing notes notation the triumph of faith over the will. It's hard to describe about this music partly because the form of it is the form of the prayer it seeks to invoke, which is a heavy prayer, a prayer to the heaviness of the One that is All.

-----

But I think it makes sense to honor the mystery of time and sequence end with something earlier from Alice, from Huntington Ashram Monastery.

This track shares elements with Journey In Satchidananda -- simple, immediate bass floor rumble non-jazz jazz riff, handclap church percussion, and the flurry of harp spider ice dance all atop everything. Huntington was Alice's 2nd solo record, from 1969, and the opening track, which is just her harping her way through every corner of the universe over the simplified rhythm section, is her happiness and hope for all of us, for mankind, even. It's this piece that shows me that the world through her eyes was the world of the Coltrane that he didn't know how to have, that he knew he couldn't have unless he married this world and it became the past of his family, the essence of that something he needed to have, that something about everything that is the piano, the harp, the organ, the strings, the sound of everything shaking the sky and tearing the night into ecstatic harmony.

Rock S(l)obster

I'm dedicating this to honesty. The kind that is the truth of a song. Because songs are true. The truth of a song is its truth. Because you can trust it to tell you the truth of spirit, of life, of the clarity that is thinking your way through life, of joining with the words in song that would be your words to sing if you had your own song to sing. The truth of a song is the trust you place in it to present the truth in all its simplicity. Songs may exist solely to be placed in the mouths of listeners and displace their minds with the sentiments of the singing sung; songs may exist to erase the minds of listeners and replace their mouths with the sentience of the sung sentence.

 

-----

I never really wanted anyone to sing anything for me, or to sing anything that I would have wanted to sing, or even sing anything I would have wanted to have be sung. All of that always seemed to me to be pointless, really, because if they were singing it, and I wasn't, that seemed to be the end of everything, and the beginning of the future that is me and not you and you and not me. Perhaps this silenced crash of point and pointless was the ultimate meaning, though, where what we end off with is a beautiful moment where meaning, suspended in the animation of one lullabying another in the lie of the next moment, becomes what one is and is to become.

-----

What do we mean when we say that a piece of music or song is "devastating"? On first thought, it would seem we are referring to the emotional effect this piece has upon us, that its content or the presentation of its content reduces us internally to some doubled over position of pain, of pure suffering. Interesting, though, that in this equation, we are not calling ourselves, by default, masochists for suffering as a result of connecting with this music; rather, we are saying that we are powerless to react in any other way to this piece, that the emotional pain it brings out in us (as opposed to causes us) is the means through which we are devastated. What about us is "stated" in this devastation? What pain is already stationed within us such that it can be devolved through (a) sound(s)?

-----

I'm also aware, rereading the paragraph above the above paragraph, how arrogant this all sounds, that I would refuse any words in any voice that touched me or that I could relate to. And it is totally untrue. I wanted to be Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and sing with their confidence and righteousness. I wanted to be Paul McCartney and John Lennon and know that everyone around me was touched by the canopy of my gigantic heart. I wanted my heart to expand with the words that the voice that wasn't mine had given me, I wanted to be inflated with a meaning that lay beyond me.

-----

I notice how much easier it is to write around music than about it, to write near it than through it.

-----

Monster Magnet's Powertrip is a cross between what my buddy Josh calls "Scuzzball Rock" and what is often known as "Cock Rock". The former means that beer has been poured over everything and mildewed its way into the seat cushions and speakers out of which the rock sizzles; the former means that the singer has poured beer down the front of his pants and dares you to enter the front door where the (c)rock sizzles. In either case, there is a slob at the door, a lobster on the floor, and everything is too loud for anything but psychedelic thinking. For the record, I have always liked Powertrip, although I don't care about it, or the rockslob aesthetic, or anything with relation to beer or pants or doors or sizzling. Within the "slob" is the "sob" who weeps for humanity, whose songs are the songs of the end of times that are the end of men.

-----

Powertrip is embedded with a dark reality that seems to invoke the darkness that rock-dick-death-excess won't ever have reckoned with. This dark reality is that there is a truth to evil, and its truth is that evil is what becomes what you are when you are willing to court it and let it live inside you. Heavy, isn't it? There are 2 poles of this reality. The first begins with the last song on side 1 (this record, even though released in the pure CD era, is here as proof that albums created the narrative space for recorded music to wax/wane/ascend/descend, and each side of the record perfectly ends in a clouded doom), "Baby Götterdämmerung". (First, listen, but don't just listen. Play the track and read below while it is playing. It's ok if the words of the song get mixed up with the words on the screen; this mix up is part of the listening that should be in the head that this song will blow up.)

-----

I don't care about lyrics. I've said that in a previous post, and I will repeat it every time I talk about "songs". They don't matter only because you need to "know" them, and "knowing" them is not the same as "hearing" them, which may mean never "understanding" them. I'm going to "never understand" them in order to hear what they are -- a voice singing inside the music to convey the music as much as anything else within the music conveys them.

-----

"Baby Götterdämmerung" is a pulse, the sound of a guitar plus-ing and minus-ing in a total repetition of one clean, whitewashed chord that disappears between each beat. There's a perfect way this is being created from the perspective of making sausages, but from the perspective of listening, it sounds like each second is divided in half, and that the second half of the second is the half where the power plug has been pulled from the floor. There's a voice that comes in over this pulse as the verse, this plus, and it is a deep, convicted voice, disturbed enough to never exceed or embellish the bi-phrasal melody. The song being sung seems to be a song of death -- and when the chorus comes, and the music's urgency ascends, and the voice gains in gain and turns ever more urgent -- the death is sung with the first refrain -- "I looked in the mirror / and somebody blew up".  The "and somebody blew up" repeats to end each chorused phrase, a repetition of the recurring annihilation that is the death that is this song. While I have repeatedly ignored the meaning of the lyrics to this song, I can't my turn my mind off to the point of completely whiting out the semiotics of memory -- the song is about forgetting, about the limits of remembering, about the demand to destroy the contents of your mind chambers in order to free space for additional content. The song is about "picking which (brain) plugs to pull" and pulling them, which is why each moment of noise is followed by, or preceded by, absolute silence. The absolute silence that is the silence of each and every death of each and every thought.

-----

Side 2 of Powertrip -- and it is important that this track is the end of the album, as well as the second side -- finishes with the descent of man into a pit of snakes -- a pit of lies, "Your Lies Become You".

-----

I'm trying to cultivate the art of listening without hearing, hearing without interpreting, interpreting without judging, judging without knowing, knowing without listening....

-----

I can't think of anything more terrifying than that phrase, "Your Lies Become You". There are other words in the song, all sung with an earnest seriousness, like the moment you look in the face of the devil and realize he's no longer a dream or a wish, that what makes him real is that he is there, before you, and he is going to take you down to the bowels of the earth and have his way with eternity. The music is pristine, the sound production -- the bass, the guitar, the drums, the voice over all of them -- is like a crystal mountain lake whose chill is the chill of your bones and the thing that chills them, too. But your lies do become that "I" that is "you", don't they? What else could they do, being the words you spin, the songs you sing? Where else could you put them but inside you because you hurl them outside you? This is why the song must sound like it does, like a dark country road, like an attic set on fire, like an ancient amulet that shimmers on the mantle, like the fireplace whose embers crackle and set sparks flying in the empty room, sparks which glow and flicker and cease.

-----

Bob Dylan's "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a song about a farmer whose farm produces death, whose children starve and cry and scream, who ends it all with seven shotgun blasts. The song devastates, Dylan's voice devastates, Dylan's guitar devastates, too, and everything is reduced to "Seven shots ring out / Like the ocean's pounding roar," even though, later, "there's seven new people born." (Dylan was always too concerned with the words themselves to leave them at the feet of the devil, so he picks them up and scatters them into the heart of the wind.) Nazareth were a Scottish rock "almost" metal band from the 70's (they exist past the 70's, yes, but not in any meaningful way, although meaningful, I know, is as subjective as clouds in your coffee...) Nazareth take "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" and they rockslob it and dirgeslow it into the death of time, the death of wind, the death of your bleeding brain.

-----

The singer seems to be tearing at the words with his teeth and bones and blood, as if each word were the next moment of sanity gone past, and to tear open a vein is to tear open life itself and hope for an additional external moment,. The melody is too high for him, as it should be, since the death of a family on the outside of town, a family outside everything that is society and the world of society that is so close to them, is the death of everything that could be human on earth, which is earth because it is the home of humanity. And this lost humanity is abominable snowman, is ancient banshee wail. There is a guitar or bass or fuzz or force in this song that spreads out across the ground that is the head pounding, drums making roaring tiger headache. I don't know quite how to describe it, it feels like the feeling that happens when, in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", the elevators open and spill a sea of slow motion blood onto the floor. The spreading fuzz sound is a giant bloodstain that sweeps across the swooping plain of the flat earth, it is the end of everything that never ends, but it expands, it explains the meaning of death without ever explaining the meaning of dying. That meaning is outside anything any song could bring us to, but the song could point us towards this wind.

-----

I'm trying to think without words, to judge without thought...I'm thinking, but I want to let the forewarned arm me for the future, where there are only always songs to avoid and meanings to dodge, and killers to get close enough to that we can look in their eyes and see nothing but frozen fire.

-----

Perhaps beneath it all, there are songs that are meant to reveal a kind of truth that we can only take in in moments, perhaps there are songs that are hidden at either ends of albums that are the deepest expression of the truth of the singers, of the songs, of the players, of the audience. Perhaps these songs take everything away from the original experience of singing and dancing, perhaps they are there to silence everything but the truth of the moment in which the song exists and you expand to fit into the space around the song, you are there to contain what the song sings and to be changed by the depth of it, to let the devastation reach you and restate you, to feel the deviation between these songs and all the others that surround them. Perhaps the rockslobs are not what they seem, perhaps they are the demons of truth couched in denim and leather and mirrored shades, and perhaps the truth they champion is only as valuable as it is because it is hidden, because what you expect are cars and girls and fights and beer, and what you get, when this has all been razed to the ground, is a skeleton, a body stripped of all flesh, a skull whose emptied eyes are the eyes of time.

The Weird People

Scene -- crowded platefuls of guitarstrung teenagers and the bearded and balded men they will become, fractured and frenzied from ripping strings into air off of fretboards. Stage empty except for drum kit, amps, microphones. Two figures emerge nonchalantly from stages right and left, exactly the same causal casuality and steadfast step, except for One is two thirds the size of the Other, the Other being six feet tall, making the One no more than four. Elongated jet-black shining waves of parallel-to-metal hair, overall impression of rolling ancient-eyed buffalo'ed plains. Thin figures, low hip-slung slim bootcut cords. Inner psyche'ed Native American turquoise tinged vests. The Tall One raises his bow and strikes the electric violin held in his opposite hand, all of which appear from nowhere. Someone is drumming, rotunda style, succint and of-a-sudden. The Small One's guitar sizzles and crackles in his hands, frying sonic eggs in the white space between the stage and the crowd. Everything stops and both Tall and Small speak deliberately into their microphones -- "Discipline is never an end in itself. It is only a means to an end." Who the red devil are these Weird People? What talk is this that they are talking, and whom shall I be in listening to them if they are talking to me?

-----

-----

When I was a kid -- which I once was and which I once hoped to always only be -- I played gobs of guitar like oodles of additional kids. I fell and then tumbled into it, to a point where I actually learned what adults call music: modes, scales, polychords, tensions -- hell, even jazz standards. Nothing on earth interested me at all besides music. Nothing. Well, maybe baseball, and a girl or two, but these were all peripheral elements, things I encountered throughout the course of the day, but which faded from view at each sunset. Guitar Mattered and became the stuff and staff of life. And life? Well, as Miles Davis once said, "I never thought about life." Why? There was Judas Priest to harmony guitar me Beyond the Realms of Death. Soaring on the wings of a distorted dream, to ride the edge of that same dream and fall into a cloudburst of strange success....

My mother, wanting me to obsess somewhere else than my bedroom, packed me off, for 3 summers (or was it 2? Revising history is more fun than making it...) to The National Guitar Summer Workshop, or "guitar camp" as I geekily liked to call it. I spent 1 or 2 weeks in upstate New York with kids more into guitar than I, which was weird, because if they were more into it, what was I doing with the other hours in my day? (Sneaking out the back door of convenience stores? Throwing rocks in parking lots? Thumbing through cigar-stained images of unattainable woman? I am still working through this all in the classified ads of my back-paged mind.) Guitar was All The World. For a week or two, in NY (now it is elsewhere), all the kids for whom Guitar was All The World quarantined themselves on Guitar Earth, framed in the image of a strung out planet of perfect harmonic form.

-----

-----

Now, the kids here were WEIRD. No more so than me, but since they weren't me, that meant they had to be weirder than me. Midget mustached kids into the darkest metal known to trolls. One kid whom I roomed with had an actual amp endorsement and sounded like the lead guitarist from 80's Japanese freak metal band Loudness, but he was a Latino named Carlos who spoke pure Bob Marley. Another kid more Edward Van Halen than Van Halen was, blankly lanking around campus like Robert Plant; but who wrung his hands as though his career was already almost over at 15. Another kid gene-spliced Mick Jagger swag with Bob Dylan's whine and scolded me politically for stealing his pot, even though he only wanted to get high and muse about maidens in flowing scarves, and who would have stolen his own pot from himself as a revolutionary act if I hadn't done so. And so on....

Into the realm of this weirdness came something weirder, something that was so weird I actually learned something about the way things sounded that still remains a deep lesson in eternal context. Two kids -- maybe brothers, but even that is outside what I know -- who were completely hooked on King Crimson's 1981 re-union album, Discipline. They learned this album exactly, interpreting each frame, each molecule, as a scientific, genetic building block of something other that they each wanted to become, a pact of brotherly weirdness between them as a living homage to the fact of becoming other.

-----

"Discipline is never an end in itself. It is only a means to an end." This is printed inside the cardboard record cover, on the inner shiny paper sleeve at the bottom of the band and production credits. It's stated humbly, with no emphasis, not even in font. The sentence is on its own line, but if you never looked at the credits carefully, you could easily pass right over it. The two kids, though, hadn't just "not passed over it"; they hadn't just read it; they hadn't even just recited it. Instead, they lived this sentence by placing it back inside the music, which they decided was their music. They took this sentence and made it, and the music, which they didn't actually make, and remade it into a living premise, a promise of perfect solidarity with their own embodied integral world, a world of guitars as the instruments of disciplinary action. They stood together through their commitment to looking out a different window at a different world, and the night took all night and more nights, too, to pass.

-----

-----

Discipline is a weird record in a very particularly peculiar and specific way -- all it is is weird at every moment. But it's the type of record that makes you BECOME WEIRD, too. It's the type of record that makes you take an oath of weirdness, where you are part of a weird world, where the weirdness of that world makes you feel like you belong to something, in solidarity, that is outside every other world. And the weirdest part of this world is that it is a Weird Guitar World, Guitars Sliding Across a Silenced Sky. All elements of modernized guitar are here, mixing about with each other like a galaxial barroom brawl -- distorted plate tectonic chunk rockslob riffs, concentric ripple circles of wicked picking, ghostly shrieks aghast at the arrival of dissident humanity, humming sheets of feedback covering the ground like a gigantic rain tarp, seagulls and whale mating calls, clean Stratocast aficionado tones. The sound of a bulldozed earth as expressed through 4 men hopping around like ants beneath a magnifying glass. Men appalled at the clutter of unfocused madness around them, what post-modernity had wrought as piles of busted up and empty dreams.

-----

-----

When I saw the Tall and the Small onstage, the Weird People, I was 17 years old. I'd been listening to Discipline for a year at that point -- it sounded great on headphones, you could listen to it pretty high, but this was no Pink Floyd fuzzed out mellow psych trip. Discipline was like broiling eggs with the heat of your mind, which roasted black all over with thought at each added sound. To me, Discipline was NOVEL, and since I bored easily, I was game for its newness. Its combination of total contemporaneity -- the record is from 1981, and it always only sounds like you are in 1981 when it is on, even when 1981 was when you played it (and I didn't even hear it in 1981, I heard it first in 1986, but I could tell that 1981 would have been when I would have heard the record, even in 1981) -- uncluttered emptiness, scrawling/scribbling/screaming/chiming/chopping guitars, pop sensations fused with imagined world phenomenon, and angular dissonance showed me that the stuff in metal and fusion that I liked was couched in style first, content second. But Discipline was all content, and style was the content itself. I thought of suits with stripes and spots, shoes with eyelets lopsided to the right, pants with asymmetrical pockets. Listening to Discipline compared to my other records was like wearing a martian suit compared to my t-shirt and jeans. But it was also like stepping around a dangerous corner with the martian suit into an unknown moment, perhaps to be accosted and stripped naked in front of men who demanded I account for myself and make myself accountable to them and to any authorities who might happen upon us.

-----

-----

But I didn't think too much about Discipline when I wasn't listening to it. Perhaps, unlike the Tall and the Small, I didn't realize, for myself, the reality that Discipline engaged. Perhaps, unlike the Tall and the Small, I was terrified to act, which is what Discipline called on me to do, which meant that I refused to think about what discipline, itself (the thing and not the record, which is what the record pointed to), could do for me if I engaged myself amongst it.

-----

Admitting to yourself that you haven't been thinking is a strenuous task. First of all, the task itself is a task of thought -- even if you were to write the sentence "I have not been thinking" or if you were to say aloud to someone "I have not been thinking", you could only do so as the product of thought itself. Thinking itself can produce things, but thinking is not made simply for us to make things from it; yet like discipline, thinking is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end. Meaning, thinking is how you make or do something you haven't made or done, and this something you make or do cannot be accomplished without the method, and the means, of thought.

-----

Track 6 of the 7 tracks on Discipline is an instrumental -- the first instrumental the listener encounters on the record; the 7th track, "Discipline" is also an instrumental. The structure of the record is that the first two-thirds are "songs", the last third is "music". The record moves from words into silence, such that it ends in the middle of an ever-ascending musical phrase, twin guitars pecking at repetitions while climbing a ladder into the soaring and silent sky. Track 6 is called "The Sheltering Sky"; it's the longest (8:22) track on the 37:55 long record. It takes up about twenty seven percent of the total record time, so it is important, inextricable and intractable from the whole; it extends itself from one end of the weird world to another with exactitude. As I watched Tall and Small use violin, drums, and guitar to recreate the entire world of Discipline, I immediately learned something new about "The Sheltering Sky", which is that this music is truly "of a piece". What is it a piece of? The pure opposite of Led Zeppelin's "Custard Pie", the song that clearly tracked why the Tall and the Small were part of the overwhelm of the universe and why I stood outside of it. "Cut me a piece of your / Custard Pie" drools Robert Plant, beneath the roof of a love shack, or at least a love outhouse. There is no sky in this song because there is no sky in the lust that is the world of the repressed....There is no weird in this song because there is no weirdness to have between the people that devour each other, that eat what is left to live on.

-----

----- 

For many of us at Guitar Camp, the guitar was our way out of the psychosexual impossibility of boys being dominated at home by our parents, it was our chance to rip something out of the world and out of our bodies cleanly and shout the pure aggression that is development. But the "Custard Pie" guitar/life progress is unfocused, slovenly, mag-wheeled and monster trucked into such oblivion that the sky disappears behind it and is sucked out past the end of the universe -- in other words, you sing "Custard Pie" to be Robert Plant and un-be yourself, which is the only hope you have of undoing your own world domination. "The Sheltering Sky" takes the disorder of that destroyed adolescent world and throws a billowing canopy over it, beginning with the clean repetition of a simple, empty earth drum rhythm soon topped with an easy sea guitar figure and snake bass support. Entering over it is an inner space melody, synthesizer triggered by guitar, dissonant and frustrated and clearly punching holes in the music beneath it as if to ascend beyond it by annihilating it. And then everything begins to rise again with the aliens speaking their hearts into the space between all the known instruments, and the space melody returns weeping out of a clouded sky to pull your teenaged heart up into the clouds and into the you that is past all of this. All of this is what I saw when Tall and Small revealed what Discipline meant and was to mean to mean. "The Sheltering Sky" was of a piece of the universe, the "uni" being the one that was me.

-----

 -----

But the Tall and the Small were appearing before us "together"; when they chanted the ethic of Discipline on stage before us, they spoke the same words in the same rhythms, but the timbre, the tone, the depth of their voices were different, and this difference was the ghost in the room, the true meaning of the development we were all attempting to undergo and have begone through Guitar. Fitting, then, that the last piece on Discipline, "Discipline", is an instrumental where the two guitar parts move from intricate unison lines to an immediate shift where notes are tossed back and forth between the guitars like words both are trying to define in time and space as of the moment. As a kid, I always wondered why a piece of music with so many guitar notes sounded like there was nothing left for the guitar to say, to do, to speak. Perhaps that was because this track, like the Tall and the Small, was there to exemplify a method, to illustrate a principle, to be the thing that I could be if I, too, just practiced myself at everything without the do-over principle that is named in the tactic of practice itself. 

-----

And then, a disappeared instant -- silent stage, dark lights rising up, Weird People all around and about me. Practice until there is no longer night, my sweet son, and rise in the morning to meet the dark days before you.

You Know, You Know

A common practice I've engaged in over long years of music buying is the selling back of used albums -- this practice has outlasted even the change in media (note, you can't sell back mp3s or anything downloaded, really, for that matter. Let's take a moment of mourned silence; even though selling something back to the store nets you nearly zero profit, the feeling that something that is no longer worth owning to you is worth something to the store that can then recycle it to a new and anonymous fan, someone awaiting the sounds of their lives -- this recapitulation of the same into what is always eternally different (it is always new to someone else, even if it is dried up of all tantalizing possibility for me, it is a shining honeyed grapefruit ripe on the possibility tree for the figure behind me) is the magic economy of the real.) from records to 8-tracks to cassette to cds. The best thing about cds is the fact that they "last forever" (as if we needed them to!), but they are now, outside of well kept record albums (like well-kept baseball cards), the only thing you can really "sell".

Selling Back is essential in BUNCHES. I mean, you could sell one or two cds, but the fact is, you generally get no more than $3 in store credit or $2 in cash for them. In the world I'm operating within, cash is meaningless except for what you need to bring in if you don't get enough store credit to exchange for what you want. In other words, we're looking at the $3 store credit, which is basically a future option on the record store's current or future inventory. The whole exercise is a total gamble, but a gamble for the rush of the gamble that leads to the rush of the victory over winning. This rush only has a success rate that starts at $50 -- because, at even the cheapest used record/cd shop, to get anything cool that is more than just one cool thing, you need about $50. Meaning, you have to sell back at least 15 cds. And if what you have to sell, for example, are 80's metal cds, or orginal issue Blue Note Jazz cds -- all of which they sell to you for no more that $5 -- you will need at least 50 cds. So, you really have to be willing to be arrogant with yourself, you have to strip everything you have away to the essentials, which you can never do, which you must do if you want to bury your doldrums at the center of your troubled, discarded mind.

The Sellback is basically how you overcome depression. You know, life gets boring sometimes. You look at your music collection, and everything is grey sand, dark dirt, decades of indecency, decades of over-dependency. You're like the philosopher who realizes he's never read a novel; the high fashion shopper who is surprised by her ignorance of much needed flip-flops; the gourmet chef who has lost his taste for the simplicity of peanut butter. You lie there, with the articles of faith strewn about the world, and at the center of your bible is a black and white image of the devil yawning. Yup, there is no question about this, my son; your lifeblood is ebbing into the ether of the past.

So, you get yourself up (the Republicans were right; bootstraps do mean something; you grab them and lift them and you fall flat on your back, and you realize the pain in your backside is, well, you), and you limp on over to the tape case, or the record cube, or the cd rack, or the hall closet, or whatever. And you start picking your way though the graves of what you were once so promiscuous to freely love, now hell bent anything that you HATE. Now, this gets really interesting, because the impetus for doing this has little to do with your feeling about the recordings; what it has to do with is the feeling you MIGHT HAVE once you get rid of these recordings and replace them with something else that you "feel better" about. Notice that I'm not talking about what you "like". As soon as you own a recording, you are beyond the point of "taste"; you are now at the point of determining where, relative to your aesthetic sense, what you now own is placed, what world it lives within, and what space within the sum total of that world that it, curiously, owns. You may own the recording, but it knows more about you than you do about yourself.

When you comb through your collection and let yourself hate what you've become, you are reinventing yourself from the past to dwell in an ambiguous future. (Perhaps what will happen, when it is time for you, is nothing, and your depression may have been the true state of things.) But you don't know what this ambiguity is -- that's what ambiguity is, of course -- and this unknown is what you convert into a hope that you then use to stare into the heart of your error'd ways (all the music you own that you hate, that you should have once known to never own), rip out that very heart and stuff it into a bag, and then race out the door while it still beats, determined to make it to the record store before all that past blood spills out and dries up and leaves you with no possibility of a future life.

-----

Once the cd or record buyer flips carelessly and tired-eyed through the pile of your losses (the causes of which are even greater losses than the objects themselves) -- the only sound being the click of opening and closing the cd case, with a 5 second pause between the click open and the click shut to turn the disc upside down and stare at its imperfections -- your own living heart rumbles in your chest, your breath quickens while they calculate the value of what you have found meaningless and write it down with furrowed brow on a post it. They don't do this without first creating separate piles of value, things worth almost nothing, more than nothing, possibly something -- these piles are, for you, the visible result of everything you have discarded coming to bear on the moment. These piles are what you begin to doubt about yourself, your loves, your life, your pleasures. Yet, when the post-it reveals a sloppily "$90" on it, who "you" are is suddenly cast in the light of the wistful summer sun: you can now go play and make a bunch of new mistakes you never made before and become that "you" that the memory of the sun promises you.

But the strangest thing that happens with the Sellback is its binary correlate -- the Buyback. You come across a record you once had that you once had determined that you hated and all of a sudden you redetermine, anew, that you might possibly love it (or have loved it and didn't know it at the time, or never gave yourself the chance to love it, or were blind to your love of it, or that you weren't advanced enough to love it, or you were too refined to love it). And so, in the privacy of your own mind, with the true embarrassment that can only be the personalized experience of someone recognizing something in themselves that no one else could ever have the subjective knowledge to reveal, you add the Buyback record into the pile of records that the $90 post-it will cash out for you.

----

All of the above is my preamble to a VERY strange record I once tried to love but truly hated -- in my late 20's -- that I sold back -- in my early 30's (as you can see, I endured this conflict for a few years) -- that I recently bought back -- at 40. The record is Keith Jarrett and Jack Dejohnette's Ruta and Daitya, a 1973 post-fusion noodle space spirit empty mind dharma jazz session. Drums, Rhodes, Flutes, Chants, all that cool stuff (or stupid stuff, depending on late 20's, early 30's, 40 mindset). These guys were post Electrice Miles, Post Charles Lloyd at Monterey, and probably ecstatic to go to Oslo, Norway, and make a gorgeous sounding record in a pristine studio with the attentive detail of classical musician sound and a label ready to take jazz to somewhere non-jazz. So, what happens, when I buy back this curiosity? Well, I LOVE it. Egads. Is that me? Is this me? Am I now a you to my me because of what I now know?

Here's the track that does it for me -- You Know, You Know (interestingly, this is the name of my favorite Mahavishnu Orchestra Track, too, also slow and simple and brooding and bursting, just like this, with a sense that the knowledge one knows is the knowledge one ought to have always known). Perhaps this song is the Sellback/Buyback dilemma perfectly named -- you sell back what you know, and you buyback what you have already known. You Know (once you buy/sell), You Know (second you buy again).

-----

The world is what we know and have always returned to have known, you know? Yes, you do know, if you are me. If you are you, only you know your hates that you may return to love.

Sabotaged by Tomorrow's Dream

It's funny to think of Sabbath now -- not "funny ha-ha", but "funny strange", maybe even "funny wistful", or "funny sad" -- after all that's happened in rock music, heavy music, popular culture and with every parody of what rock music is. It's tough to remember that there was no such thing as "self-consciousness" when rock began as we know it to now be, no empty reflection on the lack of meaning or absurdity of intended meaning, which we now have and by which we will always be plagued. I don't mean an "innocence" here, though  -- there is nothing like that anywhere on this earth, which is unearthed with the sound of what has always lain beneath. Nothing is innocent there, because there is no guilt where no one has ever been.

What earth, anyway? And whose? As "Hole in the Sky" from 1975's Sabotage shrieks, (please) "Take Me to Heaven". Which heaven, nohow? It's the heaven of space, of non-planet Pluto, of a future where there is nothing but the future that promises us the future. Black Sabbath had, since their second record, Paranoid (1970), authored a sound of doom they then enrobed in a bucket of glorified sludge, but, weirdly enough, they held this sound at enough of a distance to give you a space into which you could crawl and hide and safely wait, en-wombed, for the sun to crash into the sea. This sound continued down its dark path through each subsequent record -- the pope-on-a-rope-hopelessness of Master of Reality, the cocained-emotion-freeze of Vol 4, the morning-after-Bloody-'ell-Mary of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath -- until the high voltage hero came across the other side of the world to the depressed pill popper, they commingled translucences, and they effervesced a sacred problem child: the complete annihilation of everything, Sabotage, which seems to believe less in nothing than in what is the "less than nothing". "The food of love became the greed of our time / and now we're living on the profits of crime" - these lines aren't even sung, they are smiled over a riff that evokes the electricity of any abandoned power station on any planet not yet learned of in any science fiction novel. What I always thought, when I dropped the needle down on this track, was that the windows over my stereo would implode in a fit of static recognition, since the song wasn't angry as much as it was scolding, explaining to each earthling, with each rabid and overamplified sound, that the narrator's gaze through the heart of the sunrise, beyond the purity of space, was a wish to start everything over again, was to rebel against everything that had driven us all into depravity. This was heaviness in the name of clearing everything and replacing every piece upon the board, cleansing us all in a mud bath of delectable regret.

Of course, after we have catapulted through the sky to the end of things, and we interlude with fluttering butterflies of acoustic guitar layered across the path of the nevermore, we come upon a universe that we won't ever understand. Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAH naht - Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAHT NAH naht-- the riff of "Symptom of the Universe" breaks open the typical Sabbath heavier-than-thou-lead-doom and spills the blood of punks into the black space, punks who have not yet invented themselves, but whose DNA blueprints the end of history so long as we decide to critique it. As a kid, I longed to know how this riff -- simple to the point of blank absurdity, creating the raw deal that one can only have always lived beneath -- could shake the world to bits and leave behind this trail of dust that one could follow beyond the sun and the yoke of its setting. But the song is stranger than the riff, Sabbath was always stranger than doom and more ambiguous than this metal genre they helped to make into a gorgeous dark joke.

The massive cymballic flash on "Symptom of the Universe" -- it's as if the cymbals create a blankened space for the "A" part of the riff, the guitar and bass a raft hurtling down a desolately endangering river, the cymbals the smooth rock canyon walls on either side. But when part "B" of the riff comes, the guitar and bass stop short and the drums are the raft thrown over the rapids, cymbals fading behind the sound of the falling sticks hucked in panic at the drumskins. This being Sabbath, this song has too many parts for a song to have; they shoved too much music into a small space in order to crack the space open, in order to explode space into a blackness for the world to believe in. "Symptom of the Universe" literally explodes after a series of multiply interchanging parts, --verses, choruses, post shard-shooting guitar star solo -- into a universe where the lone planet is future hippie desire -- "O my child of lost creation / come and step inside my dree-eams" -- this is pattered over a slight funk vamp, with a village of acoustic guitars and extreme post-Woodstock noodling across each passing second, which are hurtled into the asteroids of tomorrow's hallucinatory promise.

"Megalomania" closes side 1, and it closes the hole in the sky, it reverses the exploding universe by imploding everything back into the center of your mind. I had to look the word's meaning up when I was a kid, but even reading what it meant didn't change the absolute otherness of the word itself staring into me from the back cover. What does it mean to name a song "Megalomania"? It is a mania of the metaphysical; perhaps the symptom of this mania can only be known through the universe itself....

The song is a dark cauldron of impossible sorcery, something that seems to be from beyond time, but also in the time that is the time inside your head, which is the same hole as the space in the sky. There are swirls of guitars spiraling within synths stacked atop the dream brain that is the one who thinks only of himself in his blindness. Sabbath has always courted madness as a state of mind in their songs, and "Megalomania" is the pinnacle of the madness that plagues the mind that knows nothing of itself, not even its own pain. We get to deal with this for 9:46, and when everything fades, we are still getting to deal with what faded away.

Side 2 entices the most Vegas-ed of us with "The Thrill of it All", a perfect cynical counterpart to "Megalomania', which ends in a cannibalistic carnival of total confusion. "Thrill" begins with forked tongue guitar, soon overridden by the return of the cannibals in droves, 30 guitars and synths and bass and drums and too many people in too few rooms. But when we get to the verse of "Thrill", everything drops out but a greedy rock riff played with democratic vision, even the singing sliding over it all is the riff, too. The thrill is the fact that the self obsessed autocrat is engaged with only this thrill, everything is included inside it, the entire universe compromised by lying still, lying perfectly in the lap of this lie. The narrator is only all lies, the intent of the lying voice is to thrill you with a forked tongue. Lying leads only to tyranny, a tyrant's fantasy of a swirled world of voices, strings, and death.

"Supertzar", whose only words are the play on words of "star/czar", and whose only song is the chorus that accentuates the ascension of each musical mountain, is the result of this tyranny, this mutation of the real into the space that is behind the mountain, that dominates it with its barbaric yawn. The song is "heavy", but what's weird about its "heaviness" is that there is only a lone guitar amongst the multiplicity of strings and chorus, whose mutivalence atop the simple rock accompaniment of bass and drums (these are there but almost unheard) gives the guitar its extra chainsawing cinder block-ed power, as if the guitar is the black figure of the lone rider (as in Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter") and the strings and voices are the sky and sun and the drums and bass are the impotent ground beneath it all. The future, beyond the sun, lies where there is nothing beneath anything, the ground is helpless to crumble, the mind is everything that is every crumb in any world. Insanity, when I walk into a room and everyone stares at the bright new world painted lazily behind my eyes.

"Am I Going Insane" seems to ground us for a moment, the song disguised as a sheen pop surface with entwined guitars in splendiferous harmony. We hear that everything is right, except for the fact that everything feels wrong in this song, the bass awkwardly loud and thundering and stomping like a zombie stalking the moon, the crunchy edges of the guitars peeled back to reveal only a pierced vein of twisted soloing. The singer seems too loud, too large, a baby crushing the zombie stalking the moon, semi-articulate and semi awake. As the song fades, a crazed chorus (the mirror image of the warlord choir in "Supertzar') arises, cackles and frantic howls and intensities of the inner voice gone to the zombie moon. The voice that wins out over all is the voice that screams the loudest -- the screams of a child whose pain will outlast every universe. Sabbath lets that voice extend 11 seconds into the next track, the exploding monolith "The Writ".

Writing about this is tiring, and "The Writ" is the most tiring of the writing. Why? Why write something formal, something to order and organize the world such that the universe itself is no longer only the singular amorphous mass that is the "it" it is? "The Writ" is made up of many shapes, it is also amorphous, and it seems to slip past you before the 8:17 it occupies. The song is like the presence of something that is in a space, that vanishes, that has vanished even while it was there, a law laid down by ghosts of the never to be remembered future.

-----

Sabotage is that memory of something that never was; it is the reduction of that thing to what can never have been. It's where Black Sabbath was last seen, before we forgot what it meant to see something appear and mean even nothing. It is the meaning of the "less than nothing" that is the universe you will forget right this minute.