Gone Shootin'

"Gone Shootin'" is the 3rd track on side 2 of AC/DC's 1978 "Powerage" album; it's 5 minutes and 18 seconds long, and it is notable on this particular record for how "un-heavy" it is in comparison to the entirety of the rest of the record. I wrote that line from memory -- and I say that not to prove my prowess, but to express the depth of this song on my psyche as a material fact amongst the rock and roll debris that remains littered there.

"Gone Shootin'" is notable for not only its "un-heaviness'; but for its subject matter. I'm not going to look up or quote the lyrics. I don't even know what they are, and I don't actually care what they are - since they are there to suggest. What I note is what I heard on my walkman, 30 years ago, at 10 years old:

bon scott's talking about something that he doesn't want to talk about. he's tired, he's sad, it's late, the lights are too bright for the time of night. he likes the music behind him. the music behind him is holding him up to be as sad as he is.

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Quick aside to which I will repeatedly return -- lyrics are not important in songs, just like actors are not important in movies.

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When you are a kid, you don't think anything of being sad. You are sad when something sad happens.

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If you know AC/DC -- and you most probably do, but you might not -- you know them in a particular way. Like all successful rock and roll bands, they have an image that they both inhabit (images are real) and exploit (images are fake). They always looked old, even when they were young; they always looked dirty, even when they were clean; they always looked poor, even after they became rich. Lead guitarist Angus Young has always proffered his love of the King of the Golden Age of Jazz - trumpeter Louis Armstrong; yet he plays the simplest, white knuckle-est rock that a man can play (this point is certainly up for debate, but it is nonetheless valid in service of my argument). What to make of all of this? Are they just a bunch of liars and thieves? And, if they are, how do we make meaningful sense of this ruse when we listen to them?

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"Authenticity", as a measurement of "truth" or expressed as a redeeming quality in art is certainly overrated, but it is also equally untouchable. How do you know someone means what they sing, they play, they write? How could they not mean it? Does a gambler "mean" to "win" when s/he "loses"? Does Anthony Braxton, "jazz artist" only eat "jazz hamburgers"?

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What I always thought about "Gone Shootin'" was that there was a soul on the line. Now, I can't honestly speak about the soul, and certainly, if I could, I would be breaking all kinds of sacred laws by doing so in speaking about the soul whilst talking about rock'n'roll -- but nonetheless, I always thought this song sounded like a train passing slowly in the dark against an even darker distant mountain range set against the horizon. And on that train, a man, with the light over his head to signify him being awake and alert enough to look out the window, looks out the window into the dark, for someone who has left, gone, to shoot something unknown with an unknown shotgun.

A Continuance -- Dino Saluzzi - Part 2

"El Encuentro", released in 2010 from ECM, is Saluzzi's "composer" recording. A strange thing for me to claim, as it is actually a live radio concert recording from Amsterdam, 2009. Yet, his pieces, arranged for orchestra, extend his personal whisper into a collective sign of whispers -- a forest of strings, a sea of open sound that sings the whispers of many as a sign of the singular, a united front, one could claim, against silence itself (which is curious, since a whisper both acknowledges the silence it breaks open and succumbs to it by risking that it not be heard above anything). The first track, "Vals de los dias" (Waltz of the Day), arranged for bandoneon, violincello, and orchestra, begins almost aggressively, with large sweeping waves of strings that shimmer and dissolve as soon as Saluzzi's instrument appears, And yet, he disappears just as quickly, as the orchestra builds a staircase of sound on air into the empty sky, then hovers lovingly over Saluzzi's lone figure (I imagine, anyway) bent in solemnity over his instrument.

Three minutes into this fifteen and a half minute piece, and Saluzzi the player has given us 20 seconds of sound, while Saluzzi the composer has arranged the sky to his liking. And then, at 3:01, a bandoneon solo, a hush against the silence, no strings for at least 30 seconds, and then they descend like angels to gently lift him into the same sky that they occupy. Saluzzi's sounds begin to dance slightly, and weave, and nearly (but not quite) soar. Not quite because at some unknown point (I can't tell where the sounds distinguish themselves) Anja Lechner's cello rises up and becomes the sun in this day-waltz. Saluzzi flutters in the sun's shadow, and then he's gone. The cello has become high noon, not the typical mournful voice we have all agreed it must always be. No, the sun can't be sad, else how could it actually rise before us?

And then the sky reappears in the form of strings that can only dramatize the day, the cello and bandoneon swaddled in the blankets of these strings, as the day is the protection we seek under cover of night, under cover of time, under cover of the world. the strings dissipate, the whisper returns, the day continues, and then fades in a glory of movement.

My guess is that Saluzzi -- and this guess is my poetry of this moment -- sought to express the day in all its glory, all its silence, all its ever lastingness. I mean, what did you wake up to today?