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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
