"Nice Jazz Music"

 

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When I was in my early 20's, I was in a band -- a trio, mostly, guitar/bass/drums, later adding keyboards and occasional second guitar, which rounded us out as a quartet -- and we were trying to "do something within music". One meaning of this phrase is that we were moving through music towards something -- I guess you could say we were "exploring the landscape" of music, or "seeking out the distant horizon" of sound, or any similar esoteric phrase of poetic effort. "Doing something" meant, to us, "not doing what had been done". An idiot's dream of a new world, a beautiful dream of shining things in the aging light of a new dawn, but also the willingness to try to see the world anew through sounding out the undone. We know you can't really do anything that hasn't been done, but it's the bravado of trying to do something that makes something happen (to someone). So, we played music, however we could play it. We'd stretch tempos, drop bars, go from loud to soft or vice versa, use effects and echoes and wrap our sounds in pillows of deep galaxies, we'd immediately play something almost pop long enough to stab it to death with steak knives of steely cloud sounds. We'd open the space between verses so that you'd forget there once was a verse. We didn't sing much, or if we did, voices would fall in and out of the time of the music in order to reveal to anyone listening that what we were saying were the words of ghosts hovering just behind everything, just to the side of what might be there in front of us....It was a time of strangeness, of playing things that filled the air with the mystery of their unknowing.

One day, in a quite moment, or between saturnic journeys, we heard a knock at the door. Our rehearsal space was in a pretty "hard to find" spot, on the mezzanine floor of a building that had a Jillian's pool hall above it, down an accidental open door-ed corridor you'd have to either be drunk to enter or unconcerned as to the danger you might find down there. No one besides us ever "meant" to walk down it. The knock rang out like a shotgun -- Who was it? Were we doomed? Had we paid the rent? (We were young and poor and notoriously irresponsible...) Was this the end of love as we had known it? We all shrank back from the sound of the knuckles rapping against the wood as if it were the sound of something that were to seal our fate were we to acquiesce to it. Our freedom, at that silent moment, was expressed in our refusal to respond with anything but our own silence.

But this was a fist aimed at breaking us apart, and it knocked again, and again. The bass player, a smiling guy for whom even going to the moon in music was a reason to smile even more at the glory of space, moved towards the door, then deftly flipped the lock and pulled the door open towards him, moving back lightly and quickly. A tall man stood there, quite crisp, a grey wool overcoat on his shokders, beige cashmere scarf across his collar, matching beige cap, matching smooth grey slacks, dark business shoes. We wondered if he was lost. Or, in fact, if we were even more lost, even though we thought we knew where we were on what we still call "planet earth."

He looked soberly into the sad disheveled room of our rehearsal space, the walls covered with incomprehensible hidden agendas. Then, he smiled wider than the horizon and exclaimed, "You all are playing some nice jazz music in here!" We wondered, just then, what "lost" could mean, what it was for us to be so. We were playing some nice music -- we were trying to make something in music that was the likeness of something that invited the listener in to listen -- but "jazz"?

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I generally listen to instrumental music -- not as a rule, but then, kind of as a rule. Partly it is because I prefer not to spend my listening time concerning myself with the words that someone may be singing and attempting to make meaning of those words amongst the forest of sounds swaying everything around me - as if I were looking at a row of blended green trees and, instead of losing myself in the true contemplation of nature for a moment, were called upon to attend to the bird call that isn't meant for my response. And what I like to hear in instrumental music is the sound of the instruments interacting in time in a manner that could be thought of as freedom -- that is, the open space to move amongst everything that there is to move within. So, there would be improvisation within what I like to hear, since part of this listening is hearing what is to come that is not to be known to come, even by the musicians who are there leading me on towards what is to come. But I also would like to hear a thematic element to the music, perhaps a repetitive phrase, a melody, perhaps some instant where the music unscatters itself, is gathered for a moment into something distinct, defined, co-committed. And then the sounds can go scurrying merrily along a harmonic footpath, fast or slow, mean or sweet. I want to be near this inconsistency, this constant change from one thing to another thing and then back. I want what ends up being within jazz. But I don't want jazz. I don't want a genre; I want what the genre might contain, might hide, might exhibit despite itself and despite the marketplace that craves the simple fact of its finite existence.

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There are a lot of "I wants" in the above paragraph -- perhaps too many for a reader, perhaps not enough for the writer declaring themselves aloud in a silent room. But that's part of it, too -- for me, music is what fills the silent room with an additional silence through which I complete a contemplation. Of what? Well, the music itself, which is to say everything that the music evokes - images of the world in which I have lived, times, places, images of images, shades of shades of suggested feelings. There's an Eberhard Weber piece called "Visible Thoughts" -- I think of the music I most want to hear being what lies behind the thoughts that emerge in my mind, the thoughts I think I see by thinking them. Sometimes there are fields of grass, greenish-blue, so vast I disappear in simply thinking of them; these fields are the vastness of everything I could think, ambiguous and open to the world, closed to everything that has vanished from the earth, open to everything that could appear right after this.

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Jazz, of course, has an important and essential history, and it cannot be referred to without evoking the space and time and cultural context (in?/out of?) which it arose. I pause to formally evoke history here, partly because, when I listen to recorded music, I both exist in the historical moment of the music I am hearing, as well as the past through which this music shines to alight itself upon me, or the space I am in. And then there is the historical moment in which I coexist with the sounds in the room or air around me, and the historical moment that makes the moment of all these coexistences possible, too -- while rooted in the purest chronology, I am also suspended in the impossible time of hearing something that can always repeat if I play it again. Jazz, by definition, as it is linked through identity (what is it?) to improvisation, has always resisted the recouperation of recording. It has always existed only in the moment it is being played, and it cannot repeat except by not repeating itself. So, perhaps we were playing Jazz Music that day in our shoebox, with an unknown stranger outside in the brightly lit hall, because the music disappeared upon his hearing it. Perhaps everything I listen to that has been pre-recorded only attempts to reconstruct the possibility of the music's disappearance, and it is all a wonderously lost hope. If so, then there is no style at all, no genre that can even be declared. We can all sleep gently in the noise of the thoughts we would like the genre to make of us, that it hasn't known how to make.

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There are also practical reasons for my "disowning" of jazz. Ever just like the sound of an instrument? You know, just hear it and not want to stop hearing it? (I feel that way, for example, about the sound of my wife's voice. I just want to hear it and not stop hearing it.) That's the guitar for me. The guitar, while "allowed" in jazz, is actually an instrument that enters jazz to tear it open a bit, to push it against and then through the wall into the sea, beyond the sea, into the sky, beyond the sky. The guitar soars into the sun and melts a firey path downward, and the whales jump up to greet it as it hurtles past them into the center of the earth. "Nice Jazz Music" is exactly what the guitar needs, exactly what history has given us, finally, the finality of things as they once were ending.

Ta(l)king Stock

Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. Such an incredibly weird and unexpected album, full of silences and pauses, explosions and estranged river winter sounds. Listening to it is an experience alienated from "culture" -- it doesn't relate in any fashion to the time and place around it; it follows no cultural signs, it represents nothing of "pop" music or culture. I don't know if I know anything as far from pop that seems to still be linked to the notion of its existence. If Laughing Stock evokes, say, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew -- the first "fusion" album (not true yet who cares, it is still a recording that evokes a watershed moment, partly because, looking back at Bitches Brew, it doesn't sound anything like what you might expect something that is a landmark recording in a particular genre) -- it does so in a way that we, as listeners, hardly ever really consider, which is the tone of the record. It sounds like it is made -- and that listening to it, we are there while they are making it -- along the edge of a swiftly flowing and soft grey river, and the sky above us is filled with soft grey clouds, the sun sleeping beneath (or behind?) this lush blanket. But the sun is there, since its absence is an absence that evokes a whispered presence, a hushed, yet heightened present. This swift river pours into the center of the music, flooding it with a liquidity that pushes the distance between each instrument yet blurs the boundaries between them, too, so that you don't really know what you are hearing, or what it is you are hearing, or who is is that you are hearing be what it is they are being. It's a uniquely disoriented experience, and you adjust yourself to it. Perhaps you think they made a mistake, that the instruments spilling into each other, bleeding sound into other sound, shouldn't be like this but they let it somehow slip past. But that slipping, too, is part of this waterlogged world, a world that is waking up under the sea, a world that looks up from the bottom of the ocean through a cracked rain spattered windshield at the empty green grey valley.

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It was 20 years ago that I found this silence, actually stumbling upon it accidentally as a birthday present for my (then (first!)) girlfriend, my (now (long ago (ex-)))wife -- I knew she liked music I didn't know and didn't think I'd ever come to know or ever come to like (both of which ended up as being weirdly true, perhaps prophetic, perhaps predictive, perhaps predicated on my willingness to keep things between us boundaried, perhaps caused by my unwillingness to move towards things around me that were not what I knew), but I thought, since it was her birthday, and she was my first real girlfriend, and there were used record shops everywhere around me (this was Boston, 1991, too many shops to count, but just enough shops to frequent daily), that I could give things a chance, since I wasn't yet anywhere far along enough to give up on anything, yet.

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She'd showed me The Color of Spring, Talk Talk's 3rd record, a mixture of 80's synth pop and brooding emotional season tones -- a record clearly produced in a studio, with layered sounds of various instruments placed in mid to late 80's context, but with a larger sense of sound itself, guitars sounding like guitar, piano like pianos, choruses of voices choruses of voices shouting out and making contact with the heavens. I liked it, and I was surprised to like it, since 80's pop wasn't what I liked then, and the fact that I liked it and was surprised to like it made me want to engage that surprise even further when I bought my girlfriend something for her birthday. In the record store, I came across the image of Laughing Stock's cover, and thought it might be nice to buy her this, something I thought she'd like, something that reflected our commingling tastes. She smiled widely when she unwrapped it, she seemed delicately touched that I had reached out to her taste rather than simply reflecting my own, which, at the time, was quite dominant, a voice too loud in a public space to acknowledge the space as public. A few days later, however, when I came over to her place and saw the CD case sitting next to the CD player (but something else was in the player, not this), I asked her what she thought. "That's the worst thing I've ever heard," she said, turning towards the wall. "I hate it."

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Later that night, while she was sleeping, I quietly glided out of the bed and slid along the wall to the CD player resting on the dresser. I extracted Laughing Stock from its cover and silently slipped the disc into the player and pushed my thumb down on the play button. I held my breath. What could she have hated so much? What could Talk Talk have done on Laughing Stock that could turn such an ardent fan so definitively against them? Surely aesthetics are forgivable throughout history, and this forgiveness is what we, as consumers of creative product, are what we use to make up for the distance between what those who produce give us to experience and what we actually think of these art objects, right?

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I could quote lyrics as a way to explain the profundity of the sentiments, the deep humanist philosophy that Laughing Stock proposes. But the lyrics are intended to be unheard -- the words that Mark Hollis sings seem only to be sounds that allow his voice to move between one moment and one other. I almost wonder if the lyrics are actually written down in retrospect, as potential visions of what these sounds could signify in a world in which signification means more than empty thought. If you get the CD (or cassette, possibly, or more possibly) the lyrics are handwritten on the inside in a script that is nearly illegible, neatly and essentially organized, as are the actual words sung. I've often wondered if lyrics exist in order that we have the option to no longer listen to the sounds of the music we are hearing, that if all lyrics were actually sung in a language foreign to us, or if they were sung in order to obscure the words we are hearing and not clarify them, we might actually have the opportunity to hear the human voice in its true place amongst the distant lands of the instruments that always approximate it. We might actually hear the person shining through the rain spattered windows to the outside world, which crowds in from all around us, which is always speaking to us of our difference to it, its indifference to us. The world floods into us, and we withstand it by speaking back to it in the voices that dazzle it with ineffable alienation.

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Of course, my girlfriend was right, as any pure Talk Talk fan had to have been in 1991, 5 years after The Colour of Spring (although, to be fair to both history as well as their audience, Talk Talk did release Spirit of Eden in 1988, which clearly opened the path through a misty musical forest, on the other side of which is Laughing Stock, along the banks of the sopping river; this essay COULD be about the radical step Spirit of Eden was from The Colour of Spring if the goal was to talk about the relationship between an artist and their audience, but that's another topic for someone with a larger sociological mind than I. And, for the record, this essay is not about the value of Spirit of Eden as opposed to Laughing Stock -- it is simply about the total oddity of Laughing Stock as an object of art, and I refuse, for the moment, the applicably progressing context of Talk Talk themselves.) She was right because this record was totally unintelligible, muffled, mumbling, hesitant, definite, cloudy, obscured, fogged, elongated, diffused. It was everything you don't want to hear in pop music. It was all the content that pop music has nothing to say about, all the waste pop music discards, all the words pop music never uses. My girlfriend hated it because she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be "Talk Talk"; but, more than that, she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be what music was supposed to be or had been.

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It was dark and quiet in my girlfriend's studio apartment, with the parking lot streetlights peering in through the half-closed blinds. It was as if they were seeking me out; as if they, too, wanted to know what I would hear, as if they wanted me to tell them what I heard and explain to them what my girlfriend heard that freaked her out so badly, what jarred her and upset even the simple order of a man in a dark room listening to recorded music on headphones in the middle of the night with the light of the street illuminating the corners of the walls. And then, in the distance, at the edges of the headphones, a sharp pulsing like a tape machine, interrupted by a deep, clean, trembling guitar chord, soon echoed by wind instruments and the whimper of a snare drum being righted and set in place. The chord rumbled a second time, and the elongated notes of the woodwinds lighted up the night air beneath this liquid thunder. Everything was of a depth, submerged in something full, something invisible, something to be seen later. "Place my chair at the backroom door" sang Mark Hollis, the words less sung than chanted, less chanted than lamented, less lamented than flung to the floor with the energy of a man tired of everything, especially that which he has to say, especially that which he says and which no one hears. My eyes were open. My heart was quick, then quicker. I understood immediately what my girlfriend did about this music, but from the perspective of someone with no expectations, with nothing of the future, with nothing but the moment in which everything is being heard and will continue on in its hearing. I understood that what I heard at that moment was something that had never been in any moment I knew; I understood that I knew less about what I was hearing than about what listening was to mean for me later, after I knew what I was hearing. 

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If whoever you are that is out there could meet me, I'd choose a coffee shop where the coffee is fresh, dark, and strong; where there are not too many laptops to clutter up the silence; where at least a few conversations are punctuated by passion, gesticulating hands, perhaps even gazes towards the sky evoking the real world of the false god; where the windows are filled with either sun or rain and the chalkboard menus reflect the nature of the day outside. If we were to meet, I would say more about Laughing Stock and how it still, to this day, if I am able to listen to it, makes me rethink what I think about things in general, and things in specific -- about what I say and what I see, about what I hear and what I know. It makes me reconsider what luck is and who has it; what fortune is and where it goes. Who men and women are and how they interact. But none of this seems relevant to the actual content of the recording, which is the content of something other than what you may or may not be willing to know. And willingness, we know, is where aesthetics imprint themselves on the name of the world. Willingness is how we know what we may love, and why we can decide to hate something dear. I'd tell you about that girlfriend I once had, who then became my wife and then became my ex-wife, and how her hating this record impacted my experience of music more than almost anything, and that the rabbit hole of exploration down which it led me does not yet end, even when I remember her being gone, long ago, in the future that is ours to dream in time, the rain softly beating back the soft waves of the grey river.

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?

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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....

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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)?

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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.

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

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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"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.

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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".

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

Utopia: Pop Topic of Pure Unimportance

What to make of Todd Rundgren's Utopia? Certainly not a whole blogspot, but perhaps a stop on the blog, a blinded blip spot upon the screen saver of popped-out sounds....

(For specific context you can read about Utopia on Wikipedia, and the information is in good enough order for me to leave most embellishments aside for now. Yet, can't resist this, a quick synopsis:

"Todd Rundgren and Utopia -- 70's - 80's. Assignment: describe "who" "they" were. Rundgren was/is a unique producer, singer, lead guitarist, songwriter, front man, composer, bandleader, and all other kinds of things. He made a great living producing records for rock bands -- Meat Loaf, XTC, The New York Dolls -- and making solo records of all musical sorts on the side. And on the side of THAT (like an extra order of bacon (or something)) he had a band called Utopia, which included a bunch of no-names (to the general public -- Moogy Klingman, anyone?) -- these guys were respected professionals in the biz, but this wasn't a supergroup. They originally started as a snazzed up progressive-rock-art band (3 keyboardists on their first record!) with ineffable ideas/technique, without the internal/external seriousness of Important Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes. As time went on (and it did go on!), Utopia became a very minor and curious pop band, really not like anything else, but also sounding like a perfect pop band, but also not like anything else, while also sounding conspicuously like everything else, such that no one could notice them unless they intended to notice them, meaning that they would have had to have known to notice them..."

I'll start near, but not completely, at the beginning, with this: a live performance of "Sunburst Finish", from the 1977 RA album.

Sunburst Finish, live, is kinda goofy -- the dress and hair and audience, the drab colors and ragged costumes, as if this is a performance of abstract musical theater, the context of which is forbidden to all of us looking historically at the screen. But the performance is incredibly agile, ambi- and multi- dextrous. A melody is sung over a too-many-notes-in-one-space, laughably relaxed and complex riff, the singing shared equally by three men whose voices, while of not the same caliber or quality, can each easily carry the melody safely across shifting rhythmic sands. While a few pop bands have had multiple singers -- the Eagles, Kiss, The Beatles, CSNY, Fleetwood Mac all come lovingly to mind  -- usually songs are "owned" by a singer or a voice, and that "ownership" creates the "meaning" and "message" of the song -- i.e, a "Paul Stanley song", or a "John Lennon song". But in this Utopia track, all three singers are the messengers. Later, they harmonize over what sounds like a ship sliding into the edge of the sea with an orange sun leading them onward, towards deeper waters of wizardry. Todd Rundgren has the "best" voice, so he takes the lead at the end before a disseminating a knuckle-clutch-the-highest-note guitar solo into the heart of a screaming orange jubilee sun....

But back to the singing over the initial riff -- it's the gaudiness of the act, combined with the hum-drum-iness of its execution, that gets me. Keep in mind that the "heyday" of musical prowess in rock and roll was really the 70's. I don't mean that "bands were better musicians then" (What a preposterous thing to even think to think. Who's going to publish the double-blind studies on that?), but more that this was a time when Rock music was claiming a musical legitimacy and complexity as a "part" of its identity and self definition. (Even the Ultimate American himself, "Uncle Ted" Nugent, had songs in odd time signatures as a sign of pure capitalist, sold-out-arena solidarity...) And part of this ultimate effort towards legitimacy was to flaunt, to brag, to expose, to shout one's prowess into the name of the heavens as a way of claiming one was there, that one had come, seen, laid waste to, politicized...

With that as contextual backdrop, relisten and relook at the riff and the singing in this clip: it's quite concentrated, yet totally casual, and nearly haphazard, in its delivery. And that's what Utopia brought to this 70's bombast, even a smile when Rundgren takes a high note and sleepily mangles it like Peter Brady. This is high art rock on the silliness of Spinal Tap stonehenge stages, made more normal by the homemade custom of cloth-cut, space-ape-aged costumes.

Utopia are totally unimportant. As they intend to be. Which makes the ease with which the difficulty of the musical task is accomplished as imperfectly astonishing as it ought to be for us outsiders.

(As a quick aside, RA's entire second side is a monstrous piece of Art Rock Storytelling entitled "Singring and the Glass Guitar." (Was it once intended to be "Sigmund and the Glass Cigar"?) In it, each member has their "own song" where they each solo (guitar, keyboards, bass, drums) and end each of their solos with a thematic section that they then all overlap in the song's epic denoument. Art Rock Fairy-Story Arche-Type in deed.)

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Somehow, it's 1984. We ended all up in here, synthesized and drum-machinated on our way to an empty heaven, where pleasure could only be the perfect automaticized autonomy -- and so does Utopia with their Oblivion album, where "Crybaby" (audio) meets "Crybaby" (video). (Nice irony, asymmetrical serendipity -- the video on YouTube has no audio, and the audio no video, so you've gotta double-window it to experience it in sequence -- chalk it up to the unimportance of a band no one even knew to know was there). This track's a sublimated sliver of 80's art-pop synthesis; a proto 2001 Space Odyssey with primitive future man as the monkey, and the video screen revealing his loss of total meaning, of a universe emptied of everything but pouting models with "hearts of leather and steel / who take self defense and turn it into art..." Everyone ends up crying, because isn't that what rock music is for? Crying voices, crying models, crying drums, screaming/crying guitar -- which is what this song fades with, just as 1977 faded from its art, so does 1984 fade with its identical art....

It is as if from the start, by being the side project of a musician whose solo career itself was a side project to the act of producing other artists, this replicating of reality, which is the replication of one style by another, shows the true dis-empowerment of meaning everything. Of the meaning that means unimportance.