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.