A sampling of pieces in a more personal blog style
Three Chords and a Relative Truth
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Whatever It Takes
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On Being in a Band for Almost 25 Years
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the elasticity of time
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Everybody knows a guitar is an instrument of the Devil. It should be obvious to even the simplest of minds that guitars must be regulated like anhydrous ammonia, shipped in carefully monitored portable bunkers and surrounded by sweepers and security. Drones employed, GPS monitored 24/7, an All-Clear sounded after the poisonous parcel has passed.
Communities, sleeping peacefully in darkness, must never know how close the toxic material was to their silent homes. Only the vaguest rumor of its passing, like enigmatic stencil on military boxcars to give evidence of their existence. Why must we, as a society, allow this appalling abomination of musical expression a prominent place in our popular culture? Do we still swoon at those opening four notes played by David Gilmour 3:56 into “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”? Are we still moved by the fade-in feedback intro of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady”? How is it we consistently come alert hearing anything played by Ali Farka Touré? Is it possible that, already transported by a song’s rhythm and chords, the otherworldly caterwauling of Johnny Greenwood knocks us flat, again? How is it that, from beyond the grave, Michael Hedges can assure the peace of an infant’s slumber? And what, exactly, is up with John McLaughlin? It’s demonic, and there’s your answer. The doting parent gushes with pride as the child hesitantly coaxes an errant note from the family acoustic flattop leaning in the corner. This is the moment that Lucifer’s hand is at work. Those first cautious steps into auditory cause and effect. The beginning of the end. But it’s not too late. As Ronnie Van Zandt sang: “why don’t we dump ‘em, people, to the bottom of the sea – before some ole’ fool come ‘round here and wanna shoot either you or me.” Yes, we must fight! And never surrender. Until this scourge is obliterated, once and for all. Only then shall we have peace. Only then shall new worlds of harmony open to us, and our daughters and sons cross that deep, fearful gorge to a new land; fruitful, fecund, endless, and without guitars. |
You’re at your computer: streaming audio, sending and receiving files, email and, of course, sporadically surfing the nefarious interwebs.
The audio stops abruptly and you think: is the stream buffering? You glance at the router. O ho! All the pretty little green lights are gone. The damn thing’s turned itself off. You knew this was coming, you’d already messed with it several times. Previously, you turned the router on and off along with the computer and everything else when you left the room for any length of time until recently, when the router stubbornly refused to turn back on. You pressed the power button dozens of times, from different angles, and lights came on but turned off again as soon as you let go. Like kick-starting an old Triumph Bonneville, hope springs eternal and you keep trying, until you either give up, exhausted, or it coughs and roars into life. Relief and gratitude flood your being. You can now don your helmet and ride out into traffic, risking your life. All patterns are repeated. But no…this time, pressing the router’s power button again and again avails nothing. It’s time for a different approach. A toothpick, yes, that should do the trick. In a perverse mood, you look at a used matchstick next to a candle, it’s blackened end already shrunken to a rough nub. Taking a pocket knife you whittle the end of the matchstick to a fine point. Pushing in the power button at the rear of the device you simultaneously jam the matchstick into the gap between the plastic cylinder and surrounding channel. Miraculously, hilariously, it holds. The pretty green blinking lights return, one by one. Connectivity is restored and you can now ride out into the web, risking your life. |
During rehearsal last night (we never, well, almost never rehearse) Jim launched into a song without preamble.
Typically we talk about a next song, lobbing ideas back and forth (“why do you need to rehearse THAT?”) until we settle on one and then it takes us a while to start it. Who counts it off? How fast? How does it go? We’re like that. But this one time the guitar player starts to play and I immediately recognize the notes as the start of a Mermen song but I have no idea what song it is, how it goes or what note comes next. We have played this song for years but it’s been a long time since we played it. The notes are calling urgently and I must begin my part and, without realizing it, I do. My fingers go to notes without my conscious participation. I have no idea what I’m doing. The song is playing me. I have thoughts, in the form of questions. What note comes next? How does this song go? What’s the name of this song? No answers. I carry on, my mind following my body slightly behind. We play the song and it goes well. It’s a good song. We spike the ending. I look up and ask: “what’s the name of that song?” I couldn’t remember the damn song, but my fingers never forgot. |
So I’m standing under hot water in a shower in a hotel room in Prague holding a basket of blackberries which I am eating one by one for the sheer joy of it.
After a morning walk through hot sunlit streets in which Jem G and I wandered into a small museum dedicated to the works of Alphonse Mucha and discussed, among other things, the Irish traditional air ‘She Moved Through the Faire’ as well as Natural Beauty’s Inevitable Response to the Church Expressed Through Architecture in Old Prague. We are surrounded by old stone, enormous portals and filigree of every description – stone, glass, metals, wood. At brunch this morning Mick B sat down and was quickly served the perfectly-cooked eggs he had unsuccessfully requested the previous day. Yesterday’s request had been parried with a Dada-esque response: “It’s Monday,” and the waitress had gone about her business. But Tuesday, today, feels different. A waiter brings the plate of freshly cooked eggs directly to him, the moment he sits down, as if the kitchen had been waiting all morning for this precise event. Today, weightless possibility mixes in with the ordinary urban atmosphere of grilling sausage, cigarette smoke and horse dung in the central square of this ancient city. It’s not raining, we’re surrounded by tourists and, across the Atlantic Ocean my poor young niece has died, another victim of inoperable cancer. Dead at 26, without children, without a partner but, by all accounts she went peacefully, surrounded by friends and her immediate family. It’s far away from where I am now but it’s directly in front of me, too. I felt her going that morning in a spectacular one hundred and eighty degree rainbow viewed from the top step of the gangway, just before I turned to enter an Airbus 319 in Tegel Airport, bound for Geneva. I felt her slipping away the evening of that same day during a victorious G3 concert for Guitars en Scene, in Genevoise, France, as the audience fiercely and joyously sang along to the songs, often overpowering the band. I felt her gone that night after the show, as we stood in the field under the night sky, halfway between hospitality and the bus, as a monstrous and silent lightning storm filled the entire western sky, illuminating magnificent cloudscapes over the Swiss Alps in still and humid air. |