Boo

A little holiday music, for All Saints.

To get there, click on the “furthur.”

The creature to the right there is me.

In costume, in disguise.

La Musica: What’d I Say?

It is a convention in Anglo-American vocal music that the lyrics should make some sort of sense. The meaning may be dense, or multi-layered, but the lines should not be completely impenetrable, or flat-out imbecilic. A person of reasonable intelligence and attention should be able to suss out what is being said without herculean effort. The music reproduced below, for example, just won’t do: something more than the words “in the frog/perpen-dicular to the frog/far away from the frog/without the frog” must be imparted to the listener.

Generally the search for meaning isn’t a problem. This is particularly so because, in the popular tradition, the message is almost always both straight-forward, and the same—though usually it is at least somewhat veiled. Pop music is all about loin-joining: urging the joining of loins, celebrating the joining of loins, recalling when loins once joined. Ninety percent of all the vocal music that has ever made it onto the radio bespeaks an urgent chemical roiling that may be summarized as follows: “I feel great lust for you, and desire that we engage in sexual congress as soon as possible.” This is the sentiment that lies at the core of almost every love song . . . whether the singer is Rudy Vallee, or Ras. Of course, the veils have slipped some over the past 70 years. Thus, we have moved from the slickly sincere, buttery smooth seduction of “I Only Have Eyes For You,” to Liz Phair’s blunt, bare, matter-of-fact “HWC,” in which she cheerily chirps an ode to the outpouring of her lover’s semen.

Still, there remain those oddities, works wherein the words defy the probings of logic, intuition, or even sanity. I realized this anew recently, when, while driving, an Eric Clapton rendition of “Badge” poured forth from my radio, a song that, while still a joy to listen to, still, after all these years, makes no sense whatsoever.

The Light The Heat

The Moon Is Blue

All that is created comes of water.

—Mohammed

NASA is bombing the moon. Last Friday the Houston doubledomes smashed a two-ton rocket hull the size of a bus into the lunar surface. Four minutes later, a second probe, also hurtling through space at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kamikazed into the moon.

The bombing commenced after science-types in September announced they had determined that the lunar polar regions contain water molecules. The bombing was intended to suss out just how much water might be lurking beneath the lunar surface.

The bus-bomb attack, on a two-miles-deep crater at the moon’s south pole, was supposed to send a plume of debris into space that could be analyzed for the presence of sub-surface ice. Although party-poopers at the MMT Observatory in Arizona, which closely observed the shelling, claim not to have detected any debris plume, NASA spokespeaks pooh-poohed this naysaying. “We have the data we needed to address the question of water,” said NASA’s Anthony Colaprete.

The twin bombing, intoned a second spokespeak, is “NASA’s first step in a lasting return to the moon.”

Party To No Covenants

His weariness with things was frightening; it smacked of obliteration, a wall of anger and fatigue that felt as though it might sweep him into nothingness. Worst of all was loneliness.

There were times when he was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.

And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.

—Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

A Dieu

Yesterday it was crisp all day. Never really warmed up. Mr. Sun, just not pumping it out the way he used to. Yesterday, well, “he tried to do his best,” as Neil Young once put it, “but he could not.”

The kitten, an April child who has lived all his young life in the lambent blush of sultry California summer, huddled yesterday, befuddled and bewildered. “Not likely to get any better, not any time soon,” I told him. “This is called ‘cold.’” Attempting to burrow into my feet, he makes it clear that he doesn’t like it. “And ‘cold’ is why,” say I, squatting before the wood stove, “we have this thing called ‘fire.’” And lit the match.

Yep, Mr. Sun is in trouble, up here in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s on the long slide, heading down towards the Solstice, at which time he’ll flicker out . . . to fire up anew. Northern peoples for millennia honored the passing of the sun, and his rebirth, each year at the Winter Solstice—which is why the children of Saul, when they elected to make of Jesus a Christ, decided he had been born on Christmas Day. Even though, best evidence suggests, he was really born a Pisces.

Anyway. That’s all a couple months down the road still. I wanted to post today Van Morrison’s “Country Fair,” from Veedon Fleece, the song that most says to me: undeniable arrival of autumn. But Morrison is a crusty poopstain about allowing his stuff on the tubes: as soon as somebody puts something up, his people descend to growl that it be taken down. Morrison is an ornery cuss by nature; his view of people frolicking with his songs across the tubes is also no doubt colored by the fact that, after 50 years in the music business, he’s a near-pauper, gleefully fleeced by slimeballing “managers” who serially “managed” to pocket all of his money.

So I’m left instead with “Requiem Again,” from The Durutti Column. Pretty autumn-like. Candles a good idea, too. Burning for Mr. Sun, to help him make it through.

More Than This

It was Labor Day, and I was slogging through the supermarket, in search of cold remedies, because the season is changing, and Someone has decided to afflict the humans of this household with Bugs. I was drudging, no credit to sentience, just plodding through the day, “putting one foot to front of de other,” as Cecil the bartender describes it in Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise.

And then I had a Moment.

Everybody Knows The Way

Jerry Garcia always maintained that he and his band performed poorly at Woodstock because they were distracted by “the presence of invisible time travelers from the future who had come back to see it. You could sense the significance of the event as it was happening.”

Makes sense to me. It always seemed strange that the concert was almost instantly regarded as so epochal. Why would that be? There was a hell of a lot of other stuff going on at the time. The answer, I guess, is because people from the future had already decided it was.

Perhaps because Garcia and his Grateful Dead bandmates may have been, to use a favorite Garcia word from those days, “hipper” to the presence of those invisible time travelers, the Dead were more afflicted with pixie dust than other Woodstock musicians.

It was pitch-dark when they hit the stage, and a howling wind was blowing down the hillside, actually threatening to move the huge stage backwards in the mud.

Dead bassist Phil Lesh recalls:

The stage was sinking, and the equipment was starting to roll toward the edge. The sound system went off, the lights went off, and radio signals from the Air Force were coming out of my amp. It was not an atmosphere conducive to good music.

Lesh wasn’t the only one afflicted by strange noise:

Random CB radio signals kept erupting out of the PA while the band played, and “people behind the amplifiers kept yelling, ‘The stage is collapsing! The stage is collapsing!’” Garcia said.

Dead Keyboardist Tom Constantin says:

“Actually, I had a wonderful time. The guitarists were not. Because of electrical problems, they were getting shocks from their strings and all,” he said. “Aversion therapy like that, no one needs.”

Throughout the Dead’s set, Garcia observed blue balls of electricity bouncing around the stage; these would occasionally either strike, or emanate from, his guitar. Garcia thought these balls the product of some electrical problem.

Uh-huh. Not wise, Jerry, to tattle on the time-travelers. ; )

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, I’m putting up Joe Cocker’s Woodstock version of “With A Little Help From My Friends.” Not because it’s a great version of a song that Cocker made great. But because it could be regarded as evidence of Garcia’s time-travelers theory. Cocker was always an odd duck in those days, but on this day he waddled through the looking glass. This is a man who surely seems to be seeing, feeling, receiving, reflecting somebody from somewhere.

i got to get my friends together
cause all we gotta do is love now

i’m gonna take em home with me now

you got to get hold of your friends now
you got to get hold of your friends and love

everybody knows the way
everybody knows the way now

What It Means To Be Free

La Musica: Dreams

I used to think dreams were magic. A portal into someplace special. I read all the Jung, all the dream books. I kept journals. Traced the trails of my unconscious, looking for Meanings and Grails.

I now think that’s all a load of bollocks, to be frank. Dreams are but a nocturnal processing system, of information received while the corporeal container is up and about. In any remembered dream I can easily find analogues to events or emotions experienced in an earlier waking state. Or nudges towards things I should, as KGO’s Ray Taliaferro puts it, “be thinking about, talking about, or doing something about.”

Maybe I’ve just soured on dreams because they don’t give me anything anymore. Maybe the problem is, as Joseph Kern says in Red, “it’s been years since I dreamt something nice.” Well, not quite that bad. But close.  

Some guy on the radio said Vitamin B6 stimulates vivid dreaming. I’m trying that. Nothing to report.

Wanna Be Stealin’ Somethin’

In the heyday of rocknroll, white musicians were occasionally apprehended in the act of brazenly stealing the work of black artists. Perhaps the most notorious offenders were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who once had the effrontery to rip off Robert Johnson, of all people, and for “Love In Vain.” They were promptly slapped down by Rolling Stone, which growled that they “should know better”; subsequent pressings of Let It Bleed properly credited Johnson. The Stones had already, and more successfully, filched songwriting credit for “The Last Time” from the Blind Boys of Alabama.

To be fair, Jagger’s sticky fingers were not confined solely to picking the pockets of black artists. He also wrested credit for “Wild Horses” from country boy Gram Parsons (who conveniently died during the struggle), and later floated as his own a boatload of tunes from bandmate Mick Taylor. Perhaps his most base act of thievery came when he placed his name on inamorata Marianne Faithfull’s “Sister Morphine”; only in recent years, and at the urging of Keith Richards, has Faithfull’s song been returned to her (Faithfull also had a hand in “Wild Horses”; that credit does not appear to be forthcoming, at least not any time soon).

Now, as they enter their twilight years, the Stones find themselves querulously pursuing people they perceive to be pirating their work, as in a 2008 action against Lil Wayne, for allegedly appropriating, without permission, pieces of the Stones’ “Play With Fire.” Amusingly, for a band that for so long marketed itself as “the bad boys of rocknroll” (“the Beatles want to hold your hand; the Stones want to pillage your town”), the suit against Lil Wayne additionally sniffed that Wayne’s riff on “Play With Fire” contained “explicit, sexist and offensive language” that, if associated with the Stones, might cause the aging rockers Harm.

One would think that, particularly given such history, black artists might be more sensitive to laying hands on one another’s work. But one would be wrong. For, as Kelefa Sanneh relates in the July 6 New Yorker, Michael Jackson built “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the first track off Thriller, on “Soul Makossa,” a song by Cameroon musician Manu Dibango. Jackson was eventually forced to come to a financial arrangement with Dibango, but apparently did not learn his lesson. For, even as he collapsed last week into death, he was facing another suit, in France, alleging that he had passed sampling rights to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to Rihanna for her hit “Don’t Stop The Music.” Problem is, he wasn’t empowered to pass on said rights without Dibango’s say-so, which he had failed to ask for or obtain.

La Musica: Wicked Game (Friday Mix)

I am more sympathetic to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his lover, Argentine businesswoman María Belén Chapur, than is apparently allowed by the judgemental fulminators of either the left or the right. To the former, Sanford is a laughable hypocrite; to the latter, a repugnant sinner. To both, Chapur is a “slut” and a “homewrecker.” To me, they’re just human beings, skewered by love. No blame, no balm.

At some point I plan to inscribe a long and no doubt musty essay about the recent confluence in the news of Sanford, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, all of whom were occupied by loves unconfined by the rigid de rigueur American cage of one man one woman, happy together happy forever, till death do us part.

But that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy. So instead I’ll play some music, here on this Friday, the day traditionally ruled by Venus, she who oversees love, in all its many variations.

La Musica: Black Cadillac

Children can be a trial to their parents, but that’s fair, because parents can certainly be a trial to their children.

The hellion Johnny Cash, as an example, certainly could have been a better father. But then he also got his from his daughters. Step-daughter Carlene Carter, during a 1979 live appearance at a New York club, introduced her tune “Swap-Meat Rag,” a celebration of her orgy adventuring, with the memorable line: “If this song doesn’t put the cunt back in country, nothing will.”

Unbeknownst to her, Johnny and mom June Carter were in the audience. Cash told Carlene’s sister Candy: “Carlene looked right at me and said that.”

None of them ever really lived it down.

But we know that Johnny was at heart a good father, and at heart his daughters good daughters, because of what daughter Rosanne Cash made for him after he passed: “Black Cadillac.” A live video version of the song, recorded for the BBC, is below: the cameraperson is without a clue, but the song isn’t. Lyrics here.

La Musica: Wake Up And Do Your Time (Tuesday Mix)

When I was in the jug, the guy in the next cell would each morning wake the block by cheerily chiming: “Wake up and do your time.”

The idea being that to sleep through the day was to cheat: to properly serve one’s sentence one had to be up and about. Doing something, anything, even if there was clearly no point to it, seeing as how as you were locked away in a cage.

More than twenty years on, age and ennui having transformed life itself into something of a sentence, I often come to consciousness with the same thought: “Wake up and do your time.”

The fact that there don’t seem to be any bars about when I today awake doesn’t really mean anything. In a long-abandoned novel, I pulled from the ether a character confined in a mental institution who proposed that part of the reason he was so confined was because he had discovered that the only really true free place on the planet is the Bohemian Grove. All else is prison. The fact that the prison is much larger than the free space, he pointed out, did not make it any less a prison.

Anyway. These days, to encourage me to wake up and do my time, I sometimes summon music. In recent months, I’ve taken to slouching into Tuesdays, as that day is referenced within it, behind a 1994 number from something called The Freddy Jones Band, “In a Daydream.”

You can find the thing below. The video is uninteresting and even a little frightening: those are some pretty pasty white boys. But the song itself does have that lift.

The Moody Blues’ “Tuesday Afternoon,” like “In a Daydream,” involves upbeat messages received from nature and pleasant misty mental states. Why Tuesdays would have such an effect on musicians I have no idea: the day is, after all, named after and ruled by the war god Mars, not a fellow normally associated with tree-hugging, cloud-luluing, and happily loving life.

“Tuesday Afternoon” was always a more melancholy song than “In A Daydream,” and today I find I get no lift from it whatsoever. This is no doubt at least partially the result of repeated exposure. Scoop Nisker used to caution that both experiences and memories are akin to cassette tapes: every time you play them, a wee bit rubs away. Play them over and over and over again, and eventually they’ll become so degraded they’ll barely sound at all. It was to combat this effect that Nisker would journey to Asia every year, there to enter for a month or so some Buddhist monastery, where he could “rest the tapes.”

An excellent example of how, in music, one can kill the one they love by obsessive repeated rewinding and replaying of the tape is San Francisco Chronicle Jon Carroll’s experience with Paul Simon’s Graceland. For months and then years after the thing was released, Carroll waxed rhapsodic about it, over and over and over again. He couldn’t play it enough; couldn’t praise it enough; eventually, he sounded like Philip K. Dick genuflecting before Beethoven’s Ninth. Until, one day, to his shock, he discovered that he got nothing from Graceland at all. The thrill was gone. He’d completely degraded the tape.

And now the tubes tell me that there on the TV “Tuesday Afternoon” is currently being used to push Visa. Oh well.

It was shortly after I was subjected to the horror of Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” enlisted to sell dishwashing detergent that I retired my television.