Episode X: An Rock And Roll Odyssey

Diary of a Fading Rockstar - Episode X: A Rock and Roll Odyssey

If I could stick a knife in my heart

Suicide right on stage

Would it be enough for your teenage lust

Would it help to ease the pain? Ease your brain? – Mick Jagger, "It's Only Rock And Roll"

When you’re an artist - any kind of artist - you don’t say “I’m depressed”, you say “The world is depressed” (Cf. "Paint It Black"). It’s true - it’s your world. Your world is depressed. Or scared. Or angry. And your audience tunes into your station, whichever way they do - songs, poems, paintings, novels, scripts - and they might see a world they recognize, but because it is familiar and yet also different, they can look at it from the outside and feel a kinship to it without being trapped inside it, blind, suffocating.

My world is flat broke. Interestingly enough the rest of the world at large really is just as flat broke. But I’m flat broke too on an absolutely individual level. My bank account is closer to empty than it’s been since I was a kid in college. I’m terrified, mainly because I have responsibilities to others beside myself now.

A lot of people a lot smarter and more gifted than I are having the same problems or worse. The trouble is, the worlds’ problems compound the fact that I already had problems to begin with. Just as “It’s all in your head” offers little solace, so does “Things are tough all over”. In the end they amount to pretty much the same thing.

Something happened to me where I started thinking that I need to ask permission to do what I do. It’s pretty strange, as that was never an issue before. In fact, everything I have accomplished in the past was due to a complete unwillingness to ask any goddamn body permission to do whatever the hell I wanted. The thing is, it doesn’t matter how much permission you ask -- you can’t ever get out of trouble, because trouble is being alive, and being alive is trouble.

THAT is what “the Blues” is, and by extrapolation, Rock and Roll.

Rock and Roll is properly expressed by people who have nothing to lose, having already lost everything, or who never had it in the first place. Even if they were born middle class and wanted for very little, these people have to at least have had the feeling that they’re alone out there and that if they don’t blast out the song of their lives nobody will ever hear it, nobody will ever care. If we could all apply that understanding, that perception, that reality to writing our resumes, we’d never be out of work again. Even if that job is one of those “Dirty Jobs” that no one in their right mind would show up for day after day after day.

A friend of mine in extremis due to the current financial crisis both in his own life and the world’s, opted to follow a work opportunity into a war zone. Just so he could feed his kids. Part of me thinks he’s insane, and part of me completely understands. Any entrepreneur who’s been involved in startups or advancing startup capital knows quite well that ordinary thoughts of comfort, safety, and lack of risk have nothing to do with making things happen in the real world. In fact, to a certain extent, one has to plan for the worst case scenario from the beginning. Punk rock, for example, takes this to the extreme: I am bound and blindfolded up against a wall before an existential firing squad. I have fifty-nine seconds to express my contempt for these proceedings before a sudden, violent death. One! Two! Fuck! You!

The comparison may sound a bit far-fetched, but as an indefinitely benched rockstar I have found a certain amount of strange, unexpected kinship with the soldiers I’ve met returning from the wars [the same people I used to scream at from the safety of the stage for allowing themselves to be brainwashed into committing murder on behalf of The State]. These are men and women who have, for better or worse, experienced the type of adventure outside of ordinary living that most Americans never see. They’ve seen real-life actual matters of life and death played out before them. They’ve blown shit up and killed people, or stopped things from being blown up and saved people from being killed - or if unlucky, they’ve been the ones getting blown up. And now, they are asked to return home and stand in line waiting to buy stamps, to sit on park benches watching their children play without scanning the crowd for suicide bombers. They are people with a serious, concrete experience of how illusory our commonly accepted “normalcy” is. How would you “fit in” if that was you? Maybe you could, maybe you would - but don’t expect a cakewalk. And yet, nearly every honorably discharged veteran I see in a police uniform, selling hardware, making pizzas, driving buses, washing a fire engine or wearing ER scrubs, comports his or herself with dignity, professionalism, and even humor. But the others are coming. Already they are occupying our jail cells, mental hospitals, and unmarked graves - the ones who came home KIA but didn’t realize it until after the fact. (Hence, all these zombie movies we have now). Talk to anyone who works in public mental health: They already are, and will increasingly be, a profound burden on our social services infrastructure, such as it is after the predations of “steal from the poor and give to the rich” politicians. They’re going to be with us for the next sixty years or so, and we’re going to be living with the damage they’ve suffered.

A lot of musicians I know who have had some sort of run-in with almost-famousness have a distantly similar difficulty with returning to “civilian” life. It’s not that I elevate the life of a rockstar to the level of someone experienced in the theater of war - it’s the theater part, the backstage melodrama, the shared intoxication of being a counterculture within the society. It’s not the war so much as the war stories, which is what a good majority of people who attend 12 step meetings are there for. There is the story that is written for us, and then the one we write ourselves after tearing the other one to pieces. The trouble is that the one we are handed by society was a group project, with many collaborative hands in the mixing bowl; the one we are replacing it with we wrote ourselves. At least in the army they teach you how to make your bed and shine your boots. In Rock and Roll all they seem to teach you is the human sacrifice part. And that’s another way soldiers are like rockstars - they are intended to appease the gods of chaos and war by giving up their lives. If you don’t believe that America is a death cult way more than it is a “Christian Nation”, then you’ve never heard of Michael Jackson.

So in a way it’s much safer and less frightening being a fuckup, a failure, AWOL, off the map, out of the game, out of the running. Isn’t it interesting that only a little while ago being a Wall Street executive was something most people thought was cool? Now it’s worse than being a lawyer. Human sacrifice. It never occurs to people that we have allowed institutions to arise that live on human flesh, like the ancient Ammonite god Moloch to whom children were sacrificed by being thrown into the iron furnace in its belly - we’d just rather blame individual people. Therefore Kennedy was either shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, or some conspiracy of Cuban Nationals or the Trilateral Commission or the World Bank or whatever. It took Mick Jagger, who for many is the template for “rockstar”, to postulate that it was, after all, you and me. But even Mick has benefitted from human sacrifice (cf. Altamont). It can be argued, from a mystical standpoint, that Meredith Hunter took Mick Jagger’s place (before that, it may have been Brian Jones).

One night around 1984 or 5 or so, during a two-night stand at a club with a capacity of about 1,000 souls, I briefly experienced a glimpse of The Beast. To make a long story short, during a particularly intense moment in our musical interaction with the audience, I got too close to the edge of the stage, and an unknown number of individuals tried to tear off my clothes. It wasn’t funny or cute, it was fucking terrifying. I could sense that given the chance they would also have torn off my head, arms and legs. It was, not to congratulate myself too much, like Orpheus being torn apart by the Bacchae. I beat a hasty retreat, shaken to the core, and had to be coaxed back up to the microphone. Maybe this is why zombie movies scare me so much - I’ve seen it, the mob of glassy eyes full of nothing but hunger. I yelled at them for tearing up my favorite shirt, and just got a lot of blank stares. I think the general sentiment was “Why is this pedantic asshole spoiling our fun? Boo! Get off the stage!” And thank God for that.

Iggy and the Stooges changed the rules in a profound way. By turning the myths of Jim Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, et al. on their heads, they pre-empted their own sacrifice by turning it around and making the audience the sacrifice - in songs like "Search and Destroy" (named after the infamous kill teams from the Vietnam war), "Raw Power" (in which he invites the listener to a 'guaranteed O.D.') and "Death Trip" (which sounds like a musical suicide pact, except after he kills you he changes his mind). Even his signature songs of debasement and masochism ("Now I Wanna Be Your Dog", "Penetrate Me") are throbbing with an ugly passive-aggressive hostility. He's saying go ahead and hurt me – if you dare, motherfucker.

Some people believe, barring Here Are The Sonics by the Northwest band of the same name, that Raw Power is the first actual punk rock record - the first step of evolution from “I’m either going to die of sadness or I’m going to kill myself” to “I’m taking you sons of bitches down with me”. Up until that point rock and roll was well-mannered enough entertainment that even if it seemed “dangerous” it wasn’t threatening. Iggy ended that. During the early days of hardcore I remember going to shows and actually being scared of the band I was seeing - not just of the audience, who were intimidating enough in and of themselves, but that the band itself was going to jump off the stage and stab me. It was fucking awesome!!! I have never felt so much adrenaline in my entire life, every hair on the back of my neck standing up. It all got cute after that, which is a shame.

Mel Gibson seems convinced that decadent civilizations given to various forms of human sacrifice are ripe for extermination. People call him crazy, and he probably is, but there is historical merit to his premise. And it’s nothing more exotic than was postulated by the Sex Pistols a generation ago. Gone is the optimism of Steven Spielberg in “Close Encounters” - every imagined meeting with extraterrestrials since then seems to suggest that we’re just a couple of shacks standing in the way of a new intergalactic highway’s eminent domain. Or maybe, as postulated in the “Terminator” series of movies - which has become so iconic to our culture that its main protagonist succeeded in parlaying that influence into public office - this system we’ve created is what will eventually colonize and subjugate us, make us obsolete.

On returning home from the (metaphorical) wars, I felt that my restlessness was even worse than before. At first it seemed that all the people and places had changed – but it was I who changed. I no longer had tolerance for familiarity. I had made myself obsolete, at least to the niche I had previously existed in. I left home, alone this time, heading East like Alexander on a campaign with no foreseeable end. Sometimes I feel as if I am still on that same campaign – that all the settling spots I've occupied have merely been bivouacs, and my horse is awake and ready. I reach for the microphone that's my sword, itching like a phantom limb. But the warfare of today is urban – a war of kicked in doors, collateral damage, sabotage and terrorism. I believe that our music must sound like that again.

"Remember to kick it over

No one will guide you – ah ah Armagideon Time" – Joe Strummer