Episode XIII: Embrace Your Inner Weirdo

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR - Episode XIII:
Embrace Your Inner Weirdo!

Point one: Rumors of my untimely death have been greatly exaggerated.
Point two: I have been remiss in reporting to you on schedule due to the invasion of “real life” issues, which make a life of the mind (as they would have called it in the 19th century) something of a folly (those things 19th century gentlemen had built in their backyards that resembled miniature castles, or children’s playhouses). But here I am again to stimulate your mental life and hopefully inspire you to your own further research.

Since some of you may be new to this column, I’d like to invite you to catch up by reading, at your leisure of course, Episodes I – XIII. In brief, here is a recap:
In the 1980′s I was in something of a rebel rock band that promised to surf the new wave to whatever heights were attainable at that time. At what may have, or may not have, been the peak of industry interest in our little roadshow, I took the parachute option, and it was far from golden.

Since then I have agonized over how I might have handled the experience differently, and how some of my seemingly eccentric choices and behaviors were completely unavoidable. A great deal of solitary cogitation has gone into this process over the last quarter of a century, including untold numbers of short-lived bands that in one way or another did not approach the same level of chaos magick as that first endeavor. Perhaps that’s just the way it goes with anything, and I have certainly explored this possibility in depth as well.

What I have failed to do, in fact somewhat catastrophically, is to abandon my interest in pursuing music in some form of expression, whether or not anyone actually hears or sees any of it. Some people whose opinion I respect have opined that such reluctance to abandon the old aspirations is the main cause of my failure to succeed at anything else. My contention may seem like rhetorical hairsplitting; but the way I see it, my failure to succeed at anything else is proof enough that any attempt on my part to turn my back on what at one time seemed like Cosmic Destiny of comic book proportions, is doomed to certain failure.
To fulfill the promise of the title of this episode, I would like to quote a highly trusted and respectable producer and musician I have had the good fortune to work with over the years, who said: “Sooner or later, you have got to stop this pretense that you are normal. This Clark Kent routine of yours is really getting old.”

It’s my belief that you who are reading this – whoever you may be – contain within yourself the potential energy to do or experience anything you can imagine. All that is required is that you imagine it. What some people refer to as success or failure is, I believe, largely a problem of imagination. Most of us have grave difficulty imagining anything beyond what we fear to be true, and then expending all our energy running from those imaginings, as if in a nightmare, being chased by an invisible demon whose presence is made known by an ominous, thunderous booming sound…..which, if we were able to awaken, we would discover is merely the sound of the pulse of our own blood against our eardrum, pressed damply to the pillow.

One of the things that disturbs us away from our reaching and taking hold of the overripe fruit of our own lives is that we see so many assholes who don’t have the slightest bit of trouble stuffing their faces not only with their own fruit but the fruit of everyone around them. The other thing that scares us is seeing people who have devoted their existence to expressing their true selves, and perceiving them to be deeply weird. Dear God, we think to ourselves, are those my choices? Asshole or weirdo? Why can’t I be a nice, normal person and be an artist?
I have some good news, and some bad news. The bad news first: You can’t be a nice, normal person and also be an artist, because nice, normal people are to busy making others feel good to ever express anything containing any sort of energy. Nice, normal people paint pictures that hang in hospital corridors, and write songs that get played over drug store public address systems. An artist doesn’t have time to be concerned with being nice and normal, because they are too busy being exactly who and what they already are, without living up to the expectations of others.

The good news is, you’ve been sold nice and normal and safe as being the only way to be happy, and it’s false advertising. It’s a filthy lie. The only way to be happy is to be exactly who and what you already are. Loudly. Boisterously. Shamelessly. If you’re worried about morality or ethics, being oneself is completely and inescapably coterminous with kindness. Who’s the biggest asshole? The person who sees others as standing in the way of their fulfillment. A fully, fearlessly expressive individual has no fear of anyone standing in their way, because it’s impossible. Like X-ray vision, creativity has the ability to pass through solid objects, such as other people. It also has the ability to see inside things and people and to accept the qualities found therein without judgment of any kind.

I was sayin let me out of here before I was even born–it’s such a gamble when you get a face It’s fascinatin to observe what the mirror does but when I dine it’s for the wall that I set a place — Richard Hell

There has been a lot of marketing grease squirted all over the concept of the Geek, for which famous rich guy Bill Gates bears some responsibility. With 20-20 hindsight, everybody picked on in school for being a geek can now point to the Fortune 500 and say, “Behold, my people.” Because of this cultural sea change, being a card-carring geek has been rendered “cool” and thus hopelessly trivialized beyond recognition. Television now abounds with a stereotypical token character appearing in every show – the cool geek who dresses nerdy and is smarter than everyone else and you better not laugh at him/her because he/she could lock you out of your network account in a heartbeat, or load up your hard drive with bestiality porn.

This co-opting of the Nerd is what most of us expected, or should have if we were paying attention. The Nerd is to the 00′s what grungers and ravers were to the 90′s and punks and headbangers were to the 80′s. The Nerd is cool. Therefore, the Nerd is dead.

Thankfully, there’s a niche waiting for you that now has room to move into the spotlight. Now is the time of the Weirdo.

Everybody has a place on the bus – the jock, the nerd, the thug, the stoner, the cheerleader – but the weirdo is the one people don’t want to sit next to. It’s time to step up and claim that seat. You are a weirdo. You don’t occupy yourself with computers and Japanese action figures and comic books cartoons for grownups – you do weird things. You look weird. Even the person bristling with piercings and tattoos and bondage wear looks down on you. Junkies and tweakers and stoners flinch when you walk by. The homeless person spare changing everybody on the street doesn’t even bother to talk to you.

It requires this sort of fearless diffidence towards public acceptance that is the hallmark of the true Rockstar, knighted by no one but her/himself. When you’re weird people don’t look at you and think “Punk” or “Metalhead” or “Skinhead” or “Juggalo” or “stockbroker”. They look at you and go “WTF??” Or they look at you and then quickly look away.

You don’t have to smell bad – that’s so incredibly done before. In fact, a wonderful-smelling Weirdo is the hallmark of defied expectations – everybody expects the weirdo to be somehow repulsive, but instead they are unsettlingly attractive. They might have a look for which they’d be chased off the runways of Paris with pitchforks and torches, but they are not otherwise repellent. They’re just weird. They are unique in a way impossible to ignore.

The studied, self conscious type of wanna-be weirdo who stands in front of the mirror each morning putting together their allegedly “weird” look is not a true Weirdo. That person is a Hipster. Everbody hates Hipsters these days, but they have each other. They kind of all look the same, with their skinny jeans and hats. You are not a hipster. The hipsters look at you and instead of smiling and nodding they think “God, what a Weirdo!” This is to be taken as a compliment.

I am not going to list the Weirdo bands. It’s bad luck, bad juju, killing the goose. But you probably own some of their records. Some of them even got famous and made a lot of money being weird. There are hundreds of thousands of people who buy their recordings and show up at their concerts; there are thousands of people who know the words to their songs; there are hundreds of people who think they are the only ones who “get” them, prefer their earlier work, etc. There may be a few dozen of their fans who are Weirdos and who recognize them as such. These people may party with the band, but it is more likely that they would never be allowed backstage, because they are just too weird. But they don’t mind, because there’s too many fucking normal people backstage anyway.

How do you know you’re a Weirdo? If you have to ask, you aren’t one. And if you think you are, you aren’t one. True weirdos don’t recognize such distinctions. They are unconscious and impervious to the projections or values of others. It is precisely their rapturous devotion to the contents of their own heads that make them Weirdos. Still, they are capable of great kindness, intimacy, and geenrosity with others, simply because they are as incapable of judging others as they are themselves. When they come in contact with people who insist on categorizing things or people, they warmly and amiably fail to comprehend.

You may not be a Weirdo. It’s perfectly fine either way. It’s not something one aspires to, although some people aspire not to be weird. The main thing is, everyone has an inner Weirdo. It could be that this inner Weirdo looks like a Nerd or a Geek or a Punk or a Mod or a Hippie – but it is simply a manifestation of the part of that person that is unclouded by the perceptions or expectations of others. Let’s say, for instance, you spill barbecue sauce on your white shirt at a party. The normal person would try to wash it out in the sink, or maybe ask the host if they could borrow a T-shirt. The Weirdo takes the shirt off and dips the whole thing in the barbecue sauce.

Kiss tried to look like Weirdos, but a Weirdo would never write a song like “Beth”, apologizing for hours spent in the rehearsal space. A Weirdo’s girl/boyfriend would be waiting for the Weirdo in a sleeping bag behind the couch.

Weirdos don’t play genre music. They don’t play music that can be described by listing their influences. Weirdos sometimes have obvious influences; but if the musicians who influenced them were to hear or see them, they would say “Who the hell are these weirdos??” Unless they themselves are Weirdos, in which case they let the younger Weirdos come along with them on tour.

Be wary of the band that tries to sell itself as a “Weirdo band”. Most of these are simply further regurgitated iterations of the “Hipster” template. “They’re, like, so WEIRD, dude!!” No: Weirdo bands are not weird as a selling point. They don’t wear their own band T-shirts on stage. They don’t perform in clown makeup or breathe fire or any other normal-trying-to-be-weird routine. The audience might mistake them for roadies sound-checking the amps. They might mistake them for audience members who got lost backstage. Or they might mistake them for aliens trying to pass themselves off as humans. You will recognize the Weirdo band because that is the ones the Weirdos in the audience dance their weird dances to. The Weirdos in the audience do not sing along because they want to hear the music; if they wanted to sing they’d start their own band, and in fact probably have.

Weirdos aren’t considered cool, hip, up to date, what’s happening or cutting edge, even though they are almost always imitated by wanna-bes, sometimes the minute they first appear in public. Oftentimes the imitators will sell more records and be way more popular than the original Weirdo band they were imitating. That’s because the majority of people don’t want something weird, they want something familiar, that confirms their own prejudices regarding what music and art are for. Weirdos do not compose music or art that is socially significant or purposeful. Sometimes they play benefit concerts, if the people organizing the benefit are weird enough to accept what they have to offer. Weirdo bands are habituated to creating and re-creating sounds that reflect an inner life that is invisible and probably completely inexplicable to others. However, the purity of their intent is undeniable with or without understanding. Weirdo bands may face rejection or indifference by the mainstream, but the five or six people who show up at their gig (be it a basement party, a Mexican discoteque, or a pizza restaurant) respond to them as if they have been waiting their entire lives to hear and see them.
It’s hard to find other Weirdos, particularly the right kind for my particularly weird ongoing project. That’s why, at age 44, I’m still searching. It’s not like we have a secret handshake or anything. This article may be my only chance to find my Weirdos before dying of old age.

It certainly is a weird way to recruit musicians for a band.

Episode XII: You Kids Get Off My Lawn!

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR - EPISODE XII: NEVER TRUST A MAN IN A BLUE TRENCHCOAT Or, You Kids Get Off My Lawn

Imagination creates reality. -- Wagner

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it /You play the guitar on the MTV /That ain't workin' that's the way you do it /Money for nothin' and your chicks for free -- Dire Straits

I was sayin let me out of here before I was

even born--it's such a gamble when you get a face

It's fascinatin to observe what the mirror does

but when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place

-- Richard Hell

[ YouTube links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-og7aTnL8Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1iR2Wi3u5o ]

[WARNING: Marjor “Whooooaaaa, duuuuude!!!” moments up ahead.]

__________________________________________________________

I’m almost done talking about it as a precursor to actually doing it (again). Some of my friends wish I was done talking about it years ago. Sorry, friends.

Really, this whole Rock and Roll business -- it’s got very little to do with the fantasy. When all of the dross is removed, it is simply The Work. Laboring under the illusion that The Work interferes with Life, or that Life interferes with The Work, is like driving with your eyes closed. Open your eyes, and you will see that your Life IS The Work, and that there really is no other way to live.

People -- myself included of course -- waste an awful lot of time being unhappy, and to a large extent because they actually believe that they’re supposed to, that it’s expected of them. This may sound crazy and wrong to you, but if you turn around and look back at your life so far, maybe you’ll see all the places it was true for you. Caring what people think or say about you, doing what you’re told, marching in step with things you don’t believe in. Obedience isn’t bad, it just isn’t what we think it is. True obedience to that which is driving you from within would mean that you would never procrastinate again on those things that you want to do but didn’t because you weren’t required to by other people.

I think we are all obsessed with the metaphor of zombies these days because the classic zombie narrative is an extended metaphor for the way things really are. It’s not even really a metaphor.

I know I was supposed to talk about rock and roll, and I’m getting to that, but rock and roll is only one vehicle (albeit my favorite vehicle) for something important that lies at the heart of it, or beneath it, or behind it. Something that’s invisible. There may not be any good words for that thing. Wars are being fought over which words are the best. I’ve spend a lot of time studiously avoiding using words to describe it. But I have recently come to suspect that these words come close enough to at least convey my feelings around it:

My Teacher taught me (and this was probably her most important teaching) that even when not holding pen to page, the poet is writing. Similarly, we may stop playing, but the music continues. In fact, it has never stopped, whether or not we are able to hear it. When done correctly, the poems or paintings or songs or sculptures are like windows, or glass-bottomed boats. I’m not sure what “good” is any more, but a serious (if not good) musician will tend to be a good listener -- not simply to other musicians, but to that music that is always playing, into which she is only dipping her bucket.

I used to think I was crazy for falling in love with everyone I met -- even the people I disliked, even the people I thought were ugly, even the people I wanted to avoid. Actually I only thought I was crazy for doing this when I was able to admit to myself that I was doing it in the first place. Then I realized this was simply one of my tools. We suffer under a misunderstanding about what we’re supposed to do when we fall in love. We aren’t supposed to make an object out of that person; we’re supposed to let them go. We’re supposed to let our heart be broken. If you aren’t familiar with the names Anfortas or Prometheus, go look them up on Google or Wikipedia. Don’t worry if you don’t get it. There are folks who study those stories for decades and never even come close, and don’t even realize that they never got it. But if you’re lucky something will click and you will recognize those people. Mythology is a great tool for understanding The Work, and the great thing about it is you don’t need to pay some therapist hundreds of dollars to explain it to you, because there IS no explanation -- or, the stories are their own explanation. Rock and Roll is also mythology, and when you understand that, you understand better why it calls out to so many people the way it does.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about the number of rockstars who have killed themselves. There’s a lot of diverse factors involved in each individual case, but the main cause is the fact that the rockstar has the unacknowledged job of moving mass human energy, and burnout is endemic. You think rockstars are overpaid? It’s like messing with the fuel rods of a nuclear power plant with your bare hands. The hazard alone is drastically undervalued; and if the rockstar actually produces good music, that’s a huge bonus. It is my contention that if people REALLY knew what the job of rockstar entails, underneath all the trappings, the number of people who think they want to be one would dramatically decline. In reality, you’re pretty much born a rockstar, and then you either follow through with it and do your job, or you spend your life running like hell in the other direction. I believe that there a lot more undiscovered (even by themselves) rockstars riding the bus to their crappy jobs every day than any of us could possibly imagine. American Idol just scratches the surface because the frequency band they are scanning is so narrow.

Why are so many bar bands, church bands, wedding bands, cruise ship bands, party bands, [fill in the blank] bands so annoying? Because they aren’t practicing true obedience to The Work. It’s like making paté out of the liver of the goose that lays golden eggs. Now, there are bands that are just bands, that happen to do those things to get by -- you may even be in one of them, and more power to you -- but that’s not how they define themselves. If you DEFINE your band as a bar band or whatever, you probably suck. You probably also have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. And if you’re happy, there is no reason why you should care.

But if you are actually serious about this whole rock and roll business, it’s just The Work, which defines itself. You don’t have to surrender or sacrifice your life to it because it IS your life. I doesn’t demand everything, it IS everything. There are no obstacles in your path because you’re already there. And if you devote yourself to listening with your entire being, you won’t have time to worry whether you’re “good” or not. You’ll find yourself resonating like a glass harp. And people might even start listening to you.

Episode XI:

[insert photo]

Diary of a Fading Rockstar, Episode XI: If 6 Was 9, or Recycling The Map

For study: Current music of moral and aesthetic urgency

Examples: Bloc Party, The Gossip, Saul Williams, Joan As Police Woman, Tim Armstrong, Dr. Israel, Les Savy Fav, Quasi

Opening sequence: “Maps” by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs

We used rock and roll as teenagers as a soundtrack to our adventures, either inward or outward; to help us cope with unbearable life situations; as an escape from boredom, or a coping skill for depression; as a source of hope, as a channel for our lust and rage, as a diversion from the mundane. As the melodies excited movement inside our heads, the rhythms excited movement in our bodies. We felt like we could at last leave the untenable state we were in, which was childhood, and in growing up escape to freedom.

As adults, the illusion of growing up as a liberation became the disillusion that conventional adulthood was a prison. Adults use rock and roll mainly as a nostalgia trip for a time they imagine to have been easier, more interesting, more innocent, more honest, more real, more free, more risque. They listen to rock and roll to induce a mind-state that convinces them that though their bodies are aging, their inner selves are still young, pliable, malleable, enthusiastic, un-jaded. They remember the strength they once had for recklessness, for fearlessness, for a disregard of security. But rock and roll in and of itself does not grant courage or bravery, let alone wisdom to the listener; at best it is a validation for feelings of dissatisfaction. Youthful dissatisfaction tends to drive outward, which is a natural progression of the maturation process; adult dissatisfaction more often than not drives straight off a cliff.

As teenagers we avoided the call by adults around us to grow into responsibility; as adults we continue to avoid our responsibilities. But is rock and roll really the soundtrack to a refusal to grow up? And what is this “growing up” we are supposed to be doing? I believe that in actuality rock and roll is a tool that helps us to truly grow up into a larger humanity -- one that resists oppression with energy and celebrates all forms of life -- and its stagnation and commodification as an art form results in the stagnation and commodification of ourselves.

We are told that growing up entails showing up, fulfilling the promise of our youth (as if we ourselves were the ones who made the promise, rather than those who projected it onto us). We hear often that to grow up means to give up. We’re not living for ourselves now, we’re living for others. But when did we really live for ourselves? When we were young we were obligated to do as we were told because we were not emancipated, not enfranchised. Our rights were limited, our aspirations constantly curtailed by the voice of reason. When we were young we wanted to burn out like shooting stars, but were sternly advised to cool our jets and stay grounded.

We’re told the same thing as adults. We are, in fact, somehow expected to be highly successful in careers that we love providing leadership for others and bountifully supporting our families, when in reality any any small steps or expressive acts that might have supported such an autonomous creativity and strength of character were practically beaten out of us from childhood onward. It seems that in reality we are told from cradle to grave to behave. “Productive member of society” is an interesting cliche because of how surprisingly little it is ever closely examined by those who use it. It is based on the presumption that in order to be a member of society, one has to ‘produce’ something; and if we do not, then our membership is liable to be revoked. Meanwhile the great captains of industry, in the main, have produced nothing but numbers, and more numbers; numbers measuring their own supposed value, which we must bow and scrape for like tip chips to the casino employee. It is interesting, isn’t it, that we do not say “creative member of society” -- someone who spontaneously brings forth new questions, new answers, new methods for navigating our shared landscape?

None of us asked to born. Our essentially fragmented consciousness having coalesced into existence around a fragile humanity, we’ve been summoned to roll call in what amounts to an existential concentration camp. We have been ordered to submit to any and all humiliation by those in charge, that humiliation assumed to be its own reward. We are asked to accept what we are told as gospel truth, do what we are told is the divine will, to dig our own graves and to conveniently fall into them after punching the clock on our way out.

This is true, and it is also not true. We have all been here before. Everybody knows this is nowhere. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds. We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil’s bargain, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. I don’t wanna be the prisoner. Man, there ain’t no life nowhere. I got my own world to live through and I ain’t gonna copy you. I’m on a submarine mission for you baby; I can’t figure out your watery love...I’m gonna solve your mystery; I’m sending it out from heaven above. I’m on a highway to hell. I met a man who was wounded in love; I met another man who was wounded in hatred. Love, love is all around me, every day. I wish I was special, but I’m a creep.

We have to create some kind of meta-language for navigating and shaping our own realities, because the maps that we have been given are all lies -- advertisements for a non-functioning product, a rip-off. As a child of American culture born into the end of the millennium, I believe that the meta-language for controlling reality is available in the form of rock and roll music. In the context of rock and roll we are not merely isolated tenants to the abandoned apartment complex of a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland; we are souls interconnected by the unseen forces of vibration. Pete Townshend scripted the failed rock opus “Life House”, which later became condensed to the album titled “Who’s Next”, with the intent that it represent a replacement for religion. Rock and roll would be the socio-spiritual meeting ground for people on a quest to unleash their psyches from the shackles of tradition. “Life House” was ostensibly a failure because its multimedia multi-disciplinary vision of technology serving to unite humanity in a shared ethic of humanism and liberty was too many decades ahead of its time. Instead of such a vision unfolding as the triumph of an individual will, it is more likely to arise spontaneously and organically as the necessity arising out of the death of empire and the collapse of civilization as we know it. Even through its colossal failure, “Life House” sets the bar for the aesthetic aspirations of future rockstars.

Times are once again dire enough to require a dire music, a music that dismantles the very idea of ‘revolution’ by ripping the wheel from its framework and smashing it to bits. We want off the wheel. We’re tired of the misunderstanding of sampling as repackaging -- what we are striving for is a true synthesis. We’re not interested in selling a back catalog, other than to rediscover those who truly went against the grain, and to fall in step behind them -- it is only cultural misappropriation when we fail to learn from the mistakes of those we are following.

We don’t want success -- we want to destroy everything that reeks of it. We don’t want to be successful, we want to be full of our essence. I don’t wanna cause no sensation; I’m just talkin’ ‘bout my generation.

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

Episode IX:

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR

EPISODE IX: ‘They were the heroes of old, men of renown’

We’re lookin’ for a plan of action, lookin’ for a plan of action - U.K. Subs

A friend I hadn’t seen in years came through town recently, and while we were hanging out said with a wistful tone: “I miss the old Erik, the one I used to know.”

“What’s so different between me now, and the Erik you used to know? Besides the fact that I’m fatter, older looking and have gray hair?”

“You used to be a Man of Action,” my friend replied.

A Man of Action. I like the sound of that. It brings to mind images like my favorite late 60’s Marvel Comics icon, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (not the Hasselhoff version, not the Samuel L. Jackson version, I’m talking about the Jim Steranko version. Google yourself silly on that one.) When I was a kid I would picture myself in that skin-tight blue uniform, a gun strapped to every limb, swinging from a cable hanging out of a jet plane, cigar stuck to my lower lip, orange flames leaping from the muzzle of my machine pistol as I slaughtered wholesale the despicable enemies of Truth, Justice, and The American Way.

This is what the song “Stories For Boys” from U2’s first album is about. Listen to it. “There’s a place I go when I am far away/There’s a TV show, and I will go/Sometimes a hero takes me,/Sometimes I come and go/Stories for boys...” I imagine some of you girls liked these stories too. Otherwise we wouldn’t be so used to cheering on Angelina Jolie wasting a mansion full of bad guys while wearing nothing but white silk jammies. The scene where she smacks that guy in the face with the front wheel of her motorcycle - God, that is so awesome. But anyway, I digress.

There’s something about youth that gravitates towards the fast and the furious, Vin Diesel exploding through a wall of glass with a shotgun in each hand, Wesley Snipes as Blade slashing through hordes of exploding vampires.....it’s part of what youth is all about, this incendiary life energy that urgently seeks release. Everything seems of life or death importance. Somebody made fun of my hair at school - THEY MUST DIE!! Hell must have a special place for the person who made guns available to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine Shooters.....because every one of their fantasies struck me to the heart with their familiarity. I went to school with dozens of Harris and Klebolds. Dozens, at least. The only difference was they couldn’t get their hands on the hardware.

This is the imagination of youth: The power to change reality. Sometimes violently. Violent political movements are usually fueled by the young, whether as shock troops or cannon fodder. Young people are often fanatics, about bands, sports teams, politics, gangs, you name it, they’ll fight for it. It’s a hormonal thing. Everything is black or white, left or right, all or nothing. As kids we wanted to be the best good guy that ever was, who always wins, or the worst bad guy who ever lived, feared by all. We were into extreme music, extreme fashions, extreme sports, extreme violence, extreme sex when we had that seemingly endless fountain of energy at our disposal. All that disconcerting “ultra-hardcore” porn that the talk shows are whimpering about is the provenance of people between the ages of 15 and 20. Count on it. If you want a true cultural biopsy of this past decade, look no further than “Grand Theft Auto”.

So what does all this have to do with music? Everything. Because every movie has a soundtrack, and the soundtrack of action is Rock and Roll. A huge chunk of GTA’s marketing budget goes toward the music they use in the TV commercials. In John McTiernan’s blindingly ahistorical remake of “Rollerball” [MGM/Sony, 2002], the soundtrack even appears as a character - a Nu-Metal house band who blasts every time the violence ramps up on the track. When the Sons of Anarchy ride to war against the Aryan Nations [“Sons of Anarchy” (TV series), FX, 2009], “Hands In The Sky” by Straylight Run creeps up in hair-raising fashion, evoking an ominous specter of violence. [And if you ever wonder “What was that song on Episode 12 Season 2?”, the official web site has helpful links to each and every one. If that doesn’t prove that Rock and Roll is a convenient tie-in with television and films, I don’t know what could.] David Lynch employs rock music with furious effectiveness in “Lost Highway” [October Films, 1997] - since his films are about 90% atmosphere, the music is center stage rather than ancillary. It seems at first glance an overblown gesture to populate a film soundtrack with Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein; but taken as a whole, the film really is all about the sort of dislocation that rock music has been the soundtrack for since the invention of the hydrogen bomb.

When we were kids, Rock and Roll was the soundtrack inside our skull to every imagined adventure we were incapable of living, and every cold-sweat nightmare we woke up from shaking. We swung from imaginary trees as Tarzan, ran from giant blobs like Steve McQueen, rappelled down building faces with S.W.A.T., and practiced cowboy Kung Fu with David Carradine - and every moment of it was accompanied by loud guitars and shouted vocals [even if it took network television a while to figure it out - how much adrenaline can you really pump listening to a cheesy disco track?].

So naturally, while it was all well and good to have a smart suit, a Walther PPK and a license to kill from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it was even better to be the dude playing the guitar riff over it. To BE the soundtrack inside people’s heads to whatever adventure they imagined. That seemed to contain so much power it was almost sickening to think of it. What do you want to be when you grow up, Erik? I want to be a spy, a superhero, a pirate, an astronaut, an assassin, an FBI agent, a barbarian swordsman, a genius crimefighter, a guy swinging from a rope while firing a machine gun.....but most of all, I want to be the guy singing songs about them. I want to ululate unearthly wails about black swords, coming from a land of ice and snow, on a highway to Hell! Rock and Roll was an all-encompassing aesthetic umbrella over every boyhood adventure fantasy, every dream of fame and glory, the whole damned thing.

Besides, if you’re James Bond, you only get to make love to one beautiful woman at a time, and she always gets killed afterwards. If you’re Captain Kirk, it’s just one green-skinned alien exotic dancer per show. But if you’re Robert Plant.....you’ve got armies of lust-crazed teenaged girls who want to feast on your flesh like zombies! All at once! Until you are crushed, asphyxiated, trampled, torn limb from limb, and sucked completely dry! Why do you think so many male rock stars kept to their trailers, shooting up heroin? They were hiding from the women!

The most enjoyable part of the adventure of being a rock and roll musician, for me, was being on the road. It has been likened by some to being in a roving band of barbarian raiders landing on the peaceful shores of a monastery or a village, looting and pillaging and leaving nothing but ashes in their wake; but for me it was more like being a National Geographic writer examining the native way of life in towns far from my own. Perhaps there were elements of being a preacher at a big tent revival as well, but largely it seemed as if I were crashing a party that was already going on - particularly at the college gigs.

Without necessarily knowing anything about our band before coming to the show, people came (naturally) with the expectation of being entertained -- but I had the crazy and inexplicable expectation that I would somehow change them, give them an experience they would never forget. Some took to this nicely, and some did not. I suppose it had something to do with their level of intoxication. In any case, people were able to take from it whatever they needed - entertainment, release from boredom, wild abandon, provocation, food for thought. For a very small number - most times no more than two or three in a crowd of dozens, scores, hundreds - something happened that could not be put into words, something that changed them, the way rock and roll had changed me. It might be that afterwards they looked for the hidden magic under the surface of everything; or that they decided they were going to start their own band; or maybe that night they decided “Let’s wait until next week to decide whether I really want to go forward with my plan to end it all.” These were all things that had been done for me, and I hoped to somehow pass those things on.

If there is something universally sorcerous and heroic about rock and roll, then it stands to reason that there must be a corresponding heroic archetype to every rockstar - or one that stands out among several. Jim Morrison was likened by many [Oliver Stone, for example] to the Greek god Dionysos, god of ritual ecstasy [cf. Wikipedia]. Robert Plant called himself a “Golden God”, which can be interpreted as Apollo, or Lugh, or Freyr, or Ra; can’t you just see him riding his flaming chariot across the sky singing “AhAAHAAAAAH AAAAh!!” Patti Smith is obviously the Oracle at Delphi, or the Cumaean Sybil, perhaps with one of the Furies mixed in. Sinead O’Connor is Joan of Arc; Jeff Beck is Mercutio, or some other swashbuckling swordsman; Michael Stipe is the shine-pated, oblique Silver Surfer, full of portentous pronouncements no one understands; Ice Cube is the true life incarnation of the fictional character Mister T., as ebullient as an undertaker. Elvis Presley for a time was as close as rock and roll would ever get to Superman; Morrissey is Peter Parker; John Lennon is Christ, and so on.

Have you ever played the game “If you were a superhero, what would your super power be?” The thing of it is, with a little practice, you can actually get real super powers if the hero you want to be is a musician. Depending on what it is you want to do, the only real effort required is having the guts to stick your neck out. I have many friends who are musicians or artists of some type, and they are real-life superheroes to me. I often find myself picturing them with capes and boots.

Here are some other real-life kinds of people I think are superheroes:

Single parents

Teachers

Recovered addicts

People who work with their hands for a living - building, landscaping, assembling, sewing, welding, etc.

People who are willing to march in the streets for what they believe

People in wheelchairs

Farmers

I was your typical punk rock hater of cops when I was a kid - all cops were authority junkies, violent pigs, etc. It’s when I learned what cops actually have to do day in and day out just to keep the streets functional that caused me to temper my prejudice; I literally saw them in a different light. They are people who are willing to get shot at so I don’t have to. I feel the same way about soldiers. I may disagree with, or even hate the uses they are put to, but their willingness to sacrifice their own personal safety for the good of others can’t be downplayed. Fire fighters are close to the top of the list, particularly those crazy f?!?ers who jump out of planes and helicopters into forest fires. Running headlong into a burning building - what could be more rock and roll than that?

My favorite moment of the meeting of heroes was when the Who played a tribute concert for the first responders of New York City after 9/11. While the band performed “Won’t Get Fooled Again” with power and exuberance, really putting their souls and backs into it because of the setting, the cameras kept lighting on a uniformed cop in the front row with a manic expression on his face, pumping his fist in the air for his heroes and singing along with the words. You could tell that the band felt the same way about their audience. It was pretty intense.

A lot of people get into this line of work for a lot of reasons, but mostly I think it’s because there’s no actual Professor Xavier’s School For Mutants, no Hogwarts, no Starfleet Academy in real life. The most accessible form of superheroism is to “Get yourself an electric guitar, then take some time and learn how to play” [‘So You Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star’, the Byrds, 1967]. We want to be people of action, to inject something extraordinary into our ordinary lives. Witness the huge interest in karaoke and now the Rock Band game, not to mention a Hollywood movie about a guy who plays air drums. Any movement or undercurrent in the popular music sphere that encourages those who dare to “Do It Yourself” is welcome, and these periodic occurrences are like water in the desert.

Another hero of mine (and of many people), the late John Lennon, says in ‘Instant Karma’: “Who on Earth do you think you are -- a superstar? Well right you are!” And hey, if John Lennon said it, it must be true.