Episode V: Teenage vs. Middle-Aged Love Stories

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR PART V:

Teenage vs. Middle-Aged Love Stories

Last week, after more than a quarter century of songwriting, I managed somehow to write a love song. Not a tortured angst-ridden love-in-flames song, not a “Love is a dodgy premise at best if not impossible” song, not a “Why won’t you love me?” song, not a “Why don’t you love me anymore?” song, and not an “OMG WE’RE DOOOMED” song - just a love song, no more, no less. Okay, it’s got maybe a tablespoon of broken glass in it, but rather than shame and misery and self-hatred and bitterness and resentment and whatever else you might imagine, it’s just that little bit of ouch that - guess what? - any of us who have actually really loved somebody already knows all too well. That “real life” stuff. In a rock song, can you believe it??!

My songwriting comes out of an education in the blues, soul, Italian classical music, punk rock, post-punk, dub reggae, metal, grunge, goth, country death, and so on - so I can, and have, written a fair number of tortured angst-ridden love-in-flames type songs, steeped in vitriol and 180 proof disappointment. The first song I ever wrote, words and music, came about this way:

I am invited to a party at the house of my “in” with the punk rock scene, a tough punk rock chick who happens to think mods are cool. There’s lots of different kinds of kids there of course - most of them too young to know what clique or gang they’re going to end up in. The mix is diverse mainly because of the absence of adults and the promise of beer.

My friend introduces me to a young lady with long brown hair and penetrating eyes, with whom I experience the template of many “dates” or similar interactions with women to come - me jabbering on and on like an idiot, them looking at me with a look of silent amusement. I don’t know what it is I find so compelling about this girl - maybe just that she’s a girl, and she’s at least pretending to listen to me. Underneath the gear I’m still the great big dork writing science fiction novels and imagining himself to be James Bond.

So we work our way through a can of beer together, and maybe it’s more like two or three, I can’t remember very well - for obvious reasons - and then, predictably, I am trying to kiss her, and it is fairly obvious to both of us that I have no idea what I am doing. Maybe she doesn’t either, but then girls don’t have to. I mean come on - they’re girls, they can get away with just being girls, that’s all the magic required. I, on the other hand, am so hopeless I can even screw up something as down-to-earth as kissing a pretty girl.

Just then up walks a guy who seems as if he’s three feet taller than me, with blond hair and insouciantly handsome looks, a tough bad boy type who is probably the one that always knows where the good weed is, who’s had twice as much beer and me and walks as if he’s had half as much, who actually says this: “Here, let me show you how it’s done.” He takes the girl by the hand, curls her in towards him like they’re dancing at a sock hop, and plants one on her like Humphrey Bogart. She appears to melt into him with relief, as if thinking “Thank God someone who knows what they’re doing intervened!” - she’s actually enjoying kissing this guy. I think it’s possibly one of the top five, maybe even top three most humiliating moments of my entire life. When the friend who brought me on the back of his scooter finally drives off with my dead weight hanging precariously off the back end, I wave blearily to her and cry out like a mournful loon drifting over a desolate lake: “Call me some time!”

Over the next couple of days I phone her over and over again, trying to find some kind of spark of interest in her voice. Finally, despairing of my giving it a rest, she doesn’t even hang up, just puts the phone down and waits for me to realize it’s hopeless.

Since there is nothing else constructive to do at this point, I find myself writing a song - my first song, at least in terms of having music and lyrics and not just being a clever sounding song title on an album cover of an imaginary band (a pastime that, I will one day be astonished to learn, I seem to share with Robert Pollard).

It took me about fifteen years to actually sit down with a friend’s reel-to-reel 4 track and commit it to tape, but I eventually did. (Link forthcoming) And to the girl, who is now a lady and in fact is now a friend of mine on Facebook, I can only say thank you for providing me with more inspiration than I was likely able to provide you. [I can in no way take credit for her cutting her hair short and forming a band with her friends shortly afterwards.]

Later songs of mine would deal with the predictable punk rock issues of war, terrorism, revolution, pollution, racism, sexism, shoplifting, running from cops, suicide, etc. But the subject of mere love as a songwriting topic was elusive at best, a nightmare at worst. The closest I was able to come to writing something resembling a love song is a harrowing depiction of a shotgun wedding over a blistering 12-bar R & B riff that the lead guitar player brought to rehearsal one afternoon - among other things, it contains the dubious and reprehensible admission on the part of the protagonist that his primary motive is “an ambition to get your daughter in the sack”. You can see a performance of this song here.

Our contempt for the typical love song reflected our contempt for the typical anything. Our soundtrack was “Hate and War” (as opposed to Peace and Love) by the Clash; “(Love Will Get You Like A Case of) Anthrax” by Gang of Four; “Stupid Marriage” by the Specials; and “Into You Like A Train” by the Psychedelic Furs, which featured the raggedly charismatic Richard Butler yowling “No kind of love”. One of our songs even contained the lyric “Touch the issue, hands get dirty/Play love songs until you’re thirty”, and as every rebellious youth knows, one should never trust anyone over thirty (Paul Weller claimed once not to trust anyone over 25). It’s probably the reason why, at 43, I frequently have trouble trusting even myself.

People think that being in a band is a ticket to Chick City (or Dude City if that’s what you prefer). Some people even manage to work that angle for themselves. It’s a lot like going out and getting a dog, hoping that it’s a chick magnet. But then you bring the dog home with you at the end of the day, and it looks up at you as if to say “What’s for dinner?” Now you’ve got something that needs taking care of, that actually requires effort. Seeing as how the only reason we wanted to form a band was because we really wanted to form a band, we didn’t mind the effort so much. But it’s hard work coming up with things to write about if your intention is to always break new ground, to avoid treading familiar pathways. If we’d opened up to writing actual love songs, maybe we would have had a larger palette to work with. After all, the driving forces for our creativity were rage, adversity, angst, anxiety and suffering; and if you can’t find at least two of those elements in any relationship, it’s probably not a relationship worth remembering.

Some time after leaving the band I wrote a love song of sorts that was so vague and poetic I had to carefully explain all the references in detail to the person it was about (the woman who would one day become my wife). I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I believe it was to ask what the point of a love song was if the person it was written to couldn’t even recognize it as such. There you have it in a nutshell - what it’s like being married to a poet.

When I went through my period of de-emphasizing music in favor of developing my craft as a poet, I wrote a lot of surreal, purposefully obtuse poems. I rebelled against the idea of poems or songs being “about” something obvious. A lot of my poems, when read aloud, got laughs or cheers for some of the images, but the overall response was one of puzzlement. Then, I read a poem that was essentially about missing someone and hoping they come back; it brought down the house. I resisted the lesson, though, and went back to my paeans to plastic garbage bags stuck in trees and things of that nature.

Lather, rinse, repeat for about fifteen more years.

I can’t really explain in a dramatic or even interesting way how I finally came around to working out a love song, a way that ties the whole story together and makes a complete and intelligible (much less interesting) narrative. As I may have mentioned before, I started taking responsibility for my own health to a degree I never had before, and this included (perhaps above all else) my mental health; and I stopped trying to exorcise demons of the past, and instead tried to domesticate or at least taxidermy them. One of the things that this helped me do was to pick up where I had left off developing as a songwriter. Instead of trying really hard to say something relevant and original, I just tried to speak from the heart without too much forethought. I tried to be honest, to tell the truth, admit my mistakes without self-pity, and through it all stay optimistic and keep my sense of humor. What I ended up with remained true to some of the dark, ironic essence of my past writing (the song does include references to human sacrifice, gambling, alienation, and the all-time favorite, disappointment). It also had major chords, sweet harmonies, and the word “Love” in it.

Here’s the song:

Madly (Sha La Lo) Copyright 2009 by Erik Rader, all rights reserved.

Episode IV: Jimmy Is A Punk Rocker

Diary of a Fading Rockstar, Part IV:

Jimmy Is A Punk Rocker

When I was a child (and already formulating my career plans as a future rockstar) I enjoyed my Sunday clothes so much I wanted to wear them all week. Regardless of the unpleasant actuality of the little old church ladies pinching my cheeks while criticizing the length of my hair, it was the source of my very earliest frisson of cool. It had already been made clear to me that rockstars dressed differently than most people - Rick Wakeman of Yes had his sparkling metallic cape; Kiss had their giant boots and Kabuki makeup; Jimi Hendrix looked like a gypsy from another planet; the Stones looked like barbarian princes come to burn the village to the ground; even the inoffensive, loved-by-parents Beatles had the hirsute earth-toned appearance of poets or highwaymen. None of these fanciful costumes struck me as being a natural fit with my personality; I never wished I could wear my Halloween werewolf costume the rest of the year. My Sunday clothes, however, felt magical and powerful - it was like being a secret agent or spy, my second choice for a career after rockstar.

If I had shown up to school in a tie and blazer, however, I probably would have gotten my ass kicked. I came from a working class neighborhood in Southeast Portland and attended a school with a huge brick smokestack, the kind that looked like a factory; certainly this was no accident, as I suspect that this was the intended destination they were preparing us for. It was bad enough that my liberal intellectual parents allowed me to attend 3rd grade in long hair and paisley blouses, alongside the kids in their crew cuts, T-shirts and stiff Levis; I think they would have let me show up for school in my Sunday clothes and be crucified. Fortunately for me we moved to Berkeley just as I was entering fourth grade, and as we all know schoolchildren in Berkeley in the 70’s would have routinely been sent to the principal’s office for looking normal. Unfortunately we also entered a state of poverty that temporarily forced me to conform to the attire of my peers - in other words, to dress like a child laboring in a Maoist reeducation camp.

In Junior High, something changed. My parents had finally managed to figure out which thrift stores in town were happening, we had all somewhat overcome the trauma of our relocation, and I was starting to formulate my own opinions about what I should wear.

One day, I decided to wear my Sunday clothes to school.

I didn’t get my ass kicked; in fact, several of the boys that used to punch me around for fun exclaimed “Hey, cool clothes, man!” But even more importantly, several of the pretty girls who had ignored me before now said “Hi.” To a thirteen year old this is like your first hit of crack.

Shortly after this there was a school assembly at which some of my classmates performed a cover of “Godzilla” by Blue Öyster Cult. They played the opening riff over and over without a bridge, and there didn’t appear to be any vocals. At the time I was singing lead in my church choir, but I didn’t put two and two together. It didn’t occur to me to go up to the nascent musicians and say “What you guys need up there is a front man” - I was still too blown away by the fact that they had somehow got the school authorities to let them play at an assembly, and they hadn’t even learned the bridge. I didn’t know it then, but one of the guitar players would end up in my band.

What they had planted in my mind was the seed of possibility - it was possible for someone my age to get up in front of people and play loud rock music, to somehow sneak behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and mess with the special effects. What caused that seed to germinate, however, was punk rock. Specifically, the Ramones.

Up until that point the majority of the kids I knew had been cowed by the specter of “musicianship” - everybody was into groups like Rush or Yes that played millions and millions of notes, and had huge multimillion-dollar light shows; it seemed that being in a rock and roll band was as unattainable a fantasy as being a grownup, having your own place, driving a car, getting laid, getting a job. When my brother, his best friend and I discovered the Ramones, we were immediately overcome by the realization that not only could losers like us be in a band - losers like us could be rockstars. Many years later I would learn that the business associates who called themselves the Ramones and their management very carefully crafted their sound and image concept, but at the time everyone was convinced that they were what they appeared to be: A bunch of hooligans who had probably stolen their instruments, could barely play them, very likely slept in the beer and weed scented garage they rehearsed in, and wrote their songs about sniffing glue and turning tricks on 53rd and 3rd from personal experience.

We’d heard about the “punk rock” that, the newspapers claimed, had been invented somewhere in England and was the purview of Satanists, neo-Nazis and child-rapists; that it consisted of screams and grunts and curses over the atonal bashing of cheap musical instruments; and that punk rockers all had purple lipstick and safety pins through their nostrils. However, the Ramones gave the lie to the squalid hysteria flooding the late 70’s newspapers and television news reports of mainstream America. We knew guys like these Ramones, who skipped class, smoked reefer and sniffed glue, wore motorcycle jackets (some even rode motorcycles), had long greasy hair, set things on fire, liked loud obnoxious music and didn’t give a fuck about anything. They weren’t anything all that exotic; they were already fixtures of our environment. The music they represented had already existed for a long time, but had been so fiercely and religiously ignored by the mainstream that most people imagined it had sprung wholly and instantaneously from Malcolm MacLaren’s forehead.

What very studiously conceived pop art constructs such as the Ramones did was to bring the punk ethos into the consciousness of people like me who would take it to the next level. Not long after the arrival of the Ramones’ first album in 1976, an explosion of bands around the world would revive and revolutionize popular music in a manner that had not happened since the Beatles captured the airwaves over a decade before, spawning ten thousand imitators and arguably recapturing the mystical and anarchic power of rock and roll that had been unleashed by Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and their peers, but had been subsumed by a popular recording industry intent upon rendering rock and roll into a safe, asexual, white-skinned cash cow that wouldn’t frighten aunt Mildred or disturb the neighbors. After the Beatles, the cycle began again, but the sine wave of revolution and co-optation became shorter and shorter. Thus, we have 4 years between The Day the Music Died (the fateful plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper) and the Beatles’ conquest of American radio with the single “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, the first salvo of the British Invasion; a mere 3 years between Iggy meeting Bowie at Max’s Kansas City in ’71 and the Ramones’ first performance at that same venue in ’74; and between the “death of punk” at the Sex Pistols’ disastrous performance at Winterland in San Francisco in ’78 and the release of “Gangsters” by the Specials on Jerry Dammer’s 2 Tone label, just one year.

We were inspired by the Ramones, but we sure as hell didn’t want to look like them. My inspiration for how to look came instead from the album cover of “Exposure”, the enigmatic and problematic solo release of former prog-rock axeman Robert Fripp. On that cover he was photographed in a dapper, almost conservative blazer, dress shirt and tie, his hair cropped short in Roman fashion. But what really turned all of our heads around 180 degrees was the release that same year of the film “Quadrophenia”, and the appearance at Rasputin’s Records on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley of loosely shrink-wrapped import copies of “In The City” by the Jam.

My friends and I were completely unaware that revival cults of 60’s Mod culture already existed among bored, disaffected former-punk rockers in San Francisco, San Diego, LA, New York, Boston, and several other major American cities; Berkeley had a funny way of being a cultural backwater in those days before the internet made the exchange of information functionally instantaneous. As far as we knew, we were it. In fact, finding out later on that other people were into it kind of spoiled it for us. In the heat of that moment in 1979, when we decided that we were Mods, the feeling that we had finally discovered our revolutionary stylistic niche was undeniable. Surfing this wave of momentum, rehearsals in my parents’ garage began in earnest. Our hair was all wrong and our outfits were drastically misconceived (there were floral print Vans present, lamentably, for which certain members to this day refuse any apology; I however am fully repentant of my very brief interest in white painter’s pants). But we were playing Who and Ramones covers loud and fast, actually writing stupid three-chord songs that sounded like a cross between the two, and nothing was going to stand in the way of our inevitable world conquest. Expectations and strategies would later have to be amended in the face of brutal reality, but in that incandescent moment, we were far more sure of ourselves than we had any right to be.

This was even better than wearing one’s Sunday clothes to school; this was like making every day Sunday, without the annoying inconvenience of actually having to show up at church and have one’s cheek pinched by the old ladies.

At some point we managed to get hold of a copy of Richard Barnes’ notorious photo essay on mods (Mods!, orig. Eel Pie Publishing, 1979) and from that point onward it was an obsession. When I paid a visit to the guitar player from the band I’d seen at the school assembly back in junior high, intending to recruit him for my project, he had already acquired a dapper pinstriped mohair blazer with a “Maximum R&B” badge. He brought with him a rhythm guitar player who looked like he might have stepped off of a Yardbirds or Small Faces album cover from twenty years previous. A keyboard player I had taken many classes with in school, an unassuming yet bright fellow who had never particularly stuck out much in spite of his freakish tallness, suddenly appeared in a raw silk blazer and inch wide tie. It seemed as if something was in the air. My horn-playing friends from church youth group, who played in the jazz bands of their respective schools, may have been skeptical about the Who, the Jam, mods, or any rock and roll influences; but they came to us enthusiastically by way of the Specials and their updated suedehead attire. While other bands at school made their statement by ripping the collars out of their T-shirts, we actually had the school GQ pimps calling us out as fellow stylists.

When kids from the suburbs started coming to our shows dressed in off-the-rack mallrat versions of our meticulously crafted looks, we became disillusioned, but then at that point the whole musical direction of the band had spun out on a thousand different tangents anyway. When what we had envisioned initially as a way to stand out from the pack became just another flavor of running with it, we more or less abandoned it. To our chagrin, however, we found ourselves continually pigeonholed, labeled, categorized, and genre-fied in the local press, who seemed hip to where we had been two or three years previously but not in the present. One local rock journalist of considerable pedigree went so far as to send his son (actually one of our schoolmates) in his place to see us play and report back to him, effectively ghost-writing the review. In a strange sort of way our attempt at grabbing visibility for ourselves rendered us even more invisible than ever - when one becomes the subject of projection, there isn’t even an original subject to ignore any longer.

Fast forward about 20 years, across a gulf of time in which I’d attempted to start seemingly endless bands, or else audition for others; a time during which my “look” became nondescript, my songwriting even more so, and no one who had been witness to my original 15 minutes was anywhere in sight. I had done such an excellent job of erasing myself from my past life that I couldn’t cash a check to the old account - hell, I couldn’t get arrested anywhere. Not only was I light years away from the concept of wearing my Sunday clothes 7 days a week - I didn’t HAVE any Sunday clothes. I had done such a good job of caving inward upon myself that one friend remarked, “Don’t you go and start trying to live your life like a character in a Tom Waits song.” In fact, that was pretty much exactly what I was trying to do.

It simply did not look good.

Then around about 2006 the mood changed for me again. I was noticing that the old styles of music and clothing were coming back into fashion - not that I really cared, it was just sort of interesting, and jogged my memory about some things - and that it wasn’t that hard to find the kind of clothes I used to wear at my nearest local thrift shop. I got my hair cut short, started matching solid color dress shirts to narrow silk ties and four-button jackets, or knit polo shirts to vintage windbreakers. I vowed to absolutely eliminate all pleated pants and baggy jeans forever from my wardrobe, and breathed a sigh of sweet relief. I found myself recalling what I had somehow managed to forget - that dressing a certain way made me feel good, and feeling good was for me a full time job that required full time effort.

Concurrently with my return to a sense of personal dignity, my creativity exploded; I wrote and recorded more music in the space of a couple months than I had in the previous decade; and, as you can see here, the words flowed forth in a shameless cascade, where once I had hidden them under a rock.

For the most part I continue to set myself apart from the mainstream of any subculture, but I no longer shy away from the subtle “secret handshakes” as I call them, or as a fellow Stylist from back in the day refers to them, “a wink of mod”. Meanwhile the young people seem to at last be re-awakening from their long and terrible slumber in the realm of ridiculously baggy clothing - although I still see kids wearing hideous knee-length basketball shorts with sneakers resembling clown shoes. I no longer harbor any hard feelings to inhabitants of the mall culture who may borrow a grace note here or there from mine; after all, imitation is a relatively sincere form of flattery. I frequently find myself biting my tongue, wanting to walk up to a 19 year old and say “The jacket and pants are great, but what were you thinking with those shoes?” or “Next time let me cut your hair - I could have done a better job than the overpriced idiot who did that to you.” But then I remember what I would have said at 19 if some 43 year old weirdo had come up to me talking such garbage. Instead, I keep quiet and try to teach by example. And encouragingly, dear old friends from high school who might easily be saying “Come on, grow up, you’re not a teenage rockstar any more,” are instead exclaiming “Where have you been!”

Episode III: The Pros and Cons of Time Travel

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR

Episode III: The Pros and Cons of Time Travel

By Erik Rader

This is probably going to turn out to be an embarrassing admission, but here goes nothing: About two years ago I started dressing like I did in high school. Last year I did some digital remixes of songs I wrote back then on my Macbook, some of which I uploaded to MySpace. And this year, I’ve downloaded a lot of the music I used to listen to back then, my own personal soundtrack I used to listen to on my Sony Cassette Walkman, now in a tenuous sort of existence as 1’s and 0’s. It seems more than coincidental that I’ve also recently begun to reconnect with old friends from that time in my life, either digitally, in person, or both. This is a common theme for people about my age, albeit amplified by our new total-access culture; what hasn’t changed is that not only do most of us find it embarrassing, pathetic, or both - it’s also usually a big mistake. William Faulkner is purported to have said, “The past isn’t dead - it isn’t even the past.” Faulkner’s own mortality aside, this becomes even more true when information about the past is so much more easily resurrected than before. I’m sure we’ll eventually be able to reconstruct Faulkner from his existing DNA and reboot all of his memories, something for which I doubt he’ll thank us.

It used to be that to do this you had to crawl up into a filthy attic, avoiding whatever sort of verminous species had taken up residence there, and dig out vinyl records, cassettes, photographs, letters, yearbooks, and old clothes from boxes. One had to sort through a physicality that both transported one to the realm of memory and yet left that memory safely dead. However, the way things are now, you have old flames from age 16 reconnecting via Facebook and ruining their current decades-old marriages; you have the school bully who used to terrorize you now asking you to “friend” him so you can buy insurance or buy into his new religion.

You might think, and I’m not sure I can convince you otherwise, that I’m acting like a certain type of middle aged person you can run across pretty much anywhere - the guys no longer within a loud shout of their twenties, who spend way too much money on sunglasses and designer sneakers, who shave their heads at the first sign of male pattern baldness, who get super-badass tattoos on their forearms; the women who seem to think they can dress like a sixteen year old going to the mall and yet still retain their dignity. But how this turns out for you really depends on how you looked in high school in the first place. If you were never that kind of person, it’s kind of a little bit late to be starting now.

I acknowledge that I am rowing on troubled waters here, but I may be a special case. In high school, I was the lead singer in a band that went from local popularity to opening for major acts in stadiums, recording a record, and even appearing in Rolling Stone magazine, all in five short years. (This was before I quit for various reasons I won’t go into here, and spent the next 20 years trying to start band no. 2.)

Over the ensuing years I ran from that past as if my ass was on fire. I still liked the same music, I just didn’t play it any more, and wouldn’t for any amount of money; and as for looking the part, I made every effort to look like someone who wasn’t trying to look like anything. Unsurprisingly, I failed in this effort, merely succeeding in looking very uncomfortable most of the time. When I think about the clothes I wore all through my 30’s, I find myself wishing I could forget. It’s time for me to admit that most of the music I wrote during that time was an equally bad fit. I certainly didn’t succeed in getting very many other people interested in it - hell, maybe I wasn’t even that interested in it.

My daughter was born about two weeks after my 40th birthday, and her arrival snapped me out of a depression as wide and deep as the decades I had spent trying to redefine myself. Seeing the world through her eyes helped me to see something I’d been suspecting for a long time - that my 15 year old self knew a few things that 40 year old me had managed to forget. One of those things was that 15 year old me wasn’t afraid of being seen. The circumstances of life eventually beat that cocksureness out of me, but at the time I reveled in the fact that people could recognize me for my swagger from city blocks away. I remember one friend cryptically informing me, “I saw you the other day, walking down the street, all like a rockstar an’ shit.” I pestered that friend for an explanation, but didn’t get one. I think I can see now what that friend saw, looking back. I’m certain that it wasn’t arrogance, although people who didn’t know me would sometimes tell me that’s what they thought it was (people who did know me knew that I had pretty much the opposite problem). It was, I believe, a simple knowledge of self. I didn’t have to “find myself” (and I wasted a great deal of time on that particular search, entirely due to forgetting this fact) because I already knew who and what I wanted to be.

Unless I’m deceiving myself, this recent climbing back into my old skin has been a low-cost and relatively inoffensive way of clearing away a quarter-century fog, a kind of coming to my senses, a dragging myself back from the brink. If I am to credit positive external feedback, there must be some benefit in my decision to forego appearing as if I had slept under a bridge. For the time since I first left my home town - which, I reckon with a wince, is more than half my life ago - that was my fashion statement: “Will work for food.” I recall meeting with an agency recruiter who sighed deeply before gesturing at my clothes (which I had thought were pretty tight) and saying “So, Erik - what do you want to be when you grow up?” I guess I had lost my swagger.

By contrast, almost every job interview I’ve gone to in the past two years has started out with the contact person reassuring me “We’re really pretty casual around here.” At my current place of employment a customer recently asked me “So, do they make you dress this nice for work or.....?” I’m not sure what the “or” option is. I found that it took too long to explain, and so instead I came up with the stock answer: “It’s just my thing.”

We tend to reject the concept of “cool” as insincere, shallow, somehow morally beneath us - we who are, to be sure, such highly substantial and spiritually developed beings. I guess I have a different definition of cool than other people. To me, it was always directly traceable to the people who created the term - urban musicians, poets and artists of the African Diaspora - and their search for dignity in the face of adversity, of self-determination in the face of cultural genocide. It’s been watered down a lot since then, and I for one certainly cannot say that I have ever been the victim of cultural genocide, unless we all have been. But I can relate to the search for dignity in the face of adversity - or as one overly-quoted wag has said, “Clean living under difficult circumstances”.

And that is what I want to recapture: Not my youth, which is as gone as gone can be, but the attitude that one’s destiny is within one’s grasp, and that dignity cannot be found in conformity, but only in an outward thrust against it. I don’t think it’s wrong to want that swagger back, that cocksureness, the intention to go against the grain whenever possible. People get old when they allow the weight of the world to put a curvature in their spine; people stay young when they use that weight as a resistance machine. If you’re looking in the mirror when you get up in the morning and noticing that curvature, maybe it’s time for a little time travel.

Episode II: The Doors of Self-Deception

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR

Episode II: The Doors of Self-Deception

Every time I find myself watching Oliver Stone’s psychedelic hagiography of Jim Morrison (The Doors, 1991), in between fits of giggling at its sometimes stunning flights of pretentiousness (Who is the bald naked man on a white horse that only Jim sees? Why do the spirits of Indian Ghost Dancers appear on stage with him? How does he manage to pick up hot hippie chicks by intoning stoned Rimbaud-isms with glassy, unfocused eyes?) I am given pause to consider the narrative of my own life. I used to have this Jungian shrink who explained that we lead singers, in playing out the role of Dionysus onstage, are trapped in a role of “Puer Aeturnus” or Eternal Childhood. Particularly those of us crossing over into the bleak, gray country known as Middle Age are often to be found poring over old demo tapes and dog-eared press packet photos, wondering what would have happened if we had “made it” back then.

Come on, you know this is you I’m talking about.

The pivotal, climactic moment of “The Doors” is not, however, the night they got signed by an Elektra Records executive who claims to have been “blown away” by a raucous, outrage-laden performance at LA’s venerable Whiskey night club (Jim, literally crawling the walls on acid, responds to the record company wonk’s pallid invitation with a typically mercurial “Why not?”) but rather the moment at which Jim crosses over into the Other Realm while performing, screams that he wants to fuck his mother (and pantomimes it pretty convincingly, complete with bestial grunts) and then is spontaneously “ridden by the gods” as they say in the ancient religion of the Yoruba people. Val Kilmer quite convincingly channels Jim channeling the ancestors of the Native Americans who haunt his dreams, ostensibly because once as a child he saw one of them lying bloodied and mortally wounded on the roadside after a car accident. This formative experience, along with a seemingly bottomless appetite for ingesting peyote, inspires him to such impulsive gestures as jumping onto the hood of a car in the middle of midday traffic and shouting in a thunderous voice like Christ amongst the moneychangers: “Who among you is really alive??”

If you have ever been on a stage of any size for any reason, then you are familiar with the feeling to some degree. You remember, however fleetingly, an uncanny sensation of being plugged into something big, shaggy, horrid, wonderful, a primitive “collective soul” if you will. Sometimes The Big Shaggy reaches up onto the stage and tries to tear you apart a la Orpheus and the Bacchantae, or like the teenage girls in the front row who tore apart one of my favorite shirts, eliciting a stern emo-femboy lecture.

Then it leaves you, in the middle of a tour, in a rehearsal space hopelessly unable to produce lyrics that fit with your band’s sudden fascination with the musical stylings of Joe Walsh, or unwilling to acquire one more in a series of increasingly exotic percussion instruments to play with behind the increasingly lengthy solos. (Weren’t punk solos supposed to be limited to eight seconds? Hold on, I’ve got the Policies and Procedures Manual lying around here somewhere.) It leaves you - the Big Shaggy, the Voice in the Wind, the Shadows and Tall Trees, or Whatever It Was - and at barely the age of a college junior, your raison d'être has become one more pathetically over-recycled anecdote for the therapist’s couch, overwrought party conversation, or the blog.

As ridiculous and hackneyed as it may sound to the layman, even the most cynical post-rockist indy hipster intellectual with a hatred of the conventional stronger than ten thousand espressos will, in the deepest most shame-darkened chamber of his fetid heart, harbor at least a hemidemisemiquaver of resonance with the notion of rock musician as shaman. All it takes is one taste. One. One sip of Bill Graham’s New Year’s Moet Chandon, one sip from an ice cold can of Coke during sound check looking up into the light rig of a ten thousand seat amphitheater, one sip from the ruby lips of a braless teenager wearing your band’s T-shirt. One glance into a sea of darkness dimly illuminated by a galaxy of cigarette lighters. One toke from the proffered backstage spliff of a real-life honest-to-Jah Rastafarian shaman/musician who gives you the inimitably cool musician-to-musician microscopic nod as you walk offstage drenched in sweat from your opener to his headliner.

You start to believe your own mythology. That you were on the path to some kind of Destiny with a capital ‘D’. That for some unknowable reason the Universe intended this for you - this, rather than graduate school or the seminary or a job working for your mom or dad’s company. Or the Army. That in some deeply profound yet unprovable way, it was a critical part of the deep, mitochondrial blueprint of human history that you go this way instead of that way. And it’s the main reason you haven’t been able to hold down a real job since - oh hell, since the day you first tried to. The main reason you sleep alone on the couch most nights. The reason you lie awake far into the night making playlist after playlist for yourself. “This is the absolutely key combination of songs that made me want to write my own! No, this is!” And so on.

It doesn’t matter how many therapists, intervention committees, friends, relatives, or lovers tell us to get over it, let it go, move on, grow up - you still remember the seasoned (not to mention pickled) record producer who pulled you aside and said “Listen. I hear a lot of singers, many of whom are good. You, though, you’re the real thing. You have something that most people will try a whole lifetime to find but never do. Don’t waste it.”

And then you wonder if you have it in you to write one more handful of songs, place one more “MUSICIANS WANTED” ad (and trust me, it’s easier to write a heroic epic backwards and upside down than it is to write a good ad), in between your job that doesn’t pay enough to feed your family and your soul-crushing search for one that does. You wonder if you can stand the rejection, the indifference, the brush-offs, the ridicule, the flakiness, the misinterpretation, the ones who not only want to pledge their allegiance to the band for life but want to be your best friend but oh dear god they play horribly, sing worse, write complete garbage and their rehearsal space in the self-storage facility smells like...like...like someone went in one night and never came out. And are you next??

Some people refer to it as High School Quarterback Syndrome. Homecoming weekend senior year....that incredible touchdown....making it with the homecoming queen....and a Summer that felt like it would never end....and part of you thinks that if you cling to it hard enough, it didn’t, it won’t. Like when you were a kid, and had a dream about the most fantastic, beautiful, magical toy ever imagined; you grabbed the toy just before waking up and clutched it so tight your hands bled, saying to yourself “This time I’ll bring it with me!” And yet once again when you wake up your hands are empty.

Stop telling yourself to get over it, let it go, move on, grow up. Rather, embrace it and hold it close up against your heart, the pain, like a stone you found on the side of a mountain - this knowledge that you will always want something you will never have. And then make something new that you didn’t even know you wanted. And tell the Universe where it can stick its destiny. You’re going to create your own. And the naked bald guy - whoever the hell he is - can fuck off on the white horse he rode in on.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erik Rader was, like, this close to being a totally famous rockstar in the mid-1980’s. He lives on the lawn of his elderly parents' house in a dismounted truck camper.

Episode I: What It Is, and What It Was

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR

Episode I: What It Is, and What It Was

[note: this was originally written as an anonymous blog entry some time ago.]

i know that my endless and repetitive rantings about the same old subjects may be tiresome to some, but i reserve the right to indulge in them, as this is above all else [as the title clearly indicates] a web diary, and ostensibly the reason you are here is because you have some slight accidental curiosity regarding my processes. in any case: let the inchoate, directionless and self-indulgent ranting begin.

i was, again at low ebb today, thinking about the way in which things were done once, versus how they are done now.

in the surreal landscape of high school, even the most alienated soul was privy to a local network of profound, if obscure, communitarian sensibility, a sort of ad-hoc anarchist playground where society was reduced to an abstract microcosm. one heard by word of mouth that certain people were musicians, and that they were good; it wasn’t hard to find them, as someone inevitably had a class with them, particularly jazz band. one’s word of mouth network was all the network one needed to find experts at anything - home manufacture of designer drugs, for example, or cultivated contraband; or someone who could draw a poster, or silkscreen a logo on a trenchcoat, or who could acquire firearms or explosives or other devices of terror; or someone who might have a guitar or drum kit for sale, or who might be interested in playing bass.

all it took was an exchange of phone numbers on scraps of paper, a saturday afternoon in common, which was universal, since no one had a job [well, the bass player, the elder statesman, had a job; but he showed up for rehearsal anyway]. all it took was the mere suggestion and somehow will and energy coalesced, because the landscape was devoid of imminent responsibility or entertainment. none of us were anxiously preparing for the next meeting of the model UN, or as a favorite chemistry teacher so biliously put it, “going to discover the next element”. we had time, and we had the inclination of “why not?”, and we had living rooms.

how did one write a song? one thought of a melody, imagined accompaniment, wrote down lyrics - a song was born. how did one lead a band? one demonstrated the arrangement - how difficult could it be? “it goes like this - then it goes like this - then it goes like this.” how did one promote one’s band? with a logo and a sharpie pen and a tile wall in a high school corridor. with a xerox machine and a staple gun and yards of plywood fenced construction site. how did one get bookings? one called up club owners, got hung up on, called again, got hung up on, and called again. one told stories of hundreds of kids turning out in the high school courtyard, of benefit concerts, of parties. one somehow landed a wednesday night opener. all of one’s schoolmates showed up. soon enough, the wednesday night opener became a friday night headliner.

before there were managers and booking agents and road managers and label executives and entertainment lawyers and professional photographers and producers and engineers and caterers and lighting and sound technicians and roadies and guitar and drum techs…there were some people, and some songs, and some instruments, and a living room, and a name. before all of the dross, before the muddled album cover designs and the unattractive T-shirts, before the effects pedals, before the solos that were longer than the verses, before the bragging about the previous night’s groupie sex, before the showing up late to the gig high as a kite, before the rehearsals broken up by near-fistfights, before the sudden unannounced firings of band members, before the rifts in the dream, there was the dream itself: where a consolidation of creative wills came together in an atmosphere of naivete and positivity, where nothing was ever reduced to the practical, much less the profitable; where any gig was a good gig; where even an audience of one was a triumph; where the joy and excitement of listening to ourselves play was enough motivation.

there was a time when it was enough to notice someone else’s clothes to know they were of a like mind, one could broach a conversation about bands, then in three swift moves have recruited a fellow musician for a project. there were no day planners and no day jobs, no palm pilots or palm greasing, there were no contracts, there were no riders, there were no hourly rates. there was a time when one was willing to enter into any opportunity to actually play music, before the tendency arose to find any and every practical excuse why it must be an untenable and unprofitable excursion. there was a time when people would get into a dirty white chevy van and risk life and limb to drive to some college town, raid their student council entertainment fund for cash and liquor, and blow people’s minds. there was a time when one was on nothing other than a fanatical quest to blow people’s minds, and nothing would stand in one’s way. not to entertain, but to blow their minds. before there was american idol, before there was mtv, before there was “bling bling”, before anyone even cared about a record contract - there was a time when no mental obstacles separated one from direct expression to one’s constituency - to one’s peers. you went out and you made things happen because nobody told you that you couldn’t, and when they did tell you that you couldn’t you said “fuck you anyway” and moved on. you didn’t pay to play, you “rocked the party”. you didn’t say “c’mon, everybody, put your hands together!”, you screamed “i’m an antichrist!” or “nazi punks fuck off!”

before there was alternative this or indy that, before there was a scene or scenes, before DJ’s, before the booking agent you had to know personally to get a gig, before “buzz”, you created everything, because you had no fear, because you had no hope. you did it because you were unruly and untamed. you did it because no one could stop you. not your parents, not your family, not your congregation, not your teachers, not the police, not the guidance counselor who wanted you to go to college, not the fucking losers at your school who thought they were greek gods but in reality were merely trolls.

you didn’t “break in” to anything, you stood your ground and blasted, and you let them all come to you. you didn’t do market research, you didn’t have “visioning” meetings, you didn’t read Variety or CMJ. you showed up to school in fashions you made yourself, you had music in your head you made yourself, everything about you was made yourself, not bought in a store or bought from anywhere. you were the creator of your own memetic universe, your own total reality map. you cultivated obscurantism. you cultivated eccentricity. you weren’t afraid of being divested of your livelihood because you didn’t have one - you had nothing, no freedom, no capital, no assets. all you had was your attitude and your rage. and you funneled it all into a total assault on the reality proscribed and prescribed by your inferiors, the people who lived in fear of a vision of anything beyond what had been proscribed and prescribed for them. you spit on them and climbed over their sorry asses. you shook the dust off of your sandals. you were the judgement of armagideon time upon the heads of the boring. you were righteous. you were fifteen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erik Rader was, like, this close to becoming a famous rockstar in the mid-1980’s. He lives on his elderly parents' lawn in a dismounted truck camper.

re-posting the "fading rockstar" articles

since my articles from the "fading rockstar" series seem to be difficult to access online at the moment, i'm going to repost them here shortly.

New post up at Serious Grounds

Percolator Coffee: Not Just For Grandma Any More

Episode XII of "Diary of a Fading Rockstar" Now Online

Diary of A Fading Rockstar — Episode XII: NEVER TRUST A MAN IN A BLUE TRENCHCOAT Or, You Kids Get Off My Lawn

[Excerpt:]

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.

Read More at CWG Magazine Online

Writers Rising

I've just been invited by my friend Katherine Jenkins to contribute to "Witers Rising", which is here:
Writers Rising. Whenever possible I will be crosspsotng all articles at E. Rader Media, as well as my Faceook page.

Drop on by!

Three new articles at CWG

Here are links to my most recent work: Articles on my own personal collisions with rock and roll subculture and the wreckage that ensued, published at Chicks With Guns.

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR
Episode I: What It Is, and What It Was
Episode II: The Doors of Self-Deception
Episode III: The Pros and Cons of Time Travel

ALSO, please check out my coffee lover's blog, SERIOUS GROUNDS:
http://seriousgrounds.blogspot.com

My First Article At CWG

Some followers of my other blogs may recognize elements of this piece as being somewhat recycled. Others may take some things said herein personally. All that I can say is: (1) I am a firm believer in recycling.
(2) Never take me seriously. Unless I tell you to.

Enjoy, and feel free to comment.

"What It Is, and What It Was"

writing sample: liner notes to 'Depresso' [a mix CD]

Depresso: Track Notes for a mix CD
©2009 Erik Rader. All rights reserved.

***

Starting in 2005 and continuing intermittently through 2009, during a time in which I struggled against the dissolution of my hopes and dreams, my career, and my mind, I became obsessed with the idea of compiling a mix CD of the most depressing popular songs ever recorded. I realized that such a thematic compilation could never be perfectly realized, being that one person's depressing headphone trip might be someone else's first dance; and I found that no matter how complete and perfectly arranged the mix seemed at any given time, reviewing it the next day would inevitably be a disappointment.

The dodge, which I must say in all modesty was a brilliant one, was to arrange the songs in chronological order, beginning with the earliest composition I could think of, and ending with the most recent. With that simple structure in place, filling in the blanks was a cinch. I knew I was home free, after months of sleepless nights, when I listened to the transitions and found myself laughing hysterically. Inappropriate emotional responses are, I'm told, a symptom of depression, but for me it was a sign of catharsis.

These, then, are the liner notes to Depresso. If you'd like me to burn you a copy, shoot me an email. I'm warning you, though - clocking in at about three hours, this mix is an immersive experience that is not recommended for the faint of heart. And if you suddenly find yourself laughing hysterically, you might want to call 911.


Chopin: Prelude in E Minor op. 28 no. 4
Simply put, the sound of the most nobly gifted and brilliant musical mind of his century, dying of consumption.

Hank Williams: Alone And Forsaken
Hank Williams, better known for his folksy hillbilly pop tunes such as “Jambalaya” and “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”, holds forth on the subject nearer and dearer to his heart: A miserable drunkard dies alone, abandoned by his God. Like many artists on this compilation, Hank Williams’ canon could largely be seen as an extended prophecy of his own death, or one long suicide note.

Billie Holliday: My Man
Possibly in the top 5 most depressing songs gathered here, this is Billie’s classic blues about a lethally codependent relationship. Morgues across America are filled every day with women who might have spoken these words.

The Beach Boys: I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
Few lyrics capture the despondency of the misunderstood musical genius/acid casualty better than these, with the possible exception of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, which wasn’t even written by its subject. While LSD overdose is not a universally held experience, it is perhaps the ultimate distillation of something more widely shared - the disintegration of a human being.

The Doors: End Of The Night
Quoting William Blake: “Some are born to sweet delight/Some are born to endless night.” Hmm, wonder which one Jim was. Like a Viking warrior of old, he went into battle as if already slain. In Bobby Krieger’s heavy reverb, one can hear the lapping of the wavelets on the bathwater in Jim’s own personal staging of the death of Marat.

The Velvet Underground: Venus In Furs
It may be reasonable to consider this track inappropriate for “Depresso”, as it’s actually quite positive – a celebration of what alternative lifestyle types like to call “different loving”. But it certainly sets a mood, doesn’t it?

Otis Redding: (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay
Sheer existential panic. One actually imagines Otis sitting on the dock of the bay like Nietzsche perched on his eagle's nest observing the folly of western civilization with contempt, or Sartre unable to touch the knob of his front door for sheer nausea. Doppio depresso!

The Beatles: I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
Contrary to their commonly perceived image as cheerful purveyors of frolicsome love songs, the Beatles probably single-handedly composed the largest canon of pop songs about death, tragedy, murder, mayhem and suicide of any 20th century group. On this track, we hear the simplistic and repetitive lyrics of a mind locked in sexual obsession and compulsion, followed by what can only be described as the sound of a man’s life swirling down the drain.

Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath
Ozzy recounts his first meeting with the A & R scout from a major record label - possibly the same one that signed Robert Johnson.

The Carpenters: Superstar
Originally penned by Bette Midler, this song is also included in my mix entitled The Slow Death of Karen Carpenter. Karen’s misty high notes and vibrating contraltos, her languorous phrasing and agonizing sustains telegraph a painful and early death to anyone familiar with the physicality of vocal emoting; the subject matter - the pathetic pleas for love by a groupie addressed to an indifferent musician - is interesting to hear coming from a true superstar who clearly never internalized that experience enough to save her own life.

Joni Mitchell: Blue
“Acid, booze, and ass/ Needles, guns, and grass/Lots of laughs, lots of laughs”...this could be the soundtrack to the disillusionment of the 60’s generation. On par with Neil Young’s “The Needle And The Damage Done”, Mitchell’s track wins out because on Young’s you get the feeling that he’s learned his lesson; Mitchell on the other hand, brilliant storyteller that she is, leaves the ending up to the imagination, and offers no moral to the story.


The Who: Behind Blue Eyes
How many high school Heshers bit a bullet to this song, I wonder? I can think of at least one I knew personally. Statistical analysis would doubtlessly show this track to be far more lethal than Ozzy’s “Suicide Solution”, but the Who evaded a witch hunt over this song simply because it is couched in the usual poetic evasiveness that only a suffering adolescent would understand.

Nick Drake: Things Behind The Sun
The scary thing about this track is, it’s probably not Nick’s most depressing song. Rather nonchalantly he tosses off the statement that there are “things behind the sun”, like a folk H. P. Lovecraft. “What?? WTF do you mean?? WHAT things???” I could have included “Black Eyed Dog”, but I had to pull back somewhere - I don’t want to get a call from the police at a suicide scene asking me why the victim was listening to this CD before they slashed their wrists.

Roxy Music: A Song For Europe
Bryan Ferry is the veritable (and venerable) Barista of Depresso. The only reason “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” did not make the cut is because in combination with “Venus In Furs” I would have had to title this mix “Creepiest Songs Ever Written”. That mix is, by the way, in the works and will be available shortly.

Big Star: Holocaust
Delicious! Not just a song about a girl blaming herself for her mother’s death, it’s also the sound of a band falling apart rancorously! Two for the price of one.

Brian Eno: Sombre Reptiles
From the master of atmosphere, expressing so simply what others need volumes to say.

David Bowie: Sense Of Doubt
The master of atmosphere meets the 20th Century’s Dorian Grey. Yep, that’s pretty much what a sense of doubt would sound like.

Patti Smith: Easter
Patti Smith has embraced spiritual ambiguity more artfully than any other poet of her generation. Few like she could so ably describe the horrors of religion while still celebrating it, short of Diamanda Galas. I should have included a Diamanda Galas song on this mix! Oh well, now you see why this process is never-ending.

Joy Division: New Dawn Fades
“Directionless so plain to see/A loaded gun won’t set you free/So you say...” In those last 3 words, Ian Curtis sets himself as Jesus before Pontius Pilate. Out of a catalog of appropriately depressing songs, this one comes the closest to an actual cry for help.

Talking Heads: Heaven
Depressing because its essential message is, “Most people lack the imagination to even conceive of happiness, so they compromise by avoiding any new experience at all.”

Wire: A Touching Display
Like my musician friends and I used to joke by shouting out: “Bass solo!!!”

As with most of Wire’s work, generous use of irony and double entendre clearly mark this as the work of Art School students. And as we all know, nobody knows depresso like Art School students.

AC/DC: Hell’s Bells

At least Joy Division had the grace to break up and reform under a new name when their lead singer kacked. This song seems to say “So our lead singer died - that’s rock and roll, baby. If you want a safer business, go back to your day job.” Brrrr!

The Cure: Faith
I don’t know...this could be it. As in, No. 1. I almost included “Cold” from Pornography, except that song is so over the top it’s ridiculous - I mean, cello? Then again...well, like I said, it’s a never-ending process.

T.S.O.L.: Beneath The Shadows
These guys were so far ahead of their time.

Hüsker Dü: Too Far Down
This song is so personal, so naked, it’s almost embarrassing. This is a song from inside the closet, a topic which probably deserves its own mix CD.

Robyn Hitchcock: St. Petersburg
One never knows whether Robyn is kidding or not; least of all on this track. Like a true artist he uses his unparalleled knack for hyperbole to his advantage here. Plus, nobody else could get away with rhyming “knife” and “wife”.

This Mortal Coil: I Want To Live
The entire 4AD Records catalog notwithstanding, I chose this above all the others because they come right out and say it.

Angelo Badalamenti: Laura Palmer’s Theme
The beautiful dead girl floats down the stream like the Lady of Shalott. Who killed Laura Palmer? The Devil in a Rolling Stones song might say, “After all, it was you and me”.

American Music Club: What The Pillar of Salt Held Up
Manchester had Ian Curtis; San Francisco has Mark Eitzel. How he’s still alive I’ll never know.

Metallica: The Unforgiven
It is my theory that this is the album that opened suburban kids’ ears up to the music of a certain suicidally depressed kid from Aberdeen, WA, and the whole big mess that followed...

Nirvana: Something In The Way
What do you do when you figure out that the thing that is in the way is you?

Kristin Hersh: Your Ghost
You think Karen Carpenter’s voice is beat? Try Kristen Hersh’s. Kim Carnes, Stevie Nicks, Lotta Lenya...none of them hold a candle to her. The addition of Mike Stipe on backups is just the icing on this depresso-flavored cake. Cello, dreams about dead people, a big bass drum, Mike Stipe on backup vocals...a recipe for despair.

Aimee Mann: Par For The Course
Resoundingly bleak. Are there any publicly available photographs of Aimee Mann smiling?

Girls Against Boys: Zodiac Love Team
Perverse purveyors of post-hardcore GVSB deal out yet another song about heroin addiction. This could be the soundtrack for the television show “Intervention”.

Therapy?: A Moment Of Clarity
Listening to these heavy-handed lyrics, this gigantic production, you’d think these guys were joking. I’ve seen them live; the other guys might be joking, but I think the lead singer is serious. He looks like he’s never been outdoors in his life.

Moby: Now I Let It Go
I think they misspelled Moby’s name - I think it’s actually supposed to be Mopy. Somebody buy that man a cheeseburger.

R.E.M.: Leave
Speaking of cries for help - when the song features a guitar feedback loop through a digital reverb unit that sounds like an ambulance siren.....

Soundgarden: Tighter And Tighter
It was a toss-up between this and Zep’s “Tea For One”. This one wins out because, well – who do YOU think wins in an all-out depresso deathmatch between Percy and Chris? Percy was the Golden God; Chris, on the other hand, lives a bit further south.

Elliot Smith: No Name No. 5
The man stabbed himself in the heart through his chest. You know how hard that is? You have to penetrate the bone of the sternum. Most people aren’t that strong. You’d have to really, really hate someone to be able to stab them that hard.

Radiohead: Exit Music (For A Film)
It’s kind of like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” if the drug of choice was Night Train instead of LSD.

Thom Yorke is a new breed of depresso singer, in that he maps the territory and sings his way out of it. The guy probably has a therapist and everything. I’m not worried about him at all.

Modest Mouse: The Cold Part
Now, Isaac Brock, on the other hand…

What do you think – Aberdeen or Issaquah? Which is more depressing?

Gillian Welch: April The 14th (Part 1)
It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

Beck: Already Dead
Beck, who also wrote “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me”. What many people don’t know about Beck is that he started out as a straight blues musician, then just got curious about other styles, and took off on a few tangents. So this one is actually quite old school for him.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Suddenly
Kids these days, with their noise they call “music”! Why, when I was their age, we were rubbing our chests with broken glass and peanut butter…

Cat Power: Evolution
Some singers you wait for to implode during the course of their career. With Chan Marshall you wait for her to implode during the course of a live set, or halfway through a song. (Actually I hear she’s much better now. Maybe she’s taking the crazy pills, or found Jesus or something.)

Staying current

Blogging, they say, is a harsh mistress. I've been informally (okay - read that as "in cowardly anonymity") blogging for most of this decade, and reading blogs voraciously during that time. What I have found is that blogging is not a hobby, nor a pastime, nor a sideline. If you're going to do it and do it to the hilt, it's a full-time job. It's the pinnacle of self-employment as a writer: You must set your own schedule, manage your time, and PRODUCE, PRODUCE, PRODUCE. The ultimate test of a blog is timeliness and prolificity. So what happens to even the best of us who aren't hunkered in a bunker, blogging our fingers to the bone? What happens is that after days of real-world networking, scouting out fresh opportunities, working on various projects paid and unpaid, and oh yes - taking care of our homes and families, we come back to our blog to find that we haven't updated it in a week...two weeks...a month...or more.

Did I mention that I have a vegetable patch in my backyard? Did I also mention that it is currently a wasteland barren as the moon? And before that, a trackless jungle of invasive and poisonous plant species?

This is a prime example of the two direst imperatives of blogging: UPDATES and EDITING. It is necessary that you blog about what you read, heard, saw, thought, felt, and did TODAY, and create linkages, and at the very same time, spare your readers your stream-of-consciousness unschooled and undisciplined rants.

UPDATE and EDIT. These things require a time and energy commitment. The easiest way to do this is to have "blogging time" scheduled in your calendar - first thing upon waking for example, or exactly at noon, or immediately after the dinner dishes have been washed. Otherwise you are in danger of leaving it on the "when I get around to it" pile with the rotting laundry and unspeakable vegetable crisper.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to put on my elbow-length gloves and head into the kitchen. If I don't report back within the hour, please send in a rescue team.

Some random thoughts on writing for the web

For creative writers like me who are old enough to remember manual typewriters, positioning oneself as a "creator of web content" can be a somewhat daunting task. Especially those of us who didn't get a degree in Journalism and who don't keep an APA style manual on their nightstand [not that it isn't somewhere on my shelf!] might find what we are asked to do a little nebulous. "Snappy! Friendly! Tech-savvy!" Except for that last part, it sounds pretty much like standard advertising copy. [note: if that last link doesn't creep you out, then you're not a professional writer.]

Meanwhile, I surf the web every day [sometimes I miss those days of hanging out at the public library, but the coffee's better at my house] and I keep coming across sentences [or the fragments thereof] that make me groan. While snappy is good, language pared down to the point of being little more than a thin layer of buzzwords is not something that enhances communication.

I'm on Facebook just like you are - come on, no sense in denying it - and do you know what I've noticed? Every day, i read the complaints of users who are saying [1] the interface gets in the way of their easily finding out things or telling about things; and [2] they're "dumbing themselves down" in terms of language. Is this an inescapable side effect of the medium? I don't think so. The "Notes" area that's linked to on every Facebook page, for example, is a rich and mostly unexplored opportunity to get back to something pretty close to what you and I might recognize as blogging - I know, it seems so old-school now.

As for Twitter, it certainly is very Zen, very editorial, and very good for one's character - like a literary bran muffin or dish of broccoli, if you will - to be forced to condense one's thoughts down to what can be expressed in 140 characters or less. One of the many hats I wear is the rock trivia fanatic, and sometimes the impulse comes over me to "Tweet" a brief song lyric pertinent to the way I'm feeling in that moment, to see if any of my followers will respond with the next line. And for creative writers, anything that helps to stir the pot is worth keeping around. Not to mention the fact that using Twitter has greatly reduced my need to carry countless little scraps of paper in my pockets.

I guess what it all boils down to is this: Use the tools, but don't let them use you. When I was in college, I typed when I was sitting at my typewriter, I scribbled in my diary when I was away from my dorm room, I doodled in the margins of my class notes; my walls were covered with drawings and paintings, and everything I drew and painted contained some text. I also wrote letters both on my typewriter and longhand whenever I could. This helped me flex my creative muscles as well as keeping my friends and family up to date as to how I was doing. Similarly, online social media are great for networking or just keeping in touch with your friends, sharing an in-joke or a crazy candid snapshot - but they're also useful for keeping in touch with yourself and your own process. In the next few weeks, I'm going to be spending a lot of hours consolidating and editing things I've blogged under various fake names since, oh, about 2000. I'll probably be discarding a lot of commentary around links that have gone dead, but there are some rants out there that could be very entertaining, maybe not too incriminating, and most definitely would never have come into existence without the provocation inherent in this medium.