7/25/05

The mid 80's, wasteland of bad haircuts and Oberheim squonk, saw S and me warbling an uninflected medley of What They Wanna Hear in a variety of better-than-lousy venues, to the accompaniment of a cheap drum machine and a merry band of gizmos. We were ecumenical enough to do Sting, Michael Jackson and Ella Fitzgerald in the same set -- not that we did anything for The Gloved One that a meat grinder couldn't have done better and cheaper too.

By the dawn of the second Reagan term, we'd had enough. We packed our equipment, a tight closet of show clothes and our kitties into a trailer and van and ran away to find some Shangri La where we could play acoustic music and sing our original songs and maybe, just maybe, not have to play "American Pie" every gawd-befuddled night.

A few wheel-spinning years later we were languishing in Eugene Oregon, a town commemorated by the inscrutable joke "Q: Why did all the hippies move to Eugene? A: Because there really isn't any work there!" Before we wheel-spun our way out of town, we spent a lot of time listening to a local radio station we called "The Kids," a nonprofit high-school thang that played a lot of really weird stuff. Much later I figured out that the Kids were hip to some kooky new sound called "alternative rock," but back then we just classified it as goofty and uncommercial and loved it all the more for it.

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
Not to put too fine a point on it
Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet
Make a little birdhouse in your soul

One of the songs that floated in and out our ears (and through the matte-black space between) was called "Birdhouse In Your Soul," by a group that reveled in the name They Might Be Giants. At the time I never caught it enough times to figure out what (if anything) it was actually about, but it was cheerful and the chord changes were actually interesting -- wot, it starts with a I IV V then modulates to the III Maj? And returns to the home key via a IV/ bVI pivot? Cantus firmus, dude! (And yes, we did say "dude," having picked up the locution from some redneck brats while stuck in a busted sawtown 50 miles out in the sticks. Authenticity is where it finds you.)

The years passed (montage of pages falling off a calendar, being swept up by the DS guy from the Mister Peabody parade). Now, a sesquidecade later, I've finally gotten around to tracking down the mysterious tune via Horrible Horrible Illegal File Sharing (good tho...). Some small deciphering later, I discover its subject matter to be a child's nightlight, from the nightlight's viewpoint. In other words, quirky. And yet...

S, as you may have heard, has been going through it of late (if by "it" I actually mean "awful intrusive insulting medical procedures seemingly without end or purpose"). Her cheerful mien has been beaten flatter than an elephant's ballroom, and apart from occasional entertainment appearances, her lifestyle has devolved to one long episode of your favorite overdramatic medical program without even the relief of commercial breaks. Her faith is shaken to the core.

In this sort of emotional climate, I'm constantly reaching out for any spiritual sustenance I can, but like my sweetie I'm rassling existential blight two falls outta three and holding my own mostly by ear-biting and kneeing. Prayer, even to old reliables like Quan Yin, is all too brittle a solace.

What I'm finding most useful is a notion that hope, far from being an ethereal gift of the Unseen Unknown, is a well-supported if underutilized feature of the mundane human operating system itself.

Bluebird of friendliness
Like guardian angels it's always near

There are two possibilities: either there is a personal god or there ain't. If there is, then hope is a divine gift and we're done -- you prays to your favorite deity and you takes your chances. But even if we're only atoms of austere intelligence stranded in the dark domain of matter and energy, still there is the undeniable, unavoidable tradition of a comfort, a companion, a light in the murk. Just as every religion has its devils, so has it its spirits of mercy and kindness.

There's even a rational explanation. Evolution could easily have provided a preconscious internal source of encouragement to lift our spirits when the weight of self-awareness comes crashing down on us. Indeed, such a feature would be a valuable survival trait, likely as not enabling an organism to hack through a swamp of doubt to the firm shores of reproduction (mmmmm -- reproduction...).

A source of innocent merriment would be thoroughly worthless as a permanent condition. That light-hearted, Pollyannaesque figure of incessant good cheer and optimism? Unless he's wearing a fur-trimmed red suit, he's roadkill. And if he is wearing a fur-trimmed red suit, he's a myth. Evolution's chief moods of survival are fear, loathing and a high regard for one's own hinder quarters. Respite would have greatest value when utter despair put the hammer down on the cabinet labeled "In case of deep shit, break glass." Only at the bottom of Pandora's box of loathsome goodies is there any place for irrational hope.

and while you're at it
keep the nightlight on inside the
birdhouse in your soul

In other words, if you need to take hope, make room for it and allow it to abide within you. Not necessarily a spiritual principle, quirky or otherwise -- just a mental process, no more or less mysterious than memory or cogitation. In the final analysis, it's a miracle that we're here at all. Anything else is gravy.

7/18/05

Well, I'll tell you. Me and the old lady, we've been touring.

Yep, out on the road, back in the saddle, rambling and roving, driving endless distances in vehicles of dubious reliability piled high with instruments and accouterments of performance, disgorging ourselves at the end to shock and awe the curious natives of the region with heap big smoke and mirrors. It's a winter-pale but reasonably satisfying rerun of our gory glory years as wandering troubadors and ambassadors of good will and whoopie.

We rolled down to scenic Klamath Falls Oregon, braving mountain road, flat tire and traffic diversion to play a night at the remarkable Mood Swing (The Club), a private restaurant and entertainment venue supported by subscriptions from locals interested in more than the typical Both Kinds Of Music available in south central Oregon. They bring in folkies, blues artists, jazz musicians -- oh, and Amber Tide, too. It's a novel and fairly successful approach to expanding the culture of an all-too-small town whilst keeping the wolf from the door, along with the alcohol board and ASCAP.

The audience was predictably smallish but equally predictably enthusiastic. They passed the Amber Tide Sniff Test by getting all the jokes and laughing really hard at the esoteric ones ("Is the most powerful force in the universe love -- or gravity?"). Our hosts Pam and Ron treated us like royalty, put us up in the good motel down the street and fed us til we waddled and honked. All in all, a perfect gig.

Then we bounced back over the hills to Ashland to put in a quick drivethrough pickup gig at the local crafts fair. Fifteen minutes into the show the booker was trying to convince us to come back again the next day. But we had promises to keep and miles to drive, although sleep did its best to intervene. Hallucinating lavishly, we landed back in our own driveway and spent the next two days recovering.

No rest for the wicked or us either -- the next weekend we were off again, this time to that Mecca for world-weary bohemians, the Oregon Country Fair. It was the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of their Circus, and coincidentally of the composition of my greatest hit, the Chumleighland March, scored in the front seat of a Volkswagen beetle in 1975 for brasswinds, percussion and marching fiddler. "And he never lets us forget it!" the current band director laments. My response is that when your truly immortal accomplishments are so few in number, they're that much simpler to keep track of. Beats the pants off inventing the Bomb, anyways.

Country Fair is more than just a grazing ground for free-range hippies -- it's a social experiment, or rather a whole shitload of them all at once, and sometimes some surprising results can surface. It was at Fair that I confronted a notion that Marx undoubtedly did to death in the 1800's -- the difference between commodities and currencies.

In recent times, music has been divorced from its original function in the small-scale cultural structures of pre-industrial society and transformed into a (bleah) commodity. Once the glue that helped hold tribe or town together, music got sandbagged by the arrival of the mass cultures of the late 19th and 20th centuries and shipped off to the factory, there to be shredded, skinned and extruded as nicely packaged sonic hotdogs, uniform in taste, size and price and ready to be shoved down the populace's throats. Sheet music, piano rolls, wax cylinders, 78's, 45's, LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, CD's, mp3's and on into the night -- it was Art On A Stick and just in time for Generation Mall.

The equations implied by commodity music, such as "song_by_Bob_Dylan = single_price = song_by_Jimi_Hendrix" lead to artistic absurdities like songwriting contests and American Idol . Worse, they destroy the intrinsic, idiosyncratic identity of music by relating it to soap and soup and septic tank services. All through the magic of commodification, the process of linking any and everything to some single crappy abstraction (currency).

We are not born civilized -- it takes a heap of ruler-wielding nuns to pound good behavior into the thick skulls of scampering carpetcrawlers. And any force that excises nuance from the generally accepted lexicon of civil consideration has to be regarded with the same temerity as ravening wolves on the borders. By extinguishing the distinction between, say, young Betsy at the piano recital and the last mp3 you downloaded, commodification makes us stupid. Stupid is bad. Stupid can be fatal.

But down at the good ol' OCF, a hundred flowers grow and a hundred currencies, from sauna tokens to food vouchers, compete with Mssrs. Franklin, Jackson and Washington. S and I reclaimed music (temporarily, locally) as a medium of exchange in and of itself -- a valuable process not reducible to some other measure. We happily paid for food, showers and trinkets by the strumming of strings and warbling of words. In a peculiar reversal, regular specie became a trade good to be offered in exchange for our personal wealth.

An old wise saying among the tiedyed ones is, "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope." It is my peculiar opinion that this construction can be generalized: practically anything will serve you better in the absence of money than money will in the absence of the thing.

Or to quote another wise guy: "I don't care too much for money/ money can't buy me love."

7/4/05