Your brain’s off the hook, but you’re not
It’s amazing how quickly things transform. I had some fairly serious writing to do, but I started drinking margaritas instead. I suppose you could judge just how much other stuff I have to do by how much writing I do in my blog. It seems like I write more here when I really shouldn’t— when other things are calling, but I just can’t get my brain to focus on them. Alcohol, helps, as always.
I’ve always been a music junkie, but the pace has really accelerated over the past few years, as other obligations have faded away. I indulge myself, frequently. It’s a way of life. An alcoholic says that there is never enough whiskey to drown the pain; for me, there is never enough music. But it takes strange twists and turns.
Sorting through a pile of bootlegs, just after midnight, it started to rain. I wanted to write something about the BAM bootleg of Pete Townsend, from 1993 on the Psychoderelict tour, but as I went through the pile of unlabeled disks, I settled on a Tori Amos live in Tulsa bootleg. I normally hate warblers, but tonight for some reason, I was in the Kate Bush state of mind. So here I sit, and type, and listen, and wonder why unnatural voices always take a while for me. By unnatural, I don’t mean unpleasant, I mean filled with effects or artifice. Tom Waits and Bob Dylan sound natural to me most of the time. Whitney Houston sounds artificial. I’ve never known what to think about Tori Amos. She sounds sort of warbly, and the lyrics never floored me as being particularly outstanding the way some folks have raved. But there is something about the delicacy, particularly outside the trappings of studio manipulation, that seems genuine on this boot. I need to think about it more. As usual, it’s not the sincerity that matters most, but the illusion of sincerity. And with enough tequila, maybe I’ve fallen into the trap.
It’s a delicate evening. As slow motion football players dance upon the silent TV screen, I sit here and get lost in the vibrato. Piles and piles of music, which direction to turn. I don’t know. I should hide this entry, or not post it. I had meant to make a list of sorts, a list of the pile of things that are hanging around to be filed. But the brain fades in and out. I look at the codes, and wonder how music can be reduced to Schoeps FOB> DAT > HHBCDR800 > CD > EAC > SHN. There are human beings in there. The sound on the inside can’t be reduced to the label on the box. The piss ant critical or audiophile nomenclature means so fucking little. Music is people speaking to other people. Is the world only worthwhile for people who are hip?
I put on a brand new Green on Red boot, Glastonbury 1985, as the clock passed three AM.
Me, I’ve got to keep on movin’
I don’t think much about what I’m losing
Push the entries down the pile, move on. So much to say. How did I ever get this way? I don’t fucking know. I think of poor Ray Hyde’s reaction in Psychoderelict: “Mature? I’m not mature, I’m just bloody derelict!” I don’t know how Hemmingway and those other guys did it. I can never drink and write.
I ain’t asking for an easy way out
But the noose gets tighter and tighter
But still I can shout.
It reaches the point where everything I know is an obscure reference to something. Most people don’t get me.
Spiders speak, spiders tell lies.
You catch more with honey, than with wine
You gotta to get down to the bone
No, they just don’t get me at all.
