Hard Rock and lightning
Below is a riff I scribbled last June, when I was sitting in the Hard Rock cafe. I was accompanying some kids, and I'd thought the adjacent village of shops would be covered. Nope! But I'd brought along my notebooks, and before tackling the current p, wrote these notes, which I just rediscovered while clearing my desk.
Tell me if any of this resonates, or did I miss the bus?
20 June 2008
Sitting here under Janis Joplin’s plum-colored suede bell bottoms, and Jimmy Page’s double-necked guitar, and behind me, the yellowing carbon copy of the March 1969 marriage certificate of John Lennon, age 28, and Yoko Ono, age 36.
Two thoughts occur as the summer sun bastes the outside with almost blinding light-the temp last I checked was 114. First thought, how hard these people lived and died, despite world-reaching, culture-changing success. Second, how the emotional happiness of one creative person does not necessarily jive with creative fulfillment. Whether or not Yoko Ono was at fault for acting as the last hammer-strike to the fracturing of the Beatles, or whether John’s attainment of emotional fulfillment at last blurred his creative edge, I don’t know.
Not that the Fab Four sank into obscurity, of course. They all went on to lucrative careers. But not with the impact of the sixties, when they changed music, and a culture along with it.
Not long ago, when I was trying to explain to my twenty-something daughter how utterly mesmerizing the Beatles’ sound was . . . how do you explain the tremendous and powerful rush of discovery? My kids grew up with the Beatles being part of what is now called Classic Rock. Classic Rock! I can imagine the jaw-dropped horror of my shaggy-haired peers back in the sixties, when the Mersey "sound" was new, and exciting, and surrounded us with the possibility of joy, love, action, change.
Looking at these artifacts, which are mostly detritus of the Beatles’ lives, but which contain that magical resonance of proximity, I wonder just how strong the step out of real life into the unreality of success was for them. The jet-force exhilaration of your music gripping thousands-millions-of close packed humans by flesh and spirit . . . from watching videotapes, it seems to me that the powerful rush of discovery was magnified back thousandfold, so intense that the performers couldn't be heard playing. But that was all right to the fans, who shrieked with nerve-sizzling passion just because of the proximity of the Beatles. They already knew every note of every song, right down to the cellular level.
For the Beatles, that adoration must have been the most intense rush ever. And what a cost to keep fueling it?
There’s one thing I think I share with all these famous musicians whose glitter I see about me here. That is the pure white fire of creative flow-when it’s flowing, it’s a nerve-jolting, heart-hammering, brain-frying lightning strike. Few can control it, and as I walk about here looking into photographs of young faces of musicians whose lives were snuffed out so swiftly after they attained fame, I wonder if part of the reason they did the crazy, destructive things they did was not just emotional roller coaster of life on the run when you're young, though that’s a part. And not just that step into unreality that fame causes, which can trick the unwary into thinking that the rules no long apply.
It’s because that white fire is not controllable any more than lightning is, and so the young musicians would try anything-anything-to get it back, to control it so that it was on tap for every song that needed writing, and every performance. Here’s the thing about most street drugs, when you’re high you think that your every utterance is art, every movement freighted with meaning. It’s only when you’re stone cold sober that you realize that the Magical Mystery Tour Bus looks to everyone else like a bunch of loud, smelly, drooling louts hooting like apes.
January 1966. I’m thirteen. A white fire grips me, and I write my first novel in about a week. I didn’t write it, I lived it, writing every time I could sneak from studies at school, and far into the night by the light of the streetlamp a few houses away. When I was done, I looked at that mass of pages, my head still aswirl with vivid voices and images, and I thought, oh wow, let’s do that again!
But I discovered I couldn’t command it. So I tried to recreate the circumstances.
The initial spark happened when I was babysitting, which meant I could listen to the people’s radio. The song that sparked that novel was called “The Elusive Butterfly.” I waited impatiently until those people called me to sit again. Then I waited impatiently until the kids were asleep. Then I sat down beside the radio, with a black Bic pen in hand (maybe even the same one), same kind of notebook paper ready, and although by then “Elusive Butterfly” was no longer in the top forty, they did finally play it. As the familiar melody unwound, I poised over my paper, listening to the words for the very first time, and instead of a story coming, I thought, “Yanno, this song is really kinda sappy.” No no, I take it back, I take it back! But too late . . . no white fire.
Jimi Hendrix . . . Jim Morrison . . Janis Joplin . . . they all sought any method or means they could to tap that fire. They were surrounded by smiling hipsters cooing admiration and handing out street stuff like candy-very expensive candy, but money became one of those unreal things-and they dropped, or rushed, or sped, or mainlined, or whatever it took, to find what they thought was the fire, the attempts intensified into semblance of meaning, perceptions that exalted trivia into a tapestry of gravitas that unraveled with the bleak dawn. Doesn't have to be drugs--in the grip of the white fire, what you’ve created looks like dream writing, you know, when you jot something down after a very vivid dream, and in the morning, you pore over the words slow come the insect, wondering what the heck that means. But it embraced the universe while you were writing!
Back to John Lennon, and his personal happiness coinciding with the split of the Beatles: But I’m wondering if there is more truth to the “artist suffering in the garret” than I thought, because one thing seems clear, the creative drive is an addiction. Creators=junkies? How many have had relationships fail because the significant other wails, “You spend more time doing that than you do with me!” How many others surrendered their creative drive to the dictate of the person they loved?
Tell me if any of this resonates, or did I miss the bus?
20 June 2008
Sitting here under Janis Joplin’s plum-colored suede bell bottoms, and Jimmy Page’s double-necked guitar, and behind me, the yellowing carbon copy of the March 1969 marriage certificate of John Lennon, age 28, and Yoko Ono, age 36.
Two thoughts occur as the summer sun bastes the outside with almost blinding light-the temp last I checked was 114. First thought, how hard these people lived and died, despite world-reaching, culture-changing success. Second, how the emotional happiness of one creative person does not necessarily jive with creative fulfillment. Whether or not Yoko Ono was at fault for acting as the last hammer-strike to the fracturing of the Beatles, or whether John’s attainment of emotional fulfillment at last blurred his creative edge, I don’t know.
Not that the Fab Four sank into obscurity, of course. They all went on to lucrative careers. But not with the impact of the sixties, when they changed music, and a culture along with it.
Not long ago, when I was trying to explain to my twenty-something daughter how utterly mesmerizing the Beatles’ sound was . . . how do you explain the tremendous and powerful rush of discovery? My kids grew up with the Beatles being part of what is now called Classic Rock. Classic Rock! I can imagine the jaw-dropped horror of my shaggy-haired peers back in the sixties, when the Mersey "sound" was new, and exciting, and surrounded us with the possibility of joy, love, action, change.
Looking at these artifacts, which are mostly detritus of the Beatles’ lives, but which contain that magical resonance of proximity, I wonder just how strong the step out of real life into the unreality of success was for them. The jet-force exhilaration of your music gripping thousands-millions-of close packed humans by flesh and spirit . . . from watching videotapes, it seems to me that the powerful rush of discovery was magnified back thousandfold, so intense that the performers couldn't be heard playing. But that was all right to the fans, who shrieked with nerve-sizzling passion just because of the proximity of the Beatles. They already knew every note of every song, right down to the cellular level.
For the Beatles, that adoration must have been the most intense rush ever. And what a cost to keep fueling it?
There’s one thing I think I share with all these famous musicians whose glitter I see about me here. That is the pure white fire of creative flow-when it’s flowing, it’s a nerve-jolting, heart-hammering, brain-frying lightning strike. Few can control it, and as I walk about here looking into photographs of young faces of musicians whose lives were snuffed out so swiftly after they attained fame, I wonder if part of the reason they did the crazy, destructive things they did was not just emotional roller coaster of life on the run when you're young, though that’s a part. And not just that step into unreality that fame causes, which can trick the unwary into thinking that the rules no long apply.
It’s because that white fire is not controllable any more than lightning is, and so the young musicians would try anything-anything-to get it back, to control it so that it was on tap for every song that needed writing, and every performance. Here’s the thing about most street drugs, when you’re high you think that your every utterance is art, every movement freighted with meaning. It’s only when you’re stone cold sober that you realize that the Magical Mystery Tour Bus looks to everyone else like a bunch of loud, smelly, drooling louts hooting like apes.
January 1966. I’m thirteen. A white fire grips me, and I write my first novel in about a week. I didn’t write it, I lived it, writing every time I could sneak from studies at school, and far into the night by the light of the streetlamp a few houses away. When I was done, I looked at that mass of pages, my head still aswirl with vivid voices and images, and I thought, oh wow, let’s do that again!
But I discovered I couldn’t command it. So I tried to recreate the circumstances.
The initial spark happened when I was babysitting, which meant I could listen to the people’s radio. The song that sparked that novel was called “The Elusive Butterfly.” I waited impatiently until those people called me to sit again. Then I waited impatiently until the kids were asleep. Then I sat down beside the radio, with a black Bic pen in hand (maybe even the same one), same kind of notebook paper ready, and although by then “Elusive Butterfly” was no longer in the top forty, they did finally play it. As the familiar melody unwound, I poised over my paper, listening to the words for the very first time, and instead of a story coming, I thought, “Yanno, this song is really kinda sappy.” No no, I take it back, I take it back! But too late . . . no white fire.
Jimi Hendrix . . . Jim Morrison . . Janis Joplin . . . they all sought any method or means they could to tap that fire. They were surrounded by smiling hipsters cooing admiration and handing out street stuff like candy-very expensive candy, but money became one of those unreal things-and they dropped, or rushed, or sped, or mainlined, or whatever it took, to find what they thought was the fire, the attempts intensified into semblance of meaning, perceptions that exalted trivia into a tapestry of gravitas that unraveled with the bleak dawn. Doesn't have to be drugs--in the grip of the white fire, what you’ve created looks like dream writing, you know, when you jot something down after a very vivid dream, and in the morning, you pore over the words slow come the insect, wondering what the heck that means. But it embraced the universe while you were writing!
Back to John Lennon, and his personal happiness coinciding with the split of the Beatles: But I’m wondering if there is more truth to the “artist suffering in the garret” than I thought, because one thing seems clear, the creative drive is an addiction. Creators=junkies? How many have had relationships fail because the significant other wails, “You spend more time doing that than you do with me!” How many others surrendered their creative drive to the dictate of the person they loved?