Fluid ImaginationFrom A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan:
When Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2016, he got a lot of stick. The man wrote songs! But did he deserve the accolade? Leonard Cohen, one of his most literary contemporaries, had it right. Awarding Dylan the Nobel, he said, ‘is like pinning a medal on Mt. Everest for being the highest mountain.’
His heart attack comes at an appropriate age. Everyone is sad; no one is surprised — least of all of him. He sees a flash, like a squiggle across his vision, like a tuner coming untuned, and then he’s floating, facing a ceiling of lights and moving beneath it, feet first, floating on his back through a people-mover-tunnel like under the airports he used to frequent when he was alive.
He rights himself like Peter Gabriel did in the music video and floats into an indoor-mall plaza with an all-glass spinning globe ceiling casting shadows on his eyes like a ceiling fan, and dancers, decked in neon greens and blues, kicking and shuffling along a second floor balcony.
He’s not the only one gawking.
The lights shift into dark purples and reds and direct his eye to a dark door beneath a misty sign promising karaoke and cocktails from the Orient, pineapples and shellfish and fried chicken bits, colorful tiny umbrellas and a soft mist behind the bar.
Music pours out of the door. The bass riptides behind his hips and propels him towards the dance floor. He goes with it, raises his half-closed fists in front of him, bites his lip, and starts to sway his hips in time. Floating high above the dance floor now, he’s never felt this free.
A flash, and he’s outside it all now, walking alone through empty city streets. Traffic lights cast long shadows in the night. In the middle distance, an empty elevated rail-car passes over the street. He turns at the next block, propelled by something he can’t remember. He’s sure he’ll find it somewhere, if only…maybe it’s this way. He staggers and stumbles, but keeps his feet. He looks back over his shoulder. What did he trip on?
Sirens or someone shouting echoes in the distance, not close enough to scare him, but too close to ignore. He stiffens his collar against the night, puts his head down, keeps walking.
He’ll find it somewhere.
A flash of lighting, a crack of thunder, and it’s raining. The water pours down the glass buildings, puddles beside the curbs, mixes with the mess in the street. He lifts his coat over his head and hurries his pace. The sirens or shouts in the distance don’t let up, but they don’t come closer either.
He’ll find it somewhere.
Maybe…there.
The entryway is narrow and long, painted black with black flowing curtains draped along it. Dim floor lights fight against the curtains for dominance, and with every step he takes, every shoulder brush against the curtains, the lights lose. The sticky floor rumbles beneath his feet from the bassline, but his eyes, as he comes out of the entryway, are attracted to the pink lights dancing across the ceiling of the long, wide…
He sits on a couch beneath a streetlight. Behind him, around him, beneath him, the greenest grass, the softest gentlest rollingest hills; above him, above it all, fat white clouds lounging in a sky blue sky. He stands, and everything flickers, just once, but enough to convince him it isn’t real. He reaches down and rips up several pixels of grass. Where the blades broke, sparks of electricity flicker like fingers reaching in desperation for their mother.
He sits back down on the couch and kicks his feet up. It has to be here somewhere. He reaches off to his side, finds the remote, and couch-surfs into oblivion.
[This post was written by request. For a $5 donation to the Bail Project, you can assign me to write a 500-word [minimum] blog post on any topic of your choosing. For more details, read Writing for Bail Money.]
During the holiday season, while traveling with my in-laws through northern Indiana, my sister-in-law’s boyfriend, who plays drums for Annie in the Water, told me about their upcoming tour, a special series of dates where the band would be fronted by a woman named Hayley Jane and together they would play the entirety of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album. They called the tour, “Hayley In the Water Spread Rumours.”
I asked about Hayley Jane, and it turns out she had a successful touring band of her own, Hayley Jane & The Primates. My sister-in-law’s boyfriend pulled up Apple Music on my phone and added their latest album, 2017’s We’re Here Now, to my library.
Since then, I’ve basically listened to the album nonstop.
First, let’s talk about the fact that the folks from Annie in the Water selected Hayley Jane to be their stand-in for Stevie Nicks. The reason is simple: the woman can belt it out like it’s no one’s business.
The power of her voice can be heard on virtually every song on We’re Here Now, but it’s most prevalent on the power ballad, “Madeline.” There’s a lyric in the song where the ballad becomes a power ballad, and she sings, “If you don’t dig my roots babe, stop tugging on my vine, and if you don’t love my flavor, baby, stop licking on my thiiiiiighs, my thiiiiighs!” It’s such a great melding of lyric, voice, and guitar, and I’ve been singing it at the top of my lungs for weeks (to the great annoyance of my wife).
But Hayley Jane is more than just a powerful voice. She’s a gifted, rhythmic lyricist. The second song on the album, “Cosmic Katrina,” has a fun, mouth-melting lyric wrapped around a couple of nonsense phrases, but it all works perfectly, and it’s coupled to instrumentation changes that prevent the nonsense from becoming annoying, changing up the rhythm and the melody just enough to keep the listener interested.
The band is not just Hayley Jane, of course. The Primates are all talented musicians in their own right. Each guitar solo serves the song, rather than the guitarists’ egos; the bassist keeps every line interesting; and the drummer more than holds his own.
Unfortunately, Hayley Jane & The Primates wrote the following to their fans last Spring:
“We have made the difficult decision to go on an indefinite hiatus at the end of the summer. This band has been a joy for all involved. It has also seen it’s fair share of speed bumps and difficulties as all bands do. We have decided, as a group, that it’s time for us to take a real break and turn our focus to other things in our lives that require more attention.”
I have no inside knowledge of those speed bumps, difficulties, or “other things in our lives,” but with Hayley Jane joining Annie in the Water for the “Spread Rumours” tour, I hope she’ll keep her focus on her music. The woman has serious talent, and I look forward to appreciating what she does next.
Late last night, while writing, I was listening to a live performance by the Charlie Parker Quintet, recorded in 1953. The quintet is made up of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus. If you don’t know much about jazz, you can think of this quintet as the dream team of the 1950s.
I’d been writing for about 45 minutes to their transcendent music, editing an essay on the purpose of life (you can find the original draft here)
But as the Live at Massy Hall album ended, my iTunes transitioned into one of the latest albums from Kamasi Washington, and I’ll be damned if my whole body didn’t perk up.
I love Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and all the others, but they played before the invention of 70s soul music and the flowering of the electric bass-masters of funk.
Kamasi Washington comes at the same tradition as The Quintet, but he’s influenced by hip hop, by dance, by the magic that George Clinton stole down from the gods, by Maya Angelou, by the development of Afrocentrism, and by Malcolm X (“Our time as victims is over,” a voice repeats on the first song. “We will no longer ask for justice. Instead, we will take our retribution.”)
It’s impossible to talk about jazz as an art form or as a cultural force without referencing the brilliant musicians who performed with the Charlie Parker Quintet. They are rightfully placed near the center of jazz because of their outsize gravitational influence on all of the artists who followed them.
But decades from now, the history of jazz and its influence on culture will also include the bright shining star and the incredible musical force that is Kamasi Washington.
If you’re not listening to him now, you’re missing out on the brilliance of a living master.
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band operates on the principle that all of the songs you’re about to hear are part of a show, performed by the kind of corny band your parents used to listen to but produced to such an incredible degree that you can’t help but marvel at the artistry.
The album opens with a bald-faced introduction to the concept. Here is a bunch of music, they tell you, that has “been going in and out of style,” for the past twenty years, but still, it’s “guaranteed to raise a smile.” Then with just the right kind of fanfare, they introduce you to the singer, “the one and only Billy Shears,” who like the crooners of old, regales you with a comforting, family-friendly melody.
The choice to follow “With A Little Help From My Friends,” — a song that is as corny as they come, sung by the Beatle with the weakest vocal abilities — with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” reminds the younger generation that this music is intended for them and not their parents.
We know what you’re going through, the song tells them, how crazy everything seems, but you don’t have to fight against it. Just lay your head back, picture yourself on a train in a station with plasticine porters with looking glass ties, suddenly…you’re falling in love, and falling in love…with the girl with kaleidoscope eyes…ahhhhhhhhhhh
A song like that can only fade into a harsh poking guitar and a singer who tells you, “I gotta admit, it’s getting better (better), a little better all the time (it can’t get no worse).”
If ever there was a way to describe both the time period when Sgt. Pepper’s… was first recorded and our own, that line indeed might be it. Both then and now, progressive forces seemed to be on the cusp of something, and both then and now, the reactionary response from the wider culture had (has) turned violent.
From one point of view, it was (and is) getting better; from another, it couldn’t (and can’t) get much worse.
But how do you help it keep getting better? How have past generations worked to get us this far?
By “fixing a hole where the rain gets in.”
Keep plugging away, the Beatles tell the younger generation. Fix the holes. Plug the cracks. Take your “time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.”
And if you follow that advice? “She’s leaving home after living alone for so many years.”
Making progress, moving forward, can sometimes mean leaving the people who love you behind, leaving them in the cottage where they raised you to fix the holes and plug the cracks, because making progress, moving forward, can sometimes mean recognizing there’s “something inside that was always denied for so many years.” And so, bye….bye.
And then what? Now that you’re out the door, on your own, what should you do? Should you start plugging the holes in society?
No, the Beatles tell you. Go to the circus, where “of course, Henry the Horse dances the waltz.” And if you want to have a real good time, make sure you’re stoned when you go, because “tonight, Mr. Kite is topping the biiiiiiiiilllll….”
Huh. Okay. Sure. But then what?
Go find a fucking religion man. Look over there, in the park, a couple of dudes playing on sitars. Listen to them.
“We were talking,” one of them starts singing, “about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind the wall of illusion. [They] never glimpse the truth, [and] then it’s far too late when they pass away.
“We were talking,” he continues, “about the love we all could share, [and] when we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love. With our love, we can save the world, if they only knew.
“Try to realize it’s all within yourself. No one else can make you change and to see you’re really only very small, and life goes on within you and without you.”
Whoa, you think. That’s pretty heavy.
“No,” they say. “He’s not done. The man can fucking play that thing too. Listen.”
And you do, and though maybe you’re a little jaded in this day and age, you really sit and listen to the way that motherfucker plays the sitar, and you’ll be damned if someone’s gonna tell you he can’t play it well.
He starts singing again. “We were talking about the love that’s gone so cold and the people who gain the world and lose their soul. They don’t know. They can’t see.” He looks right at you and sings, “Are you one of them?”
You don’t know how to answer.
“When you’ve seen beyond yourself,” he continues, “then you may find that peace of mind is waiting there, and the time will come when you see we’re all one and life flows on within you and without you.”
The song ends, and you look around at the rest of the crowd, and feel relieved when everyone else starts to laugh.
Man, you giggle to yourself, that shit was heavy.
Someone pushes gently on your shoulder, turning your attention to a new band that just walked into the square. Oh, hey, you think. Let’s listen to these guys. They’ve got a fun little sound, an oopma-loompa kind of thing, like maybe your grandparents might have listened to. There’s no guitar, but that bell is pretty cool. Your head starts nodding. Your knee bounces in time. They could be singing about the love between your grandparents, and really, “Who could ask for more?”
They could be singing about me, you think. Or Vera, or Chuck, or Dave, and then the singer hits you with it: “You’re sincerely wasting away.” Whoa, you think. That’s kind of heavy too. It’s almost like what the other guy said: “Life goes on…without you.”
Fuck it, I’m outta here, you think. I’ll walk down this street, past these cars, past these parking meters. Oh shit, look at that dude. He’s all stalking that meter maid, creeping up on her, dancing around her, trying to be all charming. You can see his boner from here, and he says to her, “When are you free to take some tea with me?” You can tell from the way he’s dressed that if she falls for it, she’ll be paying for the creepo’s dinner.
Onward, you think. To your Freedom. The circus behind you. Those heavy Hindu thoughts too. Your head held high as you make your way down the…is that a fucking rooster? What time is it? A crowd of businessmen rush at you. “Good morning, good morning, good morning,” they all say, like robots going through a pre-programmed day. They have nothing to say but “good morning, good morning, good morning.”
You start feeling all punky, walking through the streets, judging everyone you make eye contact with. People bustle around you, living their pre-scripted little lives. A whole day passes. It’s getting dark. “I need the time,” someone says behind you. A cat mews loudly, a dog barks, was that a horse? What the fuck is going on? You start spinning around, your senses overwhelmed by the world.
Then, all of sudden, a curtain rises, and there they are again, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!
It’s all been a fucking show, you realize, and you’re the one onstage! How the fuck did that happen? What do you do with your hands? The band gives you a look, someone takes your arm and ushers you offstage. The band follows, all of you going together.
They lead you to the green room. Someone lights up a joint. One of them starts to play a guitar. Another takes a seat at the piano. The bass rises, and it’s just you and them, seated comfortably, surrounded by four safe wall. One of them starts to sing, telling you about his day. “I saw the news today,” he sings, and then he proceeds to sing you the news. Afterwards, he tells you about a film he went to see. “The English Army had just the won war.” The movie didn’t fly with the audience, he tells you, but he’d read the book, and he just had to look.
Someone passes you the joint. You inhale and the room begins to spin, and spin, and spin.
My alarm!, you think. You’re late. You wake up, get out bed, you rush through your morning routine. Down the stairs. Grab your coat and hat. Run to the bus. No thoughts, just action. Do it. Now, up the steps. Good, you made it. You’ve got a few minutes to relax. Look out over the city. Have that smoke. And then somebody speaks, and you fall into a dream…and you sail away, over it all, above it all, beyond it all, away from it all…
And then, boom. “I read the news today.”
Oh boy.
You can dream, you think, but you can never get away. Fix the cracks. Count the holes. You’ll find the answer. And then maybe someday, you’ll tell us all.
You close your eyes and fade to black.
And out of the blackness, the voice of the collective unconscious.
“Never goosy any other way. Never goosy any other way. Never goosy any other way.” Around and around in the blackness, the sound of society’s collective insanity.
It never could be any other way.
My favorite album of the past year is America, Location 12, by Dispatch. I listen to it two or three times a week. I didn’t listen to the band before this album, and with good reason: I don’t enjoy much of their music. Most of it reminds me of a Phish-influenced version of Sublime. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t really do anything for me.
This new album, though, is incredible; it’s a totally other thing. The Sublime elements are gone. The Phish elements are gone. What we’re left with is Dispatch, a band wholly their own.
My wife, daughter, and I went to see them a couple of weeks ago. We enjoyed the show. It was a nice night out for the family: beautiful weather, friendly tunes, and a welcoming audience. On the way out, however, we decided we probably wouldn’t go see them again, not at $45 a ticket anyway. The music just didn’t make me dance very much, and if I’m not dancing, I’m not paying.
The lack of excitement in their live sound didn’t change how I feel about their album or how excited I am for their future. America, Location 12 was a huge leap for the men in this band, and while I wouldn’t call any of them a genius, their harmonies possess traces of Paul Simon and their lyrics flash with original imagery (my favorite line is, “And we can be like all the fairies making their rain angels in the eddies”). I look forward to hearing their sound and their songwriting evolve.
Thankfully, I can do that in real time. Like many bands today, Dispatch is releasing a new single every few weeks as they build a roster of songs for their next album, already announced as America, Location 13.
The new songs are different from the ones on Location 12. The tunes sound a bit rougher around the edges, but I like them. It’ll be interesting to see if the next album is just an anthology of these singles, or if they produce whole new recordings of them with more time spent in the production booth and more time given to dissect them, ala Wilco’s approach to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The songs have real potential, but as of now, they still feel half born.
I am eager to hear them come alive.
My wife and I recently gave our five-year-old daughter an iPod. It’s an old, old, old, old iPod, from back in the days when iPhones didn’t even exist yet. The kind that comes with a click-wheel. It’s been sitting in a drawer in our house for over a decade, but now that my daughter can read, it seemed like the right time to give it to her (if she couldn’t read, she wouldn’t know how to put on the songs she wants).
Our original plan was to fill the iPod with all the songs she loves, plus some others that we thought she might like, and then let her have it, but after tracking down an appropriate charger cord and plugging it into our MacBook Air, I quickly discovered that the old iPods don’t work with today’s Apple Music service (which powers all of our music nowadays), so we aren’t able to add anything new to it.
That means my five-year-old daughter has an iPod filled with over a thousand songs from mine and my wife’s old CD collection, the stuff I put on my gum-drop iMac back in the days of “Rip. Mix. Burn.” The first thing she wanted to listen to after I taught her how to use the click-wheel and what “alphabetical order” means was (and I’m super proud of this) the Grateful Dead.
Later in the evening, after I taught her how to put it on shuffle (and what “shuffle” means), she came over to ask me the name of the song she was listening to. I told her to read it off the screen, and she read, “Back in Your Head” by Tegan & Sara, a tune from 2007. My daughter loved it! She ended up pausing the song, stripping down to her underwear, raiding her dress-up clothes, donning a dress that makes her look like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and dancing around her playroom like…well, like a five-year-old girl who is thrilled to dance to music she loves.
I started thinking about this little girl’s musical future. Because the only radio we listen to is Vermont Public Radio, she doesn’t have access to all of today’s teeny-bop music (unless it’s something that my wife and I are willing to listen to as well — Taylor Swift, for example, or the Moana soundtrack). Instead, she’ll have over 1,000 songs that WE love.
I can just picture her sitting in the back of our car, or cuddling up on her bed, or dancing in the living room, headphones on, the little wire trailing around her, her tiny hand wrapped around this relatively heavy, solid black iPod filled with unknown songs for her to explore and discover with no cultural context to disturb the purity of the music itself.
I’m so excited for her to figure out what SHE likes in that eclectic mix of songs that includes everything from the Afro Celt Sound System to Zap Mama, from the Beastie Boys to Wynton Marselis, from Claudio Villa to Van Morrison. There’s songs from Phish and from the Grateful Dead, but also compositions from Mozart and live performances by Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. She’s got access to rap, jazz, rock, the blues, reggae, pop, classical, folk, and music from around the globe, from San Paulo to Rome to Mumbai.
We’re building an adult with musical taste here, and this old, old, old, old iPod may be the magical tool we need to get the job done right.