Wading in the Velvet Sea

But I didn’t wanna talk about the car today, actually. You’ll have to forgive this fever-dream of an entry after a fever-dream of a night. I was watching my newly purchased Eddie Izzard DVD last night round 8 o’clock, and damnit if I didn’t pass out before 8:30, right there in the living room. My immune system was under its own DoS attack, and my body went and groaned under the pressure of inflammation and decided it would shut down for the night. So yea, go me, 10+ hours sleep and all, obviously I needed it, but I really wanted to see the ‘Death Star’ bit in the Eddie disc, man.

So I survived the White Stripes phase with my mental faculties fairly intact, if all outward indications are to be believed. Sort of a harsh time, which matches a sort of harsh album, but both were rounded with a pretty good sense of melody, if I do say so myself. I’m in a serious Lucinda Williams’ ‘Car Wheels on a Gravel Road’ kick now, but that’s more of a ‘damn, I’ve owned this thing for four years and I never noticed how perfect most of these songs are’ sorta way. Every song is an alt-country tune you’ve heard before, but placed just left of center, with either the lyric or musical arrangements pushing it just far enough to make the whole experience really invigorating. Highly recommended. The album that’s really got my juices going lately, tho, is The Who's ‘Quadrophenia‘.

I graduated high school in 1994, which means I have my tenth year reunion next year, and really, the less said about that, the better, I feel. But, for my graduation present, my folks gave me a bit of money to spend as I saw fit. I ended up staying with a then-friend in southern Connecticut and taking the two of us to see two Broadway shows: ‘Angels in America’ and ‘The Who’s Tommy’. The former was indeed brilliant, but nothing could have prepared me for the onslaught of ‘Tommy’. Forget its merits as a piece of theatre for a moment and what you’ve got is pure spectacle, and that show had more kick-you-in-the-gut spectacle than any show I’d ever seen. After my trip I came home and bought the then recently released box set of The Who, in addition to the original recording of ‘Tommy’ and the Broadway original cast recording of ‘The Who’s Tommy’.

The box set had songs from ‘Quadrophenia’, but for some reason they never grabbed me. They all sat near the end of Disc 3, and usually I’d work through the stuff on ‘Who’s Next’ and ‘Live and Leeds’ and skip to Disc 4 to hear stuff like ‘Who Are You?’ I mean, I dug ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’, but didn’t have much use for the rest of what I’d heard. I was too busy playing air drums to a live version of ‘Sparks’ to care. (A documentary I own of The Who, one of four I own, says that if you slow the video down of their Woodstock performance of ‘Sparks’, that Keith Moon is playing 1/64th notes on his drum. That’s just sick.)

Ironically enough, it was Phish who got me back onto the ‘Quadrophenia’ boat. Between 1994 and 1998, Phish played four concerts on Halloween that featured a ‘musical costume’ as the 2nd of its 3 set performance. In 1994, they played ‘The White Album’, start to finish. In 1996, ‘Remain in Light’ by the Talking Heads. 1998 featured The Velvet Underground’s ‘Loaded’. And in 1995, they played ‘Quadrophenia’.

‘Quadrophenia’, like ‘Tommy’, is a concept album. Whereas the latter is about a modern day messiah ultimately rejected by his followers, ‘Quadrophenia’ uses the interior landscape of the protagonist Jimmy as its playing field. The title comes from the fact that his personality is split not two, but four ways. Each side is represented by a particular musical motif, which, in turn, represents one of the four members of The Who. No one ever accused Pete Townshend of making it easy on himself.

The original tour behind this album is also famous in rock lore, mostly for the fact that it was absolutely terrible. The album featured keyboards in a way that had never been seen before, and complex horn arrangements. But The Who on tour were a four-piece band, and tried to use tape loops to help recreate the sounds on the album. It never really worked, and it wasn’t until recently, when The Who, sans Moon, toured ‘Quadrophenia’ with a full orchestra and multiple back-up musicians.

Before that tour, though, Phish broke out the entire album, with three horn players, for one time. And, for the most part, it’s simply stunning. I think most of my amazement derives from the fact that in many ways, it’s the antithesis of the album. Whereas the album is meticulous, the concert performance is at times gloriously sloppy. Whereas the recording took months of post-production time, Phish had one shot to sink or swim with it. As such, when Phish nails a particular moment, they NAIL it, and they transcend the original recording.

So why drone on about all of this? Well, I’ve read up on my fair share of Phish, and their fans, and the ‘experience’ of it all. A lot of the major fan site is dedicated to intricate descriptions of the jams; they talk of ‘interplay’ and ‘feeling the groove’ and how each musician silently communications ideas to each other, in a back and forth that, to my musically untrained ear, seemed like a bunch of bollocks. It all came across as a snobbish way to describe an 8-minute dissonant jam in way that lets the writer ‘claim’ it for their own.

Lately, though, I’m not so sure. I never got how improv musicians could see patterns emerging, get instant inspiration, tweak existing melodies and reshape them into something new on the fly. Always envied that. Always envied the extreme peaks in live music, whether it be Phish or not, when the peak sounded genuinely organic. Always thought it was something beyond my reach.

But maybe, just maybe, all of my musical desires have crept into my writing. I know what its like to ‘find’ an idea while writing something else, expanding on a topic I hadn’t previously considered, or to know, while writing one paragraph, already what I want to write in the next one. So maybe there’s a ‘jam aesthetic’ in my writing, and I think it’s consistent with most of the blogs I enjoy reading so much.

I don’t like blogs that are carefully constructed; I like blogs that are irrepressibly given life by their authors in a way that the ragged edges show for the whole world to see. Some might mock the tatters, but me, I admire them. I’d rather see a blog that tries and fails that stays safe and simply mimics those around it. I like reading overlong entries because the author could not only not bear to edit it, but realizes that the original form is probably the most honest one he or she will put out.

Just when I thought I’d close shop on this site (around a month ago), just when my emotions were trying to pull a DoS on my creativity, something kicked in. A spark, an idea. You hear these in Phish concerts all the time. You see them on blogs all the time. And for the first time in a while, I had it back again. Been improvising on that initial riff for a few months now. I kinda like how the jam is going. Sure, I’ve hit some bum notes, and there are certain bars you won’t like, but stay with me for a bit. I promise to hit more peaks soon.