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The Rock Star. I’m talking the real Rock Star. Not the poseur. Not the one who’s faking it. Not the phony one with no soul. Not the one who’s just acting. Those are called boy bands. The Rock Star I’m describing is the one who plays from his heart, from the depths of his emotional substance. He’s the one up there on stage, bleeding for his audience. He’s bearing his soul, and exorcising his emotional demons in front of tens, or hundreds, or thousands. A model of vulnerability, letting it all hang out. It is through that vulnerability that he connects to us. He’s showing us who and what he is in this moment, allowing us to peer inside, and see all of him. Real and authentic and doing it in front of as many people as he can. Like his music or not, that kind of exposure takes courage. That kind of exposure has Thrasos (in Greek mythology, Thrasos was the personified concept of boldness). Pouring his soul in front of a crowd has a gravitas that we connect to. The Rock Star is a vast spectacle of human behavior and human emotion. He writes music from the depths of his soul and then has the audacity to perform it on stage, to share it with the world. For all to see. How fuckin’ outrageous. No wonder we love the Rock Star.
Individual songs are like individual facets on a gem of countless sides. Each important piece of music in my life represents a different angle from which life is lived; a different vista through which I experience the world; a different shade of a particular emotional color.
That’s one of the magical properties of art; it’s ability to transcend the everyday and catapult us into the sacred. Music can be a religious experience for me. I’m not alone in that. Music is the great connector. Across all races, creeds, people.
Presented here are two songs, in video form because they are easier to access on a website than audio files. They each represent a different piece of me. I feel differently when I listen to each, just as Sunday feels different than Saturday, and Christmas feels different than Thanksgiving.
“Hauntingly Beautiful” is how I would describe Nothing Left To Lose. A beckoning love song that brings up pain within that I have yet to completely let go of, and memories of people I love who are gone. I connect to my own experience of wanting so badly to try again, with gorgeous reckless abandon, with someone I loved with every cell in my body. The melody and the words are captivating enough, but, like all great music, the whole is infinitely and mysteriously greater than the mere sum of the parts.
The last two minutes of the nine minute opus Lateralus by Tool can be experienced as a separate song in it’s own right. Powerful Beyond Measure is how I feel this one. This is a groove so intense that I feel it literally move the blood inside of me. This is primal. This is wild. This is sexy. And Watching Danny Carey drum this is like watching Music Pornography With A Happy Ending.
I am the passionate, deep feeling, tender soul. And I am the powerful wild animal. Somewhere in you, there are your own unique versions of both as well. Find them. Get to know them. They need to come out.
Maybe music can help you do that. It certainly helps me.
In high school, my twin brother, myself, and our good buddy formed a mock rock band called “Blak Sabloon”. I forget exactly how we came up with the name. But it had something to do with our buddy being into Black Sabbath, and both Mike and I detesting them. When we formed, or more accurately, invented, this fictional group, we did it all the way. We each created our own character within the band, who were alter egos of ourselves, and even came up with their back stories. We took old clothing, jewelry, some of it that even belonged to dad....or mom....and ripped it, colored it, used it creatively, and made our stage costumes. We knew how to play music, so we taped our performances (totally Old School, using cassette tape) and created a unified recording out of those tapes. Just like you would with a “real” album. We created a body of work. A sonically obscene body of work, but a body of work nonetheless. The true mayhem of it all was that, even though we could all play instruments, we took our musical ability and completely fucked around with it. For example, I was the lead singer. And I really can’t sing. On top of that, we would deliberately choose songs that were out of my key (if I even had a key), just so that the vocals would sound even more horrific. There was lots of screaming, made up lyrics, and improvisation. We would switch instruments. We would take songs we knew and turn them on their heads. Sometimes my brother Mike, aka AcidHead Glasscock, would start playing another song in the middle of the one we were playing, without telling the rest of the band. Sometimes we would play songs we didn’t know, just to see what would happen. It was gloriously creative and ridiculously fun. The band was supposed to sound bad. Awful, in fact. The worse it sounded, the funnier it was. Being decent musicians, we played the music well enough so that you knew what song it was and could identify with it and the musicianship involved. With that foundation, we knew how to push the song into the plane of the absurd, then pull it back just as it got completely out of control. It was barely controlled insane musical madness. The band would sometimes invite friends over for a “concert”. Throw in a few beers and bodies, and it was just a good fuckin‘ time by a bunch of hyper-creative high school kids looking for an outlet with no rules, no boundaries, and the the wide open imaginative space to go wherever the hell we wanted. And we did. Often. During these shows, some of our buddies would get up and do guest vocal appearances, which were always a gas. My brother Mike was the only one of us who could sing well, and he never sang. That says everything about what the band was about right there. Not only did we record all of this sonic mayhem, but we took it a step further; we created the physical album itself. We took a Mary Poppins double album and glued construction paper to it so we could write and draw whatever the hell we wanted on it. This was inventive and resourceful action in a time of zero personal computers. The three of us were way ahead of our time. This was Spinal Tap, years before there even was a Spinal Tap. The resulting labor of love, “Black Sabloon: Wasted Live! (at the Inforium)” looked like a real album. It was complete with graphic design, photos, song descriptions, and band and crew information. We even came up with “critics reviews” of the band. All terrible, of course. My character, BoneHead Glasscock (twin brother of guitarist AcidHead), was described as having a voice that sounded like “a cross between a malfunctioning chainsaw and a rhinoceros in labor”. We used “Kiss: Alive!” as our design template and created a double live album, which were very popular at the time. The creation of Blak Sabloon says more about me than it may appear. More than just the silly play of a bunch of high school musicians, it allowed me to bring so much of what I love, so much of what I’m good at, to create something that was different, unique, one of a kind - qualities that many people use to describe me. I got to create a whole world, with a team of people I loved, and bring all the imagination, creativity, and unbridled self expression that I could muster. It was refreshingly raw, marvelously irreverent, passionately youthful, and incredibly fun. As somebody close to me brought up, many people lose a lot of those qualities as they get older, but I have somehow managed to buck that trend and bring all of that, and more, on a new level, to my life today. And that will always be so. Because that’s such an integral part of what makes me....me. The picture above is from the back of the album. It is our Officially Unofficial “Band Publicity Shot”. Of all the pictures of me and my friends during high school, this ranks as one of my all time favorites. It sums up our collective Blak Sabloon experience perfectly. There is attitude, camaraderie, youth, a fuck all sense of humor, and the implied presence of illicit substances. All crucial elements in the makings of a great Rock N’ Roll photo. We were sixteen. And the more things change, the more they stay the same.......
Getting ready to go out the other day, the movie Almost Famous was on the television, playing in the background. In the middle of brushing my teeth, I was suddenly assaulted by the opening notes of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. Then, what’s happened a million and one times, happened again; something in my soul stirred; something in my heart caught fire; something in my mind exploded; something in my body felt unstoppable. Music took me away to that magic place once again. I literally had to stop brushing and just let the experience soak in. The loves of my life have seen this happen to me. I shared one ex-girlfriend's writings about it in a post called The Original Mistress Music. Some of my lovers have been able, in those moments, to crawl inside me. And I love it when they do. Because now she’s part of this magnificent experience with me. Now I’m intimately connected to her, sharing one of the most powerful events in my life, with her. I’m no longer alone in those sacred moments. Now it's the three of us. Me. Her. Music. Just like watching a sunset by yourself is beautiful, but watching it with someone you love brings the experience to a whole new level. This connection and sharing is important to me because, the only other thing on earth besides music that does this to me is.......her. The only other thing that can bring me to that place, that can stir my insides so magically and powerfully, that can enchant me so utterly and completely, is her. My woman’s love for me, like mistress music, makes me at once her slave and powerful beyond measure. She does that to me. I want her to know that. I want her to see that. And I want her to love me madly for it......
“Do you know what it’s like to love a piece of music, or a band, so much that it hurts?” - paraphrased from Almost Famous
“I do. And if you don’t, you’re really missing out.” - not paraphrased at all, Clint Piatelli
I have longed to express, in a single sentence, the totality of my intense connection to music. Probably too tall of an order, given the vast scope and cavernous depth of that connection. But if my reach exceeds my grasp, so be it. If you don’t have a torrid love affair with music, loving it so much it hurts may be something you’ll have trouble understanding. And my follow up quote confounds things further. How the hell, you may ask, can you be missing out by not hurting? A contradiction? Only, as I said in my post Contrasting The Contrast, if you don’t know what’s behind the door. Well I’m here to tell you what’s behind the door. At least what’s behind my door. Through that, maybe you’ll understand me, and all intensely passionate music lovers, a little more. And if you are one of those intensely passionate music lovers yourself, maybe you’ll glean something about what’s behind your own door. Before I begin my internal expose, it’s worth noting that my objective in this post perfectly reflects why I write in the first place. Namely, by sharing what’s deep within me, I desire to create connections. Between you and me; between you and someone else; between you and you. Maybe you’ll even share your personal experience of music with me, in a comment or an email. I would love that. Because ultimately what I’m looking for with my audience is a dialogue. Not a monologue. Loving music, or anything else, so much that it hurts, means giving into its rapture and passion so completely that you surrender to its power and give up control. Not control of yourself, but control over what it does to you; over how much it means to you. You give up control, at least for a while, over how that something touches you. You don’t try to limit its impact on you. You’re not afraid to let it reach all the way into you and work its magic. Even if that magic makes you cry, or saddens you, or creates an unfathomable longing. Even if that magic rips out your heart. There is indeed magic in the music. And that magic feeds us, enriches us, adds to our lives in immeasurable ways. Magic is mysterious and ethereal, but it’s real just the same. Hardcore scientists, hear this loud and clear: just because we don’t understand magic doesn’t mean it’s not as real as the stuff we do understand. And let’s face it, as Thomas Edison, one of the most brilliant minds in history said, “We don’t know one-millionth of once percent about anything”. Becoming vulnerable to music is just like becoming vulnerable to anything; nature, paintings, the written word, another person. It means letting down your guard, and saying; “Okay. Move me”. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t. But, either way, you have to have your armor off. The less armor you’re wearing, the more vulnerable you become, the more you create the possibility for deep and powerful impact. Ultimately, to let it all the way in, you have to stand naked before it. At least figuratively. Although I’m certainly not going to tell you what to wear, if anything, whilst you to listen to music or read a book. This nakedness, this vulnerability, is what makes it possible for us to experience true love, with anything, or with anybody. You have to be willing to be hurt, to your core, or you will never experience the full power of love; love of music, love of life, love of another human being. The elation of that love can send you soaring. The pain can hurt so bad it’s almost unbearable. That’s the risk we take when we love with everything we have, with everything we are, with everything we want to be.
Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 7:59AM 
