Sleepy, so not much of an entry tonight. I’m over at my mom’s house after a long night of playing music in two places… the post wandering vacation is over, and now we dive back into a pretty intense schedule (and I ain’t talkin’ Indians, folks…).
Another feature of Lucky’s little corner of Providence – every patch of soil has something growing in it, and often as not it’s a food crop, like the corn here.
I must admit, for much of the day I was pretty convinced that we weren’t going to be playing Columbia Lake Front tonight – the threatening skies and the distant growls of thunder pretty much had me dreading the idea of an outdoors gig. But somehow dryness persevered (if you can truly call any Maryland afternoon in August “dry”) and the gig went off really well. We had a good time, and a couple of old friends are back in town… we’re going to have to have a Magic night.
From there we raced over to the College Perk and got there just in time to play a really heavy full band set. God, we fucking rock.
Our first night in Providence we played an open mic down in North Kingstown. I was attacked by the above monster. He’s about 3″ long and went for my face while we were playing. Heather didn’t see him and didn’t understand why I was suddenly weaving away from the mic.
So, I’ve perhaps been a little more focused on recording events than I have on telling the story. I apologoize for that – not just to you, Dear Reader (I DO have to make sure Stan Lee doesn’t have that little phrase copyrighted), but to myself. Somewhere along the line, in the prestigious studios and marble halls and city streets that made up the Maryland Institute, College of Art campus, I discovered that writing was far more important to me than visual art. I even went through a breakdown over it – here was a creature who’d been training to be a painter, a sculptor, perhaps a photographer – and
who’d been surrounding himself with a culture that was convinced of its own self-importance. The elitism that comes with the cult of art school is perhaps inevitable. With that kind of closed-in community, somehow you think your going to change the world with your brush-strokes, and you end up convinced that almost every one among you is bound up with some similar glorious fate.
In any case – when my brain suddenly sundered into component parts, one persuing art, one persuing writing, it was the more eloquent writer’s half that won the argument… I Love making my little paintings, but I often think of them as jewels that I’m polishing… expressions of line and texture that I capture and refine and uncover. It’s the writing that gets things done.
Somewhere along the line I combined that with guitar, and here we are.
And so, in a roundabout fashion, I get back to my point – recording events rather than telling the story is not only a diservice to the reader, who has to push through paragraphs of “we did this, and then we did this, and then we did this, and then we saw this”, but a dishonesty to what I’ve set myself out to do… and perhaps a diservice to the music that gets placed on hold so that I can write, and a diservice to the artwork that I abandoned.
In any case, this self-indulgent little explanation isn’t getting us anywhere.
Back at MICA (and anyone who’s been there will laugh at my description – there WERE a couple of marble halls, but for complete visualization, you’ve really got to be prepared to pour a lot of concrete into your skull, and a lot of graphiti, and homosote EVERYWHERE)…. Back at MICA was where I met Will Schaff. I must admit I hated him when I first met him. Mohawked and scrawny, Audrey held him in high regard and that was reason enough to be jealous. Will was in the midst of a very Egon Scheille phase of painting and his band, Noel the Coward, simply sounded like noise to my ears. I was in the midst of a schizophrenic Love of folk and speed metal, and wasn’t sure what to do with anything else…
But mostly, I think I was intimidated as Hell, and very, very jealous – especially after my friends Jessie and Audrey had sat around having the “He’s SOOO hot” conversation which ended with something along the lines of “well, yeah – it’s impossible for me to lust after someone under 6 feet tall”. And so Will became a symbol of a lot of things that I could never be, and in typical sour grapes fashion, the symbol of a whole lot of things that I decided to have a lot of contempt for.
It was his music that eventually made me grow out of that anger. It took a while for Noel the Coward to grow on me – with its dischords and uncomfortable pop/punk mix – I think I had to listen to it on cassette for a long time before I got it. And then it was like an obsession – I really Loved the music… his punk-rock image totally conflicted with the content – teenage Love songs and laments for the outcast. There finally came a day when he did a performance in the courtyard of the Commons – I think it may have been just after he’d shaved his head for the first time – certainly the first time I was aware of his new bald visage, and the first time I was aware of his tattoos, and he performed Jacob’s Life, which had me in tears by the finish. It was a powerful punch of imagery, combining with the song – I’m not sure what unfolded in me then, but it was part fanboy, part Love, a lot of admiration…
There was a lot of time spent on graveshifts together after that. As I was learning my way around the fretboard of my guitar, Will would take naps in the gatehouse in-between calls and when I wasn’t trying to wake him up I was busily trying to call him down, trying to show him that I was worthwhile as a musician… it must’ve worked worked eventually, as when he drew i love you And I Miss You together, I was very, very flattered to be brought along on the project.
Jacob’s Life went on to be one of my longest-standing covers. I still can’t sing Size N Battery very well… Noel the Coward never felt really tight to me, and i love you And I Miss You certainly never nailed their harmonies and timing perfectly – but the model that he generated there, of drawing friends into a band and playing with people you admire, Love, enjoy – rather than hunting down really technically great musicians and using them like different brushes on a canvas – it was a model that I still adhere to. I’ve wavered from “friends first band second” twice, and both times have been near disasters… the first ending in a compromise of morals that I had to eventually terminate, and the second ending in such a compromise of the spirit of my music that it led me into a hole for years.
And so what else do I say? The more I learned about Will, the more I admired him. His words, his lyrics, his artwork… he’s one of the few pure and simple ARTISTS that I’ve met, and one of the people I admire most in the world. I find him confusing, I don’t often agree with his view points (we had a long, long conversation Friday night after the show in which I retired to bed at 5am STILL thinking that I really didn’t agree with him, and worse, hadn’t seen the point of his argument) and his obsessions and personality border on the frightening – but perhaps that’s one of the things that I am so in Love with. There’s nothing half-way about him. He’s got Life by a strangle-hold that I’m actually afraid to exert.
And so maybe that can shed some light onto why I find my time in Rhode Island so refreshing. It’s a stressful environment. Will’s apartment is overpowering and inspirational, but his sheer output of energy is exhausting – the overload of music and imagery is frightening, and I find myself just listening and staring, and I feel often that I’m totally incapable of giving anything back. Incapable of responding. Holding my own in simple conversations can be difficult because of the sheer overload of input.
I Love it.
Maybe I’ll have to give over some paragraphs to Dan and Sonny when next we meet, but I think I’m done with this level of reminesence for the moment. Yeah – Heather, when/if you /we ever end up editing this Journal into a book, I’m going to make your Life so very, very hard. I’m sorry in advance.
