I consumed on Facebook the other night. Something I generally avoid doing. But for ONCE the algorithms had it right and popped Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket up in front of me, webcasting Live from a small room wherever it is that Glen Phillips Lives, doing a fund raiser for “Advancing Justice – a voice for the Asian American Community”. I right-clicked the tab and rerouted my audio to get sound running from Facebook, unmuted the player that I’ve got by default muted and came in on a bizarrely-wonderful, nerdy introduction to a song.
I Love the music of Toad the Wet Sprocket enough that I’ve covered a couple of tunes and there was definitely a point in late-high-school-early-college-rob Life where Dulcinea and Fear were obsessively replayed albums – and though I think I’d somewhat moved on by 1997’s Coil, they were still using one of my absolute favourite illustrators to do their album covers and so I probably picked it up for Dave McKean’s art as much as Glen Phillips’.
I certainly never thought of them as a nerd-rock kind of band but Glen introducing a song about him trying to write in the voice of an interstellar spacecraft nurturing and taking care of its sleeping human crew, and how he was going to use a weird effect on his voice so he could sing like a robot…. Well… suddenly he had absolutely won me over and I was hooked. “I know that one was kind of weird and no-one will probably ever hear it again… “ yes – I RELATE TO THIS.
He played a familiar-and-safe song and just as I’m getting over the absolutely perfect tone in his voice (seemingly unchanged from those long-ago cassettes) and the juicy, thick sound of his electric guitar (no mean feat via webcast) he shifts into responding to “Mike”, someone who in one of the comment streams has referred to “Glen Entitled Phillips” … now… first off, almost every webcast I’ve worked is “entitled” enough to have a moderator that would’ve snuffed Mike’s obnoxiousness PDQ and blocked him seconds after so the idea that Glen was actually rolling solo enough that he didn’t have someone supporting him in this fashion further endeared him to me.
And then came one of the most human moments I’ve ever seen on Facebook.
Toad the Wet Sprocket struck me at a very formative time and they were kind of an outlier for me. I was listening to a LOT of grunge, post-punk music that celebrate thick, grinding sounds that were deliberately out of control. Fierce, buried vocals and feedback solos that were PROBABLY carefully orchestrated – but managed to sound like chaos captured and lightning bottled. By comparison, even at their most passionate and aggressive Toad the Wet Sprocket sounded very controlled, but the beautiful, careful elegance of their performance – more like a post-grunge Paul Simon than anything else I was listening to at the time – spoke to me in a very different way. The rage was channeled, the beauty was that of water colour or glaze – ironically not very Dave McKean at ALL with his chaotic Love of splash and experiment and drip!
And so watching Glen Phillips struggle a bit with anger was very humanizing. He reads as very Zen and listening to him respond to a conversation that I could only hear one half of – evidently we started with “Glen Entitled Phillips” and then into “so what do you do for white people?” and probably called him racist – and Glen was remarkably even-voiced as he described his own struggles, that “of course I’m racist, I was raised in this America” and talked about how you struggle against these influences – my version of this is my “it’s not how you think it’s how you ACT” speech – because I believe that you can think racist thoughts and not act racist and that… in practical terms… does a lot towards eliminating racism… but that’s neither here nor there. He held this steadily, walked his way through his feelings on the subject and then said something to the effect of “so that’s my feeling on the topic so fuck you Mike”.
Glen apologized profusely for getting angry – because he doesn’t want to become what he hates. But you could see it getting to him. I think it even interrupted the start of the next song as he had to stop, readdress his feelings, and start again.
And so though I’m sure that on some level Glen was kind of mortified by the interaction, I was so grateful to happen to be there for it. In my world of overly-processed and thoroughly-perfect noise and visual – I thought there was beauty to that momentary lapse – because it was momentary – because it shows we’re all being pushed – and despite that push, that rage, we recover and continue trying to be our best selves.
I get kind of incoherent when I’m angry. I get embarrassed and I don’t think things through. It makes me easy to corner and it’s frustrating because I spend a LOT of time thinking through the “could’ve saids” and “If onlys” with the idea that there’s that ONE THING that I would’ve inserted in to the conversation to WIN the argument. SOME key that I could’ve placed into the lock that would’ve made a difference.
I’m not dumb. I’m not even particularly slow. But damn how anger makes me feel thick. Watching someone who I admire struggle, bite it back, control it and move on… even though he tripped up on it for a sec, makes me feel like that Zen maybe isn’t TOTALLY out of my reach.
Oh. And for those of you who are into this stuff : Happy Easter. I’m not going to say anything more about that because I’ve already put my foot wrong with my Catholic uncle this morning. He’d written a “happy Easter, everything’s great except our grand daughter nearly set her hair on fire this morning” – I’d replied that my mom (who was also on the thread) had actually convinced me that LED candles were okay nowadays but that that sounded like the child had learned an important lesson – of course I was forgetting that some people take their mythologies seriously and got a sternly-worded “except this is specifically for passing the fire from Christ to his children” reprimand – which I’m trying not to find hilarious in context. (sigh, see but I’m easily rubbed the wrong way and get sarcastic before I get incoherent – I’m really just NOT a very good person!)
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