The “It” Kings and Tantric Love Music

Posted by admin on May 7th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

In the Summer of 2004, Trey Ananastsio, lead singer and guitar player of Phish promised Charlie Rose that he would NEVER get back together with his musical soul mates.  A famous last word, “Never” can sometimes come back and bite us in the ass…but nevertheless I understood where he was coming from, and didn’t believe him.  

I also had a feeling that some of the reasons, (not all)  he was giving Charlie for the

bands “final” break-up were dancing around the truth.

I know that family had a part in it, and definitely being tired out, perhaps bored, not their best anymore had a big part in it as well…but I also think that drugs played the biggest role in their post hiatus demise.  

Why do so many musicians turn to drugs?  

There are so many reasons, but I am going to talk about one that maybe doesn’t usually get talked about so much.  (I could be wrong…but I’ve never heard it spoken of that much)  

I have had the priveledge of seeing some of the finest musicians in the world in concert.  Last october I saw Keith Jarret, Gary Peacock, and Jack De Johnette play at Carnegie Hall…I have seen Larry Corryel, Christian McBride…I have seen Joe Lovano, Paul Motion, Bill Frissel…at my college I had the priveledge of seeing some of the best classical musicians in the world…

All these concerts were amazing.  Truly extraordinary musical experiences that I will remember forever no doubt.  None of them compare to Phish concerts.  

And, I feel totally ridiculous saying that.  I feel like a huge hippy doofus admitting that actually…but it’s true…at least for me.  And the musicianship of the four members of Phish is not even close to the same ballpark as the afore mentioned musicians.  However, in my opinion…they are masters of “It” moments.  They are the “It” kings if you will and are able to sustain “It” for incredible amounts of time.  They are the Tantric Gods of Music.  

All joking aside…my experiences with Phish have teetered far beyond the edge of Wittgenstein’s idea of the “sublime.”  They have taken me (without the aid of psychedelic drugs) past the boundary line of feeling myself as a separate entity from the music and have tossed me into a whirlwind of ecstatic and indescribable bliss.  Being at a great phish concert (they aren’t always great) is very much like being on a 2 and a half hour roller coaster ride that only stops for the 20 minutes set break halfway through.  They take you “there,”…they make “It” happen and keep “It” sustained for endless periods of time.  

Now  if I feel this way as an audience member…i can only imagine how it must feel to be the people doing it.  If I feel this way listening to Phish, what euphoria, what bliss must Trey, Mike, Fish, and Page be experiencing on a nightly basis?  I read an interview with Page once where he says that everynight he has an average of 1-2 “peak” moments but many times has way more.  If those peak moments are anything like the peak moments I have experienced…that’s an IMMENSE amount of euphoric energy to contain in one body.  And the crux is that the come down must be as intense.  

When I was five years old…I literally started looking forward to my birthday two months in advance.  I could barely sleep the night before my birthday and when my “party” was over…you could probably say that I entered a mild state of temporary depression. 

Coming down from a concert where you are the players, the creators, the purveyors of sometimes, insurmountable joy, day in, day out, year in, year out must be somewhat equivalent to being addicted to narcotics and dealing with the up and the come down of that addiction.  In addition to that…when you have fans who know how “high” you’ve been able to take the music…and come see you, expecting that high…that’s quite a large amount of pressure to “produce.”  Thousands of people, riding on you every night to pull magical out of your ass…  

It makes sense to me why so many musicians turn to drugs…feeding their addiction to peak moments…and doing whatever it takes to avoid the come down.  

We forget that our first act as human beings, our first breath, is a microcosm of the nature of life.  We inhale and expand, taking oxygen into our lungs and then we exhale and contract, releasing carbon dioxide into the air.  We take what we need from the oxygen to survive, and with the expulsion of carbon dioxide, we remove what is not needed and harmful to the body.  

The universe actually breaths in the same way, although on a much greater scale.  Life is very much like a huge breath, and on a smaller level, a series of millions of both little and big breaths.  Contraction feels scary…if we let go of our breath to the point where if feels like we hardly have any air left to breath out…it feels very much like we are drowning.  ”The come down” of life experiences…like the end of my 5 year old birthday can feel very similar.  We forget that we are simply doing nature.  We are exhaling.  We have taken in what we need…and if we held it or sustained it…it would be harmful to us.

Opinions and The Creative Process…

Posted by admin on April 16th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Last saturday I plugged in an old external hard drive and found 2.2 hours of old recordings of songs, song ideas, lyrics etc on my computer from a long time ago.  I eagerly cleared my schedule for the evening and uploaded the entire 2 hour playlist on my ipod thinking that there had to be some gold to find.  I then spent the next two hours being incredibly humbled by how truly terrible I was…how off pitch my voice was…how bad my songs were and I couldn’t get over the fact that at that time in my life…I actually might have considered what I was doing to be good/presentable to other people.  

I listened to a song that I remembered playing for my music class about a girl who had large breasts.  The song was intended to be a joke about how men will do anything for a girl that has a nice rack, and I arranged the song in a mixed time signature of rotating bars of 6/8 and 9/8 thinking that I was indeed, the most clever person on the face of the planet.  Not only was I making a humorous societal reference and commentary on the ridiculousness of men and our fascination with large breasts, but I was also doing so in a complex arrangement of mixed measures and odd meters.  Man was I clever in my mind…

However, when I listened to it the other day…not only could I not help myself from laughing at how truly awful the song was…the lyrics were and my voice was (not to mention out of tune) but also at how difficult it was to follow because the meter kept changing.  In fact, it didn’t sound like the meter kept changing…it sounded like I couldn’t play and sing at the same time and thus, was having trouble holding a steady rhythm. 

And I got me thinking about my “opinions.”  My very “intense” and “important” opinions about things…life, music, quality of art, people etc…and how fast and hard I hold onto them. It also got me thinking about others opinions…and how people, not all people, but A LOT of people totally FREAK out when their opinions about things are challenged.  Have you ever been in a conversation or around a conversation where somebody’s opinion is being challenged as “wrong” and it’s like they are fighting to their death to try to defend the fact that they are actually not wrong?  Almost to the point where it feels like they are defending their life? 

Here are some examples from my own life…

-When I was 15, I was OBSESSED with Dave Matthews Band.  In fact, I ONLY listened to Dave Matthews…and pretty much refused to listen to any other music because “nothing compared” in my mind.  I learned almost every DMB song on the guitar and would spend countless time on DMB chat forums.  Anybody that didn’t like Dave Matthews was clearly a moron…

-When I was in college…Dave Matthews sucked…I hated Dave Matthews and couldn’t believe that I was ever so into him and that I went to 18 live DMB shows.  I used to make fun of people who liked Dave Matthews and who would cover Dave Matthews songs…

-When I was in college…John Mayer couldn’t have been more of a cheese ball

-Now, I love John Mayer…and Dave Matthews.  Now I think they are both amazing.  

-When I was a sophomore in college, the only music that was really “good” was either free jazz, be-bop jazz, modal jazz, mozart, avant gaurde or phish.  Anything that was “in” was lame in my book, and anything that was “out” was not only the shit…but also the only kind of music that could really be “respected.”  Anybody that didn’t agree with me was a moron.  I listened to Coltrane’s “Sun Ship” a lot and the idea of writing a song under 5 minutes was a joke to me.  Everybody told me my songs were too long…I told myself they were idiots and didn’t understand good music.  

-When I was 14 years old…I hated my mother

-When I was 21 years old…I hated my father

-In my life now…I love and respect and honor my parents in a way I never thought I would.  They are so important to me and I am so grateful for all that they are and everything they have done for me.  I deeply love my parents.  

-When I was in high school…I was an avid athlete, never smoked during season and hated sissy and wimpy feminine men…and disrespected pot heads.  

-When I was 21, I hated “macho men” and wore make up and sarongs and felt like the only way to be a real man was to embrace one’s feminine side and smoke weed.  

-I never wrote love songs cause they were cheesy

-Now I hope that one day, I will write the perfect love song…

-I didn’t like to be friends with girls when I was in high school

-I didn’t really like to be friends with men my first two years of college when I was in college

-Photorealistic art was stupid after impressionism…why would anybody want to paint a photorealistic piece of art after Monet???

-Jackson Pollock was the greatest artist ever

-Matisse was the greatest artist ever

-Picasso is so over-rated

-Picasso was the greatest artist ever

-When I was 12 years old…I wore jeans the size of an elephants hoove.  I could literally stick my head in one of my pant legs…

-When I was 19 I thought people who used the word God were stupid and religious and didn’t understand anything about real spirituality or how the world really works.

-When I was 23, I would cry sometimes at the love and joy that would overflow in my heart when I heard the word God mentioned…

and on…and on…and on…

My question here and the point of this post however is how are we served by our opinions?  When I am 72 years old God willing…will my opinions about life be totally different?  The answer is obviously yes…but then why feel as if my opinions about things matter so much now?  Why hold on to them as a defining aspect or characteristic of my life…of my foundation…and more importantly…how do they serve my creative process?????

I didn’t want to write love songs…I didn’t want to write pop songs…I wanted to be like dave matthews…I wanted to write complex and “out” be-bop lines…etc. etc. etc. and WHY?  

My feeling is that my opinions about music…about what is “good” actually hinder my creative process rather than serve it.  How? 

Because what I have learned over the past year is that creativity has the most liberty to flow when there is nothing obstructing it.  Think of it like a river.  My opinions about music, about life, about what was “right” were like little mini-damns in my river.  When I release those opinions…my river flows.  Creativity is greater served from a place of empty space…so that it has room to arise…rather than from a place of preconceptions, false beliefs, and bottomless opinions.  

However…one could also play the devils advocate and say that if it weren’t for my old opinions…and my creative attempts before that didn’t work…then I wouldn’t have learned from my mistakes and be in the place that I am now…

This is also true…So my question remains slightly unanswered…

No matter what, as human beings, it is natural to have opinions about things…but as far as the creative process is concerned, when those opinions turn into judgments…we enter a more dangerous territory.   An opinion becomes a judgement when it starts to be held as something finite.  The opinions I listed above had become judgments.  

We can’t escape forming opinions…especially as artists regarding art.  However, they should be taken as seriously as the weather….present for the day, but in a constant state of change and flux.  Otherwise, we do not allow our creative to flow in the manner that it can.  

…in my opinion that is  

Comments always welcome…

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