It’s tax season! I’ve done my returns already and this year I did pretty well. I gave various governments interest-free loans last year and now they have come due. So I’m in for a bit of a windfall. The windfall won’t be used for much of anything except for paying bills, but the prospect of “found money” excites even me.

American consumer culture hopes that you actually enjoy the act of making purchases. If I recall correctly, our crackpot president in 2001 suggested that best thing to do after 9/11 was to go shopping. Huh? Yes, this is my country.

Despite my aspirations toward an enlightened existence, I am American and sadly was raised in a culture of decadent consumerism. Whether I like it or not, even I am a consumer, albeit a selective one. I thought this morning about things that I actually enjoy buying. The purchase actually provides an enjoyment that is separate from the item. Weird, right? But then, I suppose I am as well. Here goes…

Six things I enjoy buying

1. Guitar Straps

Unlike some musicians I know, I’m not a guitar collector. I know some guys for whom buying guitars is a sickness. I can’t believe the collections they have. I call them guitar whores. How can you ever become one with an instrument with which you haven’t even a suggestion of exclusivity? To say nothing of the fact that guitars are expensive. But guitar straps? A wonderful alternative. They are the coolest. Like some people dig shoes, I love guitar straps. The smell of the leather. Finding just the right texture. Vintage or modern? Oh, the colors. The way they can be so personal and breathe new life into your old guitar.

2. Blank books

I’ve written frequently here about how I fluctuate between writing by hand and writing using a word processor of some sort. While I get a lot of efficiency out of typing and editing electronically, sometimes there’s nothing like the feeling of a pencil or pen scraping across just the right kind of paper. When the urge re-visits me, I never write on loose leaf, cocktail napkins or note pads. It’s difficult to be self-aggrandizing if my writing is not in some way enshrined from the start. That’s why I enjoy writing in blank books. They can have the most interesting covers and bindings and any kind of paper you can imagine. Scratchy, recycled, acid-free, whatever you fancy. If a writer’s ultimate output is a book, starting with a blank one means that you’re already halfway to your finished product! Shopping for just the right blank book makes me feel like I’m on a mission. What medium will satisfy me? How will this hold up for the ages on my shelf? Is this one suitable to be revisted again and again to examine my progress through creative and philosophical trials? The empty pages are a tangible form of the infinite potentials of my mind. Where some writers fear a blank page, I look at a blank book as something I can fill with the priceless artifacts of my existence. Picking the right one is a task of great significance, and a great way to procrastinate.

3. Blank tape/CDs

Related to blank books are blank tapes and CDs. (DVDs don’t give me much of a charge because I use them for backing up files. They eventually outlive their usefulness or dependability and are tossed on the fire.) I don’t buy blank tape anymore, since I’ve retired from analog recording, but back in the old days, there was nothing like buying a couple of new reels of 456, tightly wound, just aching for the imprinting of my test tones and precious, life-changing mixes. They had exponentially more infinite potentials than even blank books. They were bulky and heavy and came in large boxes you could label. Once I finished recording mixes and editing for an album and put those big master tapes back in their boxes, I could swear that they felt different in my hands than when I bought them. It all started with the purchase of blank reels of tape. A magical first step. To some degree blank CDs give the same thrill. They’re only little pieces of plastic but will hold music that never existed before I put it there. They can hold 80 minutes of it. 80 minutes of new music you can hold in your hand is never anything but exciting.

4. MP3s

At the very beginning of the wave, I had a thing against MP3s. I claimed up and down that MP3 was an inferior format for listening. To a degree, I suppose it is, but I had a revelation one day when it occurred to me that the bulk of my musical self-indoctrination had been through audio cassettes, the most flawed format available after 8-track and wax cylinders. Were those musical experiences any less valid because I came of age in the 80s, the era of the pre-recorded cassette? Absolutely not. I’ve since embraced their modern technological equivalent and never fail to delight in how I can purchase music at home, and be enjoying new additions to my music collection whenever I choose.  I enjoy buying them too, not stealing them. Much like I enjoyed buying cassettes instead of dubbing them from my friends. The music felt like it was truly mine to enjoy if I’d bought it myself. Whenever I buy a new recording on MP3 and my files are downloading, I think of Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre. He describes how the simplest things move him. He says something like “Sometimes I watch traffic lights changing and think, ‘How wonderful!’”

5. Bicycle and guitar tools 

Few things bother me more than paying “professionals” to do something simple that I could easily do myself. I hired a plumber once who spent about 7 minutes fixing a leaky pipe and charged me $600. The thing he had that I didn’t have was this new-fangled pipe-crimping tool that enabled you to make a permanent and reliable seal between two pieces of copper pipe without a blow torch. It made these flares and ridges and after bending the metal, the two pieces fit together like a puzzle and were completely water tight. The tool, he told me, costs thousands of dollars. Whether or not he was lying, his claim did appeal to my conviction that “the right tool for the right job” is an axiom for good living. Though I have no desire to plumb (is that what a plumber does?) I do want to keep my bicycle and musical instruments in good working order. Nothing sucks more than going to a mechanic to tighten a brake cable or a luthier for a seasonal neck adjustment. Last year, I bought a cable puller and have had good brakes for free ever since. Thanks to my discovery of Stewart-McDonald, I now own weird wrenches with bends in them that enable me to access the truss rods on my guitars without stripping them using a tool that doesn’t seat properly in the bolt heads. This is easy stuff. You just have to have the right tools. For the cost of a single service call to both “experts,” I can stick it to them every time the seasons change. :~) I love buying the right tools. Their purchase is an investment and as such, a guilt-free expenditure.

6. Coffee

OK, maybe coffee doesn’t technically fall under the category of consumer goods, but I do like buying it. I love choosing the right cup, establishing the perfect blend of coffee and milk, securing it with a convenient and pristine sipping lid. All of these things amount to a ritual of preparation for something completely unrelated, but in my adult life, I’ve learned that almost any activity or event you can imagine can be gilded by first purchasing a cup of coffee. The best part is that in most settings, it’s completely acceptable. Picking up coffee on the way to work, a meeting or a rehearsal is as commonplace as showing up wearing pants. Unlike wearing pants, it makes little sense, since the coffee is an arbitrary accessory that doesn’t really last and leaves an unsightly cup laying around until the first break, but who cares? The break might be a good time for coffee too, but for some reason coming back to a meeting after a break with coffee doesn’t feel as good to me. Somehow coffee at the start seems to say, “I’m ready to begin and regardless of whether I’m truly motivated by what I’m about to do, I shall eek some enjoyment out of it.” I’m confident that I’d have even loved the kindergarten if I could have stopped off for coffee before showing up. Nobody told me about it then, so I ended up pretty upset every time the bus came. Despite those scars that never heal, I’m thankful for the wisdom I now possess.

I see some crazy things in New York. If you spend enough time in the city, you’re bound to. It’s simply unavoidable. There are too many people with too many different intentions for a day in the city to be uneventful. On the rarest occasions, I witness people in serious conflict with each other. That happened today. It’s still shocking when you see a fight and though I can’t say I agree with that form of conflict resolution, I think in this case that I might understand what’s at the root of it.

The last fight I saw was at least ten years ago on 30th St. Two bums were going at it just after 9pm. I got out of a rehearsal studio and I heard them bellowing back and forth at each other. The sound echoed in the canyon of the empty street and I couldn’t immediately ascertain its origins from the dark sidewalk. I finally located them about halfway down the block. When I did, the angrier of the two had just broken a wine bottle and was brandishing the weapon in the other guy’s direction. How absolutely classic, I thought at the time. Fighting in the street with broken bottles is some old-school brawlin’! I quickly came to my senses and was sure to cross the street and get out of there before things got too gruesome, or worse, closer to me.

The fight I saw today was different. It was at an ungodly hour in the World Trade Center PATH station downtown. The place was crawling with people from New Jersey who’d just gotten off the train to go to work. That mass of humanity under the most ideal of circumstances takes some skill to negotiate, since the whole damn station is one big construction site. You have to ascend no fewer than three stair levels before you get to the street. This incident occurred just one level up from the platform.

It wasn’t two filthy street guys. The fight was between two of the most demure-looking men in the late 40s or early fifties. They were both fairly tall and lean. Where they weren’t balding, they were graying at the temples. They both wore similar jackets, in shades of blue and made of that shushy polyester material people wear when they go skiing. The guy with the upper hand wore glasses. They looked like they could have been brothers, both of whom work jobs that don’t require hand washing upon completion of their duties.

When I came upon them, the bespectacled one had the other one over the railing, pulling at his jacket where in another time there would have been lapels. He was screaming something angrily at the other guy, possibly a warning. (I couldn’t hear over the Flo & Eddie album on my MP3 player.) As people fanned out around them, I did what I normally do when I see a fight. I checked them both from a distance for weapons. Not this time, but of course, I still wanted no part of the scene. Just before I moved behind a ramp and up the second staircase, I saw the guy with the glasses “hauling off.” Many people kept turning around, trying to catch a glimpse of the progress of the scuffle. I just bounded around them, my own conflicts to confront.

What the whole thing was about, I’ll never know. Maybe one guy just crowded the other too much. The boiling point was finally reached. It was just the wrong day for both of them. As I traipsed through the streets, the fight far behind me, I studied the faces of the people I passed. There were hundreds of them. The more I looked, the more it seemed to be the wrong day for them too. Could the misery on so many faces be my imagination? Suddenly they were all corporate workers, nearing their limits.

I’m sure a commuter’s plight, whatever it is, could be considered by some to be a luxury problem since he still has a job, but even those not yet in dire straits can potentially bear a debilitating psychological burden. If it was just being crammed into disgusting trains, it might be different. But for most people in corporate America, a subtle demoralization continues when one gets to work.

Working in offices staring at computers is a tragic existence. A corporate job can be a dehumanizing charade in which there is no beginning and end, with a requirement to pretend one cares about something which was at best a trade off for the promise of life to be lived on the off hours. Instead of merely scratching and clawing for a crust of bread, days are spent surrounded by lies, politics, endless unknowns, fear and the ultimate surrender of the self. In many cases, it’s all to maintain some preconceived idea of success, a house in New Jersey, a car or two. However, over time these affectations can become little more than tangible proof that one’s been duped into cycle that is sure to swallow him whole. One in which every dollar is already spent and nothing is ever truly accomplished. The actual “work” means very little. It’s only there to occupy him, to deter him from the constant consideration of who’s above him and who’s below.

A corporate career can require so many compromises along the way that no one, two or even three changes can deliver you from the crisis of spirit it can foster. The result is inaction, even more compromise. In short, it can be a trap who’s bait is an empty promise. One that is eager to waste your life and then blame you for the choice as soon as you’re used up.

When primitive man, in some ways whose psyche we still possess, had hunted enough to eat for the day, he could rest. His fears amounted to attacks by things he could see or hear. He is completely unsuited to a corporate job, in which no amount of food can ever be enough and attackers are anything he can imagine. Rest is allowed only by the permission of his conscience. After years, coping with desperation and hopelessness becomes his true work.

This is unlike the conclusion of Langston Hughes in “A Dream Deferred” in which the poet asks if a dream deferred explodes, conjuring images of riots in Harlem. Hughes would probably have claimed that those corporate stiffs this morning, slugging it out in their psychological desolation, do in fact have a luxury problem. But it’s unfair to claim that a guy with a house in Jersey has no right to be despondent and searching for meaning. It’s also not inconceivable that a human being under extreme stress, whose attackers can’t be identified and who’s worst fears are manufactured, might choose someone in which his oppression can be personified and attack that guy for the silliest of reasons. I think that’s what I witnessed today. People are still human, no matter where you think they fall in the social strata.

With union regulations and laws concerning safety, health and child labor, reform at the beginning of the last century served to make the workplace safer for your body. Perhaps in the post-industrial age, labor reform is required to make work safe for your mind. Just because people can make a living at a desk doesn’t mean that they are not being endangered psychologically and emotionally. There is less concern for their rights per se, since there’s no clock to punch, no hourly wage, and no visible scars. But the dangled carrot, a promise that may not be realized, can be devastating to health and well-being. Those working to make someone else rich are told that they’re working to rise. It’s a mind game in which the rules constantly change. Only some figure out how to survive. It’s pretty sinister when you think about it.

I didn’t realize it until now, but my reaction to the fight this morning was not as much minding my own business like a proper heartless New Yorker, but more “There, but for the grace of God, go I…”

I wonder what happened…

Derek Sivers reposted this story a little while ago. It was originally published in Reader’s Digest. In it, the journalist describes the night on which he met Albert Einstein and how the physicist taught him to appreciate Bach. Einstein’s analogy equated the appreciation of music to the learning of arithmetic. He explained to the writer that if his teacher had thrown long division or fractions at him the first day, he’d have reacted in panic and forever closed his mind to those concepts. It would’ve been madness to ask a student so new to arithmetic to grasp such concepts before having learned more basic ones. “So it is with music,” Einstein claimed.

As far as I know, Einstein never gave concerts or tried to sell records. Maybe he was right though. I wrestle with a conflict of sophistication in my musical life quite often. It’s my nature to go for something more than the simplest approach to composition and arrangement. I need something more engaging than what is the most predictable to enjoy what I’m playing or listening to. As an artist, that idiosyncrasy can be an obstacle to universal appeal. Instead of becoming frustrated in striving for musical heights in the modern commercial climate, perhaps I should simply make a greater effort to teach long division.

I’ve always had a musical ear, it’s true. Before I completely understood what I was hearing, music would affect me profoundly. The way the parts worked together, the emotional effects that certain harmonic intervals could create in me, these stimulated my brain and heart even as a small child. As I grew up and became a musician, I honed my abilities and began to work my own alchemy with organized sounds. Now that I understand very much about music’s moving parts, I feel sometimes as if I have the key to a golden door. Behind it lay the ability to appreciate a special beauty in life, an enrichment fueled by what I can only equate with the somewhat exclusive perception of another dimension entirely. Since music is my racket, it only makes sense that I would arrive at the “long division and fractions” phase of musical appreciation and creation sooner than someone of a different vocation. If music could be equated with juggling, I’d be tossing a chain saw, a kitten, a raw egg and an apple, and eating the apple along the way. It would be a great show until I severed a limb, but then, I’m not finished learning either.

Sadly, Einstein’s age has passed. Since math is never as cool as music from a cultural standpoint, countless people claim to love music. However, if a recording artist in 2010 creates something of reasonable sophistication, there is an overwhelming contingent of listeners, critics and other musicians who are quick to dismiss the work as “indulgent” or “overblown.” In the most painful of instances, this dismissive ilk has been known to label the music as “prog,” a dreadful-sounding, shortened form of the word “progressive,” which carried with it a certain prestige some 30 years ago.

It’s almost as if the popular culture as a whole has turned its back on ambitious musical expression and achievement. I can’t believe the fuss that is made over some really terrible musicians and singers. My perspective dooms me here, but I’m still fascinated and simultaneously flummoxed when I hear yet another recording of musicians struggling to play songs that essentially reinvent the wheel of the most basic structures. They never seem to become curious about what other possibilities their music might hold.

Punk is my favorite example of this. Punk is great for kids with more passion than musical ability or experience. But even the real wave of the style didn’t last that long. It simply doesn’t take that long to progress musically and emotionally from it. However, “punk” is a connotation that has come to imply a certain creditability in the cultural consciousness of popular music. It’s baffling. I mean, how can you be approaching 50 years old and still be embracing the punk idiom? In that case, I doubt we’re even talking about music anymore. We’re just using the word to describe an affectation instead of an art form. Nevertheless, in music, Americans seem incessantly to celebrate the bird house of high school shop and to ignore the Roman arch.

When did that happen?

I don’t know what it was about the 70s, but it gave rise to some of the most experimental rock music ever recorded. Musicians had grown in skill and sophistication to the point where certain artists and bands were more aptly described as composers than songwriters. Musicianship soared as well. Rock and roll music, a folk form played by primitive musicians, had grown up. I thought of this while listening to a couple of Yes albums this week. There was such an audience for music played by guys with real chops and unusual musical vision in those days. How could a group that played so well and performed such obtuse variations on the rock style achieve such amazing popularity?

I have a few theories. One is that people had a bit more capacity to appreciate something outside of themselves. People seemed to be more willing to evolve, to go deeper into the object of the obsessions they chose. I believe that progressive rock grew in part out of a raised consciousness and more eclectic philosophical attitudes of the late 60s. Those philosophies were experimental and perhaps ultimately flawed, but at least some people were unafraid to search, to find something new.

That cultural trend has been replaced by one of fear and cynicism. As cynicism grew with each succeeding decade of psychological overload, greatness became less of an inspiration and more an unspoken indictment of one’s own laziness and unwillingness to sacrifice. In music now, it seems like everyone, regardless of true skill, thinks they can make a viable record. It’s the highest form of delusion, but there’s enough encouragement and momentum in that world for aesthetic criteria to have eroded almost to non-existence. Or so it would seem. In the modern musical climate, are skill, passion and vision looked upon as reminders of chores that were never completed, of the ever-present fear that the multitudes of the “three chords and the truth” set might not be as great as they think they are? To cope with the fear, have they created a culture of acceptable mediocrity to disappear into? If enough people use the word “prog,” any divergent musical vision becomes a punchline and it becomes safer to be around. With the right dismissal, any ambition can be controlled and there’ll still be a chance to be great without really trying.

My own cynicism compels me to accuse. Or is it like Einstein said? Has the overload of our “too much, too soon” culture simply turned so many minds off to learning more?

I want more. I want the keys to more golden doors, behind which lay more beauty and enrichment. I don’t think that progressive rock is the only way. Nor do I believe that simple music should be discounted. Not at all. I simply want every chance to experience the extraordinary humanness that only music can provide for me. My challenge then must be to figure a way to take people, as Einstein did, off to a room to listen to records and share the keys to which I believe we are all entitled. Perhaps that’s why I write my little essays here.

In that spirit, I’ll close with something for your heart and head. Maybe you need to be an ace “juggler” to dig it, but I’ll try my best at least to describe what happens when I listen to a piece of music enough times. This is an excerpt from the guitar part of a Yes tune called “The Gates of Delirium” as I remember it. Even if you find progressive rock demanding or annoying, Yes was one of those groups that could take things way out without neglecting beauty or the sublime musical release.

In measure 2 and 3 is an F major chord. It’s technically outside of the key signature, which is D, creating some sense of conflict to my ear. The chord is played in staccato eighths with accents that separate them into groups of 3. It’s tough to find a strong downbeat there, so you’re really being pushed out of your comfort zone. Back into the key, is a glissando up to a G major in measure 4. Some relief, but we’re not there yet. With a single F# that bridges you into beat 4, we’re made to wait just an instant longer before the phrase resolves wonderfully into a Dmaj7, which starting at the F chord two measures before, I had been absolutely yearning for. There it is, and all is right with the world.

This phrase changed my life in the 6th grade. It was like an orange sunset for my ears. Just greater than words. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. I have countless examples of similar experiences too. I wouldn’t part with a single one. If I never searched deeper into music, they would have been lost to me. What a tragedy that would have been.