I figured that it was time I put a band together to play the music I’ve been working on so I can finally let everyone hear it. The problem, however, is that making music as an adult carries with it more headaches, more entrapments, more catches. When you’re a kid, you make music with your friends. You dream together. No one has anything and no one has anything to lose. My adult performing career has been largely solo, so I’ve not butted up against the differences much, but beyond a certain age, musicians of any quality become more scarce. As they age, musicians play for different reasons than simply to become their heroes. They balance music with other responsibilities. They work less for a collective good, such as a band, and even less for a “solo artist” for fear of being exploited. That leaves me with some challenges, since my latest efforts feature full arrangements. Only a band can do this stuff. What’s worse, I’ve become more keyboard-centric, experimenting with different sounds and more complex arrangements.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I’d be quite content simply playing bass. It’s what I got into this for. If I’m going to play my music in a band, I’ve got to be the bass player. But how do I handle all of these keyboards? Keyboardists are very hard to come by. Hence the reason I’ve gotten more calls for keyboards than anything else in recent years. It’s too early to hire a keyboard player outright, though that’s probably what will have to happen if I’m going to get the music to sound right. What to do?

I have a drummer who can sing backup, an old friend of mine. I’m courting guitarists at the moment. After that, I’m putting all of my runaway versatility to work. I predict that when you see me play live, I shall go “all Geddy Lee on your ass.” Anyone who knows Rush knows that Geddy Lee plays bass, keys and guitar and sings too. He often uses his feet to get things played when his hands aren’t free. Good enough for me. I shall be playing keyboards and bass, sometimes in the same song. I have decided that I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna be the bass player or nobody is. I’ve set up my synthesizer so that I can play bass parts with my left hand when I need to have a keyboard in the arrangement. I’ll also be singing lead. I’ll also be working my ass off! :~) However, I’ll be joined by a stampede of unicorns, all wearing necklaces of hen’s teeth. If I think my music is different and special, why shouldn’t it take some heroic measures to perform it?

I toyed with the idea of using a sequencer for a bit. I got together with my drummer friend to give it a whirl. When you play with a sequence, it usually means that the drummer must listen to a click on headphones, so he can be sure not to lose time with the computer. Computers don’t listen to what everyone else is playing, so you’re a slave to their petrified renditions. We got through the song, and yes, I was playing bass and keyboards were coming out of the speakers. But it felt like tracking a record. When my drummer suggested we play through a different song that I hadn’t prepared with the sequencer, I roughed it out alone at the keyboard. Even though I hadn’t split the keyboard to cover the bass parts and it sounded like it had holes in the arrangement, it felt more like music than what we had played before. I had made my decision. I must bring my full abilities to bear and do something risky.

As I prepare for this undertaking, I’m finding it so stimulating that I can’t wait to get at it. I’ll absolutely have something that is worth watching. Let’s see how much damn music I can make with 3 people.

Two bands I’ve written about here, Led Zeppelin and Kiss, would have ruined their careers by becoming too intimate with their audiences. Yes, perhaps things are different now, but what would these two bands have been if the lives of their members had been documented in a readily accessible resource by the members themselves?

In the mythology of Led Zeppelin, you had deals with the devil, obscure symbols to represent the members of the group, drugs, disasters, groupies, and music that was, according to a documentary I saw about them, “Howlin’ Wolf meets the Loch Ness Monster.” I don’t believe a single one of these particular entrapments was ever addressed directly by the group. I don’t think they ever published an informal piece to “set the record straight.” The audience was left to imagine just about anything. The myth grew and grew. It was anything you wanted it to be, except like you. There were no limits to what you could discover in Led Zeppelin. It could not end because it wasn’t real in the first place. Opening the book would have blown it all to hell.

Even Led Zeppelin album cover art kept the band at a distance. They seemed to live on a planet designed just for them, a mystical place that featured monuments to gods whose names you dared not speak and rolling green Celtic geography that was literally hell and gone from Main Street USA or Times Square. They managed to perpetuate an image of dark magic, without saying a word about it.

If it existed, what could Jimmy Page’s blog have said that wouldn’t have ruined everything?

“Had a costume fitting today. I hope they get the dragon right this time. I like dragons.”

“I took a plane to Los Angeles after the show to meet this 13-year-old model I’m just mad about. I know what it looks like, but she’s just incredible.”

“I want to thank all you guys for coming out to the show tonight. Percy, Bonzo, Jonsey and I had a blast. We can’t wait to come back to Pittsburgh.”

“I’m thinking Peter needs to lose a few pounds. I’m worried about him.”

“I’ve got such a headache today. I must send Coco out for some more aspirin before we leave for soundcheck.”

“Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been soooooo busy with the new album. We can’t think of a good title for it though. I want to use freaky drawings and a tarot card for the cover, but Jonesy thinks it’s a stupid idea. Maybe it could be a contest! Leave your suggestions for the name of our fourth album in the comments. If we use your title, we’ll send you a signed copy a week before it’s released to radio!”

“I can’t stop thinking about burgers! Damn this heroin!”

I’m pretty good with the language, but I can’t think of an appropriate superlative to describe the lameness that would have ensued. Good Christ, Jimmy Page wasn’t human like us! He didn’t eat breakfast or get up for school or go to the dentist. He just made otherworldly sounds with guitars and laser beams went off behind him in all directions when he did it! A blog would have ruined him. A superstar must be a mystery. Maybe that’s why we have so few of them now.

Kiss might have blogged in character, which could have worked, but judging by those fake letters in Kiss Alive, the blogs probably would have been written by someone in the Glickman/Marks office and sucked.

Insert palaver about being rich and famous, hyper-sexual, demonic, from another planet, and something about cats and junk here.

It was so much better to wonder who they were under the makeup. Were they murderers? Was Satan involved? Was the drummer really rescued from death by a panther? Again, the mystery of Kiss made it work. Gene Simmons has stated since the 90s that Kiss were trying be the heavy metal Beatles. They never said it in the 70s though. On planet Kiss, the Beatles did not exist. Get it?

Kiss was best served by others writing about them (provided they could nudge the writers in the right direction). Every time Gene was pressed to explain the meaning of the fire and blood tricks, he could never make sense of it, even when he was in character. A personal blog would have muddied the waters even more. Without the distance, Kiss could never have been superheroes.

So, since I’m at least as interesting as Jimmy Page and Gene Simmons, I have to be careful when I blog. I could ruin everything. It’s a good thing that I do this telepathically. And since I’m getting off of all those pills it’s going so much faster now. Thanks to Satan and his hounds, Myra and Otis, I’m well protected here. I can almost see Earth, though these lasers cast quite a shadow across the great billows of rainbow smoke that surround the palace when I awaken. Regardless, at all times, music flows from me as breath, surrounding you with love.

I can’t understand how I didn’t notice the problem during the tracking stage because I was recording the bass direct and was convinced that I was capturing everything I needed to sculpt the bass sound during the mixing process. It had a thunderous quality to it in my cans and I hardly ever EQ anything on the way in, for fear that I might filter out a crucial part of the signal that I might need later.

OK, a lot of jargon there. If you’re not in my head or not a recording engineer, I might have lost you.

Direct – Recording direct means that you’re recording an instrument by connecting its output directly to the input of your mixing console or recording device, without the use of a conventional instrument amplifier. It is fairly common practice to record electric bass or electronic keyboards direct. Yes, sometimes you put a mic in front of an amplifier, but for bass, I only do that when I need the sound of a speaker flopping around.

“EQ on the way in” – An equalizer is a tool used in audio that enables you to cut or boost certain parts of a signal’s frequency range. Think of it as a high class tone control. Some recording engineers apply equalization to instruments to alter their tone before they’ve recorded anything. The drawback to this practice is that when you record all of the instruments to separate tracks and then play them back together, some of them may require a different tone altogether. If you’ve captured the instruments as purely as possible, you have a better shot at using equalizers to get the sound you want. If you’ve EQ’d on the way in, you might not have the frequency spectrum that you need to cut and boost.

For example, assume that while recording guitars, you notice that the guitars are a little boomy (too much bass), so you use an equalizer to make them sound thinner. The sound is filtered but the guitars sound better. During mixing however, you decide to go with one guitar for the song instead of two, so you mute one. That one guitar, which you thinned out with an equalizer “on the way in” now sounds too thin (not enough bass). If you’d have recorded the guitar without any EQ, you might have that fullness you want. You might be able to use an equalizer to bring it out. However, you recorded the guitars thin by equalizing them first. The lower, fuller part of the frequency spectrum was filtered out and never recorded. Therefore, it can never be brought out with EQ. You’re hosed. I knew an engineer who used to call recording “taking a picture.” It was a pretty good metaphor in this case. If you cut off the top of grandma’s head when you framed the shot, you’re never going to make it appear when you print the picture. Her head was never in the shot. You’re hosed.

Oddly enough, I’ve read that Todd Rundgren always EQ’ed on the way in. In the Meat Loaf autobiography To Hell and Back, Meat describes the problems it caused when he hated Todd’s mixes of Bat Out Of Hell and tried to give the job to another engineer. Eek!

Cans – Another word for headphones.

So what was up with my bass sound?

Impedance mismatch. Impedance is resistance to alternating current, but it’s not important that I explain the physics in detail. Suffice it to say that electric guitars and basses are high impedance sources and mixer inputs are generally suited to low impedance sources. I recorded my original bass track using an input that was supposed to have been designed for direct recording of guitars. Somebody’s guitar maybe, but not mine. The impedance rating was just too low. After a lot of research, reading of specifications for my various pieces of gear and experiments with 4 different methods of recording the bass, I determined that due to impedance mismatching, I simply wasn’t taking the picture of my bass.

Because of physics and junk, when you have an impedance mismatch condition, your bass signal loses a lot of the frequency spectrum and sounds dull and lifeless. I had plenty of low end, which I heard in my headphones, but when it came time to mix, my signal didn’t have the goods. So much for these new-fangled digital audio interfaces, eh? “You don’t need a direct box! Plug your guitar or bass right into the input of your insert audio interface model of your choice here!” What nonsense, at least where the Echo Layla 3G, my interface, is concerned.

So, like I would have done 15 years ago, and should have done a long time ago, I bought a new direct box, which converts a signal from high impedance to low impedance. I had one back then and always used it for bass (before I went digital). I re-recorded the “True Star” bass part in short order. I just played it back and wow! Do I love Fender Precision Basses! When you record them correctly, they sound fantastic, right off the pickups, no amp required.

Like Levon Helm said when listening to the piano track of “Rag Mama Rag,” it’s easy when you know how. Despite my adoption of new technologies, sometimes what I used to do still works best.

In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that I took my own advice for once and delegated. I’ve written previously about how web site design is a great way to procrastinate. It’s always a great way for me not to do what I’m more ideally suited to. However, I was growing tired of the previous look of my site and I wanted to change it. It started out very well. I had a few ideas. I had some breakthroughs in understanding and those ideas became achievable. In realizing those, I got a few more. It was very promising for a few days. Then, the days turned into weeks. Suddenly, I was working on a web site and not music, again. I needed to get out of it, but I’d invested so much time that the only way out was forward, not back. So I made a list of what I still needed done and headed to Elance.com. I posted a job and had four bids in about 20 minutes. I hired someone qualified and this headache was off my plate. Now I can just write, which is what I wanted to be doing in the first place. What a great thing! I highly recommend delegating. Could I have finished the site myself? Maybe. Should I have? Definitely not. I must learn to live this way all the time.

The sad irony of designing a great blog theme is that if your readers subscribe to your feed to get regular updates, chances are they’ll never see your theme. Wild.

This month I began obsessing about how I might stage the musical extravaganza that is my next album. After all, I have to gig on this stuff or there’s no point. I thought I had it figured out, but then I lost a key musician, already. I’m regrouping and trying to solve that problem. At least I’ve lined up a drummer on whom I can depend. He also sings backup, which makes him a damn unicorn where I come from.

In his book about excuses, Wayne Dyer had an answer to an excuse I could very easily warm my hands over. I can’t achieve my goal because I don’t have anyone to help me. To re-center, I often meditate on his affirmation. “The people you need to help you are already here, and are on their way.” That feels so much better to me than complaining about the pool of New York area musicians. Wayne’s right on, I think.

Being an independent musician means coping with countless unknowns, innumerable situations in which the outcome cannot be guaranteed. It’s a challenge for musicians like me, who are in control of most everything about their music, from conception to recording to management and so on. As soon as others are factored into the plan, things always get unpredictable. The key is to re-center constantly and resist the urge to control when control is impossible.

So, today I have a single task to accomplish. Love the music.

I rarely left the house except for trips to the doctor. I slept fitfully and in the back of my mind suspected that the strain would surely visit some of the same symptoms on me. This week, I’m left with a persistent and violent cough. While I did everything I could, I didn’t seem to be helping. There were times of utter frustration and overwhelming anxiety. I could not control the situation. I could scarcely influence it. There were times when any influence at all would have been a blessing. A loved one’s wellness isn’t something I ever want to bargain with and it never leaves room for compromise. Despite a checklist of far more severe trials that we had endured, I felt as if we were in serious trouble.

When under duress, I often retreat into relaxation and breathing exercises that are mildly akin to meditation. I’ve been using these techniques for about ten years, whenever I’m backed into a psycho-emotional corner. They came in handy last month as fevers rose and days passed without improvement. In most all of the adversity that I encounter, meditative techniques are quite satisfactory, as they enable me to look within, to find strength, peace, and sometimes, resolution. This is the first time since I can remember that I felt as if the techniques were not enough. It was then that I resorted to prayer.

I’ve long claimed that meditation and prayer were no different. Whether you called it the Universe, the higher power or God mattered very little. I maintained that we were all talking about the same thing. Interesting that when I was at my weakest, I suddenly called what I was doing “prayer” and from a cognitive standpoint was placing power outside of myself. Normally though meditation, I felt that I could draw whatever I desired to myself, but in this situation, I just could not seem to visualize a universal oneness. I was too weakened, too flustered. As I looked to God for an answer, change began to occur. Ice cracked. Fevers broke. Immune systems finally took hold.

I have a much deeper understanding of the connection between meditation and prayer now. Perhaps what I viewed as a weakness, an inability to overcome feelings of helpless isolation, was just the unconscious subverting of the ego that I required. In a way, there was an acceptance of a situation that was far outside of my abilities to control. Placing power in God’s hands was a sort of meditative shortcut to the sense of oneness that eluded me. Acceptance and peace can be goals of meditation. Instead of meditating simply to draw something to myself, by means of my own energy, I let go my problem to the universe with the profound message that I could only solve it with help. I surrendered to the flow. Help arrived because I declared that my energy alone was not enough. So, despite my internal semantic sleight of hand, I was projecting the same energy I always do, talking about the same thing, as it were. I had simply been lacking a key ingredient: cognizance of the truth that energy doesn’t just come from me. It is within and without, everyone’s to share in as needed, and there is an inexhaustible supply. In prayer, I called it God.

I thought of the idea of a higher power used by recovering addicts. I talked to an addictions specialist I know, who explained the reasoning to me. The recovering addict admits that left to his own devices, he will make a bad decision. To head off that event, he places the situation in the hands of his higher power. At first, I believed placing power outside of the self to be a weakness, but if you believe in the universal connection between all things, there truly is no way to place power outside of yourself. Placing something “in God’s hands” is only a semantic variation. This practice is acceptance while simultaneously availing yourself of the limitless energy that belongs to all of us. You’re not saying, “I can’t do this.” You’re saying, “I can do this, with help. I choose to open myself to the help I need, to the energy in all things, to God.”

If you send your message, what you desire comes to you. I’ve learned that in sending your message, you must also submit to the universe, energy, or God, within and without. In connection to what is freely given but never controllable, meditation will bear fruit. It must. It’s the law.

If your message is that you can’t do something, or that there is no hope, or that you are alone, these untruths may be “heard” as your desire. Regardless of whether we pray or meditate or whatever it is we do, we must choose to experience life as if we can do anything, that hope is real and that we are connected to all things and never alone.

That’s the way I want to live.

Nevertheless, sometimes a recorded performance goes sour almost immediately, in the first measures of the piece. Most of the time, the engineer or producer would just call the take a false start and tell the musicians to start again. For some reason, and probably for one of those I mentioned earlier, sometimes those flubs make the record. I always wonder why, having not ventured very far into a take, they didn’t just try again. Here are some of my favorite examples of “Didn’t that deserve another take?”

Majestic Dance by Return to Forever – I actually just heard this cut again for the first time in years. It has always been my favorite track from the Romantic Warrior album. It featured the most notable line-up of the band, with Al DiMeola on guitar. As early as I can remember, being a musician in grade school, I was hearing my guitarist friends rave about what a monster player Al was and how they hoped they would play as well as Al one day. (To my knowledge, few, if any, ever did.) An experienced guitarist, I can hear a typical guitar flub in measure one of “Majestic Dance.” He plays the chord on beat three, but I know what it sounds like when you just don’t grab it perfectly. Al barely got this one out and, like when I discover such a flaw in one of my own recordings, the weirdness gets louder every time I hear it. It would have been so easy to hit it again. I wonder why they didn’t. The piece is so badass.

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out by Bruce Springsteen – This was the first Bruce album on which Max Weinberg appeared. Fresh off a run in the pit orchestra for the Broadway musical Godspell, Max got his break with the E Street Band because he didn’t play like Ginger Baker. This track begins with a nice little soul fanfare. Then, it’s a solo buzz roll by Max leading into the main groove of the tune. They’d only played 3 measures and Max muffs the buzz roll! I’m sure Max had played a million buzz rolls, but this one, for posterity, sucked! Poor Max. I heard him say once in a talk he gave at my college in the 90s about his experiences with the band that the muffed buzz roll always bothered him. Me too. He’s still one of my favorite drummers. I only wish they didn’t allow him to be so horribly misrepresented. Even if the horn section had gone home, it wouldn’t have been impossible to punch in that buzz roll. It’s amazing what you can decide to live with when you’ve been in the studio too long.

Why Can’t We Be Friends? by War – This was a big single from a very interesting 70s band from East LA off an album of the same name. This track’s even got that feel-good off-mic chatter like a 60s party record. I managed to locate an original vinyl pressing of this album, still in the shrinkwrap, back in the 90s. It even had the poster in it! I love the sound of this it. It was the soundtrack for my summer barbecues for ages. In this single, there’s a high keyboard riff at the beginning that forms the foundation of the groove when the entire band enters. This record was a major hit, but in the very first measure, Lonnie Jordan just totally butter fingers the chord change! Happens to the best of us, but that’s a false start if I ever heard one! Hey barely even makes it through the second pass! Geez… To misquote a rap that appears earlier in the album, “Lonnie gonna make it real sloppy for you…”

Ventura Highway by America – This one is hard to hear. Maybe that’s what they thought too. With all of that wonderful California acoustic sweetness, your brain might be candied to numbness and never notice. I have a friend who’s a radio producer. He introduced me to the concept of the “post.” The post is that part of a record when the vocal starts. When DJs were important on the radio, it was always fun to hear the good ones talk up a record. A good DJ could run his yap during the intro of a hit record and sound completely effortless, finishing his sentence just in time for the post. It requires a good bit of musical feel and pacing to get it right. I think it works the same mental process involved in merging onto a highway without inconveniencing anyone. Sometimes, a lame DJ wouldn’t make it and he’d step on the post. (My buddy also told me about the unwritten rule of “Hotel California” and its exception to the post convention. Never talk up a record with an intro as long as that one. ) Anyway, listen to the wrong chord at the post of “Ventura Highway.” If the DJ was good, you would never have heard it.

Too High by Stevie Wonder – This one may or may not have been a candidate for another take. It depends on what instrument Stevie recorded first. He played everything on this. After one measure, the tempo takes a dive. It sounds like a burst of the musician’s energy that quickly got a hold of itself and settled. That’s not interpretation folks. That’s just what happens when you play all of the instruments yourself (I know something about this) without a timing reference. Any mistakes you make in the first track will always be there, no matter how many instruments you layer on top. If you try to overdub with a flawed first track, you’ll be a slave to that track’s idiosyncrasies on every pass and with every new part until you mix. Sounds on tape won’t breathe. They are on the tape, as is, for eternity. I’ve saved timing problems with a tambourine in my day, but no tambourine would have fixed this one. You just gotta follow it. If the rest of the tune was in the can by the time ol’ Stevland did the drums, I can see where they might’ve have wanted to live with it. However, if he did the drums first, they might have tried again, or at least cut the tape to include a more tempo-matched intro.

To be truthful, I kind of dig this one. To hear that even Stevie Wonder can be noticeably flawed makes me feel better about my own tracks. I felt the same way the first time I heard a tape edit on a Nat Cole record. Even Nat Cole’s takes weren’t all perfect. Now that I consider it, I listen to the tempo change on “Too High” for enjoyment.

Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty

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.

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…

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.

Therefore, look for a new recording very soon! I’m going to release a new song from New Aquarius monthly. I don’t expect that every song from the album will be available as a single first – probably only about half of it, but I’m going to offer something very special to those of you (and you know who you are) who acquire the previews as they come out!

Here’s what I’m gonna do…

• I’ll release the New Aquarius preview songs exclusively through my download store here at chrispreston.com (in the Music tab). I’ll release something new about once per month.
• Remastered versions of the preview songs will be available on the completed New Aquarius album when it’s released, along with the songs that were never released as previews.
• If you’ve downloaded the all preview songs by the time the CD is released, you will receive a CD copy of the album as a special gift from me!

The first song I’ll make available is an acoustic tune called “Everybody Loves A Pretty Girl”. Watch out for it!

“The suspense is unbearable. I hope it’ll last!”