Janine Guzzo was the first person that I ever heard refer to me as a musician.
I suppose I must have been about 24 years old at the time. If I remember right, it was part of a relatively benign and pedestrian thought. Something like, “I’d rather not have a drunk musician in my house at 11 o’clock at night.” Either way, the point of the sentence was not that I was a musician, but that is the part of that statement that has been hanging onto my memory for dear life. For decades.
It felt weird to me. Sort of like it didn’t belong. And it wasn’t imposter syndrome, either. When I think of “musicians” I think of the guys on Buddy Rich’s bus. I think of the school band. The girl with the cello on her back. Any of these people could take out a score, lay it on a stand and go to town. I really can’t.
I do understand how music works, though. I grew up as my own four piece. Vocals, guitars, bass, a passing knowledge of percussion and enough of an ear to know how to EQ properly. In fact, you can go on Spotify and look up Frankenstein Dog. There’s an album titled “Burst” where I wrote the songs, and played everything except the drums and a few solos.
Even still, music has always been a tool that I use to make words more expressive, to accentuate emotion and to make poetry less boring. I kind of feel more honest saying that music is a necessary evil or an effective tool rather than something I have adoration for.
I know this because whenever a well meaning relative would say something to me like “I really want you to listen to this because I know how much you love music” or when a girlfriend would say, “I thought you would want to go see “The Stupids” tonight? Don’t you love music?” I’d always think, “No. Actually I hate music. Especially other people’s.”
Now, please don’t dismiss me as a snob or a mean spirited jerkoff. I have certainly tried to enjoy other people’s music. And, of course, I couldn’t live without the music that has influenced me along the way. But the music that has touched my heart has always had little to do with the fourth and fifth and a lot more to do with the minor fall and the major lift.
This knowledge resided inside of me for a very long time and I never felt like it was something worth sharing. That is, until recently, when I saw an old Bowie interview where he said the same exact thing. I always suspected this was the case with people like Bowie and Dylan and all those other artists that transcend music theory.
The interviewer said, “Music has always played a major role in your life” and he said, “No, actually not. I don’t go and listen to music and I don’t have an enormous record collection..music has always been a way to portray my ideas. I don’t find it enjoyable. It’s like paint to me. But painting was never an enjoyment to me, either.”
There were, of course, many comments. The usual stuff you see on social media. Meaning, many different people from all walks of life, giving their opinion on subjects they have no hope of ever understanding.
Yeah, he must’ve been going through his fuck with the media stage
Yeah, he doesn’t like music. That’s why he was a millionaire.
Omg! How much coke is he on?
It’s hard to think of a phrase more pretentious than “Renaissance Man” but it’s usually the way laymen describe anyone who can excel in various areas of the art world. I know, personally, I have always wanted to crawl into a hole whenever anybody used that expression with me.
The times I have heard it is when people find out that I’ve acted and played music or written and played music—almost as if these are separate talents and skills. They aren’t, really. If you’ve ever seen The Man Who Fell To Earth or Mary J Blige in Mudbound or even Lady Gaga in A Star is Born, you know that it’s all an extension of one superpower—a very clean connection to source energy.
When the opportunity came up for me to play a disgusting priest who gets mutilated by his child victim in a metal video, I didn’t think, for one minute, that I’d be sent home because I wasn’t cutting the mustard. Poetry, music, playing pretend—it’s all available to every single one of us if we continually learn to just get out of our own way.
The elements that pollute our connection to source are ego, bad intention, and self involvement. The only natural resource any of us have is ourselves and when we’re not giving the world the purest version of ourselves, we’d be better off not clogging up the airwaves with whatever it is that produces.
Crap, I think they call it.
Hallelujah :)
“It’s all an extension of one super power-a very clean connection to source energy”. Every piece you write has at least one statement that grabs me. And for that I thank you! More short stories please. 🙏