Build It Up To Break It Down
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I had a nice little Mog mail chat with the Mog Father, David Hyman, where he responded to a comment I made, saying he was surprised about the band Phish's (Phishes? Phishs?) major influence in my musical journey. If you haven't payed attention to Channel Contrabandwidth, I occasionally slip in a reference to my hippie-esque days, and even once in a while I will post a Phish tune or cover. Perhaps it's the nature of people who are instinctual repelled by Jam Bands to flee or glaze over when they hear the bands name. I don't blame them really, millions of fans referring to the band members by their first names, as if they know them personally. Statistical analysis of the probability of certain songs being played versus when they were last played. Slobbering enthusiasm for a band that could do no wrong to their followers. Yes, it was cultish, and in the end I burnt out on both the bands and the fans. But I will never regret the good times I had at the shows - all 36 of them.
But this is not a post about Phish. This is a post about momentum. About build ups. About, as David Hyman put it, for "live joyous rapture, [it] didn't get much better". And that, above all else, is what I got from Phish's music. I get it from other music, now and then, but not as frequently as I did in those days.
This conversation led me to think about that alchemical quality that some music has over you. You know, music that turns straw into gold in your ear canal, and allows your soul to touch the edges of the heavens. The idea of transcendence is one of the first American philosophies. The idea that we must leave society/structure, and venture into the wild only to come back. To get lost in the wilds of your mind was to come back to your version of normal with a different perspective. I believe musics answer to this lies within the "jam".
Perhaps some people don't like their music reaching for the border-less void. Perhaps to some music, popular or otherwise should always be first and for most about structure. Melody to them is a different form of mathematical equation. Whether the elementary 4/4 additions of bands like the Ramones, or Other Wordly formulas by the likes of a Thelonius Monk or Sun Ra, they are all right. I have also known people who hate guitar solos and think songs should be no longer than 3 minutes. All of these views I respect. I see validity in them all.
I no longer follow "Jam Band" music, perhaps to my own misgivings, my own desire to not be pigeon holed, my realization that my great days with that form of music ended in 1998, when it all coalesced into what it was. It was about the here and now, it was about being in the moment, finding a place through listening that musicians on stage were finding through playing. It was about a build up of chords and notes, a harmony of melody, sweaty bodies dancing, and flashing lights taking you places you didn't know you could travel without drugs or divine intervention (I was only high at probably 2 Phish shows, so I know it wasn't the drugs that made the music better). It was about being there in that time. And when it was over, you could never go back to it, except maybe at the next concert. Sometimes you never got that high again. So we that were in that moment looked for pale substitutions that took us to that place in the form of bootlegs. While it made you remember, real good, that moment of elation, it's never the same. A bootleg of a concert you've been to is like second hand smoke - the qualities of the cigarette are there, but the feeling of smoking the cigarette are not.
Looking back, and forward too, I see that to me, good music has to build to something somewhat unidentifiable. There are few bands that ever built a song up live the way Phish did, you could listen to Trey Anastasio moving his fingers up the neck of his guitar until you were sure he was going to run out of notes, the whole band and crowd hanging on every note, just waiting to reach that apex and be pushed over the cliff. And it would free fall into the end of the song, at which you'd wipe the sweat off and smile at the people all around, just to make sure they were hearing what you were hearing.
Bands like Explosions in the Sky, accomplish this in each song they write a mini soundtrack for films that don't exist. Perhaps it's why they were chosen to write the incidental music for the show Friday Night Lights.
The Flaming Lips have built their music and live concerts on a mixture of earnest expression and celebration. Throw in some people in fury animal suits and Christmas decorations as well, and it's a build up of your repository of good cheer, often stored away until the holidays.
But I have also heard this build in the form of albums by bands like Radiohead, whom I followed from "Pablo Honey" to "OK Computer" wondering just how each album dwarfed and surpassed the last one. It was like discovering chocolate, deciding it was your favorite food, and then discovering something better. It doesn't get much better than that as a music fan.
There is an old saying "Beyond Mountains, there are Mountains." This is the feeling one gets when they get to the top of a difficult summit to cross over, and realizing there you have to go back down and start all over again. Sometimes we load up theSherpa's and decide to make that climb all over again with some artists no matter what, some we let take us back down to the valley, and wave them on their way.
Music can be difficult, and often hard to ascertain it's intentions. Different music is needed for different occasions. Perhaps because we often look beyond what art is, for the deeper meaning, we fall in the trap of not just existing with the music, within the moment. We ascribe personal meanings to others lyrics, and forever cement them in our own lives in certain moments in time. But like riding the notes, while their produced in front of us, we cannot feel them the same way again. Try as we might to capture their bodies into recording devices, their soul, like the idea that "Energy can never be created nor destroyed." It exists only to move through someone else's fingers, into their notes, and down into your soul.
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