San Diego/House Concerts

“San Diego,” from Building St. Petersburg (1999).

“San Diego,” from 1998-1999 (2005).

“San Diego,” from Live at Keith Danner’s House (2005).

A part of me has thought I’d post about tunes that are less what I’d think of as Bill classics–such as they are–than stuff I’ve done that show up rarely if ever in a live set and which never account for any of my iTunes sales–such as they are.  This, for no reason other than to vary the music I myself think about.  The classic Bill tunes–such as they are–get enough attention and end up in live sets, which is probably enough.

That said, in the many months since I’ve written posted anything at all here, I’ve played more gigs than I have in years, all in living rooms.  The short of it is that I’ve really been pleased to play house concerts for friends and acquaintances, much happier than I’ve been gigging out so to speak in cafes.  At most of these house concerts I’ve played, either by request or my own volition, “San Diego,” which is definitely not the best tune I’ve ever written but which is one of the most classically-formed and easiest to play well live.  Play well, meaning not simply in a technical sense, but emotionally.  It’s an easy song to invest with real emotion.

The video above, as the opening image notes, was shot in Pasadena a few weeks ago.  I went down to the CCSS conference to participate in a workshop and I arranged to play a house concert at the amazing Brian Forden’s pad.  I slept on Max Gerber’s couch.  Max shot video at the house concert itself which turned out nicely and which I’ll use for more videos as well in the future.  Max, whose photography is becoming fairly well known, shot this video in his living room the morning after the house concert and I felt I played the tune fairly well, particularly for never having cut a video of any sort before.  For those of you who have never seen me, I look more-or-less like I do in the video, except in color.

I’ve gotten a lot, as I noted above, playing these house concerts over the past six months or so.  We–my wife and I–have been fortunate enough to have been participating in a Marx reading group with some really heavy hitters from News and Letters, and we are now, having started with On the Jewish Question, are reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.  A few passages are apropos.  From the “Human Requirements and Division of Labor Under the Rule of Private Property“:

…no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds, out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the glue-pot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)

And conversely, from “The Power of Money“:

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.

As an aside, I want to repeat to everyone that that last is Karl Marx writing.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that he was anything other than as deeply a humane human as we as a species have produced.  For me, personally, the two combined crystallized feelings I’ve had about music over the last years.  For much of my adult life, certainly since I got my first good review in 1995 or so when I sent out the House Carpenters’ record to a few places, and then especially when I got some shockingly good reviews in lo-fi/DIY ‘zines and websites, with The Bathroom Mirror, etc., I’ve chased sales as a measure of my worth, musically.  Chased sales, however, poorly, with intermittent effort at best, and a chronic hesitance to press for a sale.  I am a commercial failure, without question, and for years this wounded me at some level, despite having done everything in my power to not sell records.

At all of the house concerts I’ve played, I’ve had people I know over.  At Brian’s, I was surrounded by very old friends, mostly from Pitzer, people I’ve known upwards of 20 years now, as Brian arrived in 1989 if memory serves.  I’ve played all the concerts for free, and while I’ve made CDs available on a sliding scale–they do carry a cost–I’ve approached them as social, rather than commercial occasions.  It’s a beautiful thing, really, and I feel like I’m actually coming to a point as a person where I am accepting that in fact this is the more natural form of music: that of a social affair between people who care for each other.  I have imagined Mississippi John Hurt a lot, before these house concerts, not for his “rediscovery” but imagining what it was like for him before that.  Tom Hoskins, who tracked him down in Avalon, Mississippi, asked people in town if they’d heard of Mississippi John Hurt, and if memory serves the reply that they certainly knew a John Hurt who played at social occasions locally.  Imagining him in those situations really has been good for me.  I have to think that those were beautiful events.

In any event, whether my imagination has simply run wild or not, I have been enjoying the specificity of playing for people I know, and for playing to play rather than for any other reason.  It is very difficult in this monetized society to dissociate notions of value from money.  I feel pretty certain I’m getting closer to it.

The song is one of my most often requested, and one of which I’m most proud.  As I noted above, I don’t think it’s my best tune, but it’s certainly one of my most easy to play.  The idea is pretty simple, and I came by it honestly and truly authentically.  When I was in high school, growing up 40 minute max from the border, people I knew would go down to Tijuana and take advantage of the city: buy alcohol, act foolish, and do whatever else they didn’t brag about when they came back.  They only ever bragged about getting drunk.  It struck me then as horribly screwed up, even if I didn’t have the language to articulate it particularly well.  The tune was based on that memory.

A last point: the guitar is worth mentioning.  I bought it in 2004, a Galloup Solstice. I’d had beers with someone who had recently retired and purchased for himself a truly fine piano.  He told me that I really needed to have a great instrument, that having a merely good one was not enough.  I went to Westwood Music, tried out a number of guitars, and picked this one.  I’ve never looked back.

“Body & Soul”

“Body & Soul” (1997) from The Bathroom Mirror.

“Body & Soul (live)” (2005) from Live at Keith Danner’s House.

I smell my pillow and I hear a sound.
My eyelids open and I’m earthward bound.
Pretty soon the sisters wheel me around.
“Body & Soul.”

It’s Tuesday morning so they wash my hair.
The interns greet me as I pass the stair.
I start to mumble and the sisters hear a prayer.
“Body & Soul.”

I hear the Father‘s footsteps up and down the hall.
He’ll take all morning but he’ll see us all.
I hear him whisper and I hear him call.
“Body & Soul.”

The dishes break and then a rolling train goes by.
My head jerks backward and I shut my eye.
My head sees Heaven and the swirling angels sigh.
“Body & Soul.”

The sunburnt courtyard.  The dusty hill.
The metal grating on my windowsill.
The wooden beads and all these crushed-up pills.
“Body & Soul.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tune lately, as I’m going to perform it in a couple weeks and I believe I will be able to convince my harmonica-playing pal, Colin, to up and join me on this one and likely a few others.  He and I played for the first time in 20 years last spring, noted in a previous post on “Full Tank of Gas,” and when I went to his pad one afternoon about a month later this was one of the things we did.  Predictably, it worked well.

One could argue these things, but I don’t think I’ve written a better tune that would fall into the “blues” category than “’Body & Soul.’”  Interestingly, I’ve also not written a tune that I can recall that so completely resists orchestration of any sort.  The House Carpenters recorded this one evening as we taped our rehearsal, and while I was fairly pleased with the results, nobody else liked it.  Most likely, it was the tune I was happy with, not the arrangement.

More than one person, in praising my tunes, has pointed out that I give a sense of place in them, and I’ve always felt I couldn’t get a higher compliment.  I read Vine Deloria’s God is Red a couple years ago, and it really had an impact on me, aside from being a pure pleasure to read because of his prose.  Contrasting Christianity as it is practiced in North America with a generalized Indian—that is, North American Indigenous—religious practice, the fundamental distinction is that North American Christianity has totally abstracted itself from any sense of place while Indian practice is entirely predicated on the specificity of place.  I’ve thought a lot about that, and it really seems to me that things would improve a lot in this country if we (collectively) started to deal with the specificity of place as well as deal with dreams, as in dreaming consciousness.

The place in the tune is specific, if imagined.  There is not to my knowledge any Catholic hospital in Riverside, CA that offers the kind of care described in the tune.  I don’t even think there’s a Catholic hospital.  That said, the land is absolutely there.  The “dusty hills” are the same as in “The Man From Manila”:

These hills rise above me, devoid of all plant life.

The live version of the tune, above, was recorded at a house concert just below those hills as I imagine them in both of these tunes.

I have at times introduced this tune as a blues number about mind/body dualism.  I don’t actually buy into the concept, I’d state clearly, but I imagine that someone who is quadriplegic would find great meaning in it even if one rejected the idea ultimately.  It would seem to reflect one’s life.  It’s interesting to me that some people are placed by circumstance to live in a totally existential sense, certain philosophical or religious concepts that I learned about in school or read in books.  I saw this a lot in Senegal, where I knew some deeply spiritual people, in a very true sense, but also who at some level had so little materially that it seemed that they almost–I know how problematic it is putting this way, but the sense is still there–had no choice but to detach from material things.

I’d read in the few years before I wrote this tune a lot of William Blake, as well as some critical literature on him and his work alongside a biography.  So, Blake had visions.  Of interest to me was a contrast between people who placed his visions into scientific categories–he suffered from some sort of mental illness which may or may not have played a role in his economic difficulties–and those who simply reported that he had visions.  E.P. Thompson, whom I’d discovered in grad school and really liked, wrote what was for him a short book on Blake, and placed him in his very specific religious context, that of radical London religious dissent, that is to say, Protestant but not Church of England, and very much in tune with notions of individual revelation, rather than ecclesiastical authority.  Not only Blake had visions, but lots of people in the fair number or small churches he attended did.  It’s just what you did when you were a radical English religious dissenter in the eighteenth century.

It’s really troubling to me when I look, from the outside, at Christianity in the United States, though by no means is the following characterization applicable to individual Christians or all churches.  It seems as secular a phenomenon as I could dream up, because it seems more of a social network or social identity then a means to some actual, experiential spiritual or religious anything.  The social network aspect of it can manifest in very good and important ways, as in for example The Catholic Worker movement, or in the business cards I’d find on my door in Riverside for gardeners offering their services, cards with the Christian fish symbol on it.  I imagine that putting that symbol on the card actually worked to drum up business.  The social aspect of modern American Christianity can be seen of course in its most negative aspects as well in some of the hatred people spew in the name of religion, and though I’m well aware that this is a virulent minority I also know that it’s very important to pay close attention to these people.

The tune, to bring the digression above back to the song, contrasts the nuns and priest, who obviously do good work but who are going about their day in a world that seems to them to be exactly as it appears, with the main figure in the tune, who has ecstatic visions.  I suppose that in my life that the satisfactions I’ve found become fewer and fewer as I go up the chain of any hierarchy.  I appreciate Blake more than I do any Christian leaders, and I appreciate that Hui Neng was an illiterate woodcutter.  I had a professor at Pitzer who taught the Tao Te Ching, and when going over the passage that reads something like, “the Tao is like water: it seeks the low places that men disdain,” he asked, “isn’t this a loser philosophy?”  He then added, “I’m not saying it isn’t true.”