The Dance of Electricity

“The Dance of Electricity,” from Tangerine (1997).

The hounds stopped their howling
Replaced by the wailing of machinery
The calls of the crows and the mockingbirds
Gone silent, subsiding away
The sailors now sailed to foreign places
Leave no traces, no memories behind
The urchins of alleyways
Forever now fleeting, they’re drifting away
The water of wishing wells
The dust of the dreaming that’s disappeared
The shining of sundown
Superseding’s the dance of electricity

The trace of the outline of industry
Has permanent placed itself on the old skyline
The smoke of the twilight horizon
Has, shrouding, descended and seized the day
The feeling of four-letter fingerprints
Impressed itself onto the outside.  It’s crying out,
“Wait!”  Now the whole price has pushed itself
Inside of each and of all of the hollows.
The shelter of solitude
The noise of the numbers of metal days
The brightness of moonlight
In the dark of the dance of electricity

The leaves and the laughing of lily-roses
Who now can suppose who can speak in their way?
The tempo has taken its trampling
To the tears of the hallowed of higher places
The shadows of new-orphaned faces
See the spaces of lifetimes now leaved behind
In the shaking and stealing simplicity
In the trance of the dance of electricity

I went through a period in the summer before I entered grad school where I moved from Claremont back home to San Diego and wrote a number of tunes very quickly, with little editing but with a series of what I think are pretty good melodies.  There are three or four tunes from that period that actually haven’t seen release in any form and, having heard them a few years ago as I was going through my old 4-tracks and remixing them through Pro Tools, aren’t likely to be made available any time soon.  I was working quickly and playing around, and wrote some pretty embarrassing lyrics in the process.

I got better as the summer wore on, and that August (or so) I wrote “For Good Measure,” “I Know and You Know,” and “Have You Seen My Baby?” in that order, all of which still stand up and which are here heard in the 4-track demos I cut that summer, later to be re-cut for the House Carpenters’ In the Choir of Primates in 1995 and Bill & Pete’s Hey Rhumbahead! in 1993.  It was a real streak, that August, and “For Good Measure” at the time and in hindsight really represented a jump forward for me in the way I would feel that something like “I’ve Maintained My Advantage” would later on.

“The Dance of Electricity,” on the other hand, is like all the stuff I wrote in, let’s say, June or July: cut from a different and lesser cloth than those later three.  The lyrics are a mess, if evocatively so.  I’d just read Ulysses and, while I never labored under the conceit that was a writer that sings rather than a musician, or a poet rather than a songwriter (why on earth, I think, would someone who could write songs want to be anything else?), I did like how Joyce was so willing to do unconventional or anti-conventional things with language and form.  It seemed then and in its way still seems to me a good general policy, though for years now I’ve played with form and language in a less outwardly obvious way than I do in this tune.

I became very attached to E.P. Thompson and John Ruskin‘s writing in grad school, and I thought a lot at the time about change in history, and things that are lost.  I don’t think I’m a nostalgist, but I am very skeptical about the idea of progress.  I have always lived in thoroughly modern places, be they suburbs or, as I do now, in a genuine city–and Dakar is, without question, a thoroughly modern city, if of a different side of modernity than one sees in San Francisco.  Dakar would be impossible to imagine before the creation of a global division of labor.  I say this to contextualize the fact that I spend a lot of time daydreaming about living in a quiet, rural environment and walking everywhere.  I don’t know what to make of it, but suffice to say that the imagery, drawn from 19th century reactions to industrialization, are only partially a pose on my part.

What makes the tune worthwhile is the mandolin riff.  I can’t remember precisely, but I’m fairly sure this was the first tune I wrote on the first mandolin I purchased, an Irish-style Flatiron I bought used and which later split in two when a bass drum rolled on top of its soft case on the way home from a gig once.  There’s not much to say about this, except that it proves you can get a lot of mileage from a good riff, even when the other parts of the song, while not totally indefensible, aren’t up to the riff’s quality.

I have made the point elsewhere, but, again, this is a good example of how a great record doesn’t need to be made up of nothing but great tunes.  Rule #1 about choosing tunes for a record is that the tunes must be good to listen to, and therefore they need to be decent tunes.  What makes a decent tune, though, is the big question.  I’d put forward that any tune needs to have something extraordinary about it.  In this case, it’s the mandolin riff.  Actually, in hindsight I would say that everything else about the tune, from the lyrics to the vocal performance, which is likely the oddest one I’ve released, are fair at best.  I have a few tunes that I have no intention of releasing that have both better lyrics and a better performance, with a melody on par with their better lyrics and performance.  “The Dance of Electricity,” however, beats out the objectively better tune, because it has one element that really is special.  It’s got a great riff, and while that doesn’t make for a great tune, it does make it work on what was a great, if unintended, record, Tangerine.

Tangerine, again as I’ve written before, consisted of a bunch of tunes I had on 4-track that either I’d never tried with a band or which had never worked with one.  I had a fairly large back catalogue by the time the House Carpenters ceased to be, and 1997, which should have been the worst year of my musical life given the band’s implosion, ended up seeing two good records come out and a new-found confidence and independence on my part.  The Bathroom Mirror, recorded to walkman in a day and released on cassette with photocopied packaging, served to prove myself that I possessed all the tools I needed to make something beautiful.  Tangerine served to show, above all to myself, that I had been doing so for years if only I had been aware of it.  Interestingly, though I would strongly disagree, there are people who think it my best record.

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.