The Church of Rock and Roll

I spent today’s sunny Sunday stroll with my favorite album: Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones.  Starting my walk in a kind of brain dead, crabby haze (too much grading of papers and writing of report cards!), by the time I returned I was alive, exhilarated, my head clear.  My soul and spirit had been raised and cleansed.  “Exile” was, as it always is, a religious experience: a statement which I make in very literal, very serious sense.

I don’t go to church.  The truth is, houses of worship give me the creeps, as does religion in general, particularly all the large, organized varieties.  The iconography, the incense, the ritualistic superstitious supplication, the handing over of control of my own present and future to some unseen force, the notion that going through some elaborately choreographed  set of words, gestures, or songs somehow makes me a better person— none of this has ever rung true for me.  I don’t think any supreme, sentient being is looking down, guiding, judging, or paying attention to our tiny little rock or me in any way, and even if some as yet undetermined, undefined force or being does exist, I certainly don’t think any religion or any person here on earth has ever got a clue as to what such an entity is up to at all.  If you’re a believer and religion helps you makes sense of things, that’s fine with me, but it doesn’t for me and I stay away from those places.

However, I do believe that some phenomena within our human experience do defy rational or scientific explanation.  A few years back my family had just returned from a blissful 2 week vacation.  We had visited relatives, camped, hiked, taken in ballgames, toured historical sites, and had a wonderful time in general, all at the height of summer.  We returned on a Sunday afternoon and were NOT looking forward to the harsh return to work and the weekly grind on Monday morning.  While I was certainly not faced with any tragedy or terrible hardship, I was certainly on a buzzcrash—my mood, as it was this afternoon, was bleak, unpleasant.   As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.”  I took my kids for a walk by the lake while my wife made dinner.  The Chicago Park District stages concerts by local ensembles at parks around the city throughout the summer, and on that particular evening my kids and I encountered a local gospel ensemble—a chorus backed by organ, drums, and bass—in full flight.  Tragically I forget the name of the outfit (I believe it was Bobby Rush’s Praise Ensemble, but I’m not sure), but I’ll never forget the lady singing a solo in front of the band with her eyes closed and clapping her hands, her voice rich and throaty, melodious and gritty all at once.  She was oblivious to everything in the Universe except the music coursing through her at that moment, and she appeared to be merely a conduit for this current, though one able to conduct the current because she had spent a lifetime in convocation with it.  We caught the last 20 or 30 minutes of their set, and by the end, like this afternoon, I had been turned around: my head was clear, my outlook was now positive, my soul and spirit had been raised and cleansed.  The music had been a religious experience—defying not only rational or scientific accounting but also any straightforward mental health explanation whatsoever.  No conflict had been resolved, no therapeutic epiphany reached—the music had simply fixed me up.  It was at this moment that I realized that music is my religion and that I am a member of the Church of Rock and Roll.

And so what does this mean?  “I belong to the Church of Rock and Roll” sounds like some hamhanded, trite, clichéd movie script crapola, and in some respects it is.  But for me, and, I suspect, for many others, music—not church—is where we go, what we turn to when we’re lost or bleak, what we rely on to bring us back around when everything and everyone else has failed us, the way church and religion does for people who believe in these institutions.  And so yes, in all seriousness and absolutely: music is my religion and I am a member of the Church of Rock and Roll.  Music has the power to raise and cleanse me, to exorcise my soul and brain of my own personal demons, to remind me what is really beautiful and important in this world.  The phenomenon defies rational explanation, but is undeniably real.  While on that particular afternoon, I came to this revelation through music that would be classified as “gospel,” the music which speaks particularly to me, my own personal denomination of the Religion of Music, is Rock and Roll—that raw, crass, mutt of a genre, born of a fusion of black, white, gospel, blues, jazz, folk, and country influences whose first prophet was Elvis, that crazy boy from Tupelo, Mississippi.

Religions encompass a set of ethos, of values, codified in a set of “sacred” texts.  So it is with Rock and Roll: the music has traditionally valued a youthful spirit, passion, racial and cultural diversity and equality, a questioning of authority, a respect for nature, a sense of political and civic duty, peace and love, a celebration of sexuality and bacchanalia as a response to the stresses of modern life, a self-mocking, dark kind of humor.  While not exactly the same as the values laid down in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, or any other “sacred” text, they’re not far from them, and certainly represent a modern conversation with them. 

These values are embodied in a set of sacred texts: records.  I don’t have a fuckin’ bible.  I have a record collection (here broadly defined as any music I have access so—vinyl, CDs, stuff I’ve downloaded, whatever).  This is where I always turn, always have turned when I’m lost.  Hooks from these records limn the way I live.  From Exile on Main Street: “…the sunshine bores the daylights out of me…” “…you got to scrape the shit right off your shoes…”  That, ladies and gentlemen, is the way I roll, a credo, fer sher. 

Religious folks spend time praying—communing with their values using scared texts as a basis for conversation with some higher being—every day.  Music plays in my house and in my head without stopping for a minute ever.  It fills me up and makes me think, every minute of every day.  Yeah, I pray—every time I put on a record, I invoke a power larger than myself, something which defies rational or scientific explanation—and I pray every day, all the time.

And so: I consider myself a pretty spiritual guy, despite the fact that I’m not religious at all, and am somewhere towards the atheist side of the agnostic-atheist spectrum.

Unlike many (though certainly not all) folks who do subscribe to more conventional, organized religions, I don’t think my own beliefs are “right” or appropriate for anyone else.  They’re right for me, and my bible—the colossal, dynamic body of recorded music, in particular of the rock and roll variety—allows me to have a very personal and individual set of religious beliefs, that won’t even be the same for everyone in my particular “church.”  Actually, anyone with a particular artistic bent—painting, writing, dance (my daughter)—is likely to have their own personal religion and church in an analogous way.  This is a powerful and beautiful notion: that bodies of artistic work constitute a set of sacred “texts” which articulate the human experience and transcend scientific explanation by raising and cleansing the souls and spirits of individuals who come to know these bodies of work intimately.  “You got to scrape the shit right off your shoes.”  Rock and Roll is my scraper and, thus, my salvation.  Amen.

Runnin’ On Empty and My Only Regret

I’ve certainly screwed many tons of things up in my life, and there are also many cool things that I might or could have done but didn’t, but I don’t regret any of these things except one: I never trusted myself as a musician and so never had the opportunity to go on the Road.  In later years, I have at times, perhaps quite delusionally, gone all Marlon Brando on myself: “I coulda’ been somebody.  I coulda’ been a contender.”  Maybe yes, maybe no—in all likelihood, I would have amounted to just another guy in just another band who wanted to make it and didn’t.  But I’ll never know, and I’ll never have had the experience of taking it on the Road to find out.  This is my one and only regret. 

To live a life in which the whole point of your day is to get to the stage and play for an hour or even 2, to arrive at a point as a part of a band where the act of performing becomes routine enough that you are so focused and comfortable in the act of creation that you aren’t really aware of the audience but only what you and the band are playing…that’s  the one thing I wish I had done in this life.  The feeling a band gets when they truly enter a groove—it’s better than any fuckin’ drug, sex, love, french fries, or any other damn thing in the world, and the only way you get to that point, that groove, is by performing together every night.  The Road Life--  much romanticised and also much maligned—that constitutes the pursuit of this place is the subject of Jackson Browne’s “Runnin’ On Empty.”

And so: I took a walk today with Jackson Browne and the Section (a group of LA musicians who backed dozens of classic albums in the 70s and 80s) as they hit the road with Runnin’ On Empty, and, as it always does, the album left me pretty shook up by the time the band walked offstage after “The Load Out / Stay.”  The album documents the Road experience as clearly, completely, complexly (just made that word up right now, heck yeah!), viscerally, and beautifully as anything ever recorded.  The band sound is enormous—David Lindley’s lap steel and fiddle work takes a lot of the foreground, but Leland Sklar’s bass, Russ Kunkel’s backbeats, Danny Kortchmar’s rhythm guitar, and Browne’s smooth and precise vocals all are equal elements in the palette.  The tracks—recorded onstage, in rehearsal rooms, motel rooms, on the bus— vivdly document, implicitly and explicitly, the band’s love for their musical work, but also the loneliness and boredom of the Road life, and also pay homage to the hard work and cruel ironies of the life and roles of roadies, bus drivers, audience members and other non-performers involved with the Show every night.

The album opens with the title track overviewing the magic of Road Life—driving and playing and living out The Dream-- driven by a straightforward but unshakable guitar riff, mid-tempo backbeat, and soaring lap steel lead work by Lindley.  “The Road,” documenting the ironic loneliness of a performer’s full-yet-empty romantic life, is next.  The tune’s first verse is actually recorded, appropriately enough, in a motel room, and then cuts to the stage for the last 2 verses.  The nearly silent moment when the listener sails from motel room to stage in between verses, cued only by the faint hoot of an audience member, is like running off the end of a cliff and starting to fall, and eerily evokes what must be the performers sensation as he leaves partners in one town and moves to play another show in the next before repeating the same cycle over and over.  “Rosie” is a heartbreaking testimony to the jealousies of roadies, and Danny Kortchmar’s “Shakey Town” studies the peculiar and complex relationship between the guys in the band and the tour bus and truck drivers in the Road Culture.  The cover of Reverend Gary Davis’s “Cocaine”—well, that’s pretty straightforward, but it’s a hell of a rendering of the tune and that part of the Life.  By “Nothin’ But Time,” actually recorded on the tour bus and describing the phenomenon of leaving one show to go to the next, the listener knows the band loves to play and is glad for the chance to do so but also knows that the Road Life is not simply a bed of roses.

The record closes with “The Load Out / Stay,” which the band had never performed and had only run through once very quickly the afternoon of the gig on the recording.  They had to listen very closely to each other to make the damn thing hold together onstage, and the intimacy of the band’s musical moment on this number, ironically delivered in front of a packed auditorium, is a helluva thing to hear.  “The Load Out” celebrates the hard work of the road crew, the love and devotion of listeners who attend shows, and Browne’s deep appreciation for them both as well as for the opportunity to live the Road Life.  The simple piano and haunting melody which frame the song are genuine and moving and never fail to remind me of my only regret. “Stay” is a warm bit of wishful thinking that any one show could go on forever.

I don’t regret not being a rockstar, but I do regret never having the chance to live the Musician’s Life on the Road, in pursuit of that dream.  Runnin’ On Empty’s real gift to me is that it takes me there and lets me live that life in all it’s glory and loneliness, if only briefly.  Thanks, Jackson.