Here Come The Organisms

Here come the organisms. All creatures great and small. Led by Captain Beefheart. You can’t keep a man like that down for long. The Beefheart organism is choc-a-bloc with organelles. Donkeys with doubts and doings and dongs. Guinea pigs pirouetting on the backs of elephants. Ichthyologists swimming libidinal waters. Shy quiet pools of turquoise ringed by Sonoran desert toads. Zebras in skirts. Giraffes in drafts. Crows in ice cream bowls. Mosquitos with proboscises as big as phonograph needles. The Animals. The Monkees. The Eagles. Iron Butterfly. The Stray Cats. Blue Oyster Cult. The Byrds. T Rex. Government Mule. Grizzly Bear. Atomic Rooster.

The joy of a vinyl record is a groove. Sad movies make me cry I don’t know why.

Here is what I can do for you: nothing. I can't do a thing for you until you tell me what it is you want me to do. I can be a boxing partner or float you into the trees with my ambient charm.

I want to be like a wilderness of snow and provoke the jingling of reindeer.

I want to be rocks. I want to be sleep. I want to be a tree that rocks in the wind like sleep.

You want language to attain music. It attains the sense of music not in sound but in its attitude. Attitude in aviation means orientation to the horizontal plane. It is much the same in music, as when the rhythm mimics the landscape of the human heart, and all the buffalo scatter as the train moves down the rails, the ties still reeking of creosote, I’m guessing that odor may have been in Neal Cassady’s nose before he collapsed from exhaustion and died. There is music for this and the music is inconsolably sad. But underlying all music is a sense of defiance. Music is not of this earth and it knows it and flaunts it, flaunts it beautifully in the angelic voices of women and the source of all voices which is breath, which is air, which is so thin and delicate you can’t see it, but it’s strong enough to support a cargo plane weighing over a ton, and that’s just the wind.

If it’s Lizst it spits if it’s Bach it’s back to back and if it’s Mozart it’s more than art it’s linen.

Down here in the dirt nothing hurts. The music of dirt is a music of worms. Roots and mushrooms. Correspondences. It’s a big all-encompassing melody sewn with the stars in the still of night, Juliet in the mausoleum, on her knees with a knife. This is the music of yearning. Tim Buckley's “Song to the Siren.” Sung by Elizabeth Frazer. The call of seals on the shores of Moray Firth. Music isn’t mere sounds. It’s a zone, a place where nothing hurts.