Nearest to Being Free

Richard Thompson is one of my musical heroes, and one of my favorite songs of his is “Let me Ride on the Wall of Death One More Time.” (If you haven’t heard this, go directly to iTunes.)

Literally, the “Wall of Death” term has two meanings that I know of. One is a particularly violent kind of mosh-pit activity in which two groups ram violently into each other in a sort of homicidal Red Rover move. The other, which I assume Richard Thompson is referring to, is a motorcycle stunt ride that is basically like driving around the inner side walls of a giant barrel at a 90 degree angle to the gravitational pull of the earth. Thompson, with his master-craftsman songwriting, transforms the adrenaline rush of the stunt ride into a powerful Zen metaphor for…well, basically for getting up in the morning.

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

You can go with the crazy people in the Crooked House
You can fly away on the Rocket or spin in the Mouse
The Tunnel Of Love might amuse you
Noah's Ark might confuse you
But let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

On the Wall Of Death all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death it's the nearest to being free

Well you're going nowhere when you ride on the carousel
And maybe you're strong but what's the good of ringing a bell
The switchback will make you crazy. Beware of the bearded lady
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Oh let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death…

In the last 33 days, I have played music in China, where I saw mind-blowing gardens, stood in the Cold Mountain Temple, walked through Tienan’men Square, and climbed the Great Wall (not to be confused with the Wall of Death, unless you ask my shaking legs). I have come back home and been sick for four days (probably the salmonella-tainted tomatoes the news media are all panicking about). I have taught and performed at the most intense and incredible Zoukfest ever, during which I met Andy Irvine, one of my other great musical heroes, and had the great good fortune to sit 20 feet away from him while he gave two performances that moved my heart to tears. I have, with our medieval group Altramar, learned, rehearsed, and recorded the most technically demanding ars subtilior medieval piece I’ve ever had to lay down on a CD. (Yes, I am going to write about all these things in this and in subsequent posts; this is the preamble.)

I have no idea how all this happened in 33 days, unless there was some sort of wrinkle in the space-time continuum – a phenomenon that seems to happen more and more frequently these days, as if everyone is trying to jam 4 lives into one incarnation. It ain’t over yet, either, as we can see from next month’s itinerary: Zoom back up to 7000 feet to see my Taos buddies. Fly to Bloomington to honor the tenth anniversary celebration of the monastery where my Tibetan teachers live. Fly to Massachusetts to visit my family. Go to New Hampshire and attempt to learn how to play the gamba by flinging myself into a group of people who can already do it and brandishing a bow with unabashed ineptitude. In between all of this I will be studying like mad to take doctoral qualifying exams in September.


You can waste your time on the other rides…

It’s been an interesting week. The full moon on Wednesday marked the high point of Saka Dawa, the Buddhist observance of the Buddha’s Enlightenment. This celebration changes a bit from year to year due to the lunar calendar, but it’s usually in the late spring-early summer; and the full moon day has the strongest energy. It is said, in Tibetan Buddhist lore, that any karma you accrue in and around this day is magnified a hundred thousand times.

What did I do on Saka Dawa? I played music, which is not surprising, since it’s what I do; but it wasn’t just like any other day. Coyotebanjo and I were joined this week by our comrades J and D from the medieval ensemble Altramar. We all founded this group together in 1991, and in those intervening 17 years we have made 8 CDs and played concerts from New England across to the Midwest, South, California, Pacific Northwest… and over to the other side, to Ireland, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Since around 2001, when the last of us left Bloomington, it’s been a lot more difficult to do frequent projects, and our last CD was released in 2003, before the record company’s demise. And while the three of us who settled in Texas have done concerts together since then, it’s been a very long time since all four of us were in the same room, never mind recording anything together, although we’ve had a new project in the pipeline for quite awhile now.

But something unexpected came along to kick-start us into gear: an invitation by our dear friend and mentor, the brilliant and highly-respected musicologist Peter Burkholder, to record some pieces for the forthcoming new edition of the companion CDs to the Norton Anthology of Western Music.

Now, I have to explain that this is a pretty big deal, at least to a bunch of music history nerds like ourselves. (To give you an idea, when I told the good Doctor Masbrow, our friend, colleague and Paragon of Irish Pardessus de Viol, that we had received the call to do this gig, he mimed holding a telephone receiver up to his ear, saying in mock disbelief “Who is this, really?”) The CD Anthology is used by literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of university music classes around the world as a companion to a huge number of university music history courses. Young musicians and their instructors are going to be looking at the scores, studying for listening exams, and listening to YOU. So let’s be honest with our highly Unenlightened selves: this is serious ego candy. It’s also terrifying, because that sort of microscopic scrutiny requires a certain level of performance perfection, and even if you achieve that to your own satisfaction, the aforesaid musicians and instructors may decide that, as they say in text-message lingo, UR doin it wrong. And that, my friends, makes Big Ego very worried and scared (what with the threat of nonexistence and all that sort of thing.) There is only one remedy, and that is to perform music as if it is Not All About You. Considering how blatantly obvious this is, it’s shocking how difficult it can be.

Anyhow, on Wednesday night, Saka Dawa, we did the first recording session, beginning with a fun piece that all of us have been playing for years. That was a piece of cake, and Coyotebanjo and the rest of us completed recording with no problem other than wrestling a bunch of gut strung instruments into tuning submission.

The other two pieces, to be done by J, D, and myself, were quite difficult; one with a lot of subtlety and very high in my range, and the other full of early 15th century meter changes and high-velocity gnat-notes. Since we Altramartians live so far apart from each other, there’s not a whole lot of time to rehearse – we began last Sunday – and we have to rely on learning things individually ahead of time, and then applying our professional experience and skills to get us where we needed to in terms of ensemble, and get it pretty swiftly.

So, on Thursday morning, having been pleased with the results of the previous evening, my Altramar colleagues and I were riding to the recording studio in Acuff (a metropolis consisting of a mini-mart, a diner, cotton fields, several barking dogs, and one well-hidden recording studio.) We were a little apprehensive; in truth, we really needed one more day to polish both pieces…but we were scheduled, so off we went; nervous, adrenaline pumping, zooming along in our Honday CRV – which, incidentally, Coyotebanjo and I had bought from D, who had driven it down to us from Michigan to Texas.

On the way, I missed the right turn for State Road 40, banged the next right, and looped around down a short piece of dirt road. The somewhat hyperbolic name of this glorified cowpath – “Holly Avenue” -- cracked D up; I reminded him that half of Big Flat Place is named after its home-boy Buddy Holly. In a jiff, we were back on 40; the detour had probably taken about 6-10 seconds. We approached the junction where 40 crosses the ring road that encircles Big Flat Place. This spot was apparently engineered by someone who thought that a stop sign at the end of the ring road ramp would render it unnecessary for anyone cruising down 40 to be able to actually see another vehicle exiting the ring road ramp until said vehicle was virtually at the stop sign. In this case, the vehicle exiting the ramp was some Texas asshole in a two-ton gas-guzzling Suburban going approximately 65 to 70 mph off the ramp, through the stop sign, across 40, and back up onto the ramp headed in the opposite direction. We saw him do this from a slight distance; he was, by my estimation, about 6-10 seconds in front of us.

Six to ten seconds.

After screaming something abusive in the direction of the vacuum-formerly-occupied-by the speeding Suburban, I said to my comrades, “I guess it’s a good thing that we overshot Rte 40.” A moment of silence then followed, during which it sunk into our brains that the seemingly meaningless glitch of initially missing the turnoff had probably saved all three of us from dying instantly in a fiery wreck.

We rode in silence for about 10 minutes.

J said to me later that during the 10 minute silence, the thing that was going through her mind was a swift reassessment of the importance of this recording in the Grand Scheme of Things. I myself was pretty shook up, and tried to concentrate on just being calm and driving safely. Nevertheless, I found myself musing on the serendipitous “Holly Avenue,” and remembered that D, who had thought the name was such a riot, is from Clear Lake, where Buddy Holly’s plane crashed. In short, I got completely creeped out.

The session we did that day was difficult. I was hoarse and the energy wasn’t humming. The engineer, Alan Crossland, was fantastic as always – he is the soul of skill, patience, and cheerfulness – but I was feeling sorry for him because we three weren’t locking in. We did multiple takes for two pieces and mixed part of one of them, but ended up ultimately using stuff we would record during the following two days. Normally I would be upset by that, but you know what? I wasn’t – because I was with my longtime friends, finally playing together again since I don’t know how long, and we were breathing and not being extricated from the engine of my Honda CRV.

We did eventually get the thing right. The next two sessions had the results we wanted. I can’t say we went in there and breezed through them in one take (more like 7 or 8 for each piece, with a number of additional sonic band-aid takes, what with all the little details we were trying to get right). But we’re happy with the result.

And, it was wonderful and somewhat emotional to have the four of us together in the same place for a week. Coyotebanjo did the tenzo thing and spent hours cooking fabulous food for all of us. On Friday night, the other Altramartians joined me and Coyotebanjo at our regular Friday night Irish session, and to our great surprise and delight the fourth member of my other band – the Irish band, Johnny Faa – had driven up from Austin to surprise everyone. I had never been in the same room with all members of both of these performing groups that mean so much to me, and it was quite overwhelming.

It was inevitable, of course, that on the last evening we Altramartians sat around reminiscing about our teacher Tom Binkley and the Early Music Institute. Something then possessed us to dig out the VHS tape of a 1990 performance of the EMI performance of the medieval Carmina Burana (not Orff, but sections of music from the actual medieval Carmina Burana manuscript, a huge theatrical undertaking.) Only D, myself, and Coyotebanjo had been in the production, but ironically, J had been there to see it, since she was there that weekend auditioning for the program. I tell you, it’s a strange experience to watch yourself 18 years ago. Seeing the video, and so many people we hadn’t seen for years, unleashed a torrent of reminiscences, some sad, some happy, some hilarious. In the morning, we had brunch together at our favorite place here in BFP, and then J & D went back to their respective homes, he on a plane and she in her van. I miss them already – but I feel as though something has been set back into motion; something that has been stuck. The day after the full Saka Dawa moon, the planet Mercury ceased its retrograde motion and turned direct; in astrological language this means that the energy was very good for getting things “unstuck,” and I hope that’s true.

In the meantime, I keep thinking about those 6 to 10 seconds. The fact that music is not All About You somehow feels directly related to that: "You" could be gone in the blink of an eye, and then what?

On the Wall Of Death -- all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death -- it's the nearest to being free…


Who cares if the recording is perfect, or if someone disagrees with the way you articulated those 32nd note triplets? Music is about the energy generated by the people making it, and the energy created by whatever is happening between them, or between the makers and the listeners; and not necessarily about the makers themselves. It’s a vehicle for community and communal energy. It's far greater than the sum of its parts; and even if you’re the one driving the vehicle, even if you’re the one generating the energy, it’s not about You and it’s not Yours.If you’re a musician, that’s enough of a reason right there to do your spiritual practice: I’m convinced that the musicians who understand that it ain’t theirs are the ones who move us the most. But more about that in the upcoming Zoukfest post.