my lack of presence has been due to an amazingly productive and busy semester, playing more than ever with good players on really fun projects.
you know, I dont know how it's going over there at K&^% or whatever they call it. the little bits I've heard and heard about sound very generic and overly consistent. lots of, you know, singer songwriter, indie this and that, acoustic cafe, world cafe, carnage cafe, dont give a fuck cafe, people tryin real hard to sell their "Music to the (WAH)" slogan. lots of network shows that fit the Adult whatever format and I just cant do format music any more. it all smells like theyre tryin too hard to bring the damn pledges in. from their page: "I support K&^% cause it support the music I love!" you know what...Bullshit...it's slick crap from the sewers of the music biz and that makes me wanna kick it in the groin till my foot gets tired. eat me.
music was never meant to be a slave, a pet maybe but never a slave.
sure we 'used' music to create shows and 'tell our stories'. we never abused it. we never stuffed it in an shrunk wrapped industrial plastic pre-fab widget and made it do stuff it was not intended to do. at least the vast majority of the time. we had fun and I'd like to think the audience and the music we aired was having fun, too.
then I fucked up by trying to squeeze mySelf into a widget cause I thought security and money was too good to pass up. I like to follow the river and that's where the river was going in 1997-98.
well, at least those sacrificial 4 years gave me ranting rights the rest of my free life.
now I improvise music and teach according to my own desire and design...I work all of 11 hours a week plus god knows how many practice hours I put in, at least twice that, and I get by. it's a positive life that contributes to only good stuff. no commercialism, no slaving meat wheel, no time oiling the machine for turd heads spinning their brains in the service of other turd brains. there are no turd brains in my life. how many people can say that? it's almost like I've already retired. all the turd brains I see are on TV.
I have no interest in going back into radio as we know it. I've probably said this more than a few times cause it's been on my mind a while: my pleasant little dream is to get a gig in a tiny ass free form station when I'm 70-75 in taos and do my version of ken nordine plus a ton of cool music from the various corners of my life. there has been some truly kick ass music recorded these last 50 years. millions of tunes I would love to choose from while I sit and smile at what I just said to the few hundred night creatures eavesdropping.
they might think I've become a whacko in my old age. they wont know I've always been this way.
1 comment:
I love this post. You have a way of saying what I think but in a much more creative way.
If I ever, ever get my hands on a radio station, you'll be one of the first invited. For a few brief beautiful moments there has been beautiful radio flickering in and out of the hemisphere and you rode the wheel for plenty of it. It's a tragedy of poverty on the waves now and the shrink wrap rules the day. When the human mind gets widgetized there's really no hope of drawing it into the outer reaches of unpredictability, even if that horizon is scattered with riches.
$$ is the problem. I've fucking had it with money. Money is what can bite me. My time is worth far more than money. Unfortunately when I put my ear to the world speaker, the sound of hamster wheels spinning drowns out the music these days. But amazingly enough, musicians still make music. There are people in my neighborhood pounding drums and singing in the street. I think that more than anything is why I'm liking hollywood. There's another Hollywood that's full of shit, but the unsung hollywood, even though festering with homelessness and towered over by the commercial spires at Hollywood & Highland, has some kind of spark that makes it interesting to just walk out the door. Santa Monica was a blank face compared to where I live now. This gives me some irrational hope. That and the fact that musicians are still channeling something pure, even if it's not going on the radio. How to make that happen..I don't know.
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