A Little Nostalgia For The Old Folks

A Little Nostalgia For The Old Folks

Ahhh, typing away at my own desk. Warmed over chicken nachos, a can of Steel Reserve, and chips at my side. It's a good night.

Interesting band things going on. I'd told the guys in Indiana that I could do a gig in October (two weeks after the big festival that's M's last gig and was supposed to be mine) now that their bassist situation is totally up in the air. The singer just called and I've committed to Oct. 7 - we're doing TWO gigs that day, one of them around noon in Noblesville, and we'll be making $290 each in one day.

When he offered me this, I told him, "You fucking stupid cunt. How dare you waste my time with such trivial poop. Of COURSE I'm not interested."

I love my friends.

With the band down here in a very odd state, I might be hanging on up north even longer. They have nothing else scheduled in October. The November schedule works great for me - only two weekends, one of them a Friday and Saturday, which means more money and an easier excuse to do it, and the other weekend right after Thanksgiving when I'd planned on being up there anyway, partly to take Katie up there for family, and partly because I wanted to see them with the "new" lineup that night, which now looks like I can still be a part of.

Five gigs in December. One isn't too appealing. Two are another Friday and Saturday - very doable. Another is probably the night I'd be there for XMas with family anyway. The last is New Year's Eve and pays quite well.

Given the strange existence I have now - the band here in flux, and just starting a temp job that is guaranteed to be over at the end of October - it's starting to look very likely that I'll not be leaving this band for some time. And though the other reasons for not doing it are still there (time issues, the fucking three hour drive at a time when the car somewhat frightens me) the money just might make it worth it.

I really don't want to leave. I havne't wanted to since the day I said I would, back in May.

I'll spell it out - I fucking miss where I was at four months ago. And I love being here in SW Ohio again at the same time. I've been living a crazed double existence for years now - my marriage, then the year in Indy trying to make time for Katie as well - and now I'm just doing it again here.

So I'm used to it, and I'm up for the challenge. Hey, what the fuck?

And now for what I was meaning to write before all that other shit got in the way.

Now that I'm back online, I've been exploring my favorite torrent website for bootlegs, and am currently downloading a show from the new CSNY tour - they're doing a very political set list, including most of Neil's brilliant new album. One of my friends just saw them in Michigan, and it sounds like a damn fine show.

When I got that running, I noticed something in my folder - the last thing I'd downloaded before leaving Indianapolis. A ProjeKct 2 show from June of 1998.

ProjeKct 2 was a spinoff of King Crimson, and I saw their very first show in Nashville, Tennessee in Feburary of '98. I saw more shows in that year than any other - two P2 shows, 4 Keneally shows, Bela Fleck twice, Yes, the Further festival (with a stunning set by The Other Ones, and a highly enjoyable one from Hot Tuna, so I got to see both Phil Lesh and Jack Casady mangle their basses on the same night, and believe me, I was DROOLING) and I can't remember what others offhand.

The ProjeKcts were King Crimson's way of exploring different combinations of a six-man lineup in an improvised setting. P2 was Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, and Trey Gunn. Belew was playing the then-new Roland V-Drums, Gunn was doing terrible things to a dog with a fork (OK, actually he was playing his Warr Guitar), and Fripp was...Fripp.

It's difficult to summarize the impact Robert Fripp has had on my life. He's been involved in some of the most mind-bending music my ears have experienced, and his writing - while sometimes leaning towards absurd pronouncments, such as his insane attitudes towards audience recordings of his performances - has just as often been completely inspirational. He can be both remarkably profound and highly goofy in his stilted English way, and I love him for it.

But mostly I love what he does with his guitar. Crazed yet precise pointillistic riffage, bursts of savage chord-mangling, psychotic screeching fret-burning, sustained fuzz for days and days. And lots more. Fripp is immediately recognizable in nearly everything he does, and he's displayed a committment both to excellence and individualism that is awe-inducing. He's also funny as hell sometimes, but sometimes you have to be looking for it.

My trip to Nashville in 1998 was, at the time, the longest I'd ever driven. Over 5 hours just to see three guys play music that they supposedly barely knew anything about themselves.

I remember finally finding The Cannery after driving past it about 8 times. It was off the road a bit, and was in fact an old cannery. It had been emptied out and turned into a concert venue.

I also remember finding a hotel before a show, and standing in a phone booth calling home next to a stunning blonde girl with a fabulous Tennessee accent that made my weiner warm.

Watching Belew that night was like watching a kid in a candy store. The warped pop/rock guitar-noise merchant, cut loose behind a set of electronic drums, wreaking havoc behind a pair of string-bashing gods instead of being one himself like he usually is.

Watching Gunn was like watching myself if I'd been one-zillionth as cool as him. The lucky sonofafuck who got to not only share a stage with those other two freaks, but was treated as an equal, and made some really fuckin' cool noises on his 8-string thingamafuck. He looked slightly out-of-place, but totally fit in. He was on stage with his heroes. MY heroes. I fucking hate that lucky fucker.

Watching Fripp was...most of what I did that night. How one guy on a stool can ROCK so much is something that can only be witnessed to be believed. The whole tone of the night was reflected on Fripp's entire persona - a joyous EVIL. A twisted little romp through the merry little dark corners of your sunny fuckin' doppleganger. Have a flower. It's killing time.

It was FUN. Vicious, dark, and terrible fun. The child-like wonder of a McCartney ditty welded to Hendrix-meets-Bartok in a back alley while beating the shit out of Mr. Whole Tone Scale with a bloody hammer. David Lynch re-films your favorite Care Bear episodes. Mahatma Ghandi does a two-step with Stalin. Mother Teresa hands a blanket to Satan while he pisses whiskey-stained death on her head. Dick Cheney plays Twister with They Might Be Giants. Syd Barrett records your favorite Meshuggah hits. Napalm Death's Christmas Extravaganza. The lion lies down with the lamb, the lamb lies down on Beelzebub, Stallone donates chocolate bunnies to homeless children, a little girl's favorite teddy bear cornholes Aleister Crowley while H.P. Lovecraft dances the Charelston with Dora The Explorer.

You know - Heaven. Dougiestyle.

I walked out feeling like I'd witnessed the birth of Something Special. The electronic whiz-kids of the '90s Crimson finally finding out how fun it is to act like the guys back in '73 and '74, when men were Brufords, and bass players were way the fuck too loud but sounded so goddamn cool you didn't mind one bit.

I was asked recently (by my insurance man, of all people) what would be my idea of the perfect band for me to be in. It's not an easy question, because what I REALLY want is a band that can and will do ANYTHING, at all, for no reason except that nobody ELSE will play Coltrane right after Hank Sr. tunes, after the 20-minute Pink Floyd medley that followed our tribute to Chinese polka, and by the way, next up is our xenochronic rendition of Varese's Deserts with In-A-Gadda-da-Vida and Like A Virgin.

I mean, come on, why the fuck NOT?

But if I had to do one thing and one thing only...my head would explode, but for the sake of argument...

I asked him if he'd ever heard of King Crimson. And suggested the '73-'74 band in particular.

It's not so much the exact sound they pulled off. It's just the over-arching idea of the thing. Melding tightly structred, super-intricate explorations into angular harmony and mutant rhythm with all-or-nothing fullbore improv, usually with a sense of evil lurking about, sometimes with some very weird (and out of tune) Mellotron, and always with mondo-fuzz guitar, crisp drumming, and a bass tone you could rebuild fourteen World Trade Centers on top of.

You see, '73-'74 King Crimson is kinda important to me. Once upon a time, one of the most important people in my life compared my bass playing to John Wetton's during that period, and while part of me utterly resists a compliment like that as absurdly over-kind, I know WHY he said that, because I've spent the better part of 20 years trying to BE something sorta like John Wetton (and Jack Bruce, and Les Claypool, and Paul McCartney if you filled him full of crank) in the very limited contexts I've found myself in, and nothing but NOTHING can take away the RAPTURE of finding some monster thick tone and waxing fuck-a-delic under a one-chord groove in a manner at least in the same galaxy as John Wetton in the 1973-1974 King Crimson, which might just be my entire goal in life - I wanna BE the bass guitar parts on Red. Kill my ass dead and reincarnate me as a 13/4 riff in Starless, and I WILL LOVE LIFE.

On that night in 1998, I felt that I was seeing something not exactly like that merry ol' band of yore, but something that at least had captured more than a little of that spirit, and at the very least had the same weird English guy on a stool doing the same kind of ridiculous and beautifully fucked things to his guitar.

When Crimson got back together a couple years later, it was supposed to have benefitted from the lessons of the ProjeKcts (there were three others, I've got recordings) and I was greatly looking forward to it. A new leap forward. This was the band after all that had recorded in The Court Of The Crimson King, Red, and Discipline, three radically different albums that had all pointed towards an exciting future that few other bands have still caught up on, all these years later.

Instead, they pooted forth some piece of dreck called The Construction Of Light, easily the most pointless and unlistenable SHITSTORM Fripp & The Boys had ever inflicted on the general public, with a complete disregard for the excitement and power I'd witnessed one night in Febuary 1998 in Nashville, badly produced with a rhythm section that really should know better than to be thar boring while Fripp recycles 30-year old riffs.

Actually, it's a bit better than that and doesn't bother me as much now as it did at the time, but I still regard it as Crimso's worst album, and my relationship with their output since then has suffered, even though the next album (The Power To Believe, just had it on tonight) is really not a bad thing at all.

I'll never forget that night. Maybe 40 feet from Fripp, watching him tear Hubble-photo-sized holes into the space-time continuum with a twisted glee, spending as much time shaking my head and laughing as anything else, walking out of The Cannery afterwards with my brain cells reorganized while Soundscapes fluttered over the PA and the house PA played...

"Won't you take me to
Funkytown?"

It had been playing when I walked in before the gig, and there it was again. Funkytown. Fucking FUNKYTOWN. Bookending ProjeKct Two. Never in my life will I ever be able to turn the station when I hear some shithead DJ put on Funkytown, because now that song has Special Meaning to me, and someday, someway, I will crank my Fender through a Big Muff and blast out some fuzzed-out Fripp-esque psychosis on top of MY version of Funkytown, (hopefully recast as some kind of metallic anal-fuckfest, with Wetton-sized bass, and guitar tones that would make Trent Reznor crawl into fetal position and beg for his Mommy) because goddammit, why the fuck NOT?

Robert Fripp, you are my hero. One of 'em, anyway. Shine on brightly, and may your lark's tongues always be soaked in aspic.

Love,
Dougie