Music therapy. I suppose that

October 15, 2002

Music therapy. I suppose that is what my life is really about. If I look at it from a selfish perspective it has functioned as auto erotic behaviour that doubles as healthy voyeurism for others. I’m getting off and someone is hopefully getting off listening to me get off. I think you have to look at in a grotesquely selfish way because the truth lies in there somewhere. There is no other reason to choose this as a vocation. Nobody should be able to make it work any other way. In order for the music to be of real value the musician has to love it first. Each note flies away with a piece of the ego and, after a whole night of “givin’ it away now”, the player is grounded. He or she has shared themselves with Caligula’s whole palace throng and can now kick back on the pile of discarded togas.
We took our Sharkskin music therapy machine to a sunny Vancouver Island for the thanksgiving weekend (Canada). Although I would say I “get off” playing solid, behind the beat rhythm with Colin James there is some part of me that needs to play the occasional solo. All my guitars are specially built to handle both rhythm and lead work. My amps are dual purpose as well. The ‘skins are an instrumental R&B organ combo in the style of the MGs or the Meters and this gives us all plenty of space to wank. The groove comes first. First you must surrender to the collective to be taken by the blissful trance of the groove. That can’t happen any other way. You must be willing to give up all flash and peacock behaviour in order to later be rewarded with the chance to strut. If you can stay on the same skinny little chicken skanking for five minutes you will be anointed with the power to bend, slide, trill, and hammer on before the song is over. There is no end to the song until everyone is done. In the best cases we have gone somewhere we would never have thought we’d go by the time the song is played out. We hadn’t fired up the Shark machine for some time so we were all hoping to get to that experimental and exotic place quickly. It took a little bit of time but we all got therapy. I guess its our musical veteran’s idea of a “getaway spa” in an exotic locale. We take Sharkskin to a beautiful location and get paid for doing all the things we were warned by club owners and musical advisors never to do. We don’t sound check. We show up 5 minutes before playing. We don’t have set lists. We start slowly and build it up. We don’t sing songs. We don’t play anything that anybody really recognizes. We have no “career plan”. In this way we are free.
I really think the audience loves to feel this energy. They don’t want to go for a night out to a place where the predominant vibration of the band is, “we are giving you what we think you want in order to keep our jobs and live to play for you again”. People get to wallow in that feeling at work all day. Lord knows I’ve played out the pop showcase scenario countless times in order to get a leg up. I have surrendered my will to them on many occasions . In the end those high pressure situations only ever panned out if we all went in saying, “#@7*this %#@!, lets just play”. Sometimes the “f’you attitude” backfired when the band got carried away with its own inside jokes but, in most cases, it served to make us look different than the social climbers. Anecdotally it might be fair to point out that opening with a faithful cover of “Play That Funky Music” by Wild Cherry at the Odds label signing celebration in Los Angeles might have been a mistake. I still remember the baffled frozen “what are we going to do with this” smiles of all the record company stiffs who were flown in to check out the new next best thing. They later grew to love that part of us but could never “market” it. The cultivated “f’you” works much better in a marketing strategy. We’ve seen that work through all of rock history. The “new punk” is perhaps the best example. A “fuck you” with fashion sense. A real “fuck you” isn’t as easy to control. Sometimes it involves dropping out of the whole scene in order to save yourself. That doesn’t help “career momentum” at all. Sometimes it involves burning your meal ticket and starting from scratch on your own terms. Who’s going to understand that except you? That’s why daddy needs his medicine every once in a while. It comes in the form of music therapy. Live by the sword . . .be healed by the sword.