Walking into the new boss’s office the first few times to find AC/DC, Nirvana, and Rolling Stones DVDs playing on the same big screen the previous chief had used solely to watch news updates boded well. I submitted my heavy metal fandom as an ingratiation offering right away and imagined myself eventually becoming his personal rock consigliore. To my dismay however, I soon discovered that his openness to counsel was not exclusive. He proved willing to take his musical broadening from any peddler with a CD burner. I knew the cause was finally lost when, just two days after having gifted him an expertly handcrafted Melodic/Goth Metal mix to little response, I found him effusively praising a compilation of manic California skatepunk passed him by some other wannabe Rasputin. Recognizing my pearls had been cast before swine, I let go the pipe dream of taking on an elder apprentice and retreated back into the closet solitude of unrecognized genius.
Some months later when posters started appearing around La Paz for an upcoming show by Brazilian extreme metal band Sepultura, I took what I viewed as an opportunity to remind the boss of the wisdom he had forsaken by first subtly calling out his lack of awareness of the show, and then suggesting we attend together. Despite never having heard of Sepultura, he signed on
immediately with no effort to obtain further detail or description, thus reinforcing his infuriating “open to anything from anybody” nature. To make matters worse, he nonchalantly noted that his spouse would attend also, leaving me no option but to announce that both my spouse and my 17-year-old daughter would be accompanying me. Because, you know… if I were unable to demonstrate sway over even my own dependents, how would I justify my (self-proclaimed) mandate to guide the tastes of strangers?
Now, the truth is that I am not a Sepultura fan. While their musicianship and ability to mix the occasional traditional Brazilian rhythm into their earsplitting riffage earns my praise, I am put off strongly by their growling/grunting death metal vocal style. I tried to force myself to focus beyond the vocals in the weeks leading up to the concert but was unsuccessful. As a result, I grew nervous as the show date neared. Would I end up inadvertently confirming the boss’s lack of awe at my musical insight by dragging him to a repulsive aural barrage that even I could not defensibly endorse? Twice I entered his office to warn of Sepultura’s challenging extremism, hoping to both offer him an opportunity to bow out and to lay down a marker should there be any after-the-fact questioning of my judgment. He was unfazed. “Sounds like fun” was the extent of his reaction. The days passed, the calendar turned, and soon Sepultura was upon us.
Going to a heavy metal concert in a foreign land in the company of a senior diplomat was different from my usual experience. The two extra tickets for the Bolivian National Police bodyguards who accompanied us inside the concert venue were covered by the U.S. taxpayer, as was the cost of the vehicle and driver that gathered us at our homes and delivered us directly to the main gate. The bodyguards’ badges ensured we were first into the hall, stepping onto the general admission floor nearly 30 minutes before the rest of the crowd. That meant we were standing against the railing immediately in front of the stage when the show began. It wasn’t just a possible touch of temporary sensory unpleasantness for my boss anymore, I now confronted the very real possibility that I would bear responsibility for my own wife’s and daughter’s ruptured ear drums from the auditory onslaught in front and their smashed spines from the crushing crowd behind. As the two local Bolivian opening bands screeched out their not-wholly-disagreeable sets, I braced for what was to come.
Sepultura hit the stage like a wrecking ball. From the first thump, the sledgehammer drums threatened to bring the cement ceiling down on top of us. The guitar, bass, and throat-shredding vocals fused into one blunt, reverberating wall of sound that didn’t suggest songs so much as a galloping drone that rode over whatever pounding rhythm the drummer happened to hammer out at any given moment. The crowd in front of the stage where we stood spontaneously erupted into a giant mosh pit of ramming bodies and flailing limbs.
I spent the first six or seven songs grasping the railing on either side of my wife and daughter while tensing my body in an attempt to create a protective barrier against the exploding human mass. My muscles burned as I sought to both keep my grip and absorb the clobbering blows of the mosh. From what I could tell, my efforts were successful as my wife and daughter remained focused on the stage, not so much enjoying the music as enthralled by the spectacle. When I did finally remember to look over at the boss and his wife, instead of the grimaces and disgust I expected, I saw only grins and exuberant head-banging. It turned out that the mosh pit ended at my pummeled back, leaving them to comfortably bop in a calm void created by the deft placement of his bodyguards. All were oblivious to my noble self-sacrifice.
Midway through Sepultura’s set as my arms throbbed and my neck wrenched, I finally had the sense to grab my wife and daughter and move away from the stage. I was surprised to find that we only had to go about ten feet back and toward the side before coming completely free of the crush. We were able to spend the rest of the show in our own individual space, each one swaying, rocking, or simply staring along to the booming racket to the tune of their personal preference.
Whether by plan or as the result of a crappy sound system bouncing its output off untreated concrete walls, the gruff vocals were subsumed into the instruments, allowing me to lose them almost completely in the din. The near-tribal drums pulled me in while the greater noise ensured that all extraneous thought emptied from my liquefying mind. Now finally able to pay attention, I found a comfortable groove.
By the time it ended and Sepultura departed the stage leaving us with only the ringing in our ears to remember them by, I could not have told you how many or which songs they had played. My wife and daughter were both smiling as they enthusiastically recapped the crazy scene they had witnessed both on stage and in the audience. The boss and his wife were also exhilarated, specifically citing the “incredible physical presence” of Sepultura’s vocalist as a highlight. Everybody was happy.
It was then that the realization hit me. None of my companions were candidate disciples hungering to sit at my feet and partake of my rock and roll insights. They were “experience seekers,” not potential pursuers of my enlightened musical truths. On this night, I had been simply a sponsoring participant vice the architect of their cultural education. I carried neither the burden nor the power to steer their course for them. I found myself concurrently relieved and disillusioned. I was apparently not a sage.
I can still make a pretty mean mix tape though…
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Scenes from the concert uploaded by others; the jittery chaos and distorted sound of the videos capture the ambience of the night perfectly:
In hindsight I was almost certainly receiving stolen property, but on that day in 1976 the idea that Gary’s uncle had simply given him the two LPs that he was subsequently gifting to me seemed perfectly reasonable. Gary and I had been best friends since roughly the age of seven and now, having both just turned 12, we knew each other pretty well. Given my penchant for forcing him to repeatedly listen to my small collection of 45s, Gary was well aware of my interest in music. I imagine he also suspected correctly that the reign of singles by Ringo Starr and Cher as my most-played favorites was soon to end as our initial steps into puberty were accompanied by growing curiosity about more “mature,” but still
seemingly kid-friendly, musical fare such as KISS and Alice Cooper.
So when Gary showed up at my house with used copies of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma albums and a convoluted story about his uncle’s generosity, he found a receptive audience. It somehow made sense to me that Gary’s mom’s younger brother would give him the albums even though Gary’s strictly religious parents would never let him keep them. That he accepted the gifts solely to be able to pass them along to me sounded right. I happily took Gary’s offerings and, just like that, I was the proud owner of my first “heavy” music.
We knew nothing of the groups’ music but were certainly informed enough to be aware that Black Sabbath worshipped the devil and that Pink Floyd made music for people who were on drugs. Lacking confidence in our ability to stay cool in the face of a satanic apparition, we opted to put Ummagumma on the turntable first. Not only did we not know how or where to get drugs, we had no interest in jumping off roofs in the belief that we could fly – our understanding of how drugs affected folk – so there seemed less danger in trying out Pink Floyd. Nothing we had listened to previously had prepared us for the strange sounds of what I now recognize as Pink Floyd’s least approachable album however, so Gary and I failed to even make it through an entire side before lifting the needle and moving on to other activities.
Some months after receiving my presents from Gary, I finally did get up the gumption to listen to Paranoid and loved it immediately. I started playing it regularly and loudly. While Satan’s failure to appear during the first few spins quickly extinguished my own fears that I might be risking demonic possession, my parents were less sanguine. I have fond memories of the middle-of-the-night visit to my room by my relatively newly-minted stepdad after a worrisome dream led him to hurry downstairs to check whether I was listening to that damn Black Sabbath music. (I wasn’t.) Apparently, he’d had a nightmare in which I was being set upon by dark forces. I remember the event fondly as an early and reassuring indication that this new dude in my house actually cared about me.
As it turned out, Ummagumma was the record that I would become unwilling to play while alone at night in my darkened room. The live tracks on the first disk created a floating-alone-in-the-cold-depths-of-space mood that I’d need a few more years of maturing to be able to enjoy, while the often discordant and just-plain-weird studio recordings on the second platter simply freaked me out. Even the album cover with its endless mirror image that wasn’t actually a mirror image as the band members changed places for each iteration made me uncomfortable due to its incomprehensibility, leading me to take care that it was never placed at the front of my record stacks where I might inadvertently glimpse it.
More than 35 years later, I still love Paranoid and can’t imagine tiring of it. The early Black Sabbath albums – Paranoid was their second LP – are often credited as birthing heavy metal music and I’m on board with that. The way the crunchy, but measured, guitar riffs grind along over the top of almost-jazzy bass lines and frenetic drumming certainly sounds different to my ears from what came before.
Paranoid hosts numerous tracks, such as “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” and “War Pigs,” that have earned unchallenged standing within the Holy Scripture of heavy metal, and I love those songs. But for me, it’s “Fairies Wear Boots” with its Ozzy-defining “alright now” lyric and circular groove that is the standout. While you’ll definitely bang your head to it, take time to notice the way your motion gradually strays from straight up and down to something more along the lines of a severely elongated oval. “Electric Funeral” is another corker, sludgy as hell but with a trebly sound that many down-tuned stoner rock bands of today would do well to rediscover.
Jack the Stripper/Fairies Wear Boots:
Electric Funeral:
As for Ummagumma, I no longer actively avoid it, but neither do I find myself seeking it out much. I enjoy the spaced-out feeling of the live version of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” which smartly leaves out the forward-mixed xylophone and chimes of the studio version from the earlier A Saucerful of Secrets album, and instead inserts something of a Middle Eastern vibe that allows the timpani to more forcefully propel the voyage. “Grantchester Meadows” is a beautiful acoustic song that is nonetheless dragged down by the incessant chirping of bugs and birds layered over its entire length. (It’s about a meadow, get it?) While a short field recording of wetlands and a water bird’s call inserted at one point wholly succeed in gently calling forth a sense of being “in nature,” the insect sounds simply grate. It’s too bad because I have no doubt that a remixed version of the song that omitted the annoying squeaks and twitters, were it to exist, would easily find its way onto my short-list of the best of Floyd.
Finally, I note that, despite boasting one of the best titles of all time, “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” fails to qualify as an actual song, and is instead nothing more than a cacophony of uninteresting noise. It has the unique honor of being the only Pink Floyd track I’ve actually deleted from my iPod.
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (live):
Grantchester Meadows:
I have learned that I cannot buy lottery tickets. My personality is such that, immediately upon purchasing a ticket, my mind goes haywire and I start wasting way too much time thinking about what I will do with my winnings, not to mention trying to preemptively decide whether I will go to work the day after my number comes up. It happens that I face a similar problem when it comes to my writing.
I have to draft missives about serious topics every day in my work and have found that reclaiming writing for pleasure makes me happy. I get a real kick out of first ideating, then finessing my thoughts, words, and masturbatory musings onto the page, and finally launching my written spew upon the unsuspecting world.
I used to write extended emails that I would send to a group address of select friends and family, a few of whom were charitable enough to humor me. But with those widely broadcast emails, I faced another version of my lottery ticket problem. Shortly after hitting send on each latest bit of twaddle, I could not help but begin to first pine for and then imagine expectantly the email replies I was sure to soon receive. Despite years of disillusioning experience indicating that few, if any, would actually answer my unrequested dreck, I nevertheless continued to be repeatedly disappointed when responses failed to come.
After repeated encouragement from an especially indulgent uncle, I decided to try posting some things on a website and made an unexpected, liberating discovery. I found that in posting my scrawls on a blog rather than in emails, I could still get all the same joy from my writing hobby, but without the constant discouragement of unrequited love. With no specific audience on which to pin false expectations, putting my spew out there no longer created naïve hopes of fawning riposte. This was more like keeping a diary, like recording only for me and the few folk who might slink into my room when I’m not there to sneak a peek. It was just me pointing out some graffiti on a wall in case anyone fancied a look-see.
Now, I force my missives on no one and instead simply enjoy an untroubled contentment born of the creative act itself, free of the stress of bated-breath anticipation.
● Why settle for an unresponsive dozen when one can be ignored by a billion?
● Why the impolite foist when a submissive transom beckons?
● Why knowingly shed dignity when naïve obliviousness is an alternative?
(Disclaimer: In spite of the above, I am as needy and attention-craving as the next person. As such, I sincerely thank the faceless few who arrive here for your kind willingness to humor me.)
Our daughter came to me sobbing yesterday. She had just gotten off the phone with my wife who is in New Mexico after having traveled there on an emergency basis upon learning that her father, my father-in-law and our daughter’s grandfather, was on his death bed. The phone had been put up to Papa Julio’s ear so our daughter could tell him she loved him and say goodbye. My wife says that Papa Julio, otherwise unresponsive, opened his eyes during the emotional farewell. I consoled my baby girl as best I could, assuring her that Papa Julio knew she loved him and noting that his suffering and confusion resulting from his battle with Alzheimer’s would soon come to an end and he would be released to a better place.
My wife suffers deeply as she watches over her beloved father’s final passing. The 27-hour trek from Bolivia to New Mexico was filled with anguish as she received scary updates from her sister and worried that she wouldn’t make it in time. As she checked in via phone from the various airports on her way, I offered what consolation I could through her distraught laments: I should have gone earlier. Why didn’t I go see him last month? What if he dies before I get there?
In the end, Papa Julio has held on long enough that seven of eight siblings have been able to arrive and crowd into the small house in Rio Rancho to accompany him in his last hours. The nurse explains that Papa Julio’s body is slowly shutting down and suggests he could go at any moment. My dear wife is terrified of the coming event, but gets some solace from the knowledge she has held her daddy’s hand, hugged and kissed him, and whispered her love to him before he goes.
I’m reminded of my own goodbye with my Grandma Z some years ago. While I knew she had recently moved in with my dad and stepmom so they could provide her needed care and vigilance, I had last seen Grandma on her own and feisty as ever in her little Salt Lake City apartment a year or so before. Working in Mexico City at the time, I was dependent on brief phone updates on “everybody’s lives” and, being a shitty communicator in general, my understanding of folks’ situations was pretty cursory.
Dad had told me Grandma had fractured her hip in a fall and then subsequently gotten a respiratory infection that was keeping her in the hospital, but as I called the bedside phone that day to pass Grandma my sincere “get well soon,” I had no idea she was about to pass on. I was completely surprised when Aunt Nancy answered the phone and, assuming I was up to date, told me I needed to tell Grandma goodbye and let her know it was alright “for her to let go.” Before I could even grasp what was happening, let alone prepare the right last words to my beloved grandmother and friend, the phone was at her ear and I was mumbling something about loving her and approving of her decision not to suffer any more. Grandma struggled to speak, but only labored, indiscernible grunts came through the line. Aunt Nancy got back on, said Grandma had understood and was “going to go now,” and just like that my final farewell with my cherished grandmother was over.
I’ve thought about that phone call often in the intervening years, to include worrying whether I said the right things. What was she really trying to say to me? Was it ok to tell her I supported a decision to just let go? Was she telling me she loved me too or was she frantically denying any desire to give up the ghost? Why didn’t I tell her how much she’d meant to me in life rather than trying to escort her into the light? What the hell happened?? In the end, I guess I cannot know outside simply having confidence in my aunt’s on-site judgment of the moment and trusting in Grandma’s understanding of what I meant beyond the meager words I coughed up.
Now, as I hug my precious daughter, fail in my efforts to make it all better for my beautiful wife, and miss my dear Grandma Z, I gird myself with the following realization (the truth of which I simultaneously decree and yearn for): It’s not the actual farewell that matters but rather that which has inspired our desire to offer the richest possible goodbye. A few seconds of tearjerker perfection don’t define the story; it’s instead expressed through the 17, 36, or 50 years of love, companionship, shared experience, and personal connection that precede the final moment. The goodbye is fleeting regardless of its beauty, emotion, or clumsiness. It is in all that comes beforehand that our real unions and memories are made.
Rest in Peace, Papa Julio – January 21, 2013
Lately I’ve found myself held back by the idea that, in order for something to warrant sharing, it must matter. In the context of these writings, this meant that I’d become mired in a failed effort to find an encompassing message or clever musing to anchor a next entry. Plans to write about a recent thrash/death metal concert I attended with my markedly non-metalhead wife and daughter went by the wayside as I struggled to find the right “weighty” hook. Offerings on an extended solo drive I took through the American Southwest in late 2012 died on the vine due to my inability to identify an epic inner motivating quest to serve as the narrative foundation for the road trip diary. Now however, with months having passed since my last written discharge and suffering through my own (mental) version of blue balls, I’ve had an epiphany:
Sometimes simple things completely lacking in deeper meaning can nonetheless be remarkable, share-worthy even.
Unsurprisingly, I owe this newfound understanding to the sudden sledgehammer impact of guitar-driven, hard rocking, dopamine-release-inducing, music. While driving to work one morning this week, the shuffle-all setting on my iPod deigned to pummel me with a back-to-back cacophony of brain-addling riffage in the form of the songs “Headhunter” by Krokus, followed immediately by Picture’s “Lady Lightning.” The unexpected gifting of these old-school, gut-busting, patently-ludicrous power metal blasts from the past opened my eyes while assaulting my ears. Via their over-the-top chugging simplicity, the songs reminded me of the potential potency of the ridiculously silly when it is delivered with heartfelt conviction. Too insignificant to share? I think not. I dare you to listen without smiling, even if only to smugly mock aging headbangers like me who can’t get enough of such glorious absurdity.
Krokus – Headhunter:
Picture – Lady Lightning:
The stories:
I first heard of Swiss rockers Krokus when they opened a four-band show I saw circa early 1981 at Utah’s Bonneville Raceway. With a bill that included Sammy Hagar, Molly Hatchet, and Cheap Trick, Krokus got completely lost in the shuffle for me. I remember nothing of them from that concert save for the moment when, in an excited effort to get closer to the fans, the singer jumped off the stage during an especially energetic tune and pranced around for a bit in the five-foot space between the platform and a chain-link fence that held back the crowd. When the song came to an end, the singer was unable to hoist himself back onto the stage despite multiple hilarious failed attempts. As a couple of security personnel finally arrived to help him back up, I clearly remember mentally dismissing him as Bugs Bunny might have (What a maroon!). Two years later, in 1983, Krokus released the Headhunter album from which the power ballad “Screaming in the Night” started to get some radio airplay. I picked up the LP but didn’t really get around to listening to it until years later. Now, the album is in semi-regular rotation, with the song “Headhunter” even having found its way onto one of the first mix-CDs I ever made for my metal-worshipping son.
I discovered little-known Dutch group Picture almost by chance. As a missionary in the city of Huancayo in the central Peruvian highlands in 1984, I’d regularly visit a small shop that, in those days before digital pirating, sold genuine commercial music cassettes. While thumbing through the bins one day, I came across a cassette sporting a picture of a denim-clad blonde hottie standing behind a bad-ass motorcycle and appearing to be about to throw a brick through a store window. Obviously losing any free will in the face of such a captivating image, I had purchased the tape and left the store before bothering to note that it was Picture’s 1982 Diamond Dreamer album. I don’t remember actually listening to the record at all however until rediscovering it in 2011. Now I wonder what the hell was wrong with me during all those intervening years. It’s a power metal masterpiece.
Victim of the Fury 