LET PEOPLE ANSWER THiS
Last week, I spent 4 solid days in a row jamming my nuts off in the lab. This week, I will edit these jams down and apply any necessary overdubs. And try to get a new driver’s license. Then I’ll go play the new jams at a bunch of venues I have never played at before.
A few years ago, I was playing shitloads of shows, hardly never at home, and performing the same songs all the time made me feel pretty nuts. So I talked all the time, little games, stories, etc. It helped but it wasn’t enough. So I spent a while fucking around with other musicians, trying to inject some jambandery/jazzbandery into the equation, so there might be more uncertainty about what exactly was going to go down on stage night to night on tour. It was a lot of fun, and some really great recordings came out of that era of Cex, but I also felt that increasing the uncertainty that way inherently involved some dilution of the feelings and ideas behind the songs, as well as relying on a recital-y conception of performance that obviously belonged to our parents’ world/view, the passive audience and all that, standing around looking at you like you were on tv.
Bigger than that, though: I started to think about self-censorship. Too much. When Cex was/is just me, there’s no question that it’s not only OK but ideal to try and go places that are embarassing, shameful, or otherwise uncomfortable any time there is an audience present. When there were other people on stage who were busting their ass to do justice to the tunes, though, it suddenly felt like something I needed to be more careful and deliberate about. Especially since they have only ever been people I admired and only wished for good things to happen to. No more kamikaze style, no more face-first naked stagedives into the part of the crowd most likely to move out of the way..
Obviously, I’m glossing over a lot of the subplots and subtleties here, but for some reason I feel like I ought to trace the basic path here.
Anyway, it’s been a long time since I was on the road regularly. For a while, I believed that gas prices would make extensive touring a waste until I had made some kind of ally with a grease- or steam-powered transportation. But there’s been so much going on in Baltimore that I’ve been able to play around here constantly without even trying. I play by myself and I try to have as much new material as I can manage for every show, and I try to play as long as possible.
It’s not quite as blorg-worthy, I suppose, as coming through with the “I got drums! and drummers! and 110 cornets right beside! etc” before some out-of-hibernation-out-of-the-blue shows, but it feels journal-worthy. I need to travel more often, and I also need to probably make some money to save, so it seems like going to play out of town as much as possible before gas prices return to reality is a good idea. I try to imagine what it would be like to spend the next 2-3 years (optimism re:gas, turnouts, etc) writing enough new songs to tour as much as I used to, but with an insanity-staving-off-amount of new material every time. It’s hard to imagine but it sounds a bit more perfect for me than any other plan I see around me right now. Seems like the way it’s been for a while, and def the way it wants to keep going: if you want to eat off this shit, you’ve either got to be a very obedient musician or a very, very, very prolific one.
I guess there’s an element of ludicrous martyrdom lurking in there: wanting to push myself to the limits of productivity, refusing to play the same shit over & over even though it might actually prevent people from spending money on my shows and recordings (I have been told this innumerable times since Cex’s first real US-wide headlining tour in ‘01)—- a snarky attempt to smash my head into bits in a way that all manner of strangers would applaud and encourage. I guess, deep down, I believe that all people here, healthy and unhealthy alike, no matter what work it is that they do— all must push themselves closer and closer to self-destruction (whether it be via hustling until it hurts, or stomaching meaningless repetition) in pursuit of security and survival, and that contemplation of this paradox only makes it easier and easier to “achieve.” How does that Baudillaire poem go, about death being the great famous hotel where everybody can rest and have good cheer?
Also: I’ve decided I believe in the moon landing. If it’s real, it’s an unbeatable example of how human beings could look at something for 1000s of years and not believe themselves capable of going and touching that thing, and changing it, and then some badasses come through to completely chuck that right out the window. Really, there’s no reason that we couldn’t start looking at TOIL next and thinking about the kind of rockets we might send out to that distant, daily presence in our sky.
Which reminds me of another thing that kept bothering me while I was washing dishes this weekend: if there’s no such thing as original sin, why do people need to “earn” “a living”?
Anyway, I got stacks of jams in need of complicated surgery. See you this weekend.
