Arts
Saturday, September 7th, 2019: Arts, Visual Art.
I spent my childhood and youth mastering classical figurative drawing and painting, and as a young adult, I created large-scale figurative paintings and polyptichs from imagination, relying on my academic mastery of human anatomy and three-dimensional rendering. But after that, I turned my back on painting, realism, and major art projects, and for the past 37 years, I’d turned out hundreds and hundreds of spontaneous, simplistic, abstracted drawings on paper, most of which took me on average a half hour to complete.
In recent years, admiring classical works in museums, and reflecting on my earlier efforts, I began to crave a bigger challenge, to carry forward the progress I’d made as a young artist. When I made the change from polyptich paintings to drawings 37 years ago, I had consciously conceived my drawings as components of larger installations, and the new work would extend that idea. My most ambitious visual art project ever was conceived in March 2018 and begun in February 2019. Eight months later, after many interruptions, I’ve finished planning, drawing, and preparing the surfaces, and am ready to start transferring my drawings to them.
The craft phases of this art project remind me of when I was an art student at the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios, laboriously preparing stone slabs for lithography. Both processes are essentially medieval.
This project is intended to be a prototype for a future series of works, likely to be executed in oil paint on wood. Unlike in art school or in the Middle Ages, I haven’t had anyone to show me how to do things – I’ve done a lot of online research but have had to rely mostly on trial and error to find the best methods. I haven’t had access to a proper studio or a workshop for the prep work, which has made the process extra difficult and time-consuming, as I’ve had to constantly move the art panels, supplies, and tools in and out of my house, through the kitchen, from the porch where I did the “messy” work to my music studio which is being used as a drawing, drying, and storage area.
Here are views of the some of the stages in the process.
Art: Inspirations
Art: Brainstorming, Sketching & Drawing
This initial creative phase of the project took 5 months.
Craft: Preparing Wood Panels
This phase took almost a month.
Craft: Tracing the Drawings
After the lengthy process of preparing the panels, I thought I was ready to start tracing the drawings onto them. But a closer inspection revealed that I had a little more work to do on the drawings – another reason why it’s good to step away from your work from time to time. When you’re in the midst of it, you can’t see the forest for the trees.
After a couple more days of drawing, I began the tracing: securing sheets of parchment over each drawing, and tracing every line with a fine-point pen. This took a week.
Craft: Building an Easel
Now ready to transfer the traced drawings to the wood panels, I realized I had nothing to hold the panels erect while working on them.
The traditional way to support a painting panel is the easel. A new H-frame easel large and sturdy enough to support my panels ranges from $200 up, but professional studio easels tend to be closer to $1,000 and up. There are alternatives, depending on the size and weight of your work. Small paintings can be done horizontally on a table top. If you have a solid wall wide enough for your panel, you can simply rest it on cardboard boxes and lean it against the wall, but it won’t be stable unless the panel or canvas is really heavy. Very large panels or canvases are simply mounted directly on the studio wall.
I don’t have an unused wall wide enough to work on my paintings, but after despairing at the cost of ready-made easels, I suddenly realized I already had an easel. I’d built it when I first arrived in New Mexico, to hold a small dry-erase board for workshops I was giving on my Wisdom Project. It was warped and lacked some features I would need, but with a little more work I thought I could transform it.
It turned out that I had all the wood I needed – surplus lumber from previous building projects. All I needed was about $60 of hardware. The project took about 14 hours, including trips to hardware stores.
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020: Arts, Music & Dance.
Michael Gira by Andy Catlin
A Long Struggle
I began studying music in school when I was 9, learned the saxophone when I was 10, and started playing guitar when I was 11. I started a band with friends at age 12 and became the lead singer. I had my first poems published in high school at age 15, but I didn’t put words and music together, writing my first song, until I was 17. Believe it or not, I called it “The First Song.”
Writing songs was fairly easy for me as long as I followed the familiar formulas of American and British popular, rock, and folk music. But in the fall of 1980, inspired by punk, post-punk, and the incredible variety of music around me in the San Francisco underground, I woke to broader horizons. I began deconstructing everything I knew about music and experimenting in all directions. I had no preconceptions about song structure. I was interested in raw sound, ambient sound, free improvisation, rhythm before melody.
That was liberating for a while – I actually stopped writing songs and just improvised freely with my new band, Terra Incognita. But in 1982 I discovered African music. And that made it harder, because I took on the challenge of creating a new genre that would infuse my Appalachian roots with what I was learning about African music. Unlike what David Byrne was doing or what Paul Simon did years later, it wouldn’t sample or imitate African music. It would sound like nothing anyone had ever heard.
It was a long struggle. Finishing a song was incredibly hard, and they only emerged in bursts, a handful at a time, with years in between. I was seldom satisfied with them, and kept reworking them, re-recording them, performing completely different versions with different lineups of Terra Incognita. I believed the rhythm and musicality of the lyrics was more important than the words, but I agonized over the words for years anyway.
That’s one reason why I’m blown away when I discover that someone else has written a song that perfectly expresses something I’ve felt or experienced. Why couldn’t I write that? Why has it been so hard?
No Formula
What makes a perfect song? There’s really no formula. I love ambiguous, mysterious lyrics, but I also love lyrics that are simple, direct, and didactic, like “Nostalgia,” or even “Whole Lotta Love.” The didactic songs can become classics, but ambiguous songs can give us more over time, revealing hidden depths.
How do you write an ambiguous song? I don’t think you do. I think you write a song that means something clear to you, but is so personal that it seems mysterious to others. When I analyze the lyrics of songs that I like, I often find that it’s only the chorus, or a single repeated phrase, that endears it to me. The rest of the lyrics may seem like gibberish. After all, I love many songs in other languages that I can’t understand at all. I’ve believed for a long time that the overall musical impression is far more important than the lyrics.
I mostly shun the mainstream of pop music – Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Lady Gaga et al. But whereas I’ve tended to write songs that are obscure – about the ancient Moundbuilders or the geological decomposition of granite – some of my favorite songs are sappy pop standards from various eras, like Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Unchained Melody,” “Scarlet Ribbons,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and rock clichés like “You Really Got Me,” “Hang On Sloopy,” “Wild Thing,” and the Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love.” I definitely wish I’d written those.
Then there are traditional songs from my Appalachian heritage that I’ve covered with my bands and have been inspired by, but can never match, like “Working on a Building” and “Rank Stranger,” and songs in the Yoruba language like King Sunny Ade’s “Ja Funmi” and Paul I. K. Dairo’s “Mo Wa Dupe,” which have inspired me to venture outside the narrow focus of Western pop themes.
Leaving out the classics and hits most everyone’s familiar with, the traditional country repertoire and the African songs, here, in chronological order, is a partial sample of less well-known songs I wish I’d written.
Boomer’s Story (1972)
Written by early country singer/songwriter Carson Robinson and recorded in 1972 by Los Angeles musicologist Ry Cooder, this song is an instance of serendipity for me. It’s the story of an old hobo, and I began riding the rails myself in 1978, about the same time that my high school friends discovered Ry Cooder and his album of the same title. The lyrics perfectly capture the harsh romance of riding the rails and the premature but deeply-felt sense of world-weariness that we twenty-somethings had by the late 1970s, after coming of age during the Vietnam War, the environmental and civil rights crises, and Watergate.
Final Day (1979)
I discovered and fell in love with the Welsh post-punk trio Young Marble Giants at an underground arts festival in San Francisco in 1980. Their stark, minimal, artfully primitive sound showed that post-punk was never a coherent genre, but a broad spirit of deconstruction, exploration, and experimentation. They only lasted for two years, releasing one studio album, but their work continued to inspire me along with more well-known artists like Kurt Cobain.
Fear of the Bomb permeated my childhood in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in 1979 that YMG produced the perfect song about nuclear holocaust. This was another serendipity for me, because when I first heard it in 1980, I’d just started having the nuclear holocaust nightmares that would plague me for decades.
Atmosphere (1980)
Today, 40 years after singer/songwriter Ian Curtis hung himself, people reference the short-lived British band Joy Division to prove their hipster cred. But when I was at California Institute of the Arts in 1979, writing songs and playing in a garage band, their first album had just come out on the tiny U.K. label Factory Records, and nobody in the U.S. outside of the top art schools and tiny urban punk enclaves was aware of them yet. The first Joy Division songs that stuck in my memory were “She’s Lost Control,” from that first album, and the single “Transmission,” both played and danced to over and over at CalArts parties that winter.
They were our contemporaries, just another crest in the waves of inspirational new music that followed from season to season in the wake of punk’s first appearance. Like us, they were inspired by the Sex Pistols, but like the Sex Pistols’ successor, John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, they seemed like punk’s fateful, nihilistic next step, and we couldn’t get enough of them while they lasted.
This is not the only Joy Division song I wish I’d written, but I sometimes think it’s my favorite. Like so many great songs it’s completely ambiguous yet captures in powerful imagery the gamut of human feelings in a relationship, from tenderness to mistrust and fear.
I’ve included the video version by Joy Division bassist Peter Hook and Rowetta, because it perfectly captures the spirit of Ian Curtis’s original, whereas the imagery of the official video distracts from the lyrics.
Nostalgia (1982)
After Young Marble Giants broke up in 1981, singer Allison Statton formed Weekend, another Welsh outfit that wrote and played generally bright, ethnic-inspired pop music, released in one studio and one live album.
They also covered old standard ballads, and wrote the painfully didactic song “Nostalgia,” which has been one of my all-time favorites since Weekend was introduced to me in 1982 by my San Francisco loftmate and former best friend Tiare.
I’ve included the version from their extremely obscure live album, Live at Ronnie Scott’s, because it’s better than the studio recording.
Up on the Sun (1985)
My former songwriting partner Katie introduced me to the Phoenix area band’s breakthrough album Meat Puppets II when we first met in 1984. We listened to those punk-inspired tracks while driving around Los Angeles, then we listened to their more laid-back third album, Up on the Sun, when we drove out to camp in the desert.
I’ve started many songs while stoned, and I’ve worked on many songs while stoned, but I’ve never finished a song that’s as perfect a stoner anthem as this. What I love most about the Meat Puppets and Curt Kirkwood’s lyrics is that they so often evoke nature and living outdoors and the mystical sensations we campers and hikers share even when we’re not high.
Although the Pups are an awesome live band with a rabid cult following, I’ve included the album version because their shows are never recorded with an adequate audio mix.
Pictures of You (1989)
By the time this song was released, I’d been deep into my obsession with African music for years, and I shunned the vast majority of rock music, not to mention the goth subgenre The Cure came to be labeled with. It wasn’t until three entire decades later that I heard their poppy “In Between Days” on the radio, and digging deeper, I discovered “Pictures of You,” which made me a long-belated Robert Smith fan.
This English songwriter has penned a whole slew of tunes I wish I’d written, but this one so perfectly expresses the nostalgia I’ve felt, and unashamedly embraced, for lost love affairs. In my humble opinion there’s nothing more worth singing about.
https://youtu.be/GTm8SpDPO3s
The Maker (1989)
Whereas The Cure were completely off my radar in 1989, I was open to the Canadian Daniel Lanois’s album Acadie when a mutual friend suggested it to Katie, my former partner and bandmate, because its Acadian – our Cajun – focus fit into my fiercely traditional, mostly ethnic aesthetic. As a musician I’d heard of Lanois – he produced U2’s The Joshua Tree, one of the biggest albums of the late 80s, along with records by Bob Dylan and other big stars.
The lyrics of “The Maker” are almost too perfect an example of a modern gospel song, the kind of devotional confession I have tried to write with less success. It’s one of those that some people call the “greatest song ever written,” so it’s been covered by much more popular artists like Dave Matthews and even Jerry Garcia, and few even seem to realize that Lanois wrote it.
I’ve included the stripped-down live version because live is usually better and the official video sucks, and best of all, Daniel is playing a Fender Jazzmaster with clear finish, exactly like my first Jazzmaster, a now-classic guitar purchased for $75 back in 1978. But if you haven’t heard the perfect studio recording with Aaron Neville, check that out ASAP.
Breakdown (1993)
Scottish singer/songwriter Dot Allison and One Dove are examples of how worthless the consumer economy is at promoting and sharing things of real value. I’ve had hilarious conversations with music fans who get all huffy because I don’t worship the biggest pop stars, while much greater artists die without ever achieving significant recognition.
At least One Dove’s “Breakdown” made it into a movie, a corny 90s comedy that I’ve never seen. Dot Allison went on to have an equally obscure solo career, and I didn’t discover her work until 2011 after I resumed my own musical ventures. “Breakdown” is a better pop song partly because of how unpopular it is.
Get Me (1994)
Although the English duo (and couple) Everything But the Girl started during the early post-punk era, they weren’t big enough at the time to show up on my radar, and by the time they reached a wider audience, in the 90s, I’d driven my obsession with African music into the ground and was about to be turned on to grunge.
I was deep into the grunge thing when I joined Katie on her family’s ski trip in early 1995 and heard Tracey Thorn for the first time on Massive Attack’s hit album. You can keep your mainstream divas, your Annie Lennoxes, your Madonnas, your Lady Gagas, but I’ll take Tracey any day. Eventually, I went back and discovered her earlier work, and although Amplified Heart has several outstanding tracks, I picked this one, attributed to her partner Ben, because it never became popular, despite its perfection as a conflicted love song.
Blind (1995)
Los Angeles native Michael Gira seems to have been the classic troubled artist, growing up in an alcoholic family, spending lots of time in jail. As with a lot of my now-favorite artists, I discovered him after resuming my musical career in 2011 and only know about him after the fact, never having followed his early career and cathartic performances in Swans.
But I keep “Blind” in regular rotation in my playlists, because it’s one of those gemlike songs that express some essential realities of our species in a harshly beautiful nutshell.
Protection (1995)
This is an instance where I break my rule and include a song that became a fairly big hit – although never really in the pop mainstream. I believe it became such a big hit partly because the time was right for electronic pop music, but mainly because Tracey’s message is just what we all need, all the time, in our conflicted, violent, dangerous world.
Although Massive Attack’s studio version is perfect and their official video is cool, I’ve included Everything But the Girl’s live version because it’s a decent recording, and it has Tracey!
Ribbon on a Branch (2007)
Younger Brother is a somewhat obscure English electronic duo who took their name – one of my favorites of all time – from the mythology of a Colombian indigenous tribe. I discovered “Ribbon on a Branch” in 2011 and am reminded of it every time I hike a trail in our local wilderness and spot a pink ribbon on a trailside branch. It’s a love song in nature, something I’m always aspiring to write. Get outside, you alienated city people!
This live video has a long intro, but the sound is excellent so hang in there!
No Cars Go (2007)
Perhaps not as big as Massive Attack’s “Protection,”, “No Cars Go” was still a hit single by Canadian stadium rockers Arcade Fire, so it probably shouldn’t be on this list. But despite its bombast, I respect it because it not only trashes cars, it says space ships are uncool, too. What we all need is to get to a place without our machines, without our devices.
Like Radiohead on OK Computer, Arcade Fire are dissing a sacred cow of Gen-Xers and Millennials, which is ironic since both bands are heroes to those generations.
The Never Ending Happening (2012)
Bill Fay is an old English hippie from the 60s who has languished in obscurity for decades, like most great artists. It shows how irrelevant our sacred cow of progress is that he released this perfect hippie anthem in 2012. It’s like a modern, ecologically woke but painfully self-conscious version of the old gospel hymns that have inspired me. It’s liable to make me cry every time I hear it.
Black Monday (2016)
This urban anthem by an obscure SoCal band is a perfect post-punk song that should’ve been written in the late 70s or early 80s. I can never hear it enough and end up singing along and laughing every time I do.
Which video of this song to include was a tough decision! Hilariously, this live version used sound that is obviously dubbed from their studio recording – you can tell 2/3 of the way through when backing vocals mysteriously kick in on the verse, but nobody else in the band is singing. The official video has a bunch of clips that are supposed to add narrative value, but the band looks half-dead. Take your pick!
One With the World (2016)
Rambling Nicholas Heron is a Swedish folk singer/songwriter who writes and sings in English. I love his songs, but rare videos suggest that his sincerity might be tempered by a trace of irony.
No matter, this example, which has apparently never been recorded apart from YouTube, is another perfect gem of the civilized yearning for connection with nature.
Wednesday, January 25th, 2023: Arts, Music & Dance.
Paying It Forward
Most music lovers owe their families or friends a debt of gratitude for the gift of music – not just for introductions to songs or artists, but for the mind-expanding opening of doors onto new genres, and sometimes even unfamiliar cultures.
For musicians, discovering new music has even deeper significance, because it can inspire and even influence our own work.
I’ve been especially blessed because I grew up in a culture which treated music as an indispensable way of life. Even before I formed indelible memories I was immersed in music, and for as long as I can remember I was singing and playing music with my family.
The 1960s music revolution unfolded in the outside world as I progressed from junior high through high school in our small farm town. Until the end of the decade, we only had AM radio, so cutting-edge music could only be found on LP record albums and 45 rpm singles at distant big-city record stores. They couldn’t reach us until someone’s parents drove them there and back, and were either played for groups of us in listening parties or briefly loaned out by the lucky few.
Beginning in the 1970s, my friends and I made and shared cassette copies of our own music and LP records, and that continued over the next three decades, ending in the new millenium when we could burn music CDs on our computers. Schooled in the DIY culture that followed punk rock, we appreciated these cassettes more than the later CDs because cassettes were a little more tangible – they wore our friends’ handwriting and sometimes handmade art, and they had their own dedicated mobile device, the boom box, which had speakers so a room, car, sidewalk, or beach full of friends could all listen.
At this point, the only way I can repay this debt is by paying it forward. Here are just a few of the cultures, genres, and artists gifted to me by family and friends. In most cases I’ve avoided posting live videos of the artists performing, because they’re not available, because the sound quality is poor, or because I want to save them for a later topic.
Delpha & Stella
Maternal grandmother Stella and paternal grandmother Delpha represented my rural Scottish cultural ancestry. Delpha and Stella sang me to sleep with Scottish lullabies, and throughout my early childhood, we met with their large extended families at the Williamson and Carson homeplaces out in the country, for reunions and Sunday sings, all of which featured Appalachian mountain hymns and songs, many of Scottish origin.
Thus it was like coming home when I discovered the Stanley Brothers of Virginia in the mid-1970s. They sang just like my Williamson uncles, with much the same repertoire. “Angel Band” was a song rendered sweetly by Uncle Wib, and “Amazing Grace” was one Stella sang to inspire neighbors in the nursing home before she died.
That old Appalachian music is the first and one of the most important influences on my own work.
After his brother Carter’s death in 1966, Ralph Stanley regularly included a song on each of his albums performed in the ancient style of lined-out hymnody, which was brought to North America by exiles like my Wiliamson, Carson, and Carmichael ancestors in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Joan & Vern
My parents met during the post-war jazz revolution – the birth of bebop – and they were both aspiring musicians, Joan training as a concert pianist and Vern studying violin but jamming on jazz percussion and vocals. I heard so much jazz growing up in the 1950s that it simply became my natural environment, and I didn’t even learn all the names of artists or songs until, in some cases, decades later.
But at the same time, Mom and Dad also loaded our huge hifi sound system with world music and classical music. After they divorced and my brother and I moved to our mom’s hometown, she regularly took us to jazz, classical, and world music concerts in the big city. And after I grew up and left home, my parents avidly followed my music and kept listening and exploring new genres and artists. My dad was listening to Nirvana in his 80s!
I never tried to play jazz, but jazz styles and ideas crept in unconsciously, and I can recognize them occasionally in my work. And today 1950s jazz is one of my favorite listening genres.
My dad was a great whistler and scat artist, and he often whistled “Scotland the Brave”. He gave me one of my first LP record albums, a recording of the Black Watch pipe band. Scottish bagpipe melodies have also occasionally found their way into my work.
Miriam Makeba is the first African artist I ever heard – again, on my parents’ record player.
In parallel with the British Invasion that sparked the 1960s youth music revolution, there was a much quieter invasion from a Portuguese colony – the collaboration between American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and Brazilian popular music. Despite the stiff competition, Stan’s Brazilian albums stayed in rotation at our house. This was the first international “fusion” music I ever heard, and I followed in Stan’s footsteps two decades later, as I tried to integrate African styles with my Appalachian heritage.
My mom tried to teach me some Bach on her piano, and one of her favorite artists of the 60s, the Swingle Singers, made a career out of jazzing up Bach in a capella. I was obsessed with European classical music in college, and every now and then a classical theme will still pop up in my work.
Mom took me to meet her linguistics professor at Indiana University, who sang old folk and blues songs with his wife, and they introduced me to the Pentangle, a lesser-known but unique British jazz-folk fusion group I still listen to often.
James
I’ve eulogized James elsewhere in Dispatches – one of my principal elders and mentors, leader of a group house in Menlo Park that I shared for little over a year, in 1978-79. But what a productive year! I drew, I painted, I taught myself bluegrass banjo and flatpicked guitar, I wrote stories and songs. And James, an amateur musicologist and passionate social critic, introduced me to the transgressive sounds of the Velvets, the Modern Lovers, and punk rock, all of which became the main inspiration for my work in the next year – not to mention the inspiration for most rock music throughout the following decades.
Mark
Mark is one of my two best friends from high school. We were introduced by my mom because we both wanted to form a band, and we did, and wrote songs together then, sang and played together throughout the 1970s, wrote and recorded together again in 1980, and recorded sporadically throughout the 80s and 90s as a guerrilla music and art duo, the Didactyl Brothers. We’ve always inspired each other in our shared habit of making music, art, and literature with equal passion.
Mark has written and performed both rock and country songs, and we share the love of old-time Appalachian music. But shortly after James introduced me to punk in Menlo Park, Mark was discovering post-punk down south at CalArts. The transition from one to the other was like the blink of an eye, and when I started Terra Incognita in San Francisco in 1981, we were operating in the very loosely-defined post-punk realm. Mark and I listened to Public Image and Joy Division constantly, but you will hear very little of their direct influence in any of my work. I agreed with them that our society and its culture were failing, but instead of wallowing in the failure, I wanted to start exploring the alternatives.
Jon
Jon was a founding member of Terra Incognita, a vocalist and percussionist, and one of our leading lights. Culturally voracious, he introduced me to West African music and led or co-produced TI’s ventures into performance art, multi-media cabarets, community-building, and art/science conferences. He arranged the party at our loft which brought together legends of African music for the first time, and triggered my obsession with Nigerian Yoruba music that remains one of my primary influences.
The first African cassette Jon gave me was of the Ramblers Dance Band from Ghana, but I found their highlife style too sweet, so Jon recommended Fela Kuti of Nigeria. I found this album at the legendary Down Home Music in the East Bay, and “Water No Get Enemy” remains my favorite of Fela’s. It may have been an inspiration for the sax I picked up a few months later.
At the same time, Jon gave me a book that heavily referenced the father of juju music, I. K. Dairo. I didn’t actually hear juju until almost two years later on King Sunny Ade’s first international release, but when I did, the genre became my main obsession. I finally saw Dairo in Berkeley in the 90s, shortly before he died.
Jon is also an Asian scholar, and gave me a cassette of this Indonesian gamelan album in the mid-80s. It became a favorite for late-night art sessions at the loft.
Scott
Scott joined Terra Incognita as a bandmate and one of the first loftmates in 1981, playing drums and sometimes experimenting brilliantly on other peoples’ instruments that he was completely unfamiliar with. I’d moved on from Joy Division by then, but Scott showed me that the re-formed New Order had potential – after all, they released what may be the greatest rock song of all time, Joy Division’s “Ceremony”, that summer. Years later, after I’d recovered from my African fixation, I finally embraced New Order’s decades-long repertoire, and it made me want to resume writing rock songs.
Katie
Katie was my life partner, songwriting partner, and bandmate for four years, helping me resurrect Terra Incognita and turn it into a successful performing band. A developing singer and bassist, she was a very sophisticated listener, introducing me to everything from Nina Simone and Kitty Wells to The Raincoats and early REM. But it turned out to be her cassette copies of the Meat Puppets and Holger Czukay, which we listened to over and over, year after year, in the car on road trips, and in the loft during art sessions, that became pillars of my library and inspirations for my later work.
Katie also turned me on to grunge in the early 90s. It inspired a few songs as I revisited rock in my new band Wickiup, and became a staple on mountain-bike rides, but didn’t survive the millenium.
This slow-burning track by dubmeister Czukay includes one of my favorite guitar solos of all time.
Sebastian
The Portuguese artist Sebastian Mendes was only a friend for a short time in the mid-80s, but he had a profound and lasting impact when he gave us a cassette copy of two albums by this English chamber ensemble, because he thought they sounded like our early recordings. It may seem like a stretch, but we did use some of the same instruments – ours were electrified but retained the crispness of their acoustic kin. The Penguins’ composer, Simon Jeffes, was also adventurous and had a sense of humor that TI lacked, and they remain my all-time favorite instrumental group.
Josiah
Josiah was a member of The Invertebrates, an underground San Francisco band that started roughly the same time as Terra Incognita, and in the same place – Club Foot. But we didn’t meet until 1985, when Mark, fiddle player in the reborn Terra Incognita, met Josiah, and our two bands began sharing gigs.
Josiah’s best friend from college, another artist, became one of my best friends, and Josiah became part of our extended family of artists and musicians that persists to this day. He was also writing for a music magazine and passing me cassette compilations from time to time – he made sure that reggae and dub became pillars of my library.
One cassette Josiah gave me in the 90s contained a one-off album by alcoholic Texan Jon Wayne that became my ultimate icon of music that’s so bad it’s brilliant.
Mike
In early 1988, having spent a year recording an album and unsuccessfully trying to pitch it to independent record labels, Katie and I decided we needed new talent and a bigger sound. I put up ads for backing musicians with a “spiritual” dimension, and Mike showed up raring to be our drummer and percussionist. He’d studied under jazz-funk adventurer Ronald Shannon Jackson at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and Woodstock’s Creative Music Studio and he’d briefly worked in New Orleans. But most important to me, he played talking drum and had worked in Ken Okulolo’s band, a Nigerian who played bass on King Sunny Ade’s early international tours.
Mike became one of my best friends while stage-managing our performances and introducing me to an amazing variety of music from around the world, both live and recorded.
Sun Ra is Mike’s guru of spiritual music, but with my grounding in Scottish pipe bands and old-time hymns, Albert Ayler’s spellbinding fusion of jazz, gospel, and military bugle calls struck a deeper chord.
Early on, Mike gave me a tape of pygmy music that I’ve never been able to source anywhere else, calling it the “ultimate music of the world”. I studied it seriously and, bewildered, attempted to reproduce it, and in the process discovered how it was made – spontaneously by everyone in a multigenerational community of hunter-gatherers, based on what they’d learned from animals and their ancestors and added to with their collective creativity.
But even before studying it I agreed with Mike. Pygmy music really is the ultimate music, making modern jazz, and centuries of European classical music, sound like the bumbling of ignorant toddlers. I could never hope to do anything this sophisticated.
Millie
Millie and I became partners two years after the 1989 earthquake that destroyed the Terra Incognita loft and ended the Terra Incognita band. I had realized my dream of establishing a spiritual home in the desert and mastering aboriginal survival skills, and we began exploring remote parts of the Southwest together. She was a talented singer and dancer and wanted to start a band, but mixing music and romance had ended badly for me, so I continued to work alone and she taught herself guitar and started a rock band with a girlfriend.
But like Katie, she was a sophisticated listener, and got me hooked for life on the unique Scottish band Cocteau Twins, which I had ignored in the 80s, along with so much of the developing post-punk scene, as I became obsessed with African music.
A musical friend in the late 80s, saxophonist Benjamin Bossi, had tried to get me interested in Hugo Largo, a newly formed East Coast band that used nearly the same instrumentation as Terra Incognita – electric guitar, bass, and cello. But as usual, I blew him off, and didn’t even give them a listen until 1991, when Millie gave me a cassette of their second album. The lyrics remain some of my favorites 30 years later.
Serge
Shortly after our debut in 1985, the reborn Terra Incognita was recruited for a multi-media extravaganza celebrating the legacy of Julian Beck and the Living Theater. Algerian-born Serge El Beze had been a member and was one of the organizers, so I got to know him first as an experimental theater person. We did more shows together, and I saw him perform music with free jazz pioneer Don Cherry, but with the rise of North African DJs and the international dance scene at the start of the 90s, Serge reinvented himself as Cheb i Sabbah, international music DJ.
From year to year, he migrated between residencies in San Francisco clubs, producing magical nights that were a healthy alternative to the bone-thumping, mind-numbing house music scene. Almost every time I went, I discovered new artists, rushing back to the booth to ask him who it was. I developed a bad habit of dragging new dates to his shows, partly because it was the best dance scene in town, but also partly to impress them with my worldliness. Serge was always friendly and generous in his courtly, gentlemanly, professional manner.
Gnawa music became one of only two genres of African music that I regularly listen to in the desert – the other being Nigerian Yoruba apala, which I discovered on my own.
The kora music of Mali became a staple of “world music” in the 90s, but Kasse Mady earned a permanent place in my library for his loyalty to rural traditions. Like Ralph Stanley, he’s a singer who will send chills up your spine. This piece is more urbanized, but it’s the first track I ever heard from him, the one that sent me back to Serge’s DJ booth to find out who in the world it was.
Thursday, May 16th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Artists, Arts, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Stories, Trouble.
Katie
Now we approach the main event of this ceremonial trip to the desert, which I’ve been hinting at obliquely, because it was too immediate, too painful, and there were others involved whose privacy I need to honor.
Remember this is only my version – others will differ. Why do I share such personal stories? Is it even appropriate? For me at least, sharing and hearing your responses helps me process these difficult experiences.
Forty years ago I began exploring, discovering, and falling in love with the desert with Katie, a fellow artist, musician, and writer. A mutual friend had shared his discovery of a magical place, a small basin lined with boulders and surrounded by cliffs, and my partner and I turned a boulder pile there into a home away from home – The Cave. Katie was the one who first found artifacts from the indigenous people who once camped all over that area. Those sparked our curiosity, inspired our art and music, and set me on the path I’ve followed ever since, as I broke away from my colonial Old World legacy to become a student of indigenous cultures. All in all, we explored the desert Southwest together for eight years.
At our home in the city, she was my bandmate and songwriting partner. We were ambitious, we worked hard, we competed. We were leaders in a fast-evolving, unstable community facing one crisis after another. Neither of us set limits to what we wanted to accomplish – as our music gained followers and admirers, we both continued to write and make art, and Katie experimented with new genres and media, learning to reproduce prehistoric pottery and rock writing, building assemblages from materials found in the desert.
She was a force of nature, challenging everyone around her. She changed the way I live, making me braver, more confident, more proactive. She could’ve coined the Nike motto, “just do it”.
But her dark side included anger and violence, and in the midst of all that ambition, all that work, all that turmoil, our relationship fell apart. We tried to remain friends, making trips to the desert together in the new decade, but Katie began to struggle with inner demons that drove me away and eventually destroyed her.
By the time they did, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her for 24 years. None of her many old friends and admirers had, and few even knew where she was. Her surviving family chose me to lead a memorial ceremony at our cave in the desert, believing that our time together there had been the happiest period of her life. And as the date approached, I was forced to revisit the trove of her creative work that survived in my personal archives, and to review the experiences we shared in the desert.
I discovered a file of song lyrics Katie had written before and during our time together, and decided to try putting them to music. It went well, and in the process I awakened to the nature and significance of her talent, and came to see her and her work in a new light.
Together, we’d been too competitive, and I was too insecure. Katie lacked the experience to set her own lyrics to music, and as time went by, I’d resented the competition and refused to help her. Now, too late, I realized that while I was writing from my head, she’d been writing from her heart, her eyes, her ears, her nose, her skin. Her lyrics lacked the irony, the sophisticated vocabulary and clever turns of phrase admired by critics and hipsters – they seemed simple or even juvenile, but that’s because they were economical. They clearly and honestly evoked the strong feelings of childhood and youth and the sensory experiences of engaging with our beloved desert. I realized, too late, that she’d been the only lover who’d ever truly shared my passion for the desert and its native cultures, the only fellow artist who like me had found her greatest inspiration in the magic of the desert. And I realized, too late, the talent that we’d lost, and that she’d never been rewarded for.
Climbing the steep trail
Indian summer
Following ancient feet
Up to the hunting grounds
Where are the mountain sheep?
I keep looking around
Writing on the rocks
Said I would find them here
After we broke up, Katie continued working on music and art for only a few more years. Her demons took over, and as she lurched back and forth across the country trying to find work or shelter, she lost all her old music, art, and writing. My archives preserve the only significant holdings of her creative legacy, so before heading out to the desert, I turned them into digital files and printed scrapbooks to share with her family at the ceremony.
Day Five: Reunion
I usually hate to leave my land, but after yesterday’s hike I felt ready. Driving out the mouth of the big wash onto the alluvial fan, I got a signal, reached Katie’s family, and made a plan to meet them at their rental in town. I had a long drive ahead – I decided to avoid the washed-out, abandoned highway and take back roads for about 45 miles to the next highway. Those roads would be maintained, but were sure to be heavily washboarded. They drop 2,000 feet in elevation and cross much starker habitat.
The backroads gave me views of other beautiful, remote ranges. But my lightweight vehicle’s MacPherson struts made driving that washboard an ordeal. And as I approached town after three hours of stressful driving, I discovered where all the wind from the forecast had ended up. The entire valley was beset by towering dust storms, including the house my friends had rented. We hadn’t seen each other in decades, they had adult kids who hadn’t been born back then, and we spent hours catching up as the dust swirled and blasted around their compound. I used their wifi to book a room at a nearby chain hotel where I could get points. The place was rundown, but I was still exhausted from yesterday’s hike, and slept well anyway.
Day Six: Ceremony
Yesterday’s wind and dust storm had vanished by morning. I’d assumed we would drive and hike to the cave, do what we needed to do, and leave. But in the morning, it became clear that they intended to spend the entire day out there. So I led them all in a caravan across the desert. As I said, I had no plan, but I’d brought ingredients.
We parked and loaded our packs for the day. I’d briefed them in advance on the dangers of the desert: sunburn, dehydration, cactus spines and catclaw thorns. Now I told them the hardly believable story of how I’d first discovered and fallen in love with this beautiful place – the start of the greatest love affair of my life, and the only one that has lasted.
I led them to the Cave, past fanciful boulders and flowering cacti, and they each took a look inside, and assured me that they now understood why it’d been so important to Katie. Then I led them over to the larger rockshelter nearby where we could assemble in shade for the rest of the day.
My artist friends and I had originally fallen in love with the desert partly because in this place it had largely belied its nature as a harsh wasteland. Although it could get cold in the winter and on occasion the wind would drive us away, in general it was a really comfortable place to camp out. And that’s what we found today. It was warm enough that we could shift back and forth between sun and shade, from the intimacy of the big cave to the spacious view of the ledge in back. I’d worried that we might be spotted from the road and interrupted by authorities, maybe even forced to leave. But traffic was unusually light; few stopped and no one seemed to notice us.
I always prefer to enable a group to lead itself through consensus, and that’s what I tried to do here. I began by sharing my gifts, starting with the scrapbooks I’d spent the past week preparing. Throughout the day, they all studied them carefully. A childhood friend had brought sage bundles and set one burning. And I set up a boombox playing tracks of Katie’s music, so we were surrounded by her voice and her bass lines for the next two hours.
We made lunch, and part of the group moved out back for some sun.
After a while, one of the women asked if we could regroup to share our stories of Katie, so we gathered in a circle in a corner of the big cave. I was asked to begin, and I tried to tell the story of my time with Katie. We were all overcome as I described how I’d failed her – how the world had failed her, had never found a way to handle her talent, her brilliance that had destroyed her in the end. Then her younger sister struggled to express how much she’d loved and admired Katie – like Katie herself, the feelings we were bringing out were too hot to handle.
I was especially moved to hear how the younger generation had only seen Katie’s positive side – the loss was greater for them, to discover her work after they’d lost her forever. How strange that while she’d lived a long life, we were only honoring such a short period of it, saying that was the best. Had the rest of her life really been wasted? Apparently not for her nieces and nephews. So sad, so seemingly pointless that we were only celebrating her now, after she was gone. I was feeling worse and worse, guiltier and guiltier, that I hadn’t been able to help her, to save her.
The sharing of stories devastated and depleted all of us, and we were rising to disperse when Katie’s younger brother asked me for some songs. Of course, I’d brought my guitar – as leader, I was basically on call for this group all day – but I wasn’t sure I could do it.
I stumbled through the two songs of Katie’s that I’d put to music in the weeks before. The first was the song in which she shared the experience of discovering the desert and its cultures. By the chorus of the second song, the one she’d addressed to me personally, I was breaking down, and that’s how I finished. And then we all moved out back, into the sun. One of the other elders had brought a boombox with a mellow playlist, and as we talked, we became aware of a big male chuckwalla, the largest lizard in the desert, perched on the tall boulder pile fifty feet away.
He made his way down toward us, and clambered into a flowering shrub where he began eating the blooms – they’re vegetarians, but I’d never actually watched one doing that. They’re usually shy, but some of our young ones approached within eight feet, and he ignored them. Then he moved even closer to our group, seemingly to observe us. As the young people said, “This is his home – we’re just passing through. He feels safe here.”
The sun was sinking toward the western cliffs. We’d spent seven hours out there together. Again, one of the women came and asked me to lead them in the final phase. So we packed up again and walked over to what would now be known as Katie’s Cave.
The women surrounded me outside the Cave and we conferred and agreed on the details. Then they followed me inside and formed an arc around the sister and me, who would perform the ritual. At this point, we were all overwhelmed.
And afterword, we hugged, and kissed, and thanked each other. A solitary jackrabbit sat on its haunches nearby, watching us.
We hiked back across the desert to our vehicles, and said our goodbyes.
I called ahead to the reservation, and my friend arranged a room at the tribal rate. It took almost three hours to drive there, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch. The restaurant was closed, but the staff, generous as ever, hauled a microwave and silverware to my room so I could warm up a frozen dinner from their freezer.
While eating, I looked something up online. After the ceremony, I’d recovered a vague memory of a similar ritual held prehistorically by this tribe. Based on the ethnographic record, it sounded much like the ceremony we’d invented on the spot. The place, and its memory of the ancestors, had surely guided us.
What to do with my grief, my guilt? That would be the work of the following days and weeks.
Sunday, May 19th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Artists, Arts, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
Day Seven: Singers
I was on the reservation to see my friend, and to rest up. In my mind it was the natural place, and he was the natural person, to visit after performing that ceremony in his tribe’s territory.
Before we started breakfast, he gave me a miniature gourd rattle, a symbol of my role in the ceremony, a role he’s performed himself. He spoke of the difficulty of learning the ancient ceremonial dialect, part of his legacy as a hereditary chief. We share a passion for the desert’s past, so over breakfast, we discussed prehistory and talked about our families. He said young people in the tribe want me to lead them to remote sites I’ve discovered, so we should start planning a return visit.
Then I arranged to stay another night, he went off to help his son, and I spent most of the day in bed.
Day Eight: Saddles
It was time to head home, and today would be the hardest part – the five-hour gauntlet of the interstate highway, competing with those giant tractor-trailer rigs in my little rattletrap. The dangerous wind had returned – when I first stepped outside in the morning, I was almost blown over.
The drive was nerve-wracking as usual, but it got better at the end, after I finally left the interstate for a lonely two-lane across the high plateau, and eventually reached the little alpine valley where I would dine at my favorite rural restaurant and sleep in the rustic fisherman’s motel. The drive home from the desert is just too far to tackle in one day, and I’d decided this would be the best way to divide it up, before crossing the multiple mountain ranges and high passes between here and home.
During the drive, I was starting to process the trip, and the ceremony. It had resurrected feelings buried for a generation, reopened wounds that had never healed. I’d been forced to bare my heart and soul like never before. Katie’s family had praised and thanked me, but I was feeling depleted, inadequate, guilty. Someone who had spent decades failing those who deserved his best. I longed for the comfort of loved ones, someone to share my turmoil and help me find clarity. But after briefly becoming one with the group at the cave, I was now more alone than ever.
And in the evening, there I was, being served a delicious meal while the resident elk herd shared grazing outside the window with a large band of mule deer. My body was sore all over from last Saturday’s epic hike, from driving 1,500 miles, from the emotional drain of the ceremony. My knee in particular was so bad I could barely handle a few stair steps at a time.
Day Nine: Pilgrimages
From there, it was only three hours to home, on another lonely, winding road through a series of mountain ranges. The shape of the trip was becoming clear, if not its meaning.
It had been a triple pilgrimage, triggered by the ceremony at its center. Going to the cave, I had to visit my land nearby, and make that hike to the crest – the divide between east and west. And after the ceremony, I had to visit my friend, elder of the people who had established that ceremony in that place for generations before us. As the singer of the old songs, he’d set the example for me when I sang for our group. I’d anticipated none of this in advance – I had to discover it out there, one day at a time.
What a path to find myself on! Never have I felt so much like an exile, an eternal explorer, infinitely far from my birthplace and my ancestors, irretrievably lost in an abandoned wilderness.
Children
I arrived home late in the week and spent the next few days icing my joints, resting, and editing my photos. And in the process, I finally discovered a meaning and a purpose for our ceremony.
To some extent, most of us expect to live on in the memories of others. People who seek fame and influence expect to be remembered by their colleagues and followers. Parents expect to live on in the memories of their children. I don’t know about other artists, but for me – otherwise childless – my creative works are my children.
As I learned in the desert, Katie will live on in the memories of her nieces and nephews. But for the rest of us, her legacy, her only children, are the creative works I’ve been able to preserve. Sharing and establishing those works will remain my responsibility and my inspiration for the rest of my life.
Recent struggles and traumas have discouraged me and set me back in my own work, but these memories of Katie should inspire me to recover from the setbacks and renew both our legacies. In the words of a song I wrote when I first met her, I’ll be “building for future generations”.
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