Arts
Thursday, July 4th, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance.
Preparing for Katie’s memorial ceremony in the desert, I found a folder of lyrics she’d left with me when we were partners in Terra Incognita, in San Francisco in the 1980s. Some of them she’d written before we met in 1984, and some after.
She depended on me to set her lyrics to music, but we never worked on these together, so now that she’s gone, they’re her orphans. My mission is to turn them into the songs they deserve.
The COVID pandemic began a four-year hiatus from the arts, a troubling time for most and almost fatal for me. So I’m rusty, and I have to fit creative work into brief intervals between the toil of surviving and caring for loved ones. But I wanted to share these lo-fi recordings of works in progress with our community, because who knows if I’ll ever have time to polish them for mass consumption?
I started composing most of them with the electric bass – Katie’s instrument, but also more and more my instrument of choice. The lyrics would suggest a rhythm, a melody would arise from singing over it, and the result was always surprising. But singing them myself is awkward, because they’re a woman’s songs and they should feature a female voice.
These first four came together quickly and easily – probably because I’d opened myself to her memory and her spirit. I had to revise a few lines here and there so they would work better with the music – that turned out to be the hardest part.
The drawing for “Stampede” and the photo for “I Wish You Were Awake” are by Katie.
Indian Paintbrush
Indian paintbrush is one of the most common wildflowers of the American West. Katie wrote this about our shared experience of falling in love with the desert and yearning for its mysteries. She seemed to be unconsciously channeling the spirits of the people who lived there before us, who also made songs about their journeys through the desert and the mysterious things they encountered along the way. Katie was the only friend who loved the desert as much as I did, so I’m especially sorry that I didn’t help her with this one while she was alive.
Runaway Train
Katie’s family moved several times, but finally ended up in North Dakota where she finished high school and “ran away” from home. Before I met her, I used to catch and ride freight trains all over the country, so I can attest that she captured the experience perfectly in these lyrics. And they also carry a hint of the next song.
Stampede
This is Katie writing about the condition that ultimately killed her, using her lifelong love of horses as a metaphor. I knew this would be a challenge, and I dreaded it, but I had to try.
I Wish You Were Awake
She scrawled this on a piece of scrap paper, early one morning while we were camping somewhere on the northern California coast.
Monday, August 12th, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance, Nature, Outdoor Life, Stories, Trouble.
Challenges
Three weeks with no hiking Dispatches! I hope that’s given some of you a chance to catch up?
The big news is that I’m writing songs. The last time I had a sustained burst of songwriting was thirty years ago – that’s why this is big news for me. Life got in the way, but I can already tell it was worth the wait. More on that in the next Dispatch.
A lot still stands in the way. I have more pain than ever, it’s out of control, disrupting my sleep, requiring too many meds. After working indoors all week, my body and soul need wilderness hikes on the weekend, but those are no longer possible due to a knee problem – with a two-month waiting list for treatment. Not only does my body require more maintenance than ever, but also my fire-damaged house, my overgrown yard, my dilapidated vehicles – especially in monsoon season with weeds exploding, animal pests invading, heat that requires hands-on management throughout the day due to a lack of effective insulation and cooling. And alongside all that I’m constantly managing my family situation back in Indiana, solving daily and weekly crises remotely, forced to make decisions for all of us, usually alone.
As painful as it may be for me, the inability to hike or do creative work is a first-world problem. What we call “the arts” have roots in traditional, indigenous ways of life, but our versions of these arts are so far removed, so decadent, that most of them have no place in a healthy, sustainable culture. A subsistence culture has no use for oil paintings, literary fiction, violin concertos, opera, or ballet. Songwriting, painting, and literary storytelling are things I do because I’ve been compelled to do them since childhood, and doing them is the most rewarding thing I know.
Maps and Burritos
Unable to hike on Sundays, I drive to somewhere even more remote than my hometown where I can spend time outdoors and get a midday meal. Since discovering a wooden relief map in this visitor center years ago, I’ve been wanting to return and photograph it. Unfortunately the plexiglass cover results in excessive glare.
I spent a few hours reading beside this creek.
No matter what else is on the menu – seafood, steak, burgers, Thai, sushi – if there’s a half decent burrito I’ll always order that. But it feels bizarre to be eating it at midday instead of after a long hike.
Storms are forming and rain is falling, but not enough. Still, our skies are as spectacular as ever.
The Agony and Ecstasy of Songwriting
Friday, August 23rd, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance.
Afro-Goth Fusion
This Dispatch is going to be a deep dive into the creative process. I know most of you are music lovers and hope you find it interesting – raw and unfiltered from the horse’s mouth instead of highly processed in movies like Once or the upcoming A Complete Unknown.
The last time I wrote new songs was over a decade ago – and those were just experiments, nothing memorable. After that, I became concerned about the hundreds of hours of archival recordings I’d accumulated with bands and friends, and began editing and releasing some of those. Meanwhile I was writing my epic novel and starting on a big painting. It wasn’t until early 2020 that I got the itch to write new songs. Maybe reviewing those archival tapes had reminded me of the era in which I matured as a musician – the post-punk years of 1978-1980 – because it finally hit me that although that’s what got me started, I’d only written a few true post-punk songs, instead plunging straight into primarily instrumental experimentation with my band, Terra Incognita.
I felt that the purest form of that original post-punk sound had been achieved by New Order immediately after Ian Curtis’s suicide, in their 1981 recordings of “Ceremony” and “Dreams Never End”. But rather than developing it further, they abandoned it in favor of club dance music.
I had always assumed that my mature guitar style was an adaptation of Appalachian bluegrass flatpicking to the call-and-response guitar riffs in Nigerian juju bands. But looking back, I realized that the classic post-punk sound – marching-band drums, clean guitar and bass tones fattened with the chorus effect, melodic bass, and droning or purely rhythmic guitar riffs – was not only one of my main inspirations. It freed every alt-rock and indie-rock band after that from the blues-rock cliches of the Sixties, and that classic post-punk sound is now renewed by every new generation of rock bands.
I wanted to acknowledge and honor that pillar of my legacy, and in early 2020 I recorded some instrumental tracks to my favorite post-punk beats and did some vocal improv over them. Then the pandemic took over, my house caught fire, and the next two years were spent trying to recover. During that hiatus, I discovered that the goth subculture, inspired by Joy Division and The Cure, had faithfully rescued that early sound and perpetuated it worldwide in a series of obscure bands that continue to this day.
Through pain, illness, trauma, and the stressful work of helping my family, I kept getting ideas and making notes about the new songs I wanted to write. In my heart, I really just wanted to write classic post-punk songs, but I’d spent decades studying and experimenting with African genres – especially my favorite, Nigerian Yoruba apala music. And as I reviewed and analyzed my work since 1980, I realized that my forté as a songwriter and composer is to invent new sounds by fusing distant, unrelated traditions – like I did with Nigerian juju and Appalachian in the Eighties, and apala and Native American in the Nineties.
I actually learned that kind of trans-oceanic fusion from the Africans. From the Fifties to the Seventies, record companies had dumped their overstock in Africa, and African musicians began adapting American country and funk instrumental styles to their tribal traditions. If Nigerians could use country-western pedal steel and the funk wah-wah pedal in juju, why couldn’t I fuse apala with post-punk or goth?
From the Heart
Occupied with family duties, I literally didn’t have time for music until I was forced to make time in April of this year, setting Katie’s songs to music for her ceremony. That, and the ceremonial handover of African drums from a colleague, a few months later, have provided the impetus for my new songwriting effort.
Turning Katie’s lyrics into songs proved to be easy, and I began wondering if the pain and trauma would end up making me a better songwriter and singer – that’s the old cliche. Singing lyrics that poor lost Katie had addressed directly to me definitely got my heart into my voice. Here’s the latest, a true story from the beginning of our relationship:
After finishing a series of Katie’s songs, I sat down and organized my notes, which included dozens of potential themes or ideas for songs. But of all those songwriting notes I’d accumulated since 2020, the most urgent was to “write from your heart”. In the past, the work of inventing new genres had allowed my brain to dominate. I’d written songs about things that inspired me in nature and prehistory, but by the time I finished the songs I’d ironed most of my feelings out of them.
More recently, when I wrote lyrics and tried singing them over instrumental tracks, they always came out as either too cerebral or as plaintive, mystical garbage, which is a rut I used to get in when smoking pot.
Making it even harder, in addition to evoking strong feelings in my songs, I was still determined to work outside existing genres, making everything up as I go along, combining instruments, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies from exotic and obscure traditions, while showing my love of nature and indigenous cultures and embodying the questions I’ve pursued and the lessons I’ve learned from an adventurous life. I always need a challenge.
Clear Creek Canyon Girl
Fortunately, there was one subject that was still fresh in my heart – an encounter with the past in Indian country, in which I fell in love with someone who was about as inaccessible as you could get. I decided to start with that.
I started out by writing the story of my impossible love in the form of rhythmic lines, but when I tried various ways of setting those lines to music – with African drums, drum kit sounds, a bass line, or guitar chords – by the end of the day I was back in the same old boring rut.
So I studied my music library for inspirations – beats or structures I could adapt. I don’t normally use other people’s music for inspiration, but this was a special case. Maybe I could use other peoples’ songs as disruptors to prevent me from falling into past ruts.
I started with PJ Harvey’s “The Wheel”. I spent another day using that as a touchstone – and I do love the song – but it turned out to be totally the wrong feel for my story.
So on the third day I turned to New Order’s “Love Vigilantes”. I like the song, and I love the power and simplicity of New Order’s rhythm tracks, but mainly I had the idea that the story resonated with mine in some nonintuitive way. To make things easier on myself, I settled on drum kit sounds as a placeholder, hoping to work the African drums in later. The “Love Vigilantes” approach worked, but you’d be hard-pressed to recognize the inspiration in the final result!
Each time I started over, I deleted six or eight hours of previous hard work, which takes motivation and discipline. On all three days, I was in pain and taking meds, and the meds pushed the pain into the background enough for me to work. I had to get my heart and mind to work together somehow – fiendishly tricky.
I finished it on that third day, and the result literally had me in tears. Maybe it wasn’t just the tragic love story – maybe those years of pain and trauma had something to do with it. In any event, the joy I feel after an accomplishment like this is better than anything else in life.
And the song was long – almost six minutes! Afterward, I happened to hear Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on the radio. A six-minute tragic folk ballad, it reached the top of the pop music charts in 1976. Can you imagine something like that competing with Taylor Swift today?
I can’t share my new song with you until it’s ready for legal distribution – weeks of further work – but here’s a snippet of “Clear Creek Canyon Girl”:
Stranger to the World
After that success, I was really stoked, but it still wasn’t Afro-Goth. I didn’t know what it was, it seemed a one-off like many of my compositions. So for the next song I went for broke and took New Order’s “Dreams Never End” as my inspiration – a track that’s sacred to me. The subject would be my childhood pastor, who set me on a life path as a seeker. I wanted to honor him while showing how hard a path it is.
I started writing lines based on the phrasing of “Dreams Never End”, but as I might’ve expected, I soon lost control of the subject. What was it about? My long-lost pastor, or my entire life story? How could I narrow it down and turn it into something that might engage an unfamiliar listener?
I recorded a rhythm track roughly inspired by DNE, using software drum kit sounds, and tried singing some of the lines I’d written over it, finding a key that seemed to work with my voice, and a chord progression I could alternate repeatedly. But the lines I’d written were woefully incomplete, so I spent the next two weeks trying to outline the song and focus the theme, in between doing rehab exercises and struggling with the side effects – insomnia, hot flashes, splitting headaches – from a shot of prednisone a doctor had given me for pain. This, after finishing the first song in three days! This is my kind of art, moments of ecstasy separated by days of agony.
But after seven or eight drafts I finally got something that was enigmatic but heartfelt, triggering tears again by the time I reached the end. I’d recorded an acoustic guitar track to sing over, and now I added bass and electric guitar, still trying for that post-punk sound.
But now, it had so many echoes of the New Order song, I realized I had to make big changes to avoid a copyright issue. I slowed the tempo way down, and that actually allowed me to put more feeling into my vocals. Then I realized the tempo was similar to one of my favorite apala songs, so I recorded syncopated talking drum tracks using big and little drums. In the past I’ve used banjo to take the place of lamellophone (mbira, thumb piano) in apala, so I tried a banjo track. But that made it sound way too folky, so I tried the same part on bass, and the song really began to work.
I muted the original drum kit tracks – the song seemed to be working with just talking drums, electric bass, and electric guitar. But now that I was closing in on it, I discovered I didn’t really have an ending – I just had a series of verses, all with the same phrasing. The last set of lines could be used as an ending, but I wanted them to have a different chord progression and melody, something climactic. I remembered a brief passage in a song that’s been playing on an LA radio station I listen to daily, a song by an obscure indie-pop band from the early Nineties. An achingly beautiful melody with a seven-chord progression that occurs once in the middle of the song.
I fit that to the existing key of my song and recorded a track with the guitar chords at the end. Singing over them in that melody took my voice a little too high for comfort, and totally changed the character of the song, but I decided to keep it for now. Now, the song seemed too powerful for just the talking drums, so I tried adding the kit drum sounds back in, and voila! Afro-Goth!
After listening to it from the beginning, I realized the main melody was just too close to New Order’s. I mean, the beat was now completely different, none of the instrumental parts were similar, but I’d succeeded in singing too much like Peter Hook. So I experimented to see if I could “apalafy” the vocal melody, using melismatic singing. That actually worked, in that I ended up loosening and putting soul into what had previously been a bleak, metronomic performance.
But the ending still bothered me, and my heart sank when I listened to the full song on my big speakers, and the new ending melody suddenly reminded me of a famous, sappy old pop song, probably by Barry Manilow.
What could I possibly do after investing this much time and work? The answer turned out to be simple. I ignored the high-pitched melody from the indie-pop song and sang my final lines in a lower register over the same chord progression, to a melody I just made up. At first I sounded a little like Elvis doing a gospel standard, but that inspired me to put even more soul into it. It ended up subtly evoking early rhythm & blues.
That inspired me to go back and let my lyrics take the phrasing and melody even farther from the New Order song, so that no one would recognize a connection now.
Here’s a snippet of “Stranger to the World”. Can you hear the talking drums?
Protected: Katie & Max: New Work
Thursday, November 28th, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance.
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Slant Board for Patellar Tendinitis
Friday, February 14th, 2025: Arts, Design.
Purpose and Design
Throughout the past year, as I kept researching my apparent knee condition online, I found the same advice over and over: do eccentric squats on a slant board. In an eccentric squat, you first squat slowly with most of your weight on the injured knee, then shift weight to the opposite knee to rise slowly back to a standing position.
The slant board used in physical therapy facilities is typically super-simple, as in the illustration below. But an online search reveals dozens of mainly adjustable options, with quality products starting at $70.
$70 for something I could easily make in my workshop using scrap lumber? I think not.
Woodworking
I had a length of pine one-by-twelve that would be easier to work with and make a nicer item than plywood. I hadn’t used my table saw in a couple years, so I was stoked. Happily, this wee project ended up using all my basic power tools, and mild weather allowed me to use the concrete slab right outside for sawing and sanding that would generate sawdust. I spent about four hours designing, cutting, and gluing the pieces together.
Sanding and Finishing
Even for a small piece like this, sanding is time consuming. I’d originally figured it would only take a few hours to throw something together that would be usable. But then I realized I’d need some kind of anti-slip covering, which meant the wood would have to be finished, which meant it would have to be sanded. Hence the relatively high prices for commercial products.
Finishing with polyurethane took an additional couple of days due to drying time between coats.
Final Assembly
As the slant board got closer to being used, I realized I needed some specialized items: rubber feet that would prevent it from sliding on my hardwood floor, and some kind of non-slip covering for the slanted surface. The feet were easy to find at Ace, as was this non-slip adhesive-backed tape, which was somewhat tricky to apply neatly.
Use
After only two weeks of use, I can already feel the results in knee strength and pain-free downhill hiking. This little project may well be the key to reversing nine months of damage to my knee!
