The last leg

Again, I wasn’t sleeping. My eyes closed and opened again on restlessness. “You can relax,” I told myself, “you are at John and Tina’s house now. You are with friends.” At one point, John woke up and moved to occupy a sleeper sofa not far away in the living room. I noticed him by a pair of socked feet out of the corner of my eye. Not having brought anything myself, I slept in my clothes. “Where is this place?” I thought. “Somewhere between New England and Tennessee. Somewhere between the past and future? . . . I must be in shock.” I turned over, finding a better position on the couch. “Look!” I said, ubraiding myself, “God has given you so much. This is a fantastic opportunity for you and for your family. Stop griping. Stop moaning about like something awful has happened!” But isn’t reality more complicated than that? Can’t you grieve and rejoice at the same time – is this a mood with no words?

Daylight slipped through the front window. Realizing we were both awake, John and I considered just getting up. It was good to be here. We hadn’t seen either John or Tina in years. And now, meeting their daughter, H. for the first time was a wonderful occasion. The adults congregated in the kitchen. It had been refurbished in the last few years, and L. and I admired it. John and I talked about books, about work, about his interest in the form critical developments behind the American Constitution. My mind felt disorganized. In-transit. Finally, H. woke up – what a cutie! It took a few minutes, but she and Kara soon warmed to each other. Kara was so eager to meet her. Again, what a great attitude – Kara was handling this whole thing like a pro. Then we had to push on to Nashville (with a stop at one of our favorite restaurants: Misakes).

I don’t even remember the remainder of the drive. But when we pulled into L’s parents house – their beautiful retirement home nestled in a community with high-ceilings, cathedral windows and a rocky waterfall at the entrance – with two kids, a pack-n-play, boxes of clothes, guitars and toys and baby wipes and diapers and two vehicles a baby swing, a crib, blankets, legos, CD’s, and who knows what else – I just didn’t know if this was going to work despite everyone’s best intentions. And, frankly, neither did they.

The Journey South

Finally I have a moment to review the last few weeks. Living with Lynn-nore’s parents, living with someone else’s schedule and habits, has meant time away from the routine that would have guaranteed a little more communication before now. Nevertheless, I want to talk about the trip down and let everyone know how we are doing.

The journey south was relatively uneventful. Our stuff made it in record time, arriving at the terminal in Tennessee a mere two days after pulling away from Manchester-by-the-Sea. Our own passage took a little longer. We had hoped to visit friends on Long Island Monday evening, but that didn’t materialize. Instead, we stayed in Pennsylvania. I hadn’t been sleeping well. My mind kept turning on innumerable details – car registration, insurance questions, potential trucking fees, the heavy work of unloading the truck in Nashville. It did no better now that everything was underway. The second day, Tuesday, was hard driving. An ice storm was supposed to roll in that evening, blanketing the Appalachians. We couldn’t stop until Kingsport, until we made it to John and Tina Grubb’s house, a 12-hour trip. So we drove 80 m.p.h. most of the way. I-81 is a major East Coast artery, and I worried for Lynn-nore and the kids as trucks whizzed by. On one occasion, a car turned in between us, so I slowed down to force him to pass. 60 … 55 … 50, the driver matched every deceleration without a hint of frustration. This was a Sunday drive, apparently! At 35 m.p.h. I wondered if I wouldn’t have to stop and ask the driver to “please go on ahead.” Threading the mountains in West Virginia brought another challenge. This time, a small truck weaved first this way and then that, staying in the lane but with obvious difficulty. He was tired or he was under the influence. I sped past him and then hovered, encouraging Lynn-nore to do the same, but she didn’t move. She hung back. “Come on,” I said aloud, even though she couldn’t hear me, “pass him!” She seemed frozen. Finally, her blinker came on – take the next exit. “We’re just going to have to face this guy again,” I grumbled. We stopped at a truck stop, and I punched out of the truck. “Caleb needs to be changed,” she said. “I thought you were just nervous about that drunk driver,” I interjected. She didn’t know anything about it.

The truck stop smelled of cigarette smoke. Kara and I waited while Lynn-nore took Caleb into the ladies’ room. Hunting gear, electronic poker machines, and angel statuettes were everywhere. Kara took me on a trip through the gift shop. Kids toys, remote control tanks, t-shirts, hawaiian hula dolls, hair care products. I thought about the life of a truck driver, the life of many of the people sitting in the restaurant next door, watching the remote control tank in a video demonstration, buying a Coke at the register. I’d always placed such a life somewhere between the varieties of condoms for sale in the men’s room and the brands of cigarettes behind the cashier. Yet, I have lived in communities where being a trucker is a good life. Men save up to buy their own rig to the tune of $60,000+. These men and women are as much an image of God as I am. I have no business thinking less. They need toys for their kids, t-shirts, Cokes, shaving cream, just like anyone else. Our clothes smelled like rumpled Winstons as we returned to our vehicles. Kara had me plug the DVD player back in as I strapped the seatbelt around her. It had been all day in the car and she had a better attitude than I did.

My attitude was somewhere between grief and masculine single-mindedness. I wanted to get there (wherever) in good time. Yet I missed New England in general, and our friends SWR&QE in particular. Missing them was a dull ache in my heart. Yes, I was afraid of losing “me” to my Southern roots. “In some ways it is like New England never happened,” Lynn-nore had said one evening a few weeks ago, talking about the move and the future. Thom grows up in Kingsport and moves to the big city, with that loop somewhere up North. Nothing changed, nothing put behind, nothing new added. New England had been my going away to college, every choice there had been my own. Lynn-nore and I had made what we are there, and had put 11 years into it. The result had been running into people you knew on a regular basis, a church family with shared history, the historical-yet-frenetic nature of Boston, the omnipresent beauty of the Atlantic coast, the rich resources of the BTI, decent snowfall, church bells in Harvard Square, the song-sand of Singing Beach and many, many friends, like shiny coins jangling in a pocket, and then there was SWR&QE.

SWR&QE are missionaries, and missionaries live their lives under the question mark of God. We, too, were aware of that question mark: things would change. One day God would open a door and that would be it. Hadn’t that been my prayer for nearly a decade: “What next, Lord?” New England had been a stepping stone in the beginning, a cliff not a plain. We knew going into our relationship with them that every moment had the word “temporary” written on it. But it didn’t matter. Words weren’t required. How many times did QE go up and read to Kara in her room after a long day of managing 1st graders? How often did SWR just take Caleb from us, not as if holding him was a chore but a welcome pastime. They are “our bummy friends.” We had opened the doors of our heart to them, and with it all other doors as well. How could we go with the baby due? How could we go with stories yet to be snapped off in a weekend? And it was we, not they, who were leaving. Leaving for a place far away and not coming back. Who is the missionary now? Who has sent whom? I nursed my ache with each passing mile, and my mood was as torn and overcast as the clouds against the black Virginia hillsides.

BBC4's Advent Offerings -- Thanks Be Unto God

Thank God for BBC4’s advent offerings. If you have never visited their website, I suggest you check it out. From an audio-rich advent calendar, to daily services recorded in various cathedrals throughout Britain, you can easily fill your ears with carols, choirs, readings from the lectionary, and advent homilies. Over time, the BBC has become a staple of my advent experience, if simply for the music. I can’t get enough performance during the season, and certainly can’t afford in cost or time what is available. The BBC serves it up for free.

Music, and especially choral music, really makes the advent season for me. My Mom, both a teacher of voice and an experienced and accomplished alto herself, was always dragging me to performances in my youth, and, well, it must have rubbed off. Now I’d drag myself to one every day if possible. There is nothing quite like experiencing music as a living thing. In our day of artificial lungs and mechanical hearts, we know how to keep a performance going on decades afterward, and we have mistakenly equated these corpses with living bodies. At the same time, performance groups in every area of the liberal arts have out-priced tickets to all but the wealthy, and, as each year more die from lack of funds and public interest, they reap the results. So-called culture isn’t dying because people aren’t interested any longer, rather, people are dying because ‘culture’ has turned its back on them. Music – good music -- needs its reformation.

A large part of it, too, is education. Even as I sit down in a theatre or music hall and begin to enjoy a performance, I am always painfully aware that I don’t know how to listen. I have no real framework for making meaning from what is happening. The aesthetic enjoyment is there, but experienced as a child at play, not as an adult who enters into the real depth of the thing. The only performances for which our culture educates us are political and athletic ones. My soul feels poorer for it. Just last year I drug L. and Kara to a local Episcopal church for an advent’s evening of English carols. They came more for me than for them. I wanted Kara to hear live music, to see the performers, to hear the sharp intake of their breaths, the rustle of flipping pages and the shifting and coughing of the audience. But, I had not way of really explaining to her how to take it all in. All I could do was drag she and L. there and hope for the best. There is something wrong there. If I was to go with a friend to a wrestling match, by the time we arrived at the stadium he would have filled my ears with the back-story and suitable anecdotes attached to each of the competing wrestlers. He certainly wouldn’t just induct me to our seats, sit down mutely beside me and say nothing with every body-blow of the match.

Advent suggests an answer to this malady. During Advent, the songs, readings, sermons and even the movements of time participate together lending their voices to each other. The coming of God to his people and as his people informs everything, creating what the academy calls a meta-narrative. Inducted, then, by every voice, we are led through this great story until we ourselves form a part.

So, I weep for you music and theatre. I weep for you members of the Handel & Haydn Society who, each year, sing the complete oratorio of Handel’s Messiah. I compose a lament for you well-wishers singing Christmas songs in shopping malls. You are like sheep without a shepherd. You listen but hear not. You sing, and dance, and speak your lines without knowledge. You wander in exile without a narrative-home, clutching your arias, symphonies, concertos, and chamber pieces to your breast. You have forgotten your informing logos, become unseated from the dynamic and creating Word, and need, as much as any of us, advent to give you life again.

Adventus

How should we greet the future?  With gladness or with grief?  It comes to us like a pale dawn, like New England, but it isn’t New England.  We know it for our benefit, but, at least today, parting is grief.  You, future, must wipe our eyes.

November's interview

The interview went amazingly well. I didn't get to bed until 12:20 the night before, and was up to leave at 4 a.m. God was good, though, and that nap felt as if it took 12 hours. It was raining hard driving to New Hampshire. I kept the radio switching between talk radio stations, and breakfasted on a granola bar. With me was the Chicago Manual of Style and a change of clothes. The plan was for L's parents to pick me up at the airport and take me over to the interview. Unused to Southwest, when I boarded the plane they had not assigned me a seat. What to do? Finally I claimed a seat about 3/4 of the way back, an isle, two seats over from a guy watching an Adam Sandler movie on his Dell. I read the style manual for awhile and slept for awhile. God was good to me again: the flight took forever – more sleep for me -- and my ears didn't notice a thing. No trouble at all meeting up with L's parents in Nashville, they put me in their car and drove me out to one of those isolated, Martian office parks. Gigantic squares and rectangles of glass thrust up from the grass at odd-angles. Robotic architecture. Mechanical aesthetics.

We arrived at my appointed publisher’s offices. Well-dressed, happy people coming in and going out of a blue marble lobby decorated in a red Christmas-bells motive. Even the metal trash cans had rims made special for red potpourri. I was dressed in leather shoes, slacks, with a blue shirt, a subdued complimentary tie and a blue sport coat. I carried references and a legal pad in a leather holder with Harvard's veritas crest embossed on it -- a gift from a friend. Taking the golden elevator, I pushed 5.

A receptionist named R. and I struck up a conversation about a pair of golden, Mickey Mouse ears perched on her counter while waiting for my interviewer, Mr. Darcy, to arrive. The entrance to this portion of the company (corporate headquarters is a huge, steel-and-glass building a block further away) was all of glass, though the interior was far too busy. The people, however, seemed human and approachable. Mr. Darcy himself was tall and quite cordial with black hair, blue eyes and a good handshake. He wore a blue shirt and tie. He took me to his office and sat down with his desk between us. His workspace was cluttered with attempts at organization. A large Van Gogh print was framed behind him, and pictures of his daughters made the rest -- he is in his upper 40's with a couple of kids in Middle School. Amid the papers was a Bugs Bunny coffee cup, one of my favorite scenes in which Bugs has been taken to the mad scientist's castle and is giving the monster a pedicure and saying, "You monsters are such interesting people." I decided that I liked this Mr. Darcy.

Now on the way down, I had been stressing about different interview questions. What do I say if he asks me this or that? I started thinking, as I told you, about my Dad's advice: tell stories. I can do that. The part of my mind that blogs and thinks and chats with friends comes up and says, "I'll take care of everything." And, sure enough, it did.

As Mr. Darcy asked me a question, I gave answers, stories. I described, narrated, engaged, cited, and above all informed him about me with every story-power I had. Be three-dimensional, be blood and bones to this man and you'll do a good deal, I thought.

Mr. Darcy steered clear of the stupid, evil questions and stayed on the "who is this guy and why should I hire him" questions. His clustered around the following: (1) can you put up with working on popular, rather than academic, religious books? (2) How do you handle detail; (3) How are your political skills; (4) Why do you want to be an editor? Halfway through the discussion, he started up and grabbed his boss, a member of the Board of Directors named the Storyteller. The Storyteller, a thin, tall man with grey hair and a grey moustache, smiled and shook hands. We talked like men talk at church over coffee. We talked about Texas, about barbecue, about the publisher’s stock, its CEO, the future of the company. Then he left Mr. Darcy and I to continue. We talked for 2.5 hours! I had an opportunity to get all my questions in, too (I’d taken care to come up with some good ones.) He said he was making a decision within the next week. He would want someone to start by mid-December. Afterward, he had to go and I had to take an exam. Beforehand, he loaded me down with four or five books.

The exam was awful - all English exams are. Unlike Math, where there is a clear answer, you never know if you're getting everything with English, and your mind starts second-guessing itself. Still, I knew I had lots of prayer with me, and so I carefully marked each page, going back over them several times. Checking isolated sentences is a totally different thing from editing prose. Prose has a feel, it runs in your hands and you can feel for inconsistencies. Isolated sentences are antiseptic and dead. I let myself out, the entire department was at a meeting, and met back up with my parents-in-law.

With a few hours to spare before my flight, I had a chance to tour L's parent's house: beautiful. A nice cup of coffee in their comfortable living room. We talked about friends in Germany, how their tapestries are showcased better in this house, what they were doing in the front lawn. Auntie Kara met me at the airport, looking not a day's different than she did in college. She looked so youthful I had to keep reminding myself that it was 2005. And, though it had been two years since I have seen her, I tell you not a day had passed. The flight back was macabre. The plane flew through alien and forbiddingly thick clouds of white ectoplasm. I couldn’t get comfortable, and wound up staring out like the dead into the monochromatic sky. L. stayed up to greet me, despite a horrible cough. I pulled in at 12:20 a.m. We talked until 1 a.m. about how things had gone and about our plans. Then we went to bed.

Mama & Caleb after church on Sunday.

 

Here's our little cutie-pie! 

Kara and Caleb November 17th. Just can't get them to both smile at the same time! 

the hands of love

I wish I had time to describe Joy. A beautiful girl with white-blond hair and possessing of unshockable frankness. She had Appalachian good sense and a good soul and saw at eighteen that raising a family in one’s own home is as full and rich as life ever needs to be. That was her secret in the pantomime that is High School, and it was a secret worth telling.

As we found out, Joy was getting married, and she asked Wes and I to play in the service. It was our first gig, and on a heartbreakingly beautiful day. Joy was so happy. The wedding party was happy. The green of the grass and the blue of the sky were happy. Wes and I were happy driving that morning up toward Bristol, my guitar case and bits of sheet music playfully askance upon the backseat of my Celica.

The play list for U2’s first gig at a Mount Temple talent contest included Peter Frampton’s “Show me the Way” and bits from the Bay City Rollers. Wes and I attempted nothing so audacious. My assigned piece was “The Rose.” The rolling arpeggio of the bass was perfectly suited to the classical guitar. It sounded very nice during practice, though I feared the sanctuary’s largesse would swallow it whole. (If only I remembered my fingering!) Who knows what Wes was assigned to do. A nervous pride overwhelmed me every time he played, and never more so than during public performance. Even today, whenever he plays, I want to leap around shouting: “Look here everyone! Listen to my friend play. Isn’t it beautiful! Isn’t it amazing!” Thus, I remember the anxiety but not the music, and isn’t that the way of everything.

Being a wedding there was, of course, an accident. I held the epicenter. It was a tuning accident of immense proportions -- my 6th, E-string broke – and in the middle of East Tennessee nowhere and less than a half-hour before I-Do time. What to do? Horrible horrible! The only solution was an attempt to recycle the same string in hopes it was long enough to stretch. It was, if barely, and held the tone. The wedding was simple and tasteful. Wes and I contributed flawless performances. Everyone was so happy. It was a perfect day.

fiasco

A month or so ago, Lynn-nore was asking Kara about the position of a certain scene on a particular Winnie the Pooh videocassette of Kara's.  Kara responded by saying, "It's after the fiasco."  "Did you just use the word, "fiasco"?" asks Lynn-nore.  "Yes," replied Kara, matter of factly.  By second grade she will be expectorating to her teacher: "The tedium of this philistine syntax is made superfluous through juxtaposition with the lively reciprocation of natural native speech."

On borderland we run

Where to meet? We had a bassist, long-time friend Tommy V. We also had a drummer. Wes had a friend in drama, Barry, who was willing to give it a go. Both Tommy and Barry were in band together. But where to meet? A band cannot simply practice anywhere. U2 hammered out War from inside a garden shed behind the Evans' home, but none of us could think of a spot in God's country where the beating of cymbals and drums, the crunch of a distorted guitar and the thump of an electric bass wouldn't enrage the surrounding populace. (By the way, here's a fantastic way to make a little money. Build a garage, run electricity out to it, heat it, soundproof it and then rent it by the hour at a price low enough to allow bands to practice and high enough to pay a little sum above heat and electricity. One could even charge to store or rent gear! It's an untapped market, as far as I'm concerned, because every band from here to Seattle has to practice somewhere.) There was one place that could serve our purposes, however, and that was the church.

Over the few years we attempted to play together, we met in at least two churches. The first one was a local Christian church, a brown, barn-looking building, which my family had long-attended. What made it attractive was that it was available. It had a piano and, more important, it had a new sound system! I begged a key, and Wes and I met there one Saturday morning to give it a go. It was cold that day. Wes' knuckles ached against the piano keys, and my guitar refused to tune properly. We found the thermostat, and turned on the new sound system - Crack! Hummmm. It wasn't difficult to get the microphones going, but the board was beyond us. (We were never able to sort out the electric complexities of a sound board.) Man, that guitar sounded good coming from the eight or 10 speakers in the auditorium: speakers on every corner and even in the pulpit. That was a lot of sound for a 250- to 300-seater. The second church we used was a truly auditorium-style Assemblies of God church in Johnson City. It also had a sound system and, more importantly, a mixing board. I also had a key, but it was just as cold. A few hours into a session and everyone was shivering. The face of my guitar - by then I had inherited a yellow pine-faced Yamaha acoustic from my maternal Grandfather - was always cool against my forearm. Wes also graduated up to a four-octave keyboard. Neither instrument was performance quality (the Yamaha buzzed ferociously above the 5th fret).

Now, you would think that the real trick is what to play, but it isn't. The real trick is how to play. We had some interesting chord progressions, a few U2 songs Wes and I wanted to take apart and put back together, and what not. But how do you get four people to work together? It isn't easy. First, there is an order to readiness. Once the drums are set up, they are ready to go. Keyboards aren't far behind. The bass guitar requires only a little tuning. And once musicians are next to their instruments, they are going to play them. Try tuning up to three guitars in that! Wes, whose attention to the acoustic detail was better than any of us, was always responsible for miking instruments, running wires, setting levels and getting all the amplification to work together. His job wasn't much easier - that's the last thing to go. By then, Tommy is discussing the technical boorishness of Van Halen's bassist, Barry is half-listening while running through a 2/8 tempo band exercise on the snare, and I'm going over a few particularly sticky riffs embedded in the session's playlist. Someone has to be the heavy. Someone has to lead. Someone who has the song in mind and knows how to get there. Someone who isn't (like me) painfully obsessing about their instrument to the detriment of everyone else. We had no such person. Early sessions were a horror of fits and starts, re-tunings, side-conversations, and other snafu's.

Looking back, we didn't really understand what a band is supposed to do. As simple as it sounds, having fun with your instruments takes precedent over making art. In some ways this reflects the difference between piano and guitar culture, shaped music versus discovered music, controlled liturgy versus pietist emotionalism. Piano culture is notation, planning, elegance, complexity, full-harmony. Guitar culture is wondering what happens when you do THIS. It is an unfortunate polarity. Piano culture, like Chopin's nocturnes or Mozart's concertos, was once improvisational. J. S. Bach, for example, was renowned for his improvisational abilities, transposing and arranging in his head on the fly. Improvisation is the electricity of a performance. Play is the mother of art. Mutual improvisation - jamming - encouraging and being encouraged in your instrument - this is the most important thing. You might even call it a form of musical love, the ex nihilo creation of a selfless and creative community whose being-together begets and is begotten in the whirl of energetic and spiritual power called music. "Do you know how to dismantle an atomic bomb?" Bono asked an incredulous Michael W. Smith a few years ago at a Nashville fund-raiser for African debt relief: "Love."

A good band, be it bluegrass or Dixieland, watches each other, listens to each other, and gives individual space to first one instrument and then another. Every instrument gets a turn. Even a symphonic orchestra passes the underlying motive around like a communal cup. The sum is better than the parts. Every musician will tell you how much they learn from such experiences; you come out better than you went in. But we didn't know this! Like children in a nursery school, we simply did not know how to work together. U2 provided little guidance.

The members of U2 seemed to know and inhabit their places from the very beginning. Together they formed an ordered, liquid suspension of Bono's ego meets Larry's unflappable, type-B personality and Clayton's determination to put up with anything in order to be a rock star. The only odd piece was the Edge, Paul McCartney to Bono's Lennon. Wes and I were two David Evans on the bare edge of failure or success. We knew our project needed better models if it was going to survive, and so we went out searching.

Loosen our lips

Melody is the essence of song. I wish we’d have known that. Every other element in music, every technique, every period of music, everything -- including lyrics! -- exists to set off and enhance melody. As Bono confesses in “Stuck in a Moment” (All That You Can’t Leave Behind): “I'm just trying to find / a decent melody, / a song that I can sing, / my own company.” If only we’d have figured this out sooner! Wes and I were so interested in the revealing possibilities of music, that we did not pay attention to the simple straightforwardness of the art itself. Melody is the keystone, the meta-narrative, the crux. That is why we were afraid of it. It seems comic now, but the very thing we longed for we also feared. “The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound that opens our eyes.” But, then again, there is a more basic aphorism -- call it a struggle with limitation: instruments do not play themselves.

Now Wes is a singular personality when he puts his mind to something, and he had put his mind to the piano. Night after night he sat in his bedroom, hunched by the light of a cheap desk lamp over that little Casio. I had given him a nice copy of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 in C minor – the Pathetique -- and it wasn’t long before Wes could play a hauntingly beautiful Grave-Allegro di molto. Wes taught himself enough music theory to piece it together. First he memorized the right hand and then he memorized the left, going measure by measure. That Casio was too small and too crude to allow the use of both hands. After school, I often found him in the music room putting treble and bass together and working up beautiful and often complex pieces of his own.

I was involved in a parallel process with the guitar. I owned a Harmony classical guitar, which my Dad purchased in the 60’s from a pawn shop, and the above-mentioned Peavey. Neither could hope to approach the sound or manipulative ease of a Fender or Gibson, but I was determined to make this work to our advantage. The limitations of the instruments would lend uniqueness to their sound, and force methods of “musical extraction” that would go untried using an expensive rig. In the absence of a whammy bar, I learned to physically bend the instrument, grabbing heel and stock and pulling or pushing them against each other. Lacking the subtlety of chorus effects, I learned to strum higher up the neck, emphasizing the midrange, or lower toward the bridge, heightening the timbre and brightness of the tone. I tried different tunings, and experimented with different styles, from finger picking to straight-up power chords. I also put aside the plectrum and played with a basting brush I borrowed from the kitchen. The sound in my head was always more like a watercolor wash than a wicked roundhouse, and the soft bristles of the basting brush, sweeping across several strings at a time and mixed with open chords pushed that Peavey a little closer to the goal.

As usual, U2 was a big help. Realizing their own limitations, they used all sorts of clever tricks to amplify their sound and give it a unique flavor. Wes and I watched their music videos as well as the footage of their concert at Red Rocks very closely. In all of these, the central concept of musical impressionism, the centrality of the music rather than the instrument or individual virtuoso, stood out. Let me go through a few examples. In the course of 20 minutes, the Edge might play his Flying V, then switch to a distressed looking 12-string (which you can hear beautifully in “Second” off War), then put both down and play a motive on electric piano. I watched him use dampening effects, produced by placing the fingers of the left hand over the strings to produce percussive effects. You can hear him do this in the beginning of “Vertigo” (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb), or, acoustically, throughout “Running to Stand Still” (The Joshua Tree). By combining this with harmonic overtones, he could create a rushing cascade of sound. You can hear this in the opening and during the verses of “New Years Day” (War). The Edge also uses a bottleneck-slide – a bottleneck-slide! – and not for acoustic blues but for lead riffs in distorted, effects-laden rock music ("Gloria" October). Again, the entire band was committed in their early, poor days to this post-punk impressionistic spirit: the sound is the thing, do whatever it takes to get it. Larry Mullen would tie things or place things on his drum kit, like a tambourine on the high-hat, to produce different sounds. Bono learned to play rhythm guitar and the harmonica. The four of them plugged everything at one time or another through the Edge’s digital delay, including Adam Clayton’s bass. Everyone joined in where supporting vocals were needed. They even grunted like savages in “Indian Summer Sky” (Unforgettable Fire)! A free hand or foot was possibility wasted. This was music made whole cloth from body and soul. “Cantare amantis est”, says St. Augustine, singing is a lover’s thing – and we stole every trick and technique we could find. But it is one thing to learn, and another to put into practice with others. And, like everything else, Wes and I started out back-end first.

Kicking the darkness

U2 called itself "The Hype" before it finally settled on its name, a moniker which certainly applied to their musical abilities circa 1976. "We formed a band before we could play our instruments," Bono said. "It's really like a street gang, you know, people who are joined by their sense of humor and their sense of what they are against more than what they are for. We were a pretty crap wedding band actually." That description pretty much held true for what Wes and I were trying to do. I had some musical training in my youth and knew how to read music, my Mom is an accomplished pianist. But the piano is not an electric guitar, in this case a natural-finish Peavey with a practice amp built into the case, nor does reading music teach you how to make music in a band. The music in our heads was so far beyond anything we could actually produce with our fingers, and putting that together with someone else who is having the same problems…well, it was often disastrous. Further, for some reason we didn't begin at cover songs. Most people, whether playing solo or with others, pretty much cover stuff, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones ("Satisfaction" was one of the songs used for tryout purposes in Larry's kitchen), Kansas, something. That just never appealed to us at all. It isn't like we made a decision or anything about it, we just never discussed covering other people's work. Instead, we just started at the beginning of everything. As I said before, being a band wasn't really what we were after, and so, looking back, we treated it rather incidentally.

There are a couple of essential things needed to make a band work, aside from actually having people who are willing to play. First, there's the music. You have to be able to make music. Today the big thing is sampling - a process of lifting someone else's bass line or chorus and splicing it into the mish-mash of other collected bits called a "song." In the words of Plato, lots of tekne but no arete; lots of tech but no art. Where is the talent? One avoids the formative discipline required by practice and performance, standing without thank you on the shoulders of those who have done the hard work. It is a loss of identity, a denial of the self and a denial of being. Anyway, I want to talk about the way we approached music itself before getting into the actual business of making noise.

Though our high approach to making music, coupled with a lack of funds and space, spelled an inevitable - if ultimately temporary - end to this entire affair, I am quite proud of our beginning. We wanted to find an authentic voice in music and not just recreate other models. Therefore, we went back ad fontes to the bones of music itself. I took a class on the development of polyphony in the West, and listened to a lot of chant. John G. gave me a few lessons in chord theory and had me memorize some basics like the circle of 5ths/4ths and the order of flats/sharps. John was in the process of hand-copying the score to a piece he had written for the completion of his Bachelors in Composition, and he would show me the completed pages and talk about parts and how they work together. Wes and I chewed this stuff into a developing discussion about theory and structure. I taught Wes the names of the notes on the Great Staff, and he went on to eventually score music for several plays. I also remember he read a book on orchestral composition by Rimsky Korsakov. We also read through some thick textbooks on the development of Western music….this kind of skips ahead a little, but during the summer of 1998, Wes and I were doing shift work for a glass manufacturer, working right on the shop floor pulling hot glass off a moving belt. Anyway, that job is so dangerous that they give you regular breaks. We would break along with a half-dozen other sweaty, scarred-up guys in this tin room just off the shop floor. There was nothing really to do but talk - which no one felt like doing - eat, play cards or read. There were magazines, Sports Illustrated and stuff (though Wes said to me later that he saw some guys smuggle porn into the mix), but Wes and I were hauling music textbooks. We would shout and sweat on the line for half an hour and then read about melisma, oblique motion and cantus firmus. And, of course, we studied The Joshua Tree.

One of the things going on in so-called "alternative" rock during this period, a movement in which U2 participated - if only in that those that listened to, say, The Smiths, 10,000 Maniacs or REM, also listened to them - was an impressionistic approach to writing pop music. I'm not sure if there is even a technical term for it. The Church is an excellent example of this kind of approach as well. Basically, the goal is not to stand out. Remember, rock music was still recovering from Eddie Van Halen. Even popular rock boasted screamingly fast electric guitar chops. Guitar Gods like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai were releasing studio albums. Anyway, the goal was not to stand out but to suggest, support, to color in and create a canvas, perhaps stepping out now and then to suggest a theme: the music never takes over. This is not to say it isn't doing anything. Like a good sonnet, the aim is to create levels of dialogue underneath the lyrical message. The Edge is a master. Listen to "Bullet the Blue Sky" and you note right away that he isn't doing anything incredibly difficult from a technical point of view, but he is using slide effects and laying out a humming, growling distored texture that gives Bono's anti-imperialistic screed the emotional teeth it needs. Larry Mullen's drumming adds its own urgency, as well. Everything is working together underneath what Bono is singing and saying. The message is the thing. "New Years Day" from War is also a fantastic example of this style - really amazing. The preturnaturally smooth and elegant distorted effects that Edge lays down in that song. I'm glued everytime I hear it. The earnestness itself doesn't come from a hyperactive dance beat or Bono screaming obscenities or anything. It is understated. Edge is tearing the guitar apart underneath the second chorus, but the mix puts it underneath so that the ear almost mistakes it for business casual. Along this same impressionistic line, the Edge also incorporated a delay effect right into the core of his sound. Go back to October, for example, and there it is in "Fire". Indeed, he ultimately popularized a whole new way of thinking about the electric guitar. He took the Stratocaster and made it a truly electronic instrument, capable of creating and shaping a limitless number of sounds and effects. I knew that this was the musical philosophy I wanted to bring to the table of our band-experiment. And, just to be a bare pragmatist about it, you didn't have to necessarily be good to play in this style. Impressionism was accessible when blistering chops or $2,000 worth of synthesizers weren't. The only problem was, it wasn't that accessible. You still needed decent equipment, and, at the time, Wes was playing on a 2-octave Casio.

A boy tries hard to be a man

Now when I say we put a band together, that’s wrong. We did find a bassist and a drummer (and there was even a failed attempt at a sound man.) Wes and I had both been doing the autodidact with piano and guitar for at least a year or so. Perhaps I will get into this aspect of things at another time – but when it came to putting a band together we didn’t actually want to play anything, like you might get some people together and just have fun making music. No, we were on an archeological dig. We were trying to find something, something that glinted out from the margins, and in this The Joshua Tree played a central role. Our bellies were painfully swollen with life, though neither of us knew anything about babies. The Joshua Tree was our nurse, our midwife, helping something new come into the world, or, maybe a better way of saying it, helping our world come into something new.

It may help at this point to know something about U2. U2 started out as a punk band in the mid-70’s. Larry Mullen Jr., 16, a drummer, wanted to play dances, and posted a note on the school bulletin board at Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School. Auditions were held in the kitchen of his house. David Evans (the Edge), Adam Clayton and Paul Hewson (Bono) joined with a few nameless others - who the heck cares about that. The important thing is that this group of teenagers were caught up in what everyone else was caught up in, music. They didn’t know anything about it, really, but the punk-era was all about doing in the face of raw-ignorance. That was a lesson Wes and I missed – we needed a poet-megalomaniac like Paul to pull our bookish curiosity out into the open. You can’t forget, too, that U2 is the name of a spy plane, something we know about, but that has secrets. It flies high in the atmosphere, above the clouds, and comes back down to earth with secrets about human beings and governments. Music is like a secret, and Wes and I knew it. Today the locus of the secret has changed, the wardrobe becomes a door in a wall or something. Today it is, “What is the Matrix?” That’s code for the usual questions: Who am I? Who are you? What is this all about? Can it be different than it is? Computer networks hint at this same kind of thing, but I think it is a fools gold to a large degree. Music comes out of the soul. You can look sideways through it and see something, close your eyes and almost touch something. That’s what brought those guys together in 1976, and it was the same thing for Wes and I.

Now the problem for any artist is figuring out how to talk. You get started trying to talk, and you want to talk, but you don’t know what to say. You’ve got this sickness welling up in side you, and no idea how to get well. It is sweet pain. Drowning in meaning, yet also in frustration, like when you have forgotten something important and can’t remember what it was. Now, U2 is world-class. People will be listening and studying them 100 years from now – 200 years. They were speaking already with Boy, their first album, but the language is amateur. It needs focus, self-awareness and control, aspects that didn’t begin to kick in until The Joshua Tree. As Bono said in an interview in 1988: “…I think that with this record U2 has begun to run.” That’s exactly what Wes and I wanted to do, we wanted to run. We were desperate to run. And so, we listened.

Oh, incidentally, there is at least one reason why Boy had something there already. The reason why Paul Hewson could already, at 18, begin saying something about being that was larger than himself, kind of like Emerson’s essay "Self Reliance": “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.” His mother died in 1974, when he was 14. To put it bluntly: he realized at an early and formative age that no one gets out alive.

The Joshua Tree, 1987

Sometime in late 1987, I can remember exactly where I was, in the Fort Henry Mall in Kingsport. I was on a break from my warehouse job at Brendles, and, for some reason, I found myself in Record Bar checking out the latest releases. It is weird to think about it, but there were still racks of LP’s available for sale. (CD’s were expensive and reserved in a special section near the front of the store.) It was in the very back that I came across an album just washed out and existential enough to catch my attention. The album was entitled, The Joshua Tree. I thought, “What kind of music is this?”

Wes and I had been trading music back and forth for several years. He and I were mutually supportive hedonists of the senses. We would get together and write, discuss, draw, lampoon and generally spur one another on toward all things creative. The liberal arts were our playground. (Really, it was the meaning and mystery of being which fascinated us and brought us together, but we didn’t know this directly, though we were never indirectly unaware of it.) Wes was the first person I knew to own a CD player, and he would regale me at school with his listening experiences and share them on evenings spent just hanging out in his room. I remember, for example, his telling me about listening to the entire length of Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade (now a personal favorite). Somehow or another, Wes purchased a copy of The Joshua Tree on CD. He made me a cassette copy of the same on a lovely 90-minute Capsule Maxell (the Rolls of commercial blank cassettes) and we listened to The Joshua Tree every day for the next four years.

Around this same time, two other important things happened in my musical world. First, I decided to invest in an expensive car stereo system. I owned a hatchback 1979 Toyota Celica, and my friends and I spent a lot of time in it going from place to place and generally staying “out there” rather than at home. The entire city had, overnight, become our living rooms, and we enjoyed trying out the furniture. All this time was usually spent listening to music, which was okay until the factory sound system chewed itself to bits one afternoon. Wes and I spent a weekend upside down pulling that deck out, but eventually, looking all the world like a surgeon, electronics, knobs, rubber wheels and bits of metal spilling out all over his kitchen table, Wes pronounced it hopeless. I had to agree. I decided to set aside some of my paycheck for a few months and buy a really good sound system. We knew a guy who could install it, and we had plenty of questions over the next few months for the tech guys at audio sound places all over town. In the end, I put a $1,000 Alpine system into that car. I had a cabinet built for the speakers, to which were also attached two Bazooka subwoofers. Mmmmm, that was great! I remember telling my Dad during a “is this fiscally responsible?” discussion: “Dad, of course this isn’t the smartest thing to do! However, I am never going to be able to throw this much money away again ever in my life -- I may as well do it now on something I will enjoy.” My Maxell copy of The Joshua Tree was the first thing I played on the Alpine. I can’t tell you what it felt like to feel the opening chords of “Where the Streets Have No Name” slowly boil up from the bottom of the seats in a rolling crescendo of frenetic wonder. It was like the Kingdom of God! There was no comparing the sound of the cardboard factory install of before, to the calibrated, Alpine clarity of the now. Overnight my tastes began to change. Metal proved too crude, too unwashed next to the singular balance of those speakers. You could hear everything. Every layer of sound was available, and seemed to lie effortlessly, beautifully together. Heavy Metal was like a stone against stained glass. I started listening to a lot of classical music. The Joshua Tree, however, didn’t just sound good in the new system, it became a well of musical secrets and apocalyptic meaning. It expanded out into a world, and left most everything else behind it. Looking back, you could say that I purchased that Alpine system to please my friends or myself, to ease the pain from losing my first girlfriend, or to exercise my new sense of economic power and independence. You could say all of these: but I wonder if it wasn’t just to listen to The Joshua Tree.

The second thing: Wes and I decided to form a band.

Sunlight in Winter

I long for sunlight in winter
To stretch out my limbs
   in warm generous rays
And see them washed clean
   by light.
To greet the new day.

Mama's little Frog Prince! I made the froggie hat and crown this morning to go with the costume I found. Guess what Kara is going as? -- Mama's Little Princess! 

Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott / Happy Reformation Day!

When in 1517 indulgences were sold (I wanted to say promulgated) in these regions for disgraceful profit, I was a preacher, a young Doctor of Theology, as they say. I began to dissuade the people from lending an ear to the shouts of the indulgence-sellers. I told them that they had better things to do and that I was sure that in these matters I had the pope on my side. I was relying greatly on his trustworthiness, since in his decrees he had very clearly condemned the excesses of the quaestors [name of a treasury official in ancient Rome] as he called the indulgence preachers.

Shortly thereafter I wrote two letters, one to Albert, the archbishop of Mainz, who was getting half the money from the indulgences (the other half was going to the pope, a fact of which I was at the time ignorant), the other to the ordinary of the place, Jerome, bishop of Brandenburg. I begged them to put a stop to the shameless blasphemy of the quaestors, but they despised this poor little brother. Therefore, finding myself despised, I published a list of theses and, at the same time, a sermon in German on indulgences. . . . What I did toppled heaven and consumed earth by fire.

~ Martin Luther. Introduction to the 1545 complete edition of his works.

Faith is God's work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God.  It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith.

Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.  Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.

~ Martin Luther, from the introduction to his commentary on Romans.

Happy Reformation Day!!

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Caleb, lemon-yellow in his jammies and peaches and cream in his cheeks, had a great time simply smiling at me yesterday.  He smiled at me for about two hours last night.  Lynn-nore had to step out – it was an emergency, we were out of diapers – leaving Caleb and I to camp out on the living room floor and mutually entertain each other.  I entertained him with some scrunchy circles.  One is green, with wavy lines.  The other is blue, with more wavy lines.  It has a bell inside, to which Caleb likes to listen.  He doesn’t really know what to do with these crunchy circles when he gets his hands on them.  His hands wave around like blindfolded pre-schoolers at a hyperactive piñata, but he still manages to hurl the greenie about 3 feet when I look away.  Grinning and squeaking adorable as gingerbread sugar all the while.

Kara is a good 50 pages into The Silver Chair.  I’m amazed at C. S. Lewis’ fondness for lengthy description.  He can go for as long as two pages simply describing Narnian marshland and some low hills.  I resolved last year, just a few pages into Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not to elide a single word.  Nevertheless, Kara seems to follow along.  “Why is Aslan in all of these books?” she asked me last week.  “Ah!” I intoned, “that is not for me to say, but for you to figure out.”

Two applications went out last night.  I was up late writing long-answer essays for one of them.  It is hard to not really enjoy having my books upstairs.  They seem so happy to see me, and even Lynn-nore, who seemed a few years ago to have had quite enough to do with bookshelves-as-décor, says hello to them.  Occasionally, during their 3-year basement exile, I’d go down there and greet them and make alligator promises.  But the light of one solitary bulb coupled with the concrete cold of it all made subterranean study or writing an impossibility.  “One day you’ll have a proper home,” I’d tell them.  And, even now, it could be years before they see proper shelves.

My Dad called the other day.  Turns out he liked the N. T. Wright lectures I gave him (I knew that he would.)  Why is it that Anglicans are turning out such good stuff – N. T. Wright, Marva Dawn, Rowan Williams -- even as their denomination turns to mush?  Could it be the subtle influence of creedal Christianity providing a little backbone, even from the bottom of the denominational wastebasket; a suppressed influence, wandering like a stray wind through the prayer book and tradition?

Another Success Story for Miriam and Moses

Well it appears that all went well today with Kara at school as Miriam. She attended Chapel with her class and stood up in front with another little girl too shy to stand by herself and the school got to guess which character Kara was. The other little girl's costume was a bit more obvious with wings and a halo, but Kara was pleased that people were able to figure it out. Evidently nothing else happened at school because that's all that was mentioned today!

No school this Friday, so we'll have to plan a fun day. Monday Kara's class is having a Pumpkin Party and I'm going to be helping out with that in the afternoon. Monday evening we are having dinner with the family of another little girl in Kara's class and then we'll all go out Trick or Treating in her neighborhood. Hopefully a good time will be had by all. We are contributing a Princess and a Frog to the festivities. Don't think Thom and I are dressing up... maybe we'll go as a Professor and a conservative Soccer Mom :-)