The Medicine of Community

The older I get, and the longer, quite frankly, that I dwell in this loneliness that is rockwriting, the more I find myself seeking and needing to find a permanence in everything I listen to. It feels weird for a sound junky like myself to have come to this, but I no longer have the time or patience to deal with those slight satisfaction’s in music that are doled out merely for the short term. At my age it feels only like a waste of my time to be merely “pleased” with a record. The music I listen to must truly matter to me these days; anything less turns to regret.

I received 35 records, all with hopes of gaining a review or commentary, in the mail over the past two months - a pace that amounts, obviously, to more than one every other day. Couple that with the 17 recordings (I’m a freak for these sorts of numbers, so, yes, I do keep track) I’ve purchased in the same amount of time and you have such a plethora of new sounds that no reasonably sane person can give any serious consideration to each and everyone without some process of elimination. Cuts must be made - swiftly. In the past I’d try desperately to peruse everything that came my way, a perverse endeavor at best and a purely ignorant one at worst. It seldom - in fact almost never - paid off. It depressed me to no end. So I quit.

Of the 52 discs I’d acquired this past eight weeks (the 35 + the 17) I listened fully to only 23 of them. The other 29 received a quick listen and were unceremoniously sifted off to the Great Pile of Indifference (most of them made me sad…depressed even, with their oddments of pointless sounds and useless, uninspired lyrics). Of those remaining twenty-three there were fifteen that gave me at the least some cursory pleasure before I began to recognize their unpersuasive shallowness and dulling flaws. This too became a demoralizing process, one that left me feeling hollow and cheated; time stolen from time better spent on more worthwhile endeavors.

So, one must figure that within at least those eight remaining, and therefore consequential, records I’d at least find some solace to this music processing chore that I’ve chosen as my cross to bear. But I did not. And that troubles me - greatly.

The biggest problem with choosing to write about music (which I, in my flawed and amateur way, do only cursorily) is the relentless and unforgiving push forward. The always having to process new music, always trying to stay out in front of the cultural train, always looking forward to an uncertain future and never having the time to go back to a very certain past. I’ve been running this goddamn race for too long, and now I’m tired. Music has become work…and I fucking hate working. I only want to hear that which my soul knows I want to hear. I only want the music that moves me anymore. Everything else feels like death. Darkness and silence are my friends.

“It’s the medicine,” the voice pauses for a moment…or it could be a lifetime, it sounds that desperate, “of community.” It’s the medicine…of community. It’s the medicine of community.
That line saved my soul…this time around. It says everything I’ve ever felt; everything I’ve ever tried to convey in a lifetime’s writing about this rockroll religion we share, distilled into a simple, beautiful, and elegiac line. It’s the medicine of community. My God! That is it! The medicine of community!
The voice comes out of Will Johnson, the lead singer of a band from Texas that calls itself Centro-matic, but as he utters the line, he selflessly gives his voice to the ages. It echoes out from all the dark forgotten corners of our past:

IT’S THE MEDICINE OF COMMUNITY!!!

A voice standing up in defiance of the modern culture of self! Defying the spiritual loneliness at the heart of our moneyed ways of life! It howls, it raves, it rages, it commands, and then it drops down to bloodied, anguished knees and prays!

That line, that perfect sentence, reverberates over and over in my head for weeks after hearing Centro-matic play an inspired gig on a double bill with the Bigger Lovers. It is, on whole, an amazingly wonderful night. I came to see and hear the Bigger Lovers, one of the finest rockroll bands traveling in our midst today, perform something…anything…from their brilliant (and in no sense do I use the term lightly…brilliant!) new record Honey in the Hive. I must admit, I consider them old friends now, and it’s damn good to hear them play live again. Not for a single note do they let me, or, for that matter anyone else in attendance, down (although the band seemed to have misgivings about the quality of their performance afterwards…a laughable angst as far as I was concerned). Beers! Friends! Fantastic live music! What more can anyone ask for?

Nothing. And I want nothing…at all.

I knew neither hide nor hair of Centro-matic before they set to their task that evening. I was merely along for the post-Bigger Lovers ride. Is that not how these sorts of things, these wonderful, happy, accidental discoveries in rockroll life, usually occur? As visions. Grand and wonderful aurally induced visions. And what sound and vision they were. A perfect voice, so weathered and worn, a group of comfortably rollicking musicians, all so goddamn assured (how? How can they be in the climate that exists today? How can they stare into that monstrous moneyed sun and not be blinded? How can they, facing far more than I, keep going on and on and on?)

“They seem so damn assured,” I said to a friend, and I felt better.

Confident. Controlled. Intense. Passionate.

What a night! What music! There was no way could I have described how I felt that night. It was beyond any sharing experience. Who would believe me anyways? And, after all, isn’t it all so goddamn subjectively personal anyhow? Fuck, who really cares about this rockroll thing anymore anyways? The thirty some people who witnessed it? The fools who stayed home and slept? The kids driving around the neighborhood with the bass booming like so much fascist drumming? Did any of it really happen? Was I really there?
But still…

It’s the medicine of community.

That was that: the medicine of community - in a song (“The Connection’s Not So Civilized”) on a hauntingly wistful disc about the strictures and structures of our lives (Distance and Clime) that was recorded by some boys from Texas who, as far as I was concerned, were nothing less than prophets sent to me in my moment of doubt.

Fuck the darkness.

Fuck silence.

Fuck disappointment.

I feel alive, for now, and it feels good.

And I ask myself why? Why do any of us do this?

And the answer comes to me again and again: it’s the medicine of community.

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