Eric Rosenfield

January 23, 2003

ERML vol. 2, #1: Holy Fire

Eric Rosenfield Mailing List, Vol. 2, #1:
Holy Fire

There's magic in music.

There's an old Toltec story about an evil sorcorer who plays a drum beat that is so intoxicating that anyone who hears it dances themself to death (for more info on this story you can consult the Sahagun section of my essay "Huemac: The Legendary Fall of Tollan"). It's not a unique story - tales like it which extend at least as far back as the sirens of Greek mythology who lure men to their deaths with their beautiful songs, and myths tend to reflect truths about reality. The truth here being that music has a mysterious, ineffable allure that we don't really understand but that compels us in a very real way.

There's a story I can tell that I call _the Coolest Thing I Learned in Principles of Audio Technology 101_ that has to do with this concept, but I'm saving it for a later mailing. Anyway, I've known that there's magic in music since I was about 12, and I first encountered high school students who could play songs that made me forget that I was gawky and awkward and deeply confused about just about everything for a few brief minutes during free periods. Before that, music was something kind of neat that I made me want to immitate Michael Jackson and something I actively resented while going to piano lessons. After that, music was something that became increasingly central in my life, until the point that it was all I wanted to do, period, which was when I went off to music school at 18.

I'm telling you all this as prelude to why I've "retired".

I joined the band "C" for the opposite reasons that I went to music school, but left it for pretty much the same reason. I left music school because I became a) frustrating with my own musical ability (which is to say, specifically, frustration with my inability to write songs as well as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen while simultaneously becoming the Jimi Hendrix of the piano); b) exasperation at a music school that wanted me to become either a song-writer for Mariah Carrey or a side-man for Wynton Marsalas - neither of which jibed with the aforementioned Dylan/Cohen/Hendrix goals; c) exasperation with a music industry that, as I became more and more exposed to it, struck me as being arbitrary, unjust, rewarding of mediocrity, and valuing socialization over talent.

When I joined "C" my idea was to eliminate my ego and subjugate myself entirely as the side-man to a project that seemed to have vast commercial potential, a pretty far cry from attempting to be the next Dylan. You see, it was C____ B_____'s - the lead singer's - project, and she had in her favor a truely excellent demo professionally produced in a recording studio, massive industry connections (a fact confirmed many times over), and a knack for socializing, hob-knobbing, and ladder-climbing on a level I'd honestly never encountered before. As I said, I realized when I left music school that the industry rewards socializing - the ever praised "connections" - and so I thought C____was a shoe-in for success. And besides, it wasn't as if the music was bad - it wasn't. It reminded me a lot of Peter Murphy - not exactly what I was into, but it certainly wasn't like I was selling my soul to do Britney Spears shit - I mean, I _like_ Peter Murphy.

Also, being in a band would mean playing shows, and performing in front of a live audience is as close as I've come to having an orgasm without there being anything sexual involved. Performing is an addictive high that no drug I've tried can compare to - part of that ineffable magic of music, and the reason I go and perform on the subway even when I don't need the money. Just for the rush. I know it sounds a little cheesy, but I'm dead serious when I talk about the power playing and performing music has over me - it's something palpable and real and the only thing in my life that I could even begin to think of in spiritual terms.

So I said to myself, this band's a shoe-in to make it, I'll play this stuff, have a blast, make a shit load of money and then quit and never have to work again. Then I could make all the albums, novels, whatever that I wanted to. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right? Well, I should've known it wouldn't happen like that.

Sure, we played some gigs. Sure, we performed for at least one A&R representative of a major record label. Sure, I met a bonafide rock star or two.

But as my share of the rehersal fees added up (the band insisted on performing at one of the best (read: expensive) rehersal spaces in the City - to give you an idea, at one point Paul Simon and his band where rehersing next door). As I began to wince at the cost of taxiing my keyboard everywhere, and began carting it through the subway, which is a bitch on an order that you cannot appreciate unless you've done something similar. As my role in the band became less and less that of "keyboardist" and more and more that of sound effects man, until they wanted me not to play anything at all but simply trigger prerecorded patches -

and let me explain this for a second. There's many people who do performances where they simply trigger prerecorded patches, and some who do it extremely well like DJ Shadow and DJ Spooky (the latter who also plays all sorts of odd instruments along with his recordings). I have the utmost respect for these people and enjoy their music. It, however, bears no relation at all to what I enjoy about performing music, and indeed all the aforementioned orgasm-like happiness that I get from performing is totally obliterated when I'm doing what I consider to be the equivilant of pushing "play" on a CD player. In, short it kills the fun -

which brings us to C____beginning to want to use recordings during performances of herself to cover up the fact that she couldn't really sing that well live.

Now, I don't really mean to disparage C____. I respect C____, I honestly do. But her defense of using recordings of herself (recordings engineered in a studio) was "everybody does it". Which is, you know, indescribably lame. And let me state for the record that I consider myself a shitty singer, who does what he can with a crappy voice. But anybody (even me) can sound great in a studio with multiple takes and effect processors and all manner of gadgetry and engineering. The fact that C____ wasn't willing to sing herself made me realize something that, as it percollated in my head, ultimately lead to my decision to quit.

You see C____ was a performer. C____ was somebody who, like me, understood the high of being onstage. She was somebody who understood the power that music could have over people, and herself, and wanted, much as I once did, to harness that power like some mythological siren capable of luring people to their death.

But C____ was not, and is not a musician. She wants to be the lead singer in a band, and it's not just that she can't sing. Because you can not be able to sing, but use the qualities your voice has in order to transcend your inability - like Bob Dylan's rasp that made him sound like he was always telling you a story, or like Johnny Rotton's scream that unleashed all of his pent-up defiance. But C____'s method wasn't to refine her skills, but to mask her lack of them. And her desire to use prerecorded musical as well as vocal tracks during performances only enhanced my opinion of this over-all band philosophy.

Because ultimately she didn't want to make music, she wanted to have made music. She wanted to be a rock star and perform and move people to tears, but without the toil and sweat and lonely hours and refinement and fire, holy burning bloody fire and vision that it takes to create the material that actually moves people to tears.

Which is not to say that I have any of that either, or that I wasn't guilty of some of the same vanities in my initial decision to join the group. I'm not claiming superiority. But I had already had my falling out with my own struggle for musical greatness, and I wasn't willing to be a party to someone else's any longer. The whole thing was far too depressing.

Originally I wrote this mailing with the intent of announcing that I was going to play a gig at the Orange Bear (47 Murray st. & B'way near City Hall, NYC) on Friday at 10. A gig which is going to be an absolute and unmitigated disaster, an total musical train wreck since I got roped into/volunteered to perform in a band situation with a total of two rehersals beforehand. However, I will be playing some of my own songs with them, new songs that have never been performed before, so it might be interesting for that reason. It will also probably be my last gig in a while, perhaps for years, though I've been toying with doing one last "retirement party" gig.

About three or four months ago, soon after my last performance with "C", I began announcing that I had "officially retired" from music. I had made the decision early on in the "C" experience that it was to be my last attempt at a career in music, and if it failed I would turn my attention completely to my writing, school and YankTheChain.com.

After all, when I left music school I never really wanted to perform again. But the bug started creeping back into me, and a few years ago I started playing around New York as a solo act. If you're on this mailing list, you're probably on it because you saw me playing at some point. But I'd really already given up my musical dreams, and the performing was more of a social exercise, a way to get myself out of my increasingly lonely one-bedroom apartment and exasperatingly dull job programming computers. My efforts where half-assed, I never really refined my music into anything coherent, I didn't promote myself very well, I didn't really care. I consider my one "EP" release so embarrissingly bad that I don't want anyone listening to it anymore. But, you see, the music served it's purpose - I made a lot of friends, met people, saw things, heard performers, sometimes got laid. It was fun. Sometimes I fooled myself into thinking I was doing it for the music, but really I knew the truth.

So it's not that surprising that I didn't draw people to my gigs. When I started realizing that I was starting to get more interested in achieving something significant and more-over "doing something with my life" than having fun, that was when I stopped playing. "C" was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak.

I am keenly aware that most of the people on this list are on it because they saw me perform music. This list is transforming into something entirely unlike a musician's mailing list, something closer to style of the mailing lists of Warren Ellis or Bruce Sterling. A writer's mailing list where I peel off impressions of the demons dancing in my frontal lobes and send the rubbings on to you, and it will vary in content as I find the right balance between the mailing list and the blog on EricRosenfield.com. If this kind of thing does not interest you please unsubscribe to this list now by responding to this email with "remove" in the subject header.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to come down to the Orange Bear (47 Murrey St.) on Friday, though I promise nothing except utter catastrophe.