Daily Dose #12 (06/09/11)

THE NEVER ENDING JOURNEY





When you decide to play music as a career, other than the fact that you have to be a little crazy to make that a life choice in the first place, you also quickly find out a few truths about that quest. And some truths take time to develop, but they always lead you to the same conclusion.

You are on a pathway with no destination. You never "arrive" at a static goal. You are a searcher, and the only way to excel at your craft is to keep searching until you die.

It's not like going to school and getting an alphabet soup of credentials following your name that will provide some sort of stability for you as you spend your time on the planet, or define you for the rest of your life.

The whole concept of being "goal oriented" is turned sideways. There is no goal. You just have to stay curious, and maintain that curiosity as you move through your time on earth. You can't stay static, because stasis is the kiss of death. You have to be a sleepless shark, constantly moving forward, and constantly targeting knowledge to be devoured, digested, and eventually organically find its proper place in your file cabinet as you try to craft a unique voice.

What you leave in your wake in terms of creative output are just roadside snapshots of where you were at the time. By the time people become aware of those snapshots, you're already way gone down the road.

Its exhausting, and its a slightly paranoid mindset. It certainly isn't "normal" by any conventional standard.

I have many ideas for this blog, and this medium... its a little freer than making music, and its a little more of an "action" medium. You create, you edit a bit, and you click the "publish post" button. It's just a quickie verbal and mental snapshot, and with the "365 blogs in 365 days" parameter that I've set for myself, these snapshots can't be gussied up to the point of having the life squeezed out of them through over-analyzation.

Hopefully some feedback will occur and over time, those snapshots just might serve to tell a story of more consequence.

But everything's a trade off. When you play one of your songs in front of people, you know right away whether or not you are on the right track. People either dig it or they don't, and you are able to collect that critical information in real time. Be it wild roaring applause, tepid and polite "he makes the putt" type of clapping, or the sound of crickets chirping in a room full of people, you know where you stand when you're standing in front of an audience.

Getting that type of feedback in real time is extremely valuable, and when its the "roaring" type... extremely validating as well. I will not lie about that folks.

But at this point in my life, the prices I have to pay to get myself into those situations are too high.

I don't get that type of energy and reciprocal feedback loop when I'm typing in a garret, alone, and then kicking creations out of the crow's nest to fly around the intrawebs. But frankly, I'm more then OK with that.

I like trying to be normal, and leading a normal existence. Its may seem boringly mundane to some, but its all new to me, and still has the thrill of new car smell.

I get to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Spend time with loved ones on weekends. Kiss someone I love on New Year's Eve instead of playing "Auld Lang Syne". Relax.

Writing prose is a newly discovered skill for me. Its like starting all over again. It has many of the same aspects as studying and playing music, as far as the "you never will arrive at a goal" dynamic. All I can do is keep writing, keep studying the craft, and try to get better at it.

And though it is vastly different then the usual carrot and stick perpetual motion machine that I've been immersed in for 35 or so years, both disciplines share similarities.. It's more internal, and yet it still can be shared...you can still make a difference, and you can still affect changes in your environment. You can still stand for something bigger than yourself.

But I don't have to pay for the ability to do so with pounds of my own flesh. Just turn the computer on, get lost and let go of ego for a few hours while making something out of nothing, and click the "publish" button.... and then go mow the lawn, because now I have the time to do that type of stuff, instead of being chained to a piano, a computer, a public personna or theatrical character, a false narrative of mean-girls-in-high-school gossip, or a self-definition that no longer accurately defines you.

At the end of a year of doing this, one thing is certain. A body of work will be accrued, and for anybody following the creation of that body of work, they get to see it happen in real time. That's a different type of immediacy, and a different type of intimacy with the creations, and the creative process.

These blogs are auto-biographical in nature, but I won't be able to sustain that for 365 days. My life may have been interesting, but not that interesting, not even to me. This thing is going to change radically over the next year, and I can see that. It's like a big invisible roller coaster. The ride has commenced, but you have no idea what's in store for you.

I'm just a baker, baking bread... I'm going to try to infuse that bread with enriching nutrients. If there is some kind of sustenance available to you, tear off a piece for yourself and pass the loaf to somebody else. Sharing is caring, and this world could use a lot more of that dynamic these days.
Creating and sharing is just the first step of a process that I hope will be noticed, and then replicated within individual reader.

It really isn't my job to close that deal with you like Ron Popeil, however. I'm not "setting" it for you to "forget it".

I'd like to do my part in building a tribe of like minded individuals that are truly aware of a shared sense of responsibility. That's the true purpose of the mythic conceptual land of "Hungaria" represents to me. This may be the "Daily Dose's" true purpose as well... but it really remains to be seen at this point.

That decision of type kind of participation has to happen within yourself based on the contents of this blog and the impressions you are left with: Only you can do that.

It isn't my job anymore.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK, WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

The Unseen Connective Tissue / An Introduction

In past postings in blogs or on facebook, I have often referred to the discipline of focusing on "The Unseen Connective Tissue". I have often been asked what exactly do I mean when I drop that phrase in conversation, or in writing.

Everybody is well acquainted with the concept of "6 degrees of separation"; how we are connected by or relationships, our networks of friends and family, and our work. With the advent of social networking platforms, these days its seems more like ".5 degrees". Our pasts can really come back to cheer us, or haunt us.

Carl Sagan once said "The Cosmos is also within us... We are all star stuff...we are a way for the cosmos to know itself": That even through randomly chaotic events, the basic elements of creation are constants, and we are everything, and everything is us.

As we blunder our way through this physical world, life can be randomly chaotic. It's easy to forget just how connected all of us really are. Forget about being connected at the biological, chemical or atomic level... the social patterns in the life experience are just a weak mimicry of the epic chaos of the Universe, and we all seem to be Hell bent for leather to intentionally act like bulls in the Universe's china shop. The subconscious makes it so.

So its inherently difficult to be sensitive to those patterns from our meager self-centered human perspective and vision as we bash into and away from each other in a way that seems to have no known rhythm. The human condition hardly allows ourselves to see with any type of clarity just what is happening within us, let alone what is happening within others, and just how we may be effecting what is emotionally occurring in others.

Life's narrative has a linear direction. We are born, we live, and then we die. Beginning, Middle and End. But what happens in the middle? We force it to be perceived as linear, but really, it's anything but linear. As we are busy putting our logically sequential five year and ten year goal oriented plans together and then attempt to execute them, we delusionally ignore the hovering umbrella of undetected chaos above us; the crazy celestial sphere of the unpredictable that when truly considered, has a tendency to knock us out of our comfort zones of logic, and what we think we know.

Well, we do so at our own peril. That's the stuff that we can allow ourselves to be easily distracted from recognizing, and then sympathetically react to in kind. In my middle age, I have realized that this oft ignored component has critically impaired my vision, and my ability to foresee. It’s the metaphoric log in my mind’s eye.

I have been actively training my brain to intentionally ignore the linear aspects of my own life's narrative, and force myself to view it as a massive spherical jigsaw puzzle, with my point of view being in the center of the sphere. Viewing each individual piece has it's merits, but only when all the pieces are accurately assembled and viewed as a whole allows narrative to transform into a three dimensional shape, with a much deeper understanding of how all the pieces relate to one another to create that imperfect shape as perfectly as possible.

With much practice, you then can see patterns in the chaos. This is the nascent beginnings of the true skill of foresight. There are other skills involved: Calculating mathematical probabilities, the acute study of human behavioral patterns, and the accommodation of "Acts of God".... random events that are beyond detection of a humble Homo-Sapien mortal.

Simplified, this skill is, in conventional wisdom, based on a "seeing the forest from the trees" philosophy, expanded. It's more like "Seeing the molecule of the leaf on the sub-atomic level and then seeing how it relates to the Universe, and all points in between, simultaneously". The forest is really only a slightly larger jigsaw puzzle piece.

Once on a trip to NYC, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a friend, appropriately primed with mind altering substances. At the end of a very large room was the iconic pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, "La Grande Jatte".

You could get real close to it, close enough to see a single "dot" of paint. I was truly amazed and moved not only by the sheer herculean human effort of executing singular dots, but transforming those dots into a finished realized vision that moved my soul on a much higher plane.

I turned to my friend and asked, "Can you imagine his 'process'? Getting up close, executing the exact right dot in color, size, and distance from surrounding dots.... and then running away from the canvass to get perspective and control of the whole? He was fucking CRAZY!!!"

I then began physically demonstrating, running at full speed away and toward the painting, imaginary paint brush and pallette within each hand and accompanying my demonstration with appropriate cartoon sound effects as I hit the "brakes" on my full speed approach of the canvas. Employing nonsensical Warner Brother's-esque "running" and Three Stooge's burbling "crazy" sounds at full volume in a crowded gallery of hoity-toity art lovers, and zipping back and forth in a room with millions of dollars worth of French impressionist paintings hanging on the walls, will attract attention. Especially when the source is a leather jacket clad, holes in his jeans, hair down to his ass stoned freak, laughing like a crazed hyena.

Needless to say, Museum security threw me out. But it was a good laugh, and ultimately, worth getting escorted out in rather rough fashion with my freak ass eventually hitting the pavement. For a brief "New York Minute", I WAS Seurat. Plugging directly into him was a high voltage, and life changing event.

Viewing one dot of a Seurat painting and then seeing the entire canvas, with a true understanding of how all of those dots relate to each other to create a complete picture, is a process that I have been honing and attempting to perfect within the confines of my own cranium since getting unceremoniously kicked to the Metropolitan's curb. It wasn't just the dots that were important, but the space between them was equally if not more so.

Life, and the creative force behind it, deconstructed as a series of pixels that at first glance, has no order. That cold realization will fling you from your comfort zone, and into the unknown. You are Wile E. Coyote at the moment he realizes he's off the edge of the cliff, suspended in mid-air, forelornly blinking and holding a sign that says "Uh-Oh!" knowing that the fall is about to come.

Reminding yourself that those pixels actually do relate, but perhaps the concept of an undetected but still self imposed blindness prevents you from really seeing and feeling at a much more elemental level, is not a mental exercise for the weak willed. Forcing yourself into examining the pixels, and your relationship to them while embracing fully the depth and breadth of your own obtuseness may be character building, but it isn't exactly pleasant. Its more like the prolonged ache experienced when eating ice cream too fast. A wince inducing, brain freeze look at yourself.

One of the adverse side effects is that it constantly reminds me to intentionally tear down my own ego. I can count the self imposed swipes at it on a times per second basis. It's uncomfortable to the extreme, and yet I view it as an irritant in an oyster. A grain of sand exercise that eventually ends up as a pearl of wisdom. A pearl which has no calcuable value in the realm of my mere human understanding.

So here's a story that will hopefully illustrate the concept of unseen connective tissue.... and my own inability to see it. The narrative may seem linear, but it isn't linear. It hops around, and it takes place randomly over a forty-five year chunk of my life; It's random chaos sending the seemingly sequential nature of fate careening into trees and guardrails, and sometimes, over the edges of cliffs, Wile E. Coyote sign in hand.

It isn't for the squeamish, faint of heart, and most definitely isn't for those with short attention spans. If you can't hang, do yourself a favor and move on to something else that will captivate you, because this story is like picking away at a mountain with a dental tool and trying to end up with the mountain totally transformed into a large pile of gravel.

I will, over a 365 day period, write 365 consecutive daily blogs, called "The Daily Dose". I will be exploring this very concept: That the seemingly unrelated is ALL RELATED.

If you sign on as a regular reader, in the back of your mind, try to keep this concept bubbling on your near sub-conscious back burner. These blogs may take the form of memoir, and the forensic deconstruction of a single life: but that is not the sole intent of starting this project.

I want to give to you what I have learned in a lifetime on planet Earth. How you use or even value this information is up to you, but if you decide that it is useful, then I will have achieved the goal that I set for myself.

Give Love. Receive Love. Do it with a true and authentic heart, and always remember to be grateful.

Polish Soul Music

During my recent "malaise", there were only two things I was able to accomplish (besides being drugged into oblivion and going to a therapist twice a week):

1. Read as much Shakespeare as possible

2. Try to play the piano...badly (One of the lovely side effects of lithium is that it gives you Parkinson's disease-like symptoms -- mainly, "The Shakes")

But that didn't stop me from trying. But in total insanity mode, I would wake up every morning and dig into Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, and I did that for about a year -- played nothing but that, and tried to commit it to memory, where there was no mental capability to memorize anything. All internal brain wiring was ripped out and basically I was playing with ten virtual thumbs.

As far as piano playing goes, even when I'm at my unmedicated bi-polar manic-stage, "normal" precision best, my nickname is "mittens"....so during this period, I guess you could call me "boxing gloves".

If you asked me to sit down and play it today, I couldn't. Of the countless hours spent on it (6 to 8 hours per day, for a YEAR), nothing stuck. This was a total exercise in absolute futility on all fronts.

Maybe someday I'll realize this exercise may be informing me, musically or otherwise, in future creative endeavors, but at this point, I couldn't tell you what that benefit will be exactly. I just love Beethoven; his music is "soul enriching" and I needed nourishment badly. Maybe by hatcheting through his music as meditation for a year, somewhere out there in the Universe, he knows just how much I love him.

I'm known as a "Blues/Rock and Roll/Funky New Orleans" piano stylist....so what does Beethoven have to do with that?

I have no clue. I just go where the wind blows, musically speaking. No input, No Output, but the direct effect on "output"? Anybody's guess. It's just good music.

So recently, I've been re-visiting my old pal Freddy Chopin. I have always wanted to play the twenty-four etudes

from memory, and this has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years (up until I got derailed by the works of Uncle Ludwig).

Rebuilding facility to play these things is always a drag. I learn about four of them, stop playing them for a year, and then re-learn them again -- over and over, always learning a couple more with each visitation.

But this visitation has been different. I'm actually starting to play the piss out of them. Confidence is high...and there are no wiring issues.

I guess this is normal to legitimate piano players who have been doing this their whole lives, but to me, a new experience in middle age.

The thing about Chopin is the "soul" contained within the flyspecks on the page. This is really early nineteenth century Polish "Soul Music". The feeling I get when listening to Ray Charles, Otis Redding, or Aretha (basically a pre-orgasmic tension and "chill", starting at the small of my back and creeping through and expanding through my entire body; the hairs on the back of my neck feel like they're standing on end) is the same feeling when I listen to Chopin when it's played with great artistic interpretation and commanding facility.

But now, I'm just starting to be able to do it myself, for myself...and I feel connected to the music in a visceral way...like I'm totally in his "soul"...a musical, spiritual, and physical "Vulcan Mind Meld"... the same feeling I get when I pull a solo out of my ass on the fly that even amazes...me.

I think that has always been the carrot that keeps me motivated, musically. Another expansion into the Universe, without a net. I don't always achieve that blissful state, but the few times that I do is enough to keep me plugging away.

The Dark Side Rolls In, Buddy

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Dichotomy

I have never been able to resolve the battle of brain hemispheres...there are creative endeavors on one side (mmm....just like crack!) and being Billy Biz (mmm....just like crack!...only with the extra added bonus of grinding tedium thrown in).

I have been waking every morning this September with the intent of exploring my new found love of writing...my creative half always gravitating to a medium that absolutely will not pay any monetary dividends. I spent the last three years playing Beethoven locked in my house on Bourbon Street as a perpetual party raged nightly outside my living room window...and somehow, I failed to notice.

Just like waking up and digging into the "Hammerklavier", recently waking up and answering the siren call of my computer keyboard and finding this outlet of creative expression has been....joyful. Possibilities have been unfolding, projects have been materializing, and my brain has been firing on all cylinders...and of course, whilst in the throes of a creative burn, I have totally ignored any real life concerns, such as:

1. How am I gonna pay the rent?

2. How am I gonna eat?

Every once in a while, my good friend and muse LB buys me a sammich, but man cannot survive on one sammich per week (or less, depending on how far into the hills I've driven her, screaming).

So for the past few days, I've been immersing myself in the "Bizness" of "Little Georgie"...which has always been interesting to me, but the sheer volume of time and creative energy involved to administer that business crowds out any
drive to sit down and write another installment of "Lake Boy", per example....and I'm in "Lake Boy Mode", so having to forcibly extricate yourself out of it to have a three hour co-ordinating meeting with marketing mavens who frankly can't do it as well as yourself.....sucks.

I have always dreamed of being in a position to delegate some of these business duties, but every time I try to do so, it results in a debacle of epic proportions (I'm not naming names, but this last attempt at "resurrecting Little Geo" was a true cluster fuck on the "Bizness" side of things....and a personal success on the creative and spiritual side).

And so I have to once again wrench the reins out of the hands of incompetents, and be the administrative captain of my ship.

So if you don't see a lot of activity in the blog, it's because I've gone to the Dark Side, Luke.

Strategical marketing plans, business plans, projections of profit, bookkeeping, internet whoring, etc....all result in tangible outcomes.

You do the work, the numbers rise and fall according to how much and how well you execute that work.

But none of those avenues of exploitation would be possible if I didn't allow my brain to freely traipse about the Universe, tra-la, tra-la, picking random daisies...and I just cannot do both simultaneously.

So the cycle begins...create/sell, create/sell. But there's a time inequity involved...it takes a whole lot more time and effort to sell than it does to create....and I can't shake the feeling that I would be a whole lot better at creating if I didn't have to fuck with spreadsheets all day.

Perhaps this situation is a by-product of my bi-polar mind...a good friend who administers the Music Business program at Syracuse University told me once, "Of all the musicians I've dealt with in my career (which was considerably long and storied, BTW), you are the only one who had a firm grasp of the business side of the equation".

A grand compliment, but the unspoken reply? "Thanks, but I DON'T WANT TO BE THAT GUY!"

So the battle rages, and both sides suffer great loss, and a considerable amount of collateral damage is unduly created in the fire fight.

"War....what's it good for? Absolutely Nuthin..."

BOOKER ON THE "EDGE"

As a teen-aged, aspiring piano player in the great frozen tundra known as Skaneateles, NY, I used to take a 35 mile bus ride into the city of Syracuse every Saturday morning to visit Onondaga Music.

Onondaga Music was owned by a rather sour faced man by the name of Howard Gurseny, Sr. Completely bald, with glasses that covered half of his gaunt visage and replete with what it seemed to me to be an amazing amount of bushy growth of hair sprouting forth from his ear canals and nostrils, Mr. Gurseny would crouch over the cash register grumbling as he eyeballed me the entire time I would be perusing the racks and hurl dour toned exhortations at me periodically such as "are you going to buy that record or what? I don't have all day ya know" as if I was buying a friggin' comic book instead possibly the key to my entire future as a musician...but truth be told, I actually liked the grousing. It heightened the urgency of the shopping experience, and part of the fun of my weekly visit was to find new and creative ways to antagonize him. And he had, as I learned much later down the road while in the midst of my piano plunking journey and education, impeccable taste, and one of the finest record stores I would ever have the pleasure of shopping in.

The store was a one stop-shopping destination for all things musical. The family store sold sheet music, musical instruments, and records. It was the only place in town that where I could find cool platters, especially discs of solo piano. At the time, I was trying to deeply immerse myself in the great boogie-woogie triumvirate of Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, and Meade Luxe Lewis, because The Rolling Stones had told me to do so (indirectly, of course, through interviews)...ultimately, I figured if I could play like those guys, my eventual gig with Keith Richards would ensue shortly. I had a rich and varied fantasy life at the time.

So to be able access artists like these in the vast cultural wasteland that is Central NY was ...a miracle, really.

As I was pawing through the bins, I came across a record with a series of photographs running down the left side of the cover featuring a wild looking black dude with an eye patch and the title exclaiming "New Orleans Piano Wizard LIVE" or some such nonsense.... I'm embarrassed to admit that at that point in my musical life and bumbling self-education, I bought records more on the basis of what the covers looked like rather than any internal knowledge of the sounds that may be contained within the confines of the shrink-wrapped sleeve.

I didn't know fuck all about New Orleans, and New Orleans music, but I did know that there was something oddly compelling about that dude with the eye patch and the winning smile. I couldn't keep my eyes off of him...he practically shouted at me from the cover, "Buy me, dumbass...you NEED this shit, baby, right now...right now!'

Now understand, my weekly trek to the store was a discipline of high order for me...the bus ride was a drag, and I was a lad of limited funds...my general adolescent mission quest was to amass the greatest record collection in the world, but my paltry allowance would only allow me to amass it at the rate of one record per week.... so even though I didn't have much musical knowledge at the time, it was imperative that I not come home with a dud. So rolling the dice on a total unknown was akin to betting the farm and going all in.

I finally went up to the counter with my risky selection and forked over to Mr.Gurseny the only seven dollars and change I would see until next Saturday.

With an introductory exasperated combination grunt and wheezing sigh, Mr. Gurseny would grumble, "Jeezus kid...are you sure you want to buy that? Or would you rather pitch a tent in the middle of the store and live here? Gimme the money."

He would chuck the cash into the register, slide the record in a paper bag, and carelessly toss it on the counter with a muttered "Here ya go, kid.... now get the hell outta here, and try not to come back."

Secretly, I knew that Mr. Gurseny loved our Saturday morning rituals as much as I did. He just had extreme difficulty in showing it.

I would then purposely clomp down the well worn wooden stairs to the instruments division to artlessly test drive all the latest keyboards, loitering a bit more before I had to catch my bus, and drive Mr. Gurseny's son, Howard Jr., crazier than I had just driven his father. Junior made Senior look like Mary Poppins in comparative temperament, and was a notoriously tweaked individual. Driving him crazy early on a Saturday morning by loudly playing blues licks on cheesy synthesizers, (the latest thing...this was the '70's, remember) wasn't really much of a challenge. I'd eventually get bored and head for the Greyhound station.

Every return bus ride from the Gurseny family store store was a ride filled with hope and nervous anticipation. Each sequential bump, swerve and jolting air compressed stop and whoosh of the pneumatic door flying open and shut that slowly propelled me closer to home escalated the feeling that I was more Jack with a bag of magic beans in his hands than a pimple faced socially awkward teen bouncing around on a highly suspect stained bus seat thumbing the cover of a record jacket. ...Gazing at it, in a dream state, gearing myself for the potential gifts I was about to receive.

The greatest moment of my teen aged week was when I would pull a record out of the bag, slowly tear the shrink-wrap away like Charlie Bucket would to his life-changing Wonka chocolate bar, pull the potential golden ticket of a disc out of the dust jacket and inner paper sleeve making sure to only handle it with my palms and gingerly placing the vinyl platter upon the turntable. Turn the amp on, twist the volume knob up, and wait for that 60 cycle hum.... the final aural cue that I was good to go, countdown will commence, lift-off soon.

And then there's that moment, my favorite part of the ritual, when I would lift the tone arm with my finger tip, hold my breath, crouch to make simultaneous level eye contact with the edge and the needle, and precisely slide (easy now, baby, don't drop it) my diamond tipped stylus slowly into the groove...white noise, feint crackling and the intermittent pop...and then snap. Here we go.

Sorry kids, but finger fucking the flywheel on an I-Pod pales in comparison.

That part of the experience was a constant...but I was wholly unprepared for "New Orleans Piano Wizard, LIVE!'

The slow fade in increasing volume of enthusiastic, hearty applause.... look out, here it comes, that five note descending pickup to "The Sunny Side of the Street".... then the deep as a ditch groove, the artful bending of the melody and phrasing as he establishes the head, the slight ramping up of emotional investment in his playing as he transitions from the bridge back to the final statement of the head before the solo.... Christ, it not only sounds to my virgin ears like he's got hands the size of Virginia hams, its sounds like he's playing with three of them.... the mind wrecking, stratospheric careening-around-Pluto-without -any-brakes solo (holy fuck!)...And then, that voice.

Some have said in retrospect that Booker was a singer of limited ability. They clearly not only have ears of stone, they are stone deaf.

He saved the best for last.... that freaky melismatic, rhythmically powerful yodel
(aahhyifff ahhh nevah, nevah, evah ) a combination preacher, a sand papered seasoned, nakedly emotive tour de force vocal performance that actually focuses your head in real time to the fact that these words that he's singing are not only important, but very possibly the last lyrics on earth that he will ever sing kind of important, so listen up, ye non-believers...he really don't halfta worry, cuz he's got golddust at his feet, ( see what I'm sayin'?), on the Sunny-unny-unnysaaahhheeed.. .Sunny Side of the Street! Yes, babies, A-friggin-men! You can actually sense the energy of what seems to be thousands of people simultaneously orgasming and falling in love through the speakers, but they aren't making a peep....

The teasingly humorous, repetitive ending tags (He's not done with me yet, that rascal). A nanosecond of stunned silence, and then the nuclear explosive sonic mushroom cloud release of love and applause, AAARRGH, all triggered by a single individual, just a man and a piano. Talk about white noise.... are you kidding me? It's the sound of collective humanity that in a split second has all just realized they have witnessed and been in the presence of true greatness. They all just had the collective religious experience of the re-affirmation that there truly is a God, and He has decided not to bestow his works in mysteriously strange ways this time...He had decided inexplicably to whack them directly between the eyes with a ball peen hammer, manifested in the form of James Carroll Booker, one of His more inspired creations.

And as I realized that when I exhaled that during the running time of side one, track one, that breath that I had held when I connected diamond tip to greasy vinyl, I had held through that entire emotional two and a half minute roller coaster ride of a performance. I hadn't bought just any record in Mr. Gurseny's store. I had stumbled upon the Ten Commandments of Art.....I felt like I had found the Holy Grail....by my own fortuitous ineptitude! My life officially changed, radically, right then. And I totally knew it.

See ya later, Keith Richards...I now had better fish to fry.

In my life's journey, Booker has always been my runnin' podner. Sometimes he maintains a low profile for long periods of time, but he's always there for me when I need him. I never met him, and I never saw him play. He died around fifteen years before I got the chance to finally leave the confines of Central NY for good and live as a resident in the city that care forgot.

Life doesn't always end up as a fairy tale, and mine has turned out to be no exception. I mistakenly and naively thought that if you worked hard enough, greatness could be attained, delusionally cutting God out of the equation. Bad move. But no matter how hard I worked, Booker would always have more talent in his big toe nail clipping than I would ever possess in my entire body.

After scuffling to make a living for about eight years, finally establishing myself enough to make an actual living as a musician in New Orleans and then losing the carefully crafted, arduously attained second chapter of my life as a New Orleanian all courtesy of hurricane Katrina, I found myself in the fall season of 2006 back in Central NY.

After the storm I had to clean toilets, scrape paint, gut houses, and sling a hammer to make ends meet in New Orleans, trying to keep the life I had built intact on a quarter of the money and 5% of the self esteem I had access to prior to the levees breaking. My first straight totally manual labor gig since the day I heard Booker and decided to play piano and be an artist, not just a working musician.

My father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and since my siblings had actual lives, and mine was currently discombobulated, I went back home to the place of my birth, the land of lakes, where there are actually four seasons (the longest one being winter, of course), to take care of him and assist in his care.

It very possibly would be the last chance I would ever have to spend an extended period of time with my best friend, my Pops, so it wasn't that hard of a choice.

Since his chemo and radiation schedule was going to last from late August through December, I decided that it might be a good idea to go back to college and finally finish my two year degree and score my GED in the process (I dropped out of high school they day I heard Booker to enroll in a community college and study classical piano. No Chopin equals no Booker).

So on a crisp day in November, I was in a computer lab, finishing off a PowerPoint demonstration for my Astronomy class. I had just gotten off the cell phone, having had a conversation with my girlfriend (who was keeping our life together back in NOLA). And fellas, you know this particular conversation.... the first tendrils, the initial feeler, of the prolonged, passive-aggressive, "shit-on-his-head-until-his neck-breaks" dumping process. Not verbally expressed but more in tone and tenor...the conversation where you know that the woman you love has given up hope on your sorry ass but she's not going to tell you she has, the one where you know in your heart that she will never be capable of telling you the whole truth and nuthin but the truth ever again, and has just become your future ex-girlfriend but the official be-heading is months down the road.... and when it finally happens, it will suck.

Note: The one advantage of getting old kids, is acquiring the vision to see shit like this coming from a mile away, rather than getting surprised by it. The disadvantage is, other than getting old, is the realization that if you have any type of moral center and integrity, you have an obligation to let it organically play out, and its going to be a six-month, tooth extracting, Mexican pissing match, resulting ultimately in heartbreak...and no matter how much time you have to prepare for it, heartbreak will always take you by surprise. You will be hurt, and there is no way to avoid getting hit by that bus. All you can do is prolong the moment of impact to fully prepare to gird yourself for the eventual smash-up.

I don't know what possessed me, but at that moment I flipped the phone to its closed position, I stopped working on the demonstration, googled youtube, registered (my maiden youtube voyage), and typed in the search box "James Booker", as if in a dream.... I'd like to say it was an act of cognizance on my part, but it was more like moving the "cursor" on an Oiija board.

Amazingly, several video choices popped up. I had never seen this major influence on my entire being actually perform before. I threw the headphones on, plugged them in, and clicked onto "Send Someone to Love", not surprisingly due to the content of the recent phone call.

There was my old, old friend. Hello, James...its been awhile...where y'at? I been knowin you been 'round, sorry I haven't checked in on you lately.

I sat in that dingy computer lab a middle aged, balding, 60 pounds overweight, totally depressed to the point of suicide, soon to finally being diagnosed as Bi-Polar man (as some have surmised James was himself), with a dying father; an about to be unceremoniously dumped in six months schlub working towards a high school diploma at the age of forty-seven (how absolutely and completely pathetic). I was finally witnessing the moving image of my muse, the manifestation of what I once thought to be definitive proof of the existence of the graceful greatness of God.... and as I listened to his sorrow drenched voice plaintively pleading and praying, "and if it's not asking too much.... please.... please send me someone to love".

That's it folks...pretty much as close to rock bottom as a man can get. Or so I thought...it is possible to get closer.

As I sat in that lab occupied by twenty 18 year old students at their digital stations standing at the cusp of their adult lives, filled with hope for their bright futures to come and unwittingly assuming the sitting position for their eventual slide down the razor blade of life... I openly wept. Tears streaming, snot running down your nose weeping. I cried for my loss of hope and the loss of my dreams, I cried for all the people in my life that loved me and that I was incapable of loving back; I had driven them all away. I cried for the upcoming mourning and the attendant pain and processing that I was about to go through. I cried for the ghosts of folks that haunt me daily, even the ghosts of those who haven't died. I cried for my crippled adoptive city, a place I jokingly used to refer to as "the vortex of lost souls", but really was the only place I ever felt "found".

I cried for James Booker's lifeless body, dumped in a chair in Charity hospital. I cried at the power and divine beauty of the soul shaking music that was digitally streaming into my heart through the portals of my water filled eyes and headphone muffed ears; if the existence of a Booker proves there's a beautifully benevolent God, than why has He forsaken me? I cried because Booker knew me, he still spoke to me... he still loved me, and Booker never gave up on me. He never abandoned my soul. He's right there on that computer screen, and he was there at the start of my adult life, and he will comfort me now at what seemed to be a logical time to start planning to end it.

And I thought...I can't think of a better person to have function as the "Booker" ends of my life.... and I laughed at this incredibly horrid pun. And felt a little better.

Because I felt a little better then, I'm still here on this planet feeling better still.

It's so swell, when you're well.... words of wisdom. All you need is love? Maybe, but I'm not entirely sold on that philosophy. But I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that most assuredly, if love is all you need, you still need a little Booker too.