Dispatches from the Underground #2: Crossovers and Franklins
On songs and films that get beyond words, why my kid’s friends’ parents are good, turning 35, and obligatory Julius Caesar references
I can’t stop listening to Help on the Way →Slipknot! →Franklin’s Tower. This is a conversation normally dominated by Franklin’s Tower, but it’s been Help on the Way that’s attracting the bulk of my attention. There’s something just so slinking mysterious about it, so funky and a little dark, yet cool and all right. The big thing is this one musical aspect I can’t even properly describe other than to say it’s a major, repeated resolution in the tension that happens each cycle of the song — more pronounced during the solos but certainly during the vocals as well.
The three songs function like three movements in a concerto. The first one gets us way into it, and then the second one gets a little dark and weird, maybe a little confused, yet magical in its twists and turns, setting up the great tension to be resolved by its sudden snap transition into the wild, bouncy, driving, urgent, triumphant final movement. When we sing together — no, SHOUT TOGETHER — the chorus of “ROLL AWAY THE DEW”, we do not need to actually be able to explain how dew rolls or how one rolls it or why it’s so important that we roll it away. We just know. That’s real music for you, when the words and the tones have reduced the matter to the point where it cannot be explained at all with anything further, words or otherwise. We hear what comes at us and it talks to that other part of the brain directly — you know what I’m talking about — and the other part just gets it.
Here’s some good versions I’ve been listening to:
(Yes, they are both from ‘77.)
The First Nice Day is an actual afternoon that happens every year in late March or early April. There’s only one, and it’s obvious. It’s sunny and above 60 and people are outside and everyone’s smirking and being friendly because there’s like a secret that we all know. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me it is the first moment in a calendar year in which I feel fully human and fully myself.
I remember when I lived in Boston you would mark the day because it would be the first time young folk could be found sunbathing on the hill on the Common. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been there to witness it, but it’s become almost an archetypal image deep within my psyche and I cherish it. Last year sticks with me too — I was walking in downtown Peterborough on Summer Street heading towards Main and passing Gaia’s Blessing as the late afternoon sun just beamed down at me, practically shooting power straight into my skin. That was a good one.
This year, it was last Friday, the 15th, the Ides of March.
By the way, one of our editors really hates Julius Caesar, but I won’t say who. It isn’t me.
Speaking of "Franklin’s Tower" and its preceding movements, I had the absolute pleasure of sneaking out Saturday night to join up with the Winterland Gang for a gig up at this really interesting joint called Area 23 up in Concord. I was tasked with managing the light show and the fog machine. I have never managed a light show or a fog machine before, but I was assured it was easy and handed two remote controls to play with.
If it can be possible, this was even more fun than I could have imagined. I mean, I expected it to be cool. But I hit a bit of a groove in the second set and really was able to — perhaps crudely — set a visual flow in time with the spectacular Grateful Dead music being blasted out by this fiery band (perhaps not Jehovah’s Favorite Choir but maybe his third or fourth favorite).
This night had a lot of other weird and mystical ways that kinda ran the gamut from astonishing to threatening, but rather than get into all that, I’ll just say that night served as my requisite Spring Ritual for 2019 and I’m very grateful to the band for giving me the opportunity not just to be there but to do the show in an entirely different way than usual. (I’m also very grateful to my wife — “a saint”, in Sethbag’s words — for letting me slip out for the evening.)
Anyway, I brought up Help-Slip-Frank for a reason — Winterland treated us all to a bang-up version that I had a special appreciation for given that I’ve been stuck on it, in addition to the fact that I had to miss the recent show in which the number had seen its debut. So here’s a video of that one, along with They Love Each Other and the High Sacred Prayer Hymn Terrapin Station.
Oh, and one other cool thing. Last year on St. Patrick’s Day we went to Portland to catch the JRAD show and had a bang-up time, but the one imperfection of the whole thing was my shirt. After having seen a magnificently-tailored Facebook ad in my feed, I had purchased a special navy blue Grateful Dead Steal Your Face Shamrock Endless Knot St. Patrick’s Day shirt, but it didn’t arrive in time. I had bought a blue sport coat that would have matched it perfectly (I ended up wearing black under and looked pretty good anyway, for what it’s worth). But this year I got my comeuppance and wore the shirt and jacket, at last fulfilling last year’s prophecy.
Earlier that same day, we held a birthday party for my youngest, who turned five. Nearly all his friends from school were there, along with their parents, as well as some family and friends-like-family, some with their kids, etc. It was pretty hoppin’ for a kids’ birthday party and I was mixing up some really fine mimosas in red paper cups.
I know I’m an asshole and a snob but I’m just being honest here, and I’m not exaggerating: this was literally my worst nightmare.
But I think back ten or twelve years, maybe a little more, when I first had a friend or two my age who had a kid, like a baby. And then a couple years went by and the babies were toddlers and in my attempts to continue hanging out with these friends of mine, I would get exposed to their new parent-friends. You know, either the parents of the kids’ friends or the friends you make solely on the basis of mutual parenthood. Let me tell ya, what I saw was absolutely my worst nightmare. No amount of convenience or common life status or even sheer loneliness could ever make it worth it to hang out with this kind of crowd. (A few years later, all of these people would come to own nearly identical dark-colored crossovers, if that gives you any sort of picture.)
I know I’m an asshole and a snob but I’m just being honest here, and I’m not exaggerating: this was literally my worst nightmare. It was like a horror movie. For a brief time I considered buying discreet cyanide tablets to keep in my wallet just in case one day I woke up and realized that was what I had turned into. That whiny loser Kafka has no idea. There are FAR worse things in this world than turning into a bug.
Anyway, hopefully you’re wondering where I’m going with this because here it is. So I mean think about this birthday party I helped put on this past Saturday and who was there. Parent-friends, obviously. But instead of reaching for the cyanide (I never did actually get any; I’m pretty sure that’s not actually a thing that they sell), I was both excited and grateful. I had actually been looking forward to the party for weeks.
Hang on, though, I’m not done, and I hope you don’t assume I’m going to say that now that I’m older and in a different stage in life, I’ve realized that the nightmares I found in years past, and their matching crossovers, are not actually so bad, that I was being cruel and judgmental and didn’t understand how your life changes when you have kids and lurch headlong towards middle age. The reason I’m not miserable and living in my own worst nightmare is that these people actually happen to be cool. They’re wonderful people and I legitimately enjoy spending time with them. Not because I’m forced to because I’m a parent now (anyone who knows me will tell you there’s not a lot I ever allow myself to be forced to do anyway) but because I just like them.
That makes me very fortunate and I know this well. So thanks, guys. Keep on being cool.
My birthday comes exactly one week after my son’s, and he is thirty years less one week younger than I am. Yes, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I am now the same age as Nate Fisher at the start of Six Feet Under — I mean that’s weird, isn’t it?
I had an excellent birthday this year. It was expected to be very low key, but ended up dramatically exceeding expectations. This is almost wholly due to the wonderful people I have surrounding me. And oysters (and tequila). But one other thing I feel I should mention about my excellent birthday was that right in the middle of it I got to spend four hours all by myself. Like I said, I love all the people around me. I don’t really NEED a lot of frequent alone time anymore (though when I was younger, I used to go absolutely insane without it). But man, for just four rare hours…it was glorious. I snagged a couple tacos over at De Olla and as it was too cold for me to really enjoy myself outside (below 50 is too cold to enjoy myself outside), I decided to get set up on the couch with the extended version of Malick’s Tree of Life, probably my favorite film.
It’s a very rightful movie to watch on your birthday, because it contains all of life in the cosmos, beginning to end, and reminds you what life really is. That seems like a useful thing to be reminded of when marking another passage around the sun, no?
I feel I have to say “probably” even though I do indeed consider it my favorite mostly because it is so different from other films. You can’t just, like, put it on and watch it. It doesn’t have a linear plot and the music is always turned up louder than the dialog (which is amazing). You can’t play on your phone while Tree of Life is on. You can’t have a side conversation or even take a cigarette break. You must sit, transfixed, as this master paints your screen with his palette of moving images.
It’s a very rightful movie to watch on your birthday, because it contains all of life in the cosmos, beginning to end, and reminds you what life really is. That seems like a useful thing to be reminded of when marking another passage around the sun, no? And of course even in putting it on I believed I was already aware of the nature of life and could hardly be expected to be “reminded” of anything. Obviously, that was not correct. I was reminded, and I’m still feeling that reminder.
You should watch it. There’s no way to possibly “spoil” a film like this (there’s no way to spoil any film, but that’s a subject for a different day) so I’ll just say it ends with a sandbar and some sunflowers and the eruption of God Aflame on a black screen, which every single time makes me jump up and cheer out loud because it hits me in the gut and I know what it means. It’s like Franklin’s Tower. Can I explain to you in words what the sandbar means, or the sunflowers, or this colorful flame-like thing on a black background? I’d sound like an idiot if I tried.
But I know what it means. Malick here (and elsewhere) has done what Garcia and Hunter do in reducing the concept down far beneath the level at which words can actually work. They do it with word and sound, he does it with images. I know what it means. You’ll have to watch and see if you do, too.