Destroying the Page with Words

The hardest part is the blank page.  With those seven words the page is no longer blank.  Ha!  One hurdle down!

As long as I can remember there's been something inside trying to be heard or seen.  In my obsessive record collecting youth it was the former.  Records accompanied me home under my collegiate arm, usually well worn by their previous owners, but cheap.  The grooves in the vinyl contained the creative output of (almost always) men and they (almost always) were older than me.  Buried in the pleasure derived from placing the needle on the record and hearing the warm, if not a bit poppy and scratch, sounds was a hidden hope and desire that one day i would be one of the men making music that went on vinyl and that I would be the older person inspiring and making someone happy.

That was over twenty years ago.  During that time the dream was never realized, though there were semi-close brushes two or three times removed from a few folks who for a brief moment had it within their grasp.  Four years at public radio station KCMU provided a peripheral experience.  There those who volunteered could put together four-hour long stretches of musical collages, forcing a fucked up genre mixture for which I will always be thankful.  The volunteer DJ's weren't making the music to be heard (not always true:  this was Seattle from 88-92 after all), but they were responsible for making it heard over the airwaves and blending the disco with the dissonant jazz with the industrial noise with the beautiful power pop from New Zealand with the enchanting sounds of Africa.  Only after leaving did I realize what a creative experience those four years were.

A few years later I enjoyed about a decade of playing bass in an all-improv group where magically I wasn't the person playing the songs but one of the people making the songs.  Sunday evenings in the summer of 1996 or 1997 the music happened.  We had a practice space on Capital Hill where we met around 7pm.  The chemistry of anywhere between three or four guys (or drum machine) clicked after two to four beers.  I didn't know what I was doing, but it provided an outlet.  A release on the valve to get something out, to get something heard.  Never mind that rarely did anyone ever hear it (live shows happened infrequently), but being there in the present, letting my fingers put together some messed up riff that I never thought anyone would contemplate working with, and having others lay down music on top of it, then hearing it then in the here and now was a rush.  A buzz well beyond anything the beers offered.

From the improvised band I moved to one who played real songs and a recording actually happened, as did a few shows.  However, like countless other good bands, this one never rose above the occasional show and halfway decent demo before the flame went out. By the fourth year practice as a weekly boys night of beer and playing the same old songs in a dark room.  Sure it was fun, but the potential and fire were gone.  And unlike most other similar good bands, we were middle-aged in our 30's, 40's, and 50's.

Fast forward to now.  In the twenty plus years since I started obsessively carrying home cheap used stacks of records I became older than nearly all the musicians who I elevated to hero status were when they put out the records that moved me.  Pete Townshend, Ace Frehely, Joe Strummer, Keith Richards, Mark Arm (and several other grunge musicians in my back yard).  I'm 44 going on 45.  Pete Townshend just turned 26 when Live at Leeds was released, Ace Frehely was 27 when my parents gave me his Kiss solo record for Christmas, Joe Strummer is dead by natural causes, and Keith Richards was about 35 when Some Girls came out.  The most entertaining output by Mr Richards since are the crazy adventures put on the page in his autobiography, Life.

The musical urge, while not dead, is fading along with those who inspired it.  Perhaps one day, like the prolifically creative aged men who I still adorn with hero status (Julian Cope, Jah Wobble, Mike Watt, Buzz Osborne, Thurston Moore, Fred Cole) something I record will be played by a young kid.  And perhaps it will be an electronic, intangible file rather than a hefty chunk of vinyl.  Perhaps it's as likely to happen as my 24 year old fantasy chatting up King Buzzo in downtown Olympia and him asking me, "Hey, we're replacing Joe Preston.  Do you know any good bass players?"

Back to the now.  The musical urge cross-faded with the writing urge.  Both are outlets, a way to get something out, to make something that didn't exist before, hopefully with an audience.  And fortunately the writing urge requires only two investments:  a device (computer, check) and the will (uh, checked, then erased, then checked again in pencil just in case to avoid commitment, then erased, and now once again checked again, though digitally so it's permanent but can be deleted).

My best friend from high school is married to a writer, Sydney Salter.  I congratulated her the other day on accolades she received by another writer on a writers' blog.  She responded saying the hardest part is the empty page.  She wrote, "My guess is that if you're even thinking about writing, you're meant to write".  The voice deep inside me said, "Whoa, how did she know?".  The voices on the surface, the ones that are always trying to get out, said perhaps he'll finally do it.  She also wrote, "Get some words down".  Destroy the blank page.  Ok, she didn't say that sentence - I did.

Well, mission accomplished.  This page is no longer empty.  Some of the voices swirling inside searching for a way out are set free.  A creative outlet is tapped and, like the jamming in the late 90's, even if it does't receive an audience, it's still a healthy release feels really good.