Headsmack:

guitar chords, drums,
bass, a vocal, lyrics
smart enough
or stupid enough:
no more, no less.

Mood dependent:

might approve a keyboard,
horn, second vocal,
lead guitar.

Mood adjacent:

get big, get busy
with every polyrhythm
polyamorous for all
other sounds.  Balalaika,
bouzouki, bodhran,
zither, timbale, woodblock.

Mood shifter:

fingers, strings,
no voice.  Let’s hear
ladders, let’s hear ascent
and descent upon
a fretted neck.

If there’s no mood at all

what’s needed,
what comes to mind,
is interstellar space,
travel to
Pure Land on
pure mind:
saxophone chasm Tesseract,
points A and B
peaks in a range,
hurtling all of the in between
in one leap.

The Hammond organ:
wet wide brush,
thick colors. Warm
tones.

Fender P-Bass:
smacks down dark hues,
richer, deeper, rounder
shapes.

Telecaster:
pointillist stinger
chattering spatter
patterns everywhere.

Ludwig kit with
an old Gretsch snare:
possibly, under the paint,
an ancient figure rising?

Let the baritone sax
call it out,
all-dimensioned,
sketching then filling in details.

Remind me, please:
why do we need a singer?
Why frame this work
that already works so well unframed?

I’m pretending to be
a bad band
silenced by changing tastes

sitting round mourning the fads
of the record industry
and the general public

scheming publicity stunts
and abrupt shifts in musical direction
under the guise of experimentation and growth

or perhaps instead actually thinking 
and planning experimentation and growth
as inspired by changing musical directions

knowing that no one
will believe the latter
makes for bitter blather

I pretend I’m a bad band
because the alternative
is to face myself as a bad man

and know that no one else
can possibly have my back
when it comes to reinvention

A dead man is singing and playing.
It happens all the time.
It has now for some years.
Since the phonograph.
Not long at all.
Used to be it never happened.
It’s kind of a new thing.
No wonder we fear zombies.
We have them here on record.
Have them on film.
They move, they sing, they never leave.
How are we supposed to miss them?
We want a proper moment with their absence.
Want to call this feeling grief.
Want to call it mourning.
If you’re dead you’re dead Jimi Hendrix.
Stay dead.
Stay a legend.
Don’t keep up the Zombie Franchise!
However much adored this is.
However much goddamn good this is.
However much good this does to hear it.
We would have gotten by without it.
We would have gotten over the loss at some point.
Don’t like loving it.
Loving it anyway.
It appears they aren’t gone.
Like they never left.
Hear them out there.
Like a train whistle off a ways.
Hear my train a comin’.
Hear my train go by.
A dead man playing real live blues.
I hear my angel fly.

No blessing brighter than
how sterling the crash
of music writ loud on the ear
can become, silver slivers ringing
afterward, sheer cliff of sound pressure
pushing you back from the stage,
the subsequent vaccuum
you rush to fill leaning forward,
the fascination with its circuitous path
from first note to last,
the ultimately unrejectable nature
of compulsion to ROCK, the lyric
a second thought, the lyric’s sudden turn
into the only important thing, the beat
of wild drum as the only remaining thing
to connect us back to the start
of the evolutionary chain, to us as we were,
to the Basic, the Clean, the
thankfully Sacred UnCivilization
inherent in loosing the body
into thrumming communion
with the rest of the known
and unknown world.

Isn’t it a beautiful
Saturday night
in the city?

A punk fan
spits up on a classic rock fan
in front of a disco
as a car banging rap slips by
and a country fan turns up her nose
at the hard, hard house music
her date seems to prefer.
The jazz fan hurries past everyone
because no one likes a jazz fan
except for the reggae fans — they
love everyone, mostly.  Mostly —
except for that guy
with “Tosca” leaking
from his earbuds.  Meanwhile
on the corner two surprising kids
are committing a bluegrass murder,
hoping for spare change in the hat
and getting some
while there’s a hint of bhangra in the air
and a hint of merengue in the air
and a hint of calypso and soca and mento
and someone’s got a ska torch lit too;

isn’t it a beautiful Saturday night
in the clamoring city,
isn’t it making you wish
you could play everything
whenever you close your eyes?

There are unnamed beings in the world
that no one wants to acknowledge.

For less than 100 years we have locked away
legions of sub-gods in favor of a brighter world

and the world has gotten darker
in their extended absence.

Tired of wating for less boring entities
than vampires and zombies

to become trendy enough
to move freely about the popular imagination?

I say it is their time… 
our time.

Hpw shall we free them?  
It’s not like they’re fairies:  they need more 

than kid applause to stay mobile and flexible
and free.  A little fear to feed on, to grease gears.

So, strike: strike an anvil, take hard exception,
strike up a chord progression in a key to a passage.

Something about distortion, overdrive, sustain…
something about sounds unheard ever on Earth less than 100 years ago.  

Something about making those sounds…
about the freedom to make such sounds.  

To know how.  To know how to do it in more than one fashion.  
To make them at the perfect time.  

To get that it’s still music even when it is
dissonant and discordant and atonal and out of strict harmonic standards…

To meet the eyes of others who also get it as you are playing it
and settle in and lock down and ride it to the Other Side of Right Now,

the unacknowledged side, the dismissed side,
the Dionysian flight side…

Skies of steel, lead, aluminum, iron, gold, silver.
Bronze, copper, tin; the malleablilty of these,

their clashing and clanking; sheets and bars and ingots falling,
breaking the door to where the sub-gods have been kept.

When they break out, when they rise singing,
we rise singing.  When they roar up to view,

we roar up to view.  Is it any wonder we 
stir inside when we hear

distortion, overdrive, sustain,
the tone breaking up regardless of the headroom?

Is it any wonder that we close our eyes
and surge inside?

Fuck a ukulele
for being a ukulele.
Fuck a banjo for being
a banjo when there are plenty
of outlets in this messed-up world
to set a musical instrument on fire.
Fuck a gentle instrument, fuck everything 
except drum and bass and the rumble strip
on the highway. Fuck the whole notion of simple
and easy.  Fuck a depression outfit and a plunky-ass sound.  
Fuck a turntable for refusal to stop being an instrument. Fuck anyone 
who calls it out. Fuck music in general for being a thing someone wanted to make
and someone else wanted to hear. How dare we stop?  Fuck musical people who are not
blessed with a desire for silence right now.  They’re probably sitting home in non-silence. They
have a banjo on the wall, a ukulele on the knee, a respect for the simple things, and fuck-all to say.
Ten years ago they talked a good game  about something else.  Fuck them for being bad prophets.