Looney Toons

Looney Toons

Dave Marsh

Some weeks it seems like all of hippiedom over-dopes and under-drinks. Contrast euphoria, generally non-productive, to depression, generally fruitful, if only as a way out. Listen to the music . . . depression music, if you can dig that, is the magic music, the music to put you deeper in and farther out, all at the same time.

Listen to Smokey’s sweet sadness, Pharoah’s tortured tenor twitchings, Miles’ painful progress. Now that music makes sense, whether it’s Stooge agony or merely Coltrane running into the mystic wall and finding his frustration in not finding the void quite where he’d hoped it’d be. Ah, yes, the masses lead lives of noisy desperation these days. I’d celebrate a few for you.

But Smokey ends and ’Trane begins, not instigated by me exactly but just there. So. Like that. One slip and it cuts right through your wrist. Ray Davies .with too much on his mind or Mick Jagger with an overcrowded cloud. Superman music, the kind you can jump out windows to. Not because of, just as an adjunct.

Or Blonde on Blonde, from beginning to end; sorry, Bob, but you got well and the rest of us are still wondering whether or not it’s terminal, fuck the cure, we just wanna know whether or not we’re gonna make it. Some days, it don’t seem like it.

These days, it’s all cosmic music. The inept, the insipid, the trite, all to the cosmic degree, excite me and make me wanna do the liberation boogaloo. Because I really somehow know we’ll all make it, if only because we’re getting it out there, not holding it in.

Magic music is all of the Kinks and Stooges and ’Trane and Pharoah, a lot of Ornette, especially Chappaqua Suite, don’t forget Alice and I hope you all listened to In A Silent Way. I don’t know, maybe Johnny McLaughlin wasn’t desperate or cornered one way or another when he did those guitar lines, maybe Miles is the one, it don’t matter. I know what it says and the message is one and the same with old Rolling Stones; it’s just a shot away, glass or needle, pill or bottle.

Elvin Jones, for example, isn’t just schizophrenic, he’s multiphrenic, most times. Eleven different directions at once, each farther out than the last. There may be a method in our collective madness but there is certainly a positive strength here, a demanding unity.

Barriers. Once Coltrane or Taylor (Cecil, ingrates, not James) or Coleman had made the magic music there was no way that they could go back to bop. No way. Now I don’t pretend to know that from a saxophone /piano perspective, but I know it from a cultural one. The thing that holds us all to our long haired , dope-smoking ways is the magic in the music and the music’s in me. Uh hunh. But no, there was not the desperation in those words that my interpretation could find there. No, the Spoonful are gone, problems worked out or something I suppose. They never were chilling.

Don’t let’s kid ourselves; none of us were ever really happy on the other side. We were outlaws even before we knew and, the quicker we discovered it, the quicker we moved to establish the barriers that hold us from ever going back. Super-personal ones most times.

Then again, there are those who just were never part of it at all. That is, I’m sure at this point that even those who were really deep into it, on the other side, and you all know exactly what I’m talking about or you will soon enough, but even those who were deep into life on the other side were never really pleased with it. And aren’t things much nicer out here, with your friends going to jail, not for parking tickets but for dope? Yes, yes, I know what drives a man to drink. I can really understand how it could be Hamms, not Panama Red, that would trip you up. Even sympathize. And I always did like Norman Mailer, who is too an outlaw, fuck you Abbie Hoffman.

No, don’t kid yourself, you can’t go back and do that other thing. Or soon enough you won’t be able to. And so here you are, out here with all the rest of us, no matter how late you came. There were those of us who were waiting for you and there were those of us who didn’t think you’d make it. But you did and you’re not really any better off, no, just that you’ve been given another chance to make it work. Or at least to stop what’s not working from functioning. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Like I said though, it’s the magic music that puts you in and takes you farther out. And as bad as it looks sometimes, it always does get farther out and we always seem to win. And Huey’s out of jail and there’s a whole load of Weathermen still on the street somewhere and god knows what all else is going on, right here in the bowels of the beast.

I have other visions to share with you. But I guess we’ll make it now, for this month anyway. Kyrie Elaison. All of us.