IGM YouTube

Inter-Galactic Memo

To: All Personnel

Fr: W. Leavitt

Re: YouTube

6-21-2010




I spend an inordinate amount of time watching YouTube videos, listening to music. Mostly, I go for stuff I already know, memory lane, as it were, but I’ve been known to venture off into uncharted territory as well. I never intend to spend that much time. I always have a specific video or song in mind, but as I’m listening/watching, that damn string of useful suggestions to the right of the screen beckons me like a Siren, and I click on another, and another, and suddenly it’s like whoa! Here’s a suggestion for someone else, and I haven’t heard that one in forever, or yikes! I didn’t know those two people ever sang together, etc., etc., and before I know it I’ve been up half the night, lost in a kind of musical reverie.

Sometimes I run across a real gem, hitherto unknown to me. Like when I looked for David Wilcox because I wanted to hear The Eye of the Hurricane song, and discovered this insane Canadian of the same name—a middle-aged madman, blues guitarist of extraordinary talent. Most of the new ones, however, come from my children, and most of those from Chani, because she is CONNECTED. I get my fix of weird from Grah, who finds stuff so esoteric that even the internet is surprised. Like The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, or Depapepe. (Is that right? I’m not online right now.) I listen to a lot of Chani’s stuff, with her band, Rubik’s Hotel, and some Crowd of Small Adventures, and Hungry Cloud, because my second cousin (or first cousin once-removed, I can never remember), Jack Wilcox, the Human String Bean, fronts them both. (For those of you lucky enough to have seen Thor at the Bus Stop, Jack is the Milk Strider.)

A few nights ago, I got an itch to hear “In My Room,” by the Beach Boys. It maybe my favorite song by them. So I got on YouTube and found it and listened, and loved it again, and then how could I not listen to “Little Deuce Coup, and then there was “Surfer Girl,” Brain Wilson’s favorite of his melodies, and on it went, "Good Vibrations", "Be True to Your School", until I found an interview with Brain. Brian Wilson is one of my hero’s, and a universal cautionary tale. I listened to an interview from the 60’s, with Mike Douglas, and then a long one from the 90’s. Brain is fried. His mind is gone, his brain burned to a crisp—which he readily admits in the second interview. Drugs, and poor mental health, combined to destroy one of the most creative and brilliant musical minds of our century. Oh, he’s still articulate, in his own way (and by that I mean he was never articulate), but he has trouble concentrating, and is the king of non-sequiturs. He wanders, and has a tendency to protect himself by breaking into song at odd moments.

Here’s this perfectly normal California kid, with a gift from God, who at 16 puts together a band of his brothers, a cousin, and a family friend, and somehow brings normally talented teenagers up to the levels of greatness by the time he is 19. And they let him, They listen to him, because his brain is on fire with melodies, and harmonies, and arrangements both manically complex, and angelically sophisticated. Then—because of issues with an overbearing and physically abusive father, his own innate emotional instability, DRUGS, and a manipulative, greedy, despicable, Svengali-like therapist—he is brought down into a living hell for decades. And through all of it, he manages to write and arrange—and produce—some of rocks most enduring anthems. He couldn’t perform live, though. Six months after their first big hit, which I believe was “Surfin’ USA,” he was home in bed, where he stayed for three years. In the interview with Douglas, Brain sounds like a PSA against drugs. He describes the many times he took (among others) LSD, and how wonderful it was, but what it did to him as well. He was very frank, very candid. Then, in the newer interview, the guy asks him if he ever took LSD. Brian says “oh sure,” and goes into some random, wandering diatribe, then suddenly stops. “At least I think I did,” he says, then looks off into space. “Maybe not . . . I’d have to ask somebody.” He looks at the camera. “I don’t remember.”

I probably listened to 30 songs that night, thinking about all of this, dismayed, and amazed at what he did, what he went through, and curious about what might have been under different circumstances. Then, towards the end of the long interview, he mentioned his two older daughters, Carnie, and Wendy, whom he barely knew while they were growing up, and I was off into a search for Wilson Phillips.
As you may recall, they were a female trio from the 90’s with a few good hits. Carnie and Wendy were Brian’s girls, and the other one, Chynna, was the younger daughter of Papa John and Michelle Phillips, who founded the Mama’s and the Papa’s. How she survived her father’s bizarre lifestyle is anyone’s guess. But those girls could sing. It was top-notch pop music, with a legacy unparalleled in music history. Nothing profound, but “hold on just one more day,” is a fine sentiment for a song, evoking all kinds of possibilities. I listened to all the stuff of theirs available, watching them, trying to imagine the dynamics in which they had grown-up, and were formed, and the serendipity that might have brought the unlikely pairing to fruition.

Maybe the reason I spend so much time doing that, reading about all these people, listening to them, and wondering about them, is because of the emotions it makes me feel. Music—even obviously commercial music—has a strong effect on me. Musicians fascinate me. What they do is so hard, and requires so much time and commitment before anything can really begin. I know just enough about that to make me particularly susceptible to the struggle, and the miracle of talent at that level. Hell, even the 1910 Fruit Gum Factory had talent. And although it makes me nauseous to admit it, even the Rolling Stones have talent.

We often marvel at how easy and effortless they make it look. But most of us don’t delve deeply enough to discover the years of sacrifice, of obsessive practice, repetition, and compulsive dedication it takes to be one of the great ones. Eddie Van Halen says he locked himself in his bedroom with one of Eric Clapton’s albums, and a guitar, and didn’t come out for three years—essentially his adolescence—until he could play every note of every song perfectly. You wanna see extreme skill? Go to Youtube and call up a band called Dragonforce. You won’t like them. They are a “speed metal” band, “shredders,” but they have a unique sound. Watch part of a video, listen to the drums and the lead guitars. It is impossible to play that fast, much less complex arrangements that fast, that perfectly, for that long. I can’t even describe the speed. You have to experience it. It makes one wonder where the limit is. What can’t humans do? Remember the 5 minute mile? The unbreakable barrier? Now housewives run faster than that, in sneakers, on concrete. And usually really ugly outfits . . . . nothing personal, housewives.

Sometimes people wonder how I can possibly know some of the stuff I do. Especially about music. First of all, I don’t know all that much compared to someone who really does. It’s easy to impress people who don’t know anything about something. And second of all, I can’t help it. I remember it. (Actually, my memory is terrible, chaotic. Except in a few narrow areas. ) I’ve read the back of every album I’ve ever owned (a lot), I’ve read countless articles, books, biography’s, I watch documentaries endlessly, heck, I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone—who does that? and I was a music major for a while. And now that YouTube is around, well . . . it’s even worse. I get to see them too. Ultimately, it comes down to curiosity.

It’s like the people who think I’m a pretty good musician. I know better. They usually only think that because they aren’t one at all. I think we all experience that. Yeah, I write better than people who don’t write, but I’m not kidding myself. I’m no Mark Helprin or Cormack McCarthy. I’m not even Larry McMurtry or Tom Clancy, or Anne Rice. Such is the nature of talent, of “the gift”. It is an infinite spectrum, a river into which we are all dipped, like Achilles. Some are dipped deeper than others. And like Achilles, something about the experience often renders us tragic, as well as gifted. Look at Brian Wilson.