Rock on the Brain

Yeah, I've been away from this a while. The last couple of weeks were sort of a logjam of obligations and celebrations, among them my birthday, my parents visiting town, my trying to meet a script deadline, and my girlfriend leaving for two months in Paris. Today is quite literally the first day I've not had some pressing thing to attend to. There are things, of course, that need to get done, but I've got a few hours here, and it feels nice.

One of the things I've got to get around to is prepping a pitch for various network types, based on a show my writing partner and I developed. It's a music-focused show, and between "researching" it (watching music DVD's, buying CD's I can't afford) and doing some drum work on a batch of demos for a bass player friend of mine, I've definitely got rock on the brain.

Lately, what's been humping on the stereo around here is a mix of classics (The Jam, Husker Du, The Replacements, Gang of Four, Stones) and newbies (Fruit Bats, Robbers on High Street, Rogue Wave, I Am Kloot, Magic Numbers). It's as if a Keith Richards-like blood transfusion of rock n roll has begun working into my veins, reinvigorating me and reawakening zombies from an old life. ROCK N ROLL ATE MY BRAIN! I am really surprised at how much the...passion...for Rock n Roll has come back. I guess when I became a writer, or more accurately DECIDED to become a writer, I purposefully set that part of my creative self aside, thinking that there wasn't room in town for the both of us. But, much as the lead character in the proposed show I'm writing, I'm finding that there's only so much you can put those passions to bed. They will wake up. The sleeping giant will be disturbed. And so I find myself eating and breathing and dreaming about music, about drumming, about playing on stage. Not that I was ever some grand rock star who turned his back on the "life," more that I'm just aware of how long I let a certain very vital part of myself atrophy. And the truth is that it's a part of me I never realized how much I missed.

I'm not saying I haven't played music or bought a CD in the intervening years, because Lord knows I have, but there is something happening here that is more about the FEELING of it all, the impossible-to-replicate-elsewhere-ness of it that I haven't realized until now, until I've come through the other end of writing's satisfactions. The satisfaction you derive from writing is peculiar and short lived, like a nitrous oxide hit that spins you upward for a moment and then dissipates in thirty second's time. Music is there, you can hear it, you know when you've done well, when you've done justice to your skill or your stated goal: the band nails the song, the fill drops in exactly the right pocket, the song ends (always touch and go) on a dime and is followed by that wash of elation that, like the nitrous, only lasts a moment...but is shared by all participants, as with a family watching fireworks. You feel the bursts in your chest, thumping in and out of a rhythm that resolves in slow dissipation, prompting you to elbow your brother and look him in the eye as if to say "did you see that?"