Sunday, March 15, 2015

Seven Degrees of Separation:

Is this the best font to use when writing about Memphis?

Everybody is from somewhere.  Some place, some time, some town, some generation, some scene.  These parts and pieces and places coalesce into an image.  The image ebbs, fades, the corners of it grow blackened with fire and time.  Memphis is just like any other place, except it isn't.  No place is like any other place, and to sit and describe and discuss it marginalizes the perspective of those living elements that comprise it.  I have long imagined blank pages of paper slowly being filled with markers of my experience, calligraphic conceptualizations of times and places that sink into the mind and remain, tributes to the gravity of growth and loss and general angst.  And as the pen scribbles the places change. Suddenly memory is nothing but a parody of the actual moment.  The essence is lost.  The symbol that seeks to represent in turn destroys that upon which its existence is dependent.

So why use words?

You can be born just about anywhere and still be "from" Memphis.  No matter how long it took you to wind up here, chances are the second you step into city boundaries, you'll be changed forever.  You can't walk far without hearing the pulse of it, feeling the oppressive weight of its imagination and its sorrow.  The pigment of the city is derived from powdered pain, crushed up by rage, and soaked in gasoline.  It paints a tale of love and hate, friendship and trust, blind luck and song.  On a Sunday morning, you can walk past any corner and see a house of God, the walls bursting with echoes of gospel legacy.  On any given afternoon, you can find yourself wandering the dirty brick Beale, bustling with tourists and biker gangs, everyone vibrating with the ache and dance of the blues.

It's the loss that brings us together.  If you don't know someone who is in a band, chances are you aren't asking the right questions.  More than likely, your musician friends have a musician friend who has a musician friend who knows someone in Saliva, a band that you can't reference in most crowds without hearing an audible groan and someone immediately saying, "Hey remember that time when..."

The pact that we make without realizing it is that we'll never give up the struggle to get out, even though being in is what makes us truly remarkable.  So many leave only to return like they'd never left.  It isn't failure that marks their faces but resolution to just go for it all over again.  It's an amnesia of artistic glory.  And there is nothing you can do to stop it, like you would ever want to in the first place.

I'm so fucking sick of losing CDs I can never buy again.  If the musical immortality we all look forward to is a peeling bumper sticker in the bathroom of the Hi Tone, then I say fuck that.  People die, bands die, and everyone forgets, except on those rare nights when we huddle around a fire pit, smoking cigarettes and drinking bad beers and talking about the good old times.  And that's all well and good, but can you blame me for needing a little more?  I expect to try and make that happen, because I can't handle missing you all anymore.  If you dare to live, then I want to help you live on.  If you are brave enough to put your sound and your sorrow out there for all the hear and hurt, then you deserve a gravestone that won't crumble when it's over.

So here it is.

Enjoy it, you bloody bastards.















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