by Rob Brezsny
As I drove and Layla patiently massaged me, I hovered in an electrified state halfway between sleep and waking. One side of my mind was pouring forth extravagant scenarios of my glorious future as if I were stoned on red Moroccan hashish; the other side watched the unfolding panorama with cool objectivity and made sure I didn’t drive off the road.
As we sped across the border of South and North Carolina and passed through Gastonia, the dawn still three hours away, I received a riveting revelation about what my next move must be. The vision arrived out of nowhere, unexpectedly, and fully formed. I was to relocate to Santa Cruz, California—a place which at that time I knew only by reputation as a wild hippie utopia—and ply my trade there. Nowhere else but there, my unknown spiritual source informed me, could my genius bloom. Here in the Deep South it could at best emerge only in sullen and distorted forms of expression.
Strangely, as this lucid waking dream erupted, Layla withdrew her kneading hand for the first time in a long time. I imagined that she sensed in that moment the beginning of the end of our relationship.
As indeed it was. A few weeks later, I dropped out of Duke University and headed for the West Coast on a Greyhound bus.
My ascent to the role of culture hero in Santa Cruz began at an open mike at the Good Fruit Company cafe. My song “Blasphemy Blues” and long rant-poem “Scare Me Smart” impressed a reviewer for a local entertainment rag, who described my contribution as a “mouth-waterin’, id-ticklin’, ass-kickin’ communiqué from the collective unconscious itself.”
Within a year, I had done seven poetry readings and performance art spectacles in cafes and maybe twenty others in guerrilla street shows. I’d also xeroxed and sold two hundred copies of my first homemade chapbook and practiced the art of compassionate demagoguery in a semi-regular late-night show, “Babbling Ambiance,” on a local radio station.
Best of all, I’d cobbled together my first Santa Cruz band, Kamikaze Angel Slander. When we played our first gig at a friend’s party, our set consisted of five songs I had written with Momo, covers of two David Bowie tunes, and four brand new epics my bandmates and I had whipped up, including a poem with musical accompaniment called “The Prisoner Is in Control”:
I dreamed I saw drunken marines in Vietnam shouting, “These idiots have never even heard of Goofy and Mickey Mouse!” as they raced their golf carts through rice paddies and shot squirt guns full of napalm at everyone who seemed to need a dose of entertainment. I laughed. I cried. I ran towards the Lee Harvey Oswald Memorial Whorehouse, eager for consolation, but on the way was accosted and suavely raped by a pretty CIA tease. She made me shiver and sing, broke me down and stole my imagination. Thank God for that, though. It made me too woozy to pay attention when the President of Goddess-Haters hired ten thousand Hell’s Angels to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Iran and Guatemala and the Dominican Republic and Brazil and Chile.
Meanwhile, out in the wide world beyond the borders of Santa Cruz, the first part of Davie Bowie’s oracle in Atlanta was proceeding as prophesied. By the late 1970s, the rowdy, fuck-the-world spunk of punk music was in full eruption. I was appreciative of and sympathetic to the Sex Pistols and their ilk, though I felt vaguely superior to them all. Bearing (my delusion of) Bowie’s seal of approval, I thought of my work as more subtle and intelligent than their simplistic and decadent dissidence. Sooner or later, I was sure, I would ride the punk surge to greater visibility, even as I distinguished myself from it with my more spiritual sensibilities.
There was only one factor darkening my growing exhilaration: grubby poverty. None of the music or spectacles I was creating earned me more than the cash I plowed into making them happen. And I resented life’s apparent insistence that I was supposed to take time out from my ingenious projects to draw a steady wage. My enrollment at the University of California at Santa Cruz helped. For a few sporadic quarters I was able to garner government loans and grants in return for attending once-a-week poetry and creative writing classes. Monthly allotments of food stamps also aided the cause.
Despite assistance from the welfare state, I was still compelled to degrade myself with actual jobs. Among my humiliations were stints washing dishes at restaurants and posing as an artists’ model and putting in time as a farm laborer in apple orchards. And even then I just barely made my rent, let alone being able to finance the kinds of accessories that up-and-coming mega-stars need, like a car and high-quality musical equipment.
I lived in a moldy basement with nothing but a temperamental space heater to warm my fingers as I composed rebellious anthems on my dinky electronic piano. On occasions I was forced to resort to a “performance art” trick, which was to hang out in cafeteria-style restaurants and scavenge the food that diners left behind. My wardrobe? Both my street clothes and stage costumes were garnered entirely from a warehouse called the Bargain Barn, which charged a very reasonable dollar per five pounds of recycled garments.
The proud shame I felt about my poverty was in marked contrast to the proud pride I sopped up as lead singer of my new band Tao Chemical. We were punky and funky and melodic and literate and politically polemical and spiritually aware all at once. In one of our shows we shared a stage with author William Burroughs, and on another occasion, I arranged for punk novelist Kathy Acker to call long-distance in the middle of a show to deliver an obscene screed. But the smart-ass, fuck-the-world trickery we had in common with those two malcontents was balanced by an equal devotion to messages of peace, love, and understanding. “Compassionate nihilism” was my description for our politics. We were New Age punks, a social category that as far as I knew had not existed before we invented it.
The name Tao (pronounced “Dow”) Chemical was itself a masterpiece of contradiction. It derived in part from the multinational company Dow Chemical, which was the hated manufacturer of the Vietnam War’s most nefarious novelty, napalm. The other meme came from the Chinese word “Tao,” famous for thousands of years as the earthly embodiment of heaven’s truth. Juxtaposing these two meanings embodied the esthetic by which the band was ruled: weaving together the opposites that seemed most alien; playing sacred in the heart of the profane and vice versa; redeeming the darkness not by avoiding it but by exploring it armed with light.
One of the first songs Tao Chemical wrote as an ensemble was “Post-Manhood.” It was a seminal artifact of my career as a macho feminist.
I fell in love with an amazon
She’s boss at bedtime
I never have to make the first move
Her pleasure is mine
She says she don’t like men or boys
Then why’s she like me?
Some of my best friends are girls
When they’re acting like boys
Some of my best friends are boys
When they’re acting like girls
I’m post-manhood
“Post-Manhood” had a sweet, major-key melody that distracted even the most homophobic and sexist listeners from the controversial message. It embodied one extreme of our musical approach: wrapping confounding and confrontational lyrics in a pop package.
At the other extreme of our oeuvre were sardonic tunes that paid almost no homage to conventional song structure: no rhymes whatsoever, no typical verse-chorus structure, and not even a passing reference to (ugh) romance. Among these was “Scare Me,” a response to Ronald Reagan’s reign of affable terror.
You have the right to remain silent
You have the right to brainwash yourselves
It’s a free country
You’re free to be a slave
You’re free to be a proud voyeur of the friendly fascists’ smiles
I did condescend, in the end, to composing one—but only one—love song for Tao Chemical, breaking the unwritten rule in the music biz that a minimum of eighty-five percent of a band’s material must deal with the vagaries of amour. The first verse and chorus of “Romance Is a Sickness” went like this:
I love the way
that you use me
Please ask me for more
Let’s have a wedding next June
just in time for the war
It sounds sentimental
but I want to catch your disease
I want you so badly
I want to be you
Romance is a sickness
Romance is a sickness
But I love you so
Tao Chemical was a supple vehicle that allowed me to scratch my creative itch just about any way I wanted. I was hot. I was radical. I was doing exactly what I was born to do.
On the other hand, I had made almost no progress in improving my financial lot. I had a plenitude of visions but a scarcity of longrange master plans. And I was almost utterly unknown outside a medium-sized California beach town.
I still didn’t own a car, bought my wardrobe at the Bargain Barn, and cooked my rice-and-bean-dominated meals on a hot plate.
I trusted in the Goddess and believed the universe always conspired for the best, but had no idea where the specific money and help were going to come from to make my urges come to fruition.
And though I was a fucking legend in my own mind, the brute facts about my impact on the world were increasingly hard to ignore. Except for an infinitesimal mention of my music in Option magazine, my work had never once been reviewed anywhere outside Santa Cruz in a single music magazine or poetry review or performance art rag, not even of the “alternative” variety.
Before the devil’s bargains I made with CBS and WBM almost two years ago, I had never caught the attention of or signed a single contract with any entity in the music business. The three records I made were all do-it-yourself productions done on budgets so low I had to donate blood to pay for one of them. Rock videos for my songs? Ha!
At least my poetry book, Images Are Dangerous, was not a vanity-press job. It was put out by Jazz Press, a legitimate and credible publishing company in Santa Cruz that had done books by established poets like Jack Marshall, Morton Marcus, and Deena Metzger. On the other hand, the book materialized mostly because I incessantly badgered the publisher, who was a friend of mine, and because I myself handled every step of the physical production of the book, including typesetting, layout, art design, and photostatting. It was accorded a favorable review in New York’s tiny St. Mark’s Review, but that was all.
Images Are Dangerous sold only about four hundred copies out of a total two thousand produced before the rest of the lot met an untimely end. The publisher fell way behind in the rent on the warehouse where he’d been storing my books and others, and during the eviction process the landlord relocated sixteen hundred copies of my pride and joy to the county dump.
At least my music cassettes had brisker sales: a whopping total of about two thousand, two hundred among the three of them.
I’m being sarcastic. Even by the samizdat-style standards of the indie record scene, that number was pathetic. I never had a deal with even a small distribution company, and so didn’t have much power to get any of my precious creations in the hands of stores outside Santa Cruz. I can say with confidence, at least, that my work was played for a few weeks in more than twenty-five distant cities, from Schenectady to Chapel Hill. I have the proof in the form of playlists from tiny college radio stations in all those places.
The evidence was unambiguous. According to most of the standards by which success is measured, I had virtually no professional credentials. My fame was extremely local. The money I earned was miniscule. The artistic artifacts I produced were virtually unknown.
Maybe nothing embodied my chronic sense of abject humiliation more than a scene at an all-night Kinko’s photocopy store one chilly October morning at 3 A.M. It was around the eighth anniversary of the launch of my career as a sacred entertainer. Though I had only crude, self-taught skills as a graphic artist, the task had fallen to me to create a poster for an upcoming Tao Chemical show. There simply weren’t enough funds to hire a pro. For that matter, I barely had enough cash to order the two hundred or so flyers necessary to cover all the essential telephone poles, bulletin boards, and public walls in town. (A task I’d be handling myself later that afternoon.) I’d brought my penny jar with me, planning on looting it to pay the Kinko’s bill.
As I struggled to assemble all the elements of the flyer in a visually appealing way, I kept an eye on the only other customer in the shop. It was Crazy Carl, the homeless prophet who always wore a pair of green baseball pants wrapped around his head as a turban. He, too, was working on his latest propaganda: one more in his series of telephone-pole broadsides wherein he detailed the CIA’s collusion with Jehovah-worshiping UFOs in a sick project to use mind control technology to force every man, woman, and child in America to wet their beds every night.
As the years went by, David Bowie’s prophecies in Atlanta detoured into the same ambiguous limbo as my brilliant career. Just as I was forced to re-evaluate my vision of being one of the anarchist bards on the leading edge of a national groundswell of feverish revolutionary culture, I had to accept the likelihood that Bowie had been wrong.
The counterrevolution had come, all right, but not in the way he predicted—not through anything so obvious as the arrest of dissidents or the suspension of the Bill of Rights. Instead, the “revolution” had been bought with Reagandollars and turned into an ingenious form of social control. The music of chaos, heresy, and disruption was now a lucrative product belonging to the Brobdingnagian engines of capitalism. They packaged it in such a way that it could never be truly dangerous to any institution. It had become a simulation of revolution. Spunky rebellious angst was confined to cartoony displays of generic rage at live concerts and on rock videos. Goaded by wealthy rock icons who cared not so much about overthrowing reality as basking in the perks of their fame, the kids spent a few hours pretending to be free-thinking outlaws, safely blowing off steam which might otherwise have been directed into staging protests about the widening gap between the rich and poor or organizing teach-ins about the deadly collaboration of American might with Salvadoran death squads or writing their congresspersons about the secret genocide in East Timor.
Rock and roll, owned and operated by the same corporate culture that became an invincible vampire during Reagan’s swath of destruction, was the perfect smokescreen and diversion to drain off libidinous troublemaking and revolutionary fervor into mere fantasy.
The upshot to all this was that real wackos like myself—artists who weren’t churning out the emasculated simulations of revolution formulated and sanctioned by the priests of Trickle-Down Economics—didn’t stand a chance at fame and fortune.
In the wake of my depressing epiphanies, I retrenched. My imagination suffered a deflation, but I welcomed that as a sign of a growing pragmatism. Instead of trying to be a poet, musician, performance artist, raconteur, radio personality, graphic artist, writer, dancer, and actor, I decided to shrink a little—maybe just be a poet, musician, and performance artist.
I dissolved Tao Chemical and for a few years pursued a solo career. Using taped music and ambient sound as my accompaniment, I did shows in which I blended incantation, singing, and an approach to ritual that I called “shamanic performance.” I was part-Patti Smith, part-Abbie Hoffman, part-minstrel. Years before MTV featured “spoken word” performances that brought the genre respectability, I recorded an album of songs, stories, prayers, and poems.
“Reality,” I declaimed in one of the pieces, “is now nothing more than the sum total of the war between competing infotainment conglomerates.”
I have made the catastrophic discovery that it is legal to torture and murder people with entertainment. Your very body is a battleground for the World Entertainment War.
The mass audience is in danger of total extinction through “enjoyment” and “education.” An elite cabal of entertainment criminals has, through telegenetic engineering, created a telepathic analogue of the AIDS retrovirus that infects the human imagination, destroying its link to the Dreamtime.
This AIDS of the imagination, which I call RAIDS, disguises itself as healthy signals and symbols. Its victims readily drink it in, whereupon it devours their imaginations and substitutes the sterile and pathetic stories propagandized by the entertainment criminals.
Fuck the threat of war! The genocide of the imagination is at hand! You’re lucky you don’t have to live in fear of literal death squads, but you’re not so lucky to be living in a country where death squads of the imagination are welcome guests everywhere you go!
Don’t console yourself by choosing to believe I’m speaking metaphorically. This is not a poetic conceit. Actual electrochemical substances in your brain are being redesigned by the imaginations of the imagination-killers. And television is only the most obvious way they deliver their lethal payload.
If we don’t stop them, there will soon be a single, monolithic, tragically inbred global imagination built around the favorite stories of a small group of American plutocrats and their media toadies. This black hole of insipidly dangerous images and sounds will bring the unholy perfection of totally destructive “peace.” World War Harmony is the covert goal of the entertainment criminals.
Welcome to
Mary Magdalen’s Monster Truck Rally and Tantric Cryfest!