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The
Brain Tuba
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by Jesse Jarnow
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Let's All Be Serious
Last night, I was reading a short story by Charles Baxter entitled "Saul and
Patsy Are Pregnant". In it, the main character - Saul - sends away for a
pamphlet advertised on the back of matchbook that promises to reveal to him,
in no uncertain terms, "the SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE" in return for six
dollars. After dropping the money in a mail box, Saul thinks to himself "I am
no longer a serious person. My grandfather read the Torah, my father read
Spinoza and Heine and books on immunology, and here I am, writing off for
this."
(1) The question of "seriousness", in a sense, dogs Saul for the
duration of the piece.
I'm in college right now. Over the course
of the past three years, I've taken numerous classes in English, History, and
other humanities. In those classes, there were dozens of discussions ranging
from visceral declarations of existence to completely hyperbolized and
practically indecipherable streams of codified mumbo jumbo. The common bond in
all of these threads, even if a given argument was punctuated with humor, was
an underlying seriousness of purpose. The question of how, precisely, to
define that purpose is an age-old debate of academia.
While taking any number of classes for academic credit, I've also spent a fair
deal of time writing about music - jamband music, in specific - mostly for
myself, but occasionally (and growing more often) for JamBands.com. These past
few months have been interesting, as I get sucked further and further into
working on things for the site. In terms of mental energy expended, I've
spent a large amount of time thinking about improvised music on really nerdy
terms. Generally speaking, my spiel is to take some minute aspect of
something and blow it out way out of proportion. The ultimate question
- in regards to that, anyway - is whether or not this music is actually worthy
of such attention.
In a sense, I'm only following the example of numerous papers I've been
assigned to read over the course of my academic career that blew up something
itsy-bitsy - say, the word order of a sentence - into a representative model
for a large chunk of the universe. I've been trained to think that way, and
everything ends up going through that filter. There is something quite
consciously humorous about placing jambands in that frame. It's something
that's fun to do. At first, it felt like a side project of sorts: taking a
breather from some of the more mundane analytical assignements by using the
techniques on something I was more interested in. Recently, though, it seems
to have become primary focus. When I do it, I often feel a strange twinge of
guilt for devoting my time to picking apart the more arcane aspects of a bar
band instead of the so-called deeper truths of a canonized literary giant. Of
course, a very good explanation as to why I do it, could just be a
justification for the amount of time I devote listening to the music. Either
way, there's guilt involved.
Where does that guilt stem from? One aspect of it could well be that I'm
attending college - supposedly, the pinnacle of higher education - while
coming to more conclusions about life in general from experiences occurring
separately from the collegiate structure. In other words, it's almost as if I
expect to have more of a learning experience going to a show than I do going
to a class. Perhaps it's taking the line from Scarlet Begonias - "once
in a while you can get shown the light / in the strangest of places, if you
look at it right (2) - just a step too far, by only looking in the
strangest of places. All of this would fall under the category of "guilt for
getting more out of comparatively cheaper experiences". That's one part.
Another side of that same aspect is the value system that has somehow been
ingrained in me that intones that what is presented in school is somehow of a
higher intrinsic value than what I'm witnessing when I go to see Phish play. That may be so, but why? If it has
to be questioned, then it's not an obvious answer. Time may have something to
do with it. The bulk of the material studied in college dates back sometime.
While most colleges do offer classes in contemporary literature, their
approaches are often still seen as radical -- perhaps because it is hard to
filter the importance out of something if one is still in the midst of the
context that produced it. No matter how many pundits assess the so-called
importance of an event as it happens - the Monica Lewinsky debacle, for
example - no real sense can be made of it until some years down the line.
Contemporary music criticism? Bah!
Phish might be as ultimately important as Miles Davis, but who's to know right
now? The world of the Grateful Dead, for
example, has recently begun producing a cottage industry of pure scholarship
around it. Check out Michael Getz and John Dwork's "the Deadhead's Taping
Compendium". In it, there are several amazing accounts of the Acid Tests by
Nick Meriwether (3); subjective, taboot. Comparing those to contemporary
descriptions of the events - namely Tom Wolfe's "the Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test" (4) - one begins to get a firmer hold on what actually went down and
what the true ramifications were. Distance, indeed, has much to do with it.
After 25 years, by some definition somewhere, cars become "classic". By one of
my father's favorite sayings, people from 50 or more miles away are "experts".
Things that are over 50 years old are safely history -- and therefore on solid
ground for scholarly nit-picking. Rock and roll will soon be fifty years old.
We shall, indeed, see.
Things of some importance are happening -- but not everything, as we
are sometimes led to believe, matters a damn. Filtering things poses a bit of
a problem. What makes it even harder is that it seems that there is hardly an
event that goes on these days that isn't documented in seven different
mediums. Is the music of Phish - or any jamband, for that matter - important
or even... gasp... serious? What is serious? I'd argue that it's more
in the approach than the content. Even scholars of literature would be well
advised to acknowledge that humor can be the transfer point of much knowledge.
Does it matter?
Actually, for that matter, does the question "does it matter?" even matter?
(Like, wow, man!) People are having rad, albeit totally subjective,
experiences witnessing these hoedowns. If it is, in fact, more in approach
than content -- whose approach is it? The band or the listener's? It goes back
to that "seriousness of purpose" thing. What is the ultimate purpose of
studying anything? To understand it, of course. Well, why does one want
to understand it? To better understand himself and to better understand the
world. (Cheesy answer.) Ideally, the same motivations and values are behind
the study of historical topics and the study of current events. What's the
point of being serious, anyway? For someone who has a hard time believing in
religion, making the most of everything is important to me. Experiences, I
feel, are fuller when I know what's going on.
The reason we study history is to get a better handle on where we've been. The
reason we need to grip this handle is to get some hold of where we're going...
which is useless, unless we know where we are. All of that, of course, is a
bunch of hyperbole. I study these things because, to me, they are meaningful.
And, while the dissection of ancient military maneuvers and evasive Bloomsbury
philosophical tactics might well not do a damn thing for me, they do come into
play. As David Gans sang, "just remember what a metaphor is for"
(5). When
something learned in a class can unfold itself into real life, that's when it
becomes important: objective study into subjective reality. There's a segue
for you.
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