WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir

About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~ Chapter 4 ~
Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Chapter 5 ~ Holy Spirit

The plains of Paris lay below my feet. A conqueror’s view. Me, I was just an unemployed newspaperman about to turn 30 when May came that Spring. But I’d overthrown something to get here. (Caution and common sense, my congenitally anxious mother an ocean away in Ohio would say). The white walls and soaring triple domes of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris rose at my back this Christmas Eve. From Sacre Coeur’s perch on the butte Montmarte, the highest vantage point in town, I gazed down at the City of Light. Make that a city of a million coruscating lights.

Town — what a funny word to call Paris. What did the Parisii, the tribe from which the city would cull its name, call their settlement here on the river Seine three centuries before Christ? Lutetia. Ah. Even then the place was mellifluous, at least in name. Lutetia Parisiorum, “Lutetia of the Parisii.” The city stretched to the horizon, low to the ground. No skyscrapers allowed, except for a cluster of glass and steel towers to the west in the business district, La Defense, rising like a lone batch of cornstalks from a sweeping field of rye grass.

Out of the flat Parisien plain the eye leapt toward a few other exceptions. The jutting index finger of the Eiffel Tower, bathed bottom to top in bronze light. The stout, bulldog shoulders of the Arc de Triomphe in the Place Charles de Gaulle. The arch’s mouth was big and wide enough for an exuberant French pilot to steer his biplane though a couple weeks after World War I ended in 1919. There’s newsreel of it somewhere.

I shivered from the bone-cold chill. What was I doing here? When I began mulling the answer to that question (whose translation into motherspeak was: ‘What are you doing with your life, not-so-young James?’) I ducked. Weaved.  I answered the pocket-size version of the question. What am I doing here? Going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve in Paris. In Paris. That bore repeating. I turned from the low marble parapet, from the living postcard view of the city, and entered Sacre Coeur. The basilica was packed, hardly a pew to be squeezed into throughout the vast interior. France was a mostly Catholic land, after all. This was the place to be on the eve of the day that marked the entry of the faith’s Messiah into humankind’s grubby midst. (more…)

Of late, I’ve begun some collaborative musical work, so was intrigued to read one of my musical hero’s thoughts on collaboration. Here is David Byrne on working with a bunch of Brian Eno ‘wannabe’ songs that had languished on a shelf, until Eno turned them over, with some ground rules. Byrne writes:

How do these things work? My last record — the Byrne/Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today — was, as far as the process goes, typical in some ways. Brian had a slew of tracks on the shelf, tracks that seemed to want to become songs (as opposed to ambient pieces, or film scores), but he was unhappy with his own attempts at completing them. So, from his point of view, he had nothing much to lose by passing them to me — they were just gathering dust anyway, and unless I did something horrendous (which we agreed he could veto), it was a win-win situation.

I was sent stereo mixes of his musical ideas, which I sometimes left alone, but just as often I slightly restructured them to bring them closer to a song form. However, I never even thought about requesting musical changes in the tracks — key changes, changes in groove or instrumentation. The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.

This presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon.

Read the whole entry here, plus you get the bonus of seeing Byrne’s home studio. I could go on for awhile on what Talking Heads’ music meant to me, after a friend turned me and Bruce S. on to “More Songs About Buildings and Food” at an apartment complex in Oxford, Ohio, at Miami U., in the summer of 1978. (There were some aromatics in the room, which intensified the whole introduction. But it was love at first listen.) Then, we went to Bogart’s in Cincinnati that Winter and saw the Heads live.  Byrne came on like some skinny, speaking-in-tongues singing preacher/shaman. And then came “Fear of Music,” “Remain in Light” and “Speaking In Tongues.” The soundtrack for my life’s movie as its storyline went good, bad, up and way down.  And, finally, up again. Thank you, Rev. Byrne. (Love the gold hair…)

Here’s me before work this morning. No, not really. This would be West Virginia’s greatest psycho-billy rocker,  the late, legendary Hasil Adkins. (1937-2005). I’m working on a multimedia piece for my newspaper on the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame at Tamarack near Beckley, W.Va. The eclectic exhibit documents a host of performers with W.Va. ties, from opera to jazz, gospel to crazy-ass rockers as this photo in the exhibit of the Boone County cult figure testifies. | click photo bigger