Updates
New folks have been joining the email list. Welcome. Reminder: In addition to these at-least weekly screeds, I send out a Collage of the Day—FIVE days a week—for paying subscribers. It lands in your email at 5:30am, so while you sip your morning beverage and reckon with another day of human incarnation, you can see what it looks like for a pin-up model to have an animal head.
I’ve been working on booking a proper dive bar show. I’m excited to play in that setting, but I quickly remembered how much I dislike the logistics of booking. But I think this is all leading to playing with a live drummer, which is fun. Alongside this show I’m going to keep working on playing in various retail locations.
I’m up against it in lot of ways right now. Things are good AND some of the progress I’ve made of late, mental-health-wise, has been the kind that obliterates what has comes before. Existential crisis? Mid-life crisis? These are terms people use. While positive and perhaps even essential, it’s not easy. I’m like a new born colt. I don’t know how to walk, much less, like, manage my emotions. I think a lot of people figure this stuff out as kids or teenagers, but instead I focused on learning how to disconnect from my feelings. I got really good at it. So now I’m like a toddler w/r/t emotional regulation, but I’m in my mid-40s. Charming. Apologies to everyone I know IRL.
Into the Void
I’m on a tear with music memoirs lately—Robyn Hitchcock, Kathleen Hanna, and now Geezer Butler. This is another book that had been on my radar for a moment when I realized I could listen to it on Spotify. At this point, I’ve read Mick Wall’s band bio of Sabbath, Symptom of the Universe, and Ozzy’s cash-grab of a book. I’ve yet to read Tony Iommi’s (but I will), and Bill Ward hasn’t written one—yet! So I’m well on my way to a Sabbath PhD.
I came to Sabbath very late, but no one proselytizes like a new convert, so here we go. Like the Beatles a few short years before them (The first Sabbath record came out January 1970, less than 7 years after the first Beatles LP), Sabbath were four working-class kids from an industrial part of England. Unlike the Beatles, however, there was no Brian-Epstein-like figure sanitizing them and making them palatable for mass consumption. (Which is not a dig at the Beatles; they would have been huge even if no one had cleaned them up, and ironically The Rolling Stones [who were much more affluent guys] would come soon after the Liverpool crew to show the world how to trade on a bad-boy image.) In contrast, the managers and business folks working with Sabbath played up their darker tendencies and amplified an interest in the occult to make it seem central to the band. And made it essential to the nonmusical aesthetic.
But, look, let’s be honest. They were never evil. Black Sabbath invented heavy metal, no argument. They are also the greatest Christian rock band of all time.
More provocation behind the pay wall!
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