Rock Music
Pilgrim plays air guitar
Another kind of social lesson was being taught at that exact point in time over the air in Berkeley. Thiw was way more pervasive worldwide than political, philosophical, or anthropological thought from KPFA. These lessons called themselves “Rock Music”.
Ignorant Pilgrim thought they came from young people like himself: newly stoned, sitting in front of big speakers, making “air guitars”, and syncing with the universe. Much to his surprise: the folk music “high school Pilgrim” laboriously picked out at Ranny Pegler’s, didn’t come from the urban people who sang them. The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell: all grew up swapping country songs or blues songs at “folk clubs”.
Many of them came from scratchy recordings made by WPA-funded people sent out during the great depression. Rock music actually came out of slavery and human suffering, and it came from completely overworked people: black and white, just barely surviving. For a couple centuries they’d sang, worshiped, and plucked home-made stringed instruments at the end of workdays, or on Sundays.
It never occurred to Pilgrim that ordinary people could make sense out of pure sound, and simple words repeated over and over again. He fancied himself “a poet”, but poetry was a floundering art form: a group of “designated speakers” titillating each other inside an aura of wisdom and intellectual cleverness. When a poem’s finished, its shy “reciter” sits down.
Such cleverness isn’t profound at all: “profound” is something that takes over your body! Pilgrim’s musical taste from Berkeley onwards wasn’t run by cleverness like that at all: it was run by simple slogans and attitudes backed by the powerful undercurrent of hymn-like chords and “thumpings”. It was an unstoppable sexual or experiential longing and young human desire turned into an amplified wail.
“Rock” wasn’t translatable at all to his parents, who learned to dance step by step, or “play the piano” from cabinets full of lined paper speckled with “teaspoon-handled spots”. Dancing and listening to music was a simple social affair for them.
This new music wasn’t about learned by rote: it was a religious rite! Musicians abandoned scores, and dancers broke ranks: to celebrate, live in the present, feed on crowd energy and bask with everyone else inside the “now”. It was an innate call to move in rhythm with something greater. It was to weave and stomp and declare one’s affinity.
Once experienced: it’s impossible to escape: it’s in the air you breathe. As an old man, Pilgrim can quiet his nightmares by re playing one of these songs in his dreams, and immediately synchronizes and “refuels”: anytime a rock song from his generation drifts across his senses.
Excerpt from Life of Pilgrim: Book II on Amazon. Click here: