My Time as a Human

While many frolicked in the high winds and long dusty white outs in the Black Rock Desert this last weekend, some gathered to commemorate the event here in Austin at an event called Orfunner. (‘Cause we’re all burn orphans for the year!) It was like a little “taste of Burning Man” with one flame throwing car, one thump throwing DJ, a couple of fire spinners and two small chill domes. At the center of it all, like something flown in from another time and place, was the glow of the outrageously overdone Blue Moon Roadhouse featuring live mad-lib sock puppet blues karaoke and, among others, me.

As my last film project has been winding down I’ve been allowing the long stifled and barely contained musical Kai to emerge. The result has been a slew of song ideas and a nearly insatiable desire to play guitar. I was struggling to get some tech work done the other day but I kept finding myself mired deep in guitar porn, checking out old videos of Stevie Ray or websites of minutia about the history of the EVH Wolfgang guitars. This was intensely frustrating because web surfing for guitar porn wasn’t anywhere on my priority list. I wasn’t getting tech work done and I wasn’t playing guitar either.

At last I just picked up my old Strat and played my heart out for the last few hours before going to bed. The lights were out and I’d just dropped my head onto pillow when I could almost hear the snapping sound as the relays clacked over in my brain. Suddenly I knew just how I was going to restructure my tech solution and solve my problem. Brains are mysterious things that way.

So I decided that it would be worth heading out to Orfunner for a day to do nothing else but play guitar all day with my friends at the blues bar. I pulled up, loaded my gear into the tent, and we started practicing immediately. Everyone left for a break and I goaded Nobodobodon up on stage to tell some really terrible jokes, in part so that I could keep vamping away behind him.

When night arrived to drape the Blue Moon Roadhouse in the more appropriate robes of murky darkness, the bar rose to take it’s place in a long history. The walls were dipped in blue light and the bar tables were moons. A hand painted, full sized cityscape backdrop filled in behind the band. Along the pilers were framed photographs of BB King, Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn and, of course, Patrick Swayze who appeared in the film, “Roadhouse”.

The first notes chords of Red House punched from the ancient speakers, leapt out into the night and immediately began grabbing people by the ears and dragging them in. Soon the club filled with tiki-cup wielding patrons and hooting tutu clad cowboys. With Michael’s heckling and my reassurances we were able to get quite a few people to step up to the mic. Some were actually quite good vocalists and improvisors but most made use of the stacks of cue cards written mad-lib style by the audience members. They were everywhere, intently scribbling out tales of their deepest woes with sharpies. Lost cats. Shaving cuts. Embarrassing unintentional bowl movements.

There were swing dancers and guest musicians. We even took things down a peg for a few jazzy spoken word numbers. The band sounded good, gelled well and did a great job of working together to come up with off the cuff musical bits, dropping right into grooves and playing off of each other. The sound system Aaron put together was fantastic, and I couldn’t get over how well my old friend, my pink ‘62 re-issue Strat, was singing. My playing is a hundredfold better when I sound good and can hear myself well. My friend Jose had been out of town for quite a while and despite my having grown a beard and lost the glasses, he claimed the reason he couldn’t recognize me right off was my playing. “You were playing so much better than I remember that, combined with the hat, I thought you were some great seasoned old blues guy!”

In trying to duck out quickly the next morning I was only waylaid once for an hour or two, and it was time well spent getting to know some people I’d been wanting to talk to for a while. I loaded up the van and cruised back to town to be welcomed by my projects now freshly infused with life and proceeded to knock out both code and video editing progress like they were the best things in life.

Bob Dylan never really had any appeal to me until the universe woke up one day and decided to introduce us in a manner to which I am most receptive: complete meltdown. In May of 2004 the Flipside effigy was a giant six armed monkey that spewed fire. You could hear his trumpeting, honking cry for miles every time the fire bursts shook his tiny rubber valve seals. I had broken my foot rock climbing that year and so I was hopping around on crutches when I discovered that my girlfriend of two years had run off with a mutual “friend”. I couldn’t hear the monkey sing over the roar of the engine as I stole my suddenly ex-girlfriend’s car and floored it along the dirt road away from the event. I drove north out of Texas until I could drive no more and, after at last taking a moment to figure out where I was, aimed west towards the mountains.

As I was winding my way up into the Rockies, I pulled out a CD by a musician friend I’d met working at SxSW. She was a singer songwriter type, and as I was a musician primarily interested in strange changes and weird jazzy improvisations, I found the idea of three strummed chords mind numbingly tedious. Somewhere in the mountain air was a voice asking for it, though, and I wasn’t in any state to argue so I popped the pink and yellow disk into the little slot on the dash to wait and see what would come out. After an hour I had mixed feelings about the CD in general, but for the first time I found that I was listening to the lyrics more than the song. It made me wonder about the heralded icon of the genre, Bob Dylan. I wondered if that’s what I’d been missing when I had dismissed him years ago.

For some inconceivable reason my haste had been so great that I hadn’t brought a guitar with me. I set myself on a mission, that as soon as I took a little time to smash some large rocks and scream at the sky, the next order of business would be to find a cheap acoustic.

As I walked empty handed out of the first pawn shop I found, I passed an old guy arguing with a little kid of about thirteen. “Man I’m telling you, you don’t even understand. After Blood on the Tracks…” at this point the old guy looked up at me and noticed my stare as I processed the coincidence of coming across an argument about Dylan. “Do you wanna get in on this?” “No,” I said, “but do you know where I could find a used record store?”

The first place didn’t even have a single Dylan CD in the racks. On the way to the next one, I wandered into a T-shirt shop. The walls were covered with posters, but two faces looked out from 90% of them: Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan. I was beginning to wonder if Boulder was secretly a shrine for an underground cult hidden in the mountains.

Two record shops later I took a break to walk into a coffee shop. They didn’t have WIFI and so I pulled out my paper notebook to scribble about my experiences so far. As I was writing I suddenly paused to squint and listen to the music piping through the old speakers tacked to the wall. In the time it took me to nurse my cup of twiggy green tea, they played the same Dylan album twice through.

Now I was really an unstoppable force. The cult of Bob was reaching out to me in every way it knew how. I cruised neighborhoods until at last I got a strong signal to my laptop and the universe we call the internets beamed me a crude copy of “Blood on the Tracks”. It didn’t even have breaks between songs. And yet there it was. Track three.

I woke up and there it was, a new song. Sometimes I struggle for hours trying to get anything interesting to happen but the best music just pours out in a quick, continuous session. A fair amount of crafting and polishing follows but once the core is there the excitement drives the rest of the process.

This piece is about an experience I had seeing my old friend Margaret and having the strange sensation that everything that had happened in the years we’d been apart had been some sort of silly game I’d been playing, or a dream I had until we could get together and laugh about it. Like reality only existed when we were together. I had this sensation with her and several of my old housemates from the same era a number of years ago at a wedding. I can’t help but feel that maybe this set of friends were there for just the right moment in time and we were all marked forever.

I made a promise to myself to start trying to share more of my music, most of which never leaves the pile of cassettes in an old tool chest in the corner. This seemed like the perfect opportunity so I got to work trying to record a version to throw out to the internet audience and see what happened. Paralysis set in immediately. There isn’t enough life in the vocals. The tempo drifts. The lyrics are trite and meaningless to anyone but me.

I have a motto, though: anything that scares me, and won’t kill me, I must attack. So this song is going to go live to the world well before I’m ready for the simple reason that being ready 1) would mean that there is no more fear and 2) will probably never happen.

The vocals on my crude first recording are really not quite listenable at the moment, so I’ll start with the lyrics as they poured from my brain yesterday morning and post the music later.

——————————————————
Awake With You Again
by
Kai Mantsch

——————————————————

[MELODIC LINE]

I had the strangest feeling
when I talked to you just now
I felt as though the years in between
were meaningless somehow

It’s as though our time apart
was a story that I made up just for you
and now that I can hear you laugh
it’s all a joke and I feel like it’s true

what’s real was shared with you

—————————-
REFRAIN
—————————-

Being with you again
feels like I just woke up from a dream

everything I’ve done
since we were together
has passed like texas weather

hearing your laugh
and knowing what has passed between us

it feels so good to be awake with you
a-gain

———————————————————

Around the corner, from our house
wondering what to do
It was cold and early and all it would take
was to let myself kiss you

I’d already sworn it could never happen
But you weren’t going to let it get away

I said goodnight and tried to leave
but there was no where else to go

so we went wonderfully astray

—————————-

walking ’round the block and holding hands
in the morning after sun’s rays
all bright colors and sunrise light
felt like hippies in all the right ways

our house was full of constant laughter
so full of friends exploring what was new

we were all in tune and in sync and in rhyme
writing music with you
writing new lines all the time

—————————-
[REFRAIN]
—————————-

you laughed and pointed out with glee
as hallmark’s day descended
how very far, we had strayed,
from what was intended

while everyone else was uniformed,
and spending money on expensive meals

we were dressed like total freaks
preparing to tear our clothes off for a crowd

we had nothing to conceal

—————————-
We drove out to Colorado
Lost my car on the way
Wrapped our gear in duct tape
and took the last greyhound that day

when we got to the mountains
we rode the snow like waves between the trees

you were that snow rabbit that I’d
always dreamed of
having next to me

—————————-
[MELODIC LINE]
—————————-

After three months apart I wandered Buenos Aires
looking for your face
I turned to see you run to me
and nearly died in our embrace

you taught me all my spanish directions
and then we marched and practiced in the park

we learned folklore dancing
from strangers who saw us
safely home after dark

—————————-

we snuggled on an overnight bus
riding westward toward peru
a wide eyed little boy wondered
by what luck I had found you

when we finally reached the mountains
we sang all night in spanish in a fire-lit room

the daytime sun watched us waist deep in snow,
trying to reach the lake
at the base of the hill

and smiled when we finally got through

—————————-
[REFRAIN]
—————————-

We did so well together
and so much was so right
but then at last the time came
for our last kiss goodnight

we only had, so much time,
I think that we both knew it from the start

I stole your car and with my broken leg
drove away with my broken heart

and headed for the mountains one more time

—————————-

And now that’s a story too
one more in our collection
the romance that we shared was just
part of our connection

and all we’ve dared and time we’ve shared
now is part of something we can feel

when we are together
I can tell again
what is real

what is real

[MELODIC LINE TO CLOSE]