Now that I'm a little older and wiser the suicide of a musician I was heavily influenced by in my formative years shouldn't affect me that deeply. I was in my prime when Kurt Cobain took the collective hopes and dreams that a young generation had unfairly placed on him and with a single blast said "it's not possible to survive out here"and killed himself. The guilt was immediate too. Didn't he know that we loved him - the REAL him? We too were confused, sensitive, fucked up people who understood exactly where he was coming from. And if he couldn't survive out there, then surely we were all fucked and the "system" had won, once and for all.
As the years went by and the recording industry and rock press wrenched all things Kurt out of everything and everywhere, we all went back to sleep. Yesterday I was awoken with another blast, this time straight into the heart of Mark Linkous, a musician who went by the band name Sparklehorse.
I was introduced to the music by first reading an article about how he had written his last record after a near death experience. I'm not one to be marketed to easily though, and i didn't think much more about it. Until two hours later in fact, when I was walking in my neighbourhood of Commercial Drive in Vancouver and stopped at a yard sale where out of the few CD's in the box on the lawn, there sat "Good Morning Spider" by Sparklehorse, the very release I had just read about. Now I admit to being all about the coincidences and if it were Kenny Rogers and the same senario I probably would have bought that too.
So I took it home and took it for a spin, and it became one of those
things in my life. One of those records that feels like only you own, or only you get. I can remember taking it to Toronto with me to see a friend (remember no Ipods? Weird.) and having that feeling of everything had to be perfect when I rolled it out. It turned out he loved it too. Later on through the years, I watched as the artist went on to work with lots of musicians I admire. Tom Waits, Radiohead, PJ Harvey, just to name drop a few.
What I loved about his music, but most of all
that record is the overall artistic outreach of it. Everything seemed important enough to be dealt with in an artistic manner, from the packaging to the inside photos to the music within, even the lettering. Inside, a blistering distorted burner of an opening track claiming "I want to be a tough skinned bitch but I don't know how," followed by a dry drum loop song calling for the "Painbirds" and then the dive into the abyss with "the only thing that I really need is water, a gun and rabbits" from "Saint Mary. So many production choices confused me and gave me hope at the same time. He would take an entire track, and only mix in two or three elemts, and then shorten it so what was on the track ended up only being about thirty seconds in length. He heavily influnced my music in the desire to use kids microphone toys and bring lots of "trinket" sounding things to my own music. Listeing to it now, all these years later (that was 1999) I also hear how his sense of improvisation ignitited something in me long ago that now is coming into full blossom. It seemed that nothing was off limits, and he was completely free to dip into any style of music, call it his own, and then move on. Inside the songs, there are lots of creaking chairs while guitars are played, and what sounds like aluminum wind up toys found out in the old shed that morning.
With a wife, talent, peer support, as well as a home at a major label one would assume that he should feel a certain amount of freedom and it seems impossible to imagine that all these things still can't bring even a bit of happiness to cling to in the dark hours. Of course, there are many evil details within all of these lauded connections, not to mention personal and health troubles that may have weighed on him in his final days. I would also suggest that the current system of being an artist in our society makes people sick. I'm not talking strictly in a mass popularity sense where people pay hundreds of dollars to watch a young girl lip-sync her way through her dance gyrations, as the crowd cheers on. Of course that shit taints our collective consciousness but for some reason there are those that are still drawn to that idea of "success." We have elevated the term "artist" to such heights that the pressure is simply too great to produce real change in our lives
for us rather than us doing the real, hard and dirty work needed by our own souls.
I remember distictly watching a shellshocked Eddie Vedder talk about the sudden massive success of Pearl Jam in terms that before they were a bunch of happy guys in a room hammering out music and suddenly he's getting a letter from someone on the other side of the world who relates how they played one of his songs at his best friends funeral, and how the hell is he supposed to write something now in the light of the fact that he knows an entire world of kids will be hanging on every word he says as if it's gospel, rather than words he just thought sounded cool when he wrote them at the beach one day? The answer is that all the songs start to sound like you have an imaginary audience in mind. And seeing as you are in the top demographic of successful musicians, you start to sound like other people who are operating in the same conditions. It's the same problem with music journalists. Maybe, just maybe talking through the process will relate some kind of information that the artist has that the rest of us can access. You gave us your music, now give us everything else. That reality is in the spotlight when one of our most gifted grabs the gun out of our hands and shoots himself in the heart.
The slick celebrity bit is only growing more rampant and I hope it is the next to grab the gun. Maybe Madonna will break down and command everyone to get a life and pull back the curtain to introduce her board of directors and personal consultants. Then we can get to the real business of appreciating artists for what they do but not holding them as an idol but rather as an creative
ideal to strive for. I'm grateful for the special time in my life when Good Morning Spider was the soundtrack to my life, but I can honestly say I'm not going to try to track down all the reasons he might have had when he decided to kill himself, in an effort to glean what I need to avoid feeling to avoid a similar fate. Pulling out the first bullet was exhausting enough.
I bought some kick ass little battery powered speakers, put the thirty minute remix on a loop (for five hours) and hoisted it up in a little hallway at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver. As people went up and down the stairwell, what they heard would usually be different each time they passed under it. Sometimes a slow drone, other times a bright toy keyboard. The peice took on its own personality hanging up there in the stairwell while we drank Guiness at the bar downstairs. I had the chance to actually really admire it as it seemed to create itself and I wasn't tied to it in an egoistic sense. I liked that. Too often I don't take credit for my own expressions and or they are difficult births and painful to try to express after the fact. I am hoping to share this more and it is my way of keeping the music of Sparklehorse moving forward. Just because the man is gone, doesn't mean that the energy he generated died with it. Oh and the line "my bones wish to escape..." was repeated in the remix over and over again until the end. This happened naturally of course and somehow just found it's way into being.
