ADRIAN BELEW "SIDE TWO" FROM THE CHRYSALIS OF NUEVO METAL BORN . . .
Theme to "Flipper" (The TV Series)
(Beginning of show) They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning, no-one you see, is smarter than he, and we know Flipper, lives in a world full of wonder, flying there-under, under the sea!
(End of Show) Everyone loves the king of the sea, ever so kind and gentle is he, tricks he will do when children appear, and how they laugh when he's near!
Ask anybody and you are likely to hear that Adrian Belew is a great alternate rocker with a sense of spirit and complexity in his music. That's true as far as it goes. The usual influences are there from Willie Dixon to Robert Johnson, but Adrian's paint palate doesn't stop there. Mr. Belew exhibits a taste for tonality well outside the borders, the accepted power chords, and the rest of the West. The world of sound on Side Two has a taste of gamelan, sitar and all those Eastern World banjos and bells. He plays all the music makers on this disc and naturally what goes on between Belew's ears comes out something wholly other from a different genre, or an invisible dimension. This man has broken on through to the other side of Nuevo Metal, where composers play on the road to Mandalay, Shambala, Covington, Kentucky, and the outskirts of Nashville. This isn't art rock like Kansas anymore. This expression of sonic consciousness has gone way down the rabbit hole, down the yellow brick road, and over the other side of the fence into 21st Century composition. Side Two is a suite of songs with symphonic intent, like Gustav Mahler's "The Song Of The Earth" or Henryk Górecki's "Third Symphony." Adrian has gone and turned into a composer this time out. Don't tell the fans with the glow sticks. Those who can handle it will know. This is serious music, and a hell of a lot of fun.
This review follows one about Terry Riley's The Cusp Of Magic and two utilizing the East meets West mash up and new music of Jadoo, the intuitive masters from Uzbekistan. My head had those tools handy while listening to Side Two, and that was good fortune meeting an opportunity. I've been a lucky bum to meet some composers and talk to them. There's something in those eyes that marks these folks as something else. A series of sentence-or-two conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, John Adams, Adam Rudolph, Morton Subotnik and others has prompted me to look for visual clues when I look at Adrian. He's got the twinkle and the restless mind of a composer, damn straight. It's something awake in there, and that wisp of incense floating from his ears, like smoke from an overworked computer. Those guys see music differently than I do, and they seem to pursue it in their songs as something that almost gets away. A composer is a seeker. This album explores some new worlds where the normal sounds of rock 'n' roll are welcome, but don't run the store. It's a town in the Midwest on the outskirts of the universe. It's a place where the common folk toss concepts like Frisbees down main street and most of the best jokes are Cosmic questions good for a belly laugh. Dancing isn't demanded, but it is the preferred mode of travel. Nice place! A good man lives there. He paints the time with forces of emotion all wrapped up in dazzling gift wrap contemplation, and a great big colorful bow full of joy. Good folks these Belewman Mind people. They always feed the tourists.
"What up with that?" is the question of a newbie heard in this sonic landscape as visitors leave the thought trolley. These thoughts form a percussive basis for the exchange of beautiful, warm packets of light spinning between the players like little thoughtful gifts skipping through the air. Adrian Belew dreams out loud on Side Two, giving directions to the warm pools of refreshment along the contemplative stream of sound mind and good vibes that runs parallel to Main Street in Belewville. There are visiting tonal beings from the Inscrutable East, off the deep end, the triumphant army of asymmetry, Mars and Canada, Covington and the Constellation, Kierkegaard and Cincinnati. The water mammal called Fripper is a conspicuous presence in the deep water, "faster than lightning. No-one you see, is smarter than he, and we know Frippertronics live in a world full of wonder, flying there-under, under the sea!" There's always something beautiful and strange going on beneath the surface. Who'd want it any other way?
When I listen to Adrian Belew's Side Two, my mind is at play, and my soul is laughing it's ass off. This music takes me off to dreamland while doing the housework. For the vacuuming, cordless headphones are recommended. Some deconstruction is required. Recommended for ages 1 through 2009. No instructions necessary. Heartbeat included. This Side Two is a tone poem to the metal born. From the chrysalis of art rock Belew has emerged, spread his wings, and set out to flop through the air like some Monarch Beethoven, Butterfly Brahms, the lovely Gyrogi Lygetti, or Terry "Blistful Wizard" Riley flittering through the clocks and clouds. It's a man. It's a bird. It's a dead dog on asphalt. It's Adrian Belew faster than lightning doing tricks when the children appear. From the chrysalis of Nuevo Metal born, Side Two is something like a symphony. Something borrowed, something blue, something old and something new. Let us not to the marriage of our spirits admit impediments. My soul is laughing when it bellows, "Shut up and dance!" Something else, indeed. This album just Belew my mind while doing the dishes. This is practical nonsense, deeper than the warm water with a squirt of Joy. Senses all a flutter and dancing from ear to ear. Niiiiice!
1. DEAD DOG ON ASPHALT
From Belew: "Bought a beautifully beat old farm truck. 1965 Chevy much like my dad had. Bolted a fake rhino horn onto the hood. 8:00 the morning of July 15, 2003. I was driving the rhino truck on North Green Hill Road, a tight hilly serpentine two lane. At the top of a hill a dog ran out in front of me. Barely missed him. Then a second dog darted right between my wheels. No way to miss him. Saw him spinning in the road in the rear view mirror. And so went back to drag his body from the pavement. Very sad. Always imagined I might take up painting someday. When I was an old man. Maybe 78. But that morning I saw in my mind something I wanted to paint. Later that day I went to an art store asked multiple questions and returned with 2 canvases, some paints, brushes, tape, palatte knives. Then painted my first painting. The cover of this disc. I called itDead Dog On Asphalt."
This story stirs up some feelings, and it presents a visceral and philosophical dilemma. Adrian's drive ended a life. While he had done no wrong, he was the proximate cause of the death of a dog. We prefer not to think about such things. What is the value of our lives that can end so suddenly? Are we worthy of the toll we take on the world by existing or living or whatever it is we do?
I take the music of this song to be a gut reaction and meditation on the fragile nature of life itself, and the poison pill we all swallow knowing that even our unintended actions have effects and consequences.
The piece starts with a cloud of Sky Saw guitar broken by the thin, driving, rapid cadence on a non-resonant string. The prevailing pulse of this piece enters on bass and drums and it is deliberate with enough inertia to keep it irresistible as a force. Adrian's lead on guitar ascends the higher notes on the harmonic scale where a human voice might scream. The lyric is simply "dead dog on asphalt." Even "Lark's Tongue In Aspic" involves an animal whose life was transformed by man. This song meditates on the predicament of one man in single story from a common ride in a truck in the Midwest. It also contemplates the universal inner life of a self-conscious animal on earth called human. If we are spirits made flesh, then what is the dog? There is some anguish in the contemplation of the consequences of our being alive. So says the guitar.
2. I WISH I KNEW takes this mental journey into rapid thought with a rhythm like an irregular racing heartbeat. As thoughts run free and fast an underlying feeling is expressed the lilting lyric and a satellite transmission with a decaying trajectory soars overhead with the words, "I wish I knew . . ." The need to know certain things outstrips the utility of that knowledge we seem to lack. These are generally "why" questions. We don't get to know them, but they form a basis for our beliefs. If this song is about the mindset of a seeker, it sounds just about right. There are layers to this kind of thing. Adrian's cluster of rhythms and those clusters of notes present the complexity of the knowledge he is seeking.
"It's not that reality is stranger than we know, it is stranger than we CAN know." ~ Aldus Huxley after reading Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.
3. FACE TO FACE most of our lives we await your embrace and to know what it's like when we meet face to face is it a beginning a continuing or an end?
I take this to be a prayer. It may be a bit of a Buddhist prayer, but it's a prayer to the one who knows what we can't know. The Big One. Mr. Big. The Prime Mover. For all intents and purposes, God. This God with a face is a personal god. We don't get to know everything, and we don't get to see God face to face in this lifetime. Exceptions prove the rule. Time is on our side. There is infinite opportunity to see the face of the one who started it all. But "when we meet face to face, is it a beginning, a continuing, or an end?"
Good question.
4. ASLEEP one day you wake up but you didn't even know you were asleep
Plato says we see our lives like shadows on the back of a cave. Mark Strand writes that we are reading the story of our lives as though we were writing it. Theodore Roethke writes in "The Waking" that "I wake to sleep and take our waking slow / I learn by going where I have to go." All this may describe sleepwalking. We think we act in the world but we feel the same in a dream. Everyday we are born into a new day. Once before all we knew became nothing we could remember, and a new way of experiencing the world became ours to wrestle with as though it were all there is. The realization in this cagy haiku short thought poem is as deep as it needs to be. Maybe it's as deep as it goes. "Who am I?" is at the core of most good writing, and this one hits the spot. We aren't what we think we are, and we may be more than what we say and do. Life can be called "going through the motions" on a given day, so there are nooks and crannies in our consciousness enough to catch those puddles of butter and preserves we'd like to have on our toasted existence from time to time. Is there an awakening in our future? I don't think we are sleeping. Not me, anyway. What do you feel about that? Won't that be something if you "wake up, but you didn't even know you were asleep?"
There is some waking anxiety at the start of this exercise. There are space ships arriving with a hiss of some propulsion from the horizon. The lowly worm climbs the winding stair on the bass, with ticking percussion snapping like fireflies to kiss the dormant into consciousness. That guitar seems a little disturbed by the changes, and ready to cry it's way into the new world just beyond the wall of the current dream. At the end we are floating in space, with new uses to learn for our moving parts with strange and beautiful creatures of light flashing around us in the aquarium of this nascent experience. It makes you want to weep a little. Are we supposed to cry now? Is that part of the birthing in this new everything? Does a blade of grass strain on it's lopped limbs toward life?
"Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything." ~ Willie Dixon
5. SEX NERVE she shudders like a leaf falling from a tree when I touch her her fingertips soft like cloth across my lips
Björk hath said, "But, oh, to get involved in the exchange / Of human emotions / Is ever so, ever so satisfying." Interaction has it's sensual rewards in this lyric, and sexy souls slither by in a two-step. Don't forget to feed the animals. They are as interested in you as you are with them.
6. THEN WHAT
Starts with a "boing" sound in the frequency modulation headed right into a marching army of Sky Saw warriors like a trip to visit Zappa's "Grand Wazoo." Adrian "Feedback Merlin" Belew does a cameo, before we take a rest stop at the gamelan gardens hospitality station near the twinkling stream in the sound garden. Do what you need to do, there may not be another opportunity until we get there. We'll be taking the scenic route through Quicksand.
7. QUICKSAND sometimes I'm paralyzed with life speeding by I never seem to get anywhere no matter how hard I try used to be I thought I was in command but now I know I'm up to my chin in quicksand is there no thread of hope that you could throw? if you could only pull me up I will never let you down
That rest stop sponged up the confidence quotient for the neighborhood, so you can expect a little cloud of doubt on either side of the road. Those "Soft Shoulder" signs aren't pulling your leg. Try to stay in the lane. The edges of this throughway can swallow you up. Don't drown in your analysis, just take it all Frame By Frame, one day at a time, and don't look too far down the road. Get the big picture and keep you hands at 2 and 4 on the wheel. There's help up ahead. You might get a sinking feeling from time to time, but Ranger Bob is said to patrol this highway. The Divine Towing Company is on call for Wayfaring Strangers. Wherever we are headed, there we will be. This road is treacherous, but it's name is "Hope Street." Roadside Assistance telephones are clearly marked. Don't fret if you don't hear from the other side of the line. This call is recorded for training purposes. Help has been dispatched in ways you may not expect.
8. I KNOW NOW
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot." — Albert Einstein
It is what it is. The guitar wails and cries like a Lone Rhinoceros. The drums sound like sticks beating out the message on a log in the jungle. It means something. I don't speak Belew fluently, but I can feel the meaning.
9. HAPPINESS
Happiness descends like Dali's clocks ticking out the holding pattern of time, with a dash of half flocked turns arcing across the path, and those little bird songs Doppler decay as they go where everybody's from but nobody goes. It's all leading to sunlight up ahead. We will arrive.
10. SUNLIGHT you start out wrinkled and you cry you end up wrinkled and you die sunlight
AB takes a delightful trip down Mannheim Steamroller Road where New Age joy meets samisen, sitar, or some other banjo from afar. Familiar territory beckons ahead. We wake to the dawn of a new day. We live like balloons here floppy at first and floppy at last and lively as a Cotton Tail while it lasts. No sunblock required. Adrian is more prone to Elephant talk than happy talk, and this one is no exception.
The journey is ending pleasantly. It was a wild ride. Reminds me of poet Charles Wright in his description of the music of the night: NIGHT MUSIC (by Charles Wright)
Each second the earth is struck hard by four-and-a-half pounds of sunlight Each second Try to imagine that No wonder deep shade is what the soul longs for, And not, as we always thought, the light.
No wonder the inner life is dark. Sounding, and sicced on like a dog they all go down and devolve Vowel-dancing, hear-sick Hoping for realignment and a space that won't shine
Unlike the October moon, Apached and blade-dazzled, smalled Down the western sky into Ovidian intersect with time and its ghostly renderings. Unlike the leaves of the ash tree, moon-treated and hanging on For on day longer or so. Unlike our shrunk selves, dripping like washing on the line.
ALL INSTRUMENTS PLAYED BY ADRIAN BELEW
SIDESHOW:
This is a video of The Adrian Belew Power Trio, which played The Southgate House last week (April, 2009). The lineup:
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Adrian Belew - Guitar, Vocals
Julie Slick - Bass
Eric Slick - Drums
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Click the image below to visit the Adrian Belew Power Trio on myspace:
