A Trip to the Philosophical Santa

Alexander and I, Renata and Guthry Hahm visited Santa today and he gave us all a talking to, saying "the best things are free, like visiting the library or spending time with a family member." He told Renata to not get into Guthry's toys and he told Guthry to not get mad at his sister if she does get into his toys.

Then Santa pointed to Guthry's head and said "this is what's important, all that knowledge you get from studying at school, doing your homework and going to the library, and they can't take that away from you."

With all this free advice I wanted to ask him a few philosophical conundrums myself, like: "How did the 1% get there and how can I do it too?" or, "Was the God Particle made by God?" or "how do you find the one "blinking bulb" on the tree so your lights won't blink?"

Thank you to the Hahm family for taking Alexander on camping trips with them this year and making it possible for me to do a little bit of touring with my band mates.

I Wonder Why

Donna Grace and CLB 1993 Tecate Mexico, photo by Paul

Another song from Club Passim's in Cambridge. Bob Colby recording us this past summer...

This is a song that's stayed near and dear to me all these many years later, from the Garage Orchestra time period. I wrote it in Paul and Donna's van, about a week after I met 'em. They were in a restaurant eating burritos with Paul's Japanese agent, Mr Asanto and I was out in the van convening with some blue jays about this melody...You really can't go wrong with a pretty song about loss...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=GXl0RVfjRUA&feature=endscreen

Journal Entry: September 1992

These are writings from my 1992 journal, five months after meeting Paul, and while writing the songs that became Garage Orchestra

Am I in love?

I'm afraid to admit I may be.

And he is so often on my mind.

Got a letter from him today, I like that.

hmm, wish he were here.

then again, when he is, there's little time

for music work. So much of our attention

being devoted to one another.

He is adorable, lovable, high strung,

a lot of nervous energy.

Mind on high speed. He self consciously

speaks in slower meter, keeping his voice low

and tries to make it pleasant. Which can come off,

well....self conscious. Then other times it sounds a little higher

and a little quicker and more nervous and sorta kid-like (almost) and it's

less controlled.

I like it better less controlled.

Sometimes, a controlled voice sounds a bit like a new age author reading

chapters from a positive thinking book at a meditation/prosperity consciousness raising seminar.

I don't trust those types.

A lot of white people try too hard.

(Ocean Beach, CA 1992)

Ushers Into The Theater Of Life

Sebastian Green, CLB, Renata Bratt at NVA Theater, Carlsbad CA

(think we were singing a Carter Family tune here, "You're Gonna Be Sorry")

There are a lot of great things about being a guitar instructor. One of them is getting to work with young students that are just finding out who they are as human beings and some of them find out how much they love music, and some discover they have a gift for it. As a teacher, I think, we are just usher's into the theater of life, showing young souls their seat and then the rest is up to them.

Here's a really nice article on one of my guitar students, a 14 year old that's quite the natural on all things musical, but particularly bluegrass guitar. It's been fun and an honor working with Sebastian...

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/columnists/inperson/in-person-teen-guitarist-already-has-a-bright-career-in/article_53dea65f-575e-50d6-bd3d-66ead9b0691c.html

photo credit: Peter Meade

Straight Outta Marysville

This is me and Paul 2 1/2 months after his bicycle accident/brain injury (April 15, 1995)...at the American Bookseller Assoc. convention. The doctors and nurses and therapists who were working with Paul had asked him not to go the the convention, it was in Chicago, they wanted more time for his brain to heal. But there was no talking him out of it so I went along and made sure he stayed safe.

You're wondering what I mean by 'safe'? It was just a month earlier he had come home from the hospital and on that day he went raging, out of the apartment and down the street because his mother had told him the chicken wasn't finished cooking yet. One minute he seemed perfectly normal, the next he was yelling at me he wanted a divorce...fine, except we weren't married. Or, he was waking up early in the morning, getting out of bed and peeing in a cardboard box in his office. Or, he was crying profusely over a passage in the children's film, James and the Giant Peach. It was a challenging adventure to be sure.

Before his accident happened I was just beginning to write songs for the follow up album to Garage Orchestra. I'd only had a few songs written so far...Talking With A Mineral, Diane of the Moon, I'm a Tumbleweed. Me and the core members of the Garage Orchestra: Randy Hoffman, Renata Bratt and Chris Davies, we're just beginning to workshop some of the tunes. But mostly we'd been touring throughout 1994 and 95 for the Garage Orchestra album.

We'd done a bunch of shows with the Smithereens, one of the shows had a new band opening before us, Weezer. The guys in Weezer were super cool and we all hung out behind the theater together after the show, discussing how much we liked each others music. We'd gone out as a 3 piece, me on guitar, Chris on bass and Randy playing timpani/vibraphone/percussion...

Anyways, when April 15, 1995 happened....I was in a bit of a funk. So many friends and fans were so enthusiastic about Garage Orchestra (released 4/94) and I'd gotten some great reviews, but nothing was moving my life closer to easy. It was tax day. I was driving home from a rehearsal with Randy and Chris and had a feeling of being hungry, and I thought to myself I'm not gonna stop to eat because I want to grab something with Paul, so I waited and I hightailed it home. I came in the apartment and no one was home, so I fell down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Next minute our neighbor was banging on the door and shouting for me to follow her...the accident had happened a block from our place, on a big hill going down to the beach on 3rd street. But I've written of this before...

Long story short: Once Paul was out of the hospital, out of inpatient rehab, out of outpatient rehab ...our lives were supposed to be normal again. Wrong. Bringing your loved one home after a brain injury is kinda like bringing a feral animal home, one that loves you, but is none the less, feral.

That first month he was home I wrote the song Unknown Master Painter. I must admit, I had the overwhelming feeling that I wanted to get in the car and drive it as far east as I could go. I wanted to escape, at the same time I knew I wouldn't. A few family members, Paul's family, were calling and inviting me to leave him. One said, "You're too young to have to live a life like this. You should leave now and let yourself have a life. He may never be the same again"

I didn't listen. In fact, I didn't understand what she was talking about at all. How does one leave someone that they love? Especially in their darkest hour. Plus, I was still too in love with Paul. You see we'd only just moved in together the year before. It was still in the intoxicating phase. But now, maybe with a big shot of Haldol mixed in. And then, there was that ever-present desire one has to want to fix it and make it all better, however impossible and delirious that fixing may be.

It was hard. My musicians were supportive and understanding and we fit in rehearsals when we could. The accident certainly set us back and I was left without any feeling of where the creative process was going, and then quite suddenly the cellist Renata had to move away to the east coast. So it became an issue of timing.

Somewhere in there I had a conversation with Paul about what the album should be and he brought up the idea of a Fire Sale, that is getting rid of all the songs I'd had in my arsenal, and hadn't released. And so that became the spirit of the album.

We recorded it in the fall of 1995, about 6 months after Paul's accident. Thinking back I don't know how I pulled it off at that time. It seems astounding now, considering what I was going through with Paul's recovery. And his insistence in getting back, quickly into his regular life pace. So we went to Europe so he could do a lecture tour, and he took a job as a music editor of a HiFi magazine, and I made an album and I watched over Paul's progress and his care.

This is the fire that brought forth Straight Outta Marysville. And it is back in print now, as of today in a digital only format..at iTunes and the like. I heard some of it today for the first time in over 12 years and it is an odd album, full of peculiar characters and plenty of youthful anxiety and some beautiful if minimalist orchestrations...Lenny Kaye once said to me that recordings are photographs, Marysville is then a photo album of my 1995 with a few amazing musical friends.

When she left Picasso,

the days were still warm, all the world was young

it was summer

or what was left of it.

When she left Picasso

there was nothing to be done to make the going easy

she was met at the end of the lane

by a man with a lamp

who showed her the way out

and which road to go

away from Picasso.

When she left Picasso

she couldn't eat or sleep

there was too little time

there was too far to go

and the future a steep/grade up/into the unknown.

When she left Picasso

it was a summer night

with the windows of the town fully open with light

and the terrible red eye of Antares staring down

from the bright net of stars called Scorpio.

and, what was there to be done with

the things he'd given her

the stories, the visions,

the children of nuclear fission

it was a hell of a way to go...

...when she left Picasso,

he wondered why

wanted to know the ways a bird can fly

so many had flown too close to the sun

but she has left me while our love was still young

and that rattled the soul of old Picasso.

When she left Picasso

the waves smashed on the shore

in the south of France

the rip tide was great

and pulled at full force

full of yearning for Picasso.

When she left,

and they kissed their last kiss

white hot as the first

he slammed his fist on the desk

spilling the green tea,

'women don't leave a man like me,

don't you know who I am, I'm Picasso'.

When she left Picasso

god he was mad

all the colors drained out of the room

and left were the etchings of structures of things

like bones and stones and tombs,

and the sucking black hole

at the end of the o, in Picasso.

When she left Picasso

she wasn't afraid

she had the right of the spheres on her side,

and the winds blew behind her and tousled her hair

and the gods in her did confide,

'we'd hoped you'd stay for a while,

but if you must then go,

you've earned your wings

with this Picasso'.

When she left

started her car

set the GPS for somewhere,

all the way down that long-haul road

were scattered bones of those that had gone before

lovers friends and foe of Picasso.

When she left Picasso

the Santa Anas were blowing

from California to Barcelona

the tin roofs of bordellos were coming down,

a chime from a church bell

the doppler'd harmonica

the sound of his voice,

his voice that echoed through her lost mining towns,

on the winds of desire that blew through the portals

of the P and O, of Picasso.

When she left Picasso

goodbye was still a hello

a fond waiting 'til next text or talk on the phone

every door left open

and buttons undone

like a nuclear wasteland

with all things in place

but the humans were totally gone.

Like this she said yes, to life and to love

and sent a wish out into the unknown

a kiss to all things

both fierce and beautiful

like this, she said no, to Picasso.

the sweetest thing is....

the heart goes on loving...

the sad thing is the heart goes on loving...

the exasperating thing is....

the beautiful thing is the heart goes on loving and the sun shining.

the ridiculous thing is the heart goes on loving and the sun and stars turn round in the sky, over and over again.

the encouraging thing is the heart, goes on,.... loving even while sub-atomic particles move on, changing partners, making whole new babies and snowflakes.

the dumbest-stupidest most wonderful thing is the heart... goes on loving despite the weather here and what you've had for dinner.

the trickiest part is the heart.

Somebody's Angel

When I was a kid there was a popular song that told of a soldier who'd come back from war paralyzed and in the lyrics he was imploring his wife Ruby, to not take her love to town. She was apparently a floozy, I sorted out later, 'cuz what kind of wife would doll her self up and go into town nights. I'm not sayin' it's one of the best songs ever written, I can't be objective enough for that, but I can tell you it effected me enough as a little kid that the lyrics would go through my mind time and again. Other songs along the same lines, that stuck with me were Skip A Rope (Henson Cargill) and Jackson (We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout, we been talkin' 'bout Jackson ever since the fire ran out..)...these songs were all trying to tell me something about what the future held for us little kids...like some mysterious cryptic Cuneiform, that would let on just what it was to be an adult.

Somewhere along the way I realized that the Ruby in the Kenny Rogers song represented some kind of bad person, a woman that didn't take care of loved ones. I was a teenager in rural Ramona when Kenny Rogers came to play a concert in a remote part of our back-country. There were probably about a hundred of us teens and young adults on a lawn while he played through his hits. I don't remember much except that everyone sang along with the part of the song that went...."oh Ru-u-by,Don't Take Your Love to Town".

As a spouse to a man who had a serious brain injury which later turned into early onset of dementia....I've come to see Ruby in a new light. Within the lyrics you see that she's at home with him by day, and by night she goes out...but doesn't she deserve a life beyond being a care-giver? Maybe she goes to bingo at the church, maybe she meets a girlfriend for tea, or maybe she has a clandestine affair with a man, or maybe she's dancing with the lipstick lesbians at a dive-bar. Ruby deserves to discover who she is despite the fact that her husband can no longer do the things a husband can do.

I met a young woman a year ago, she had just lost her husband to the war inAfghanistan, she'd come to me for guitar lessons. She was pushing herself to do things she hadn't done before, to find ways to move on, discover who she was now....It's very hard work, this moving on business. But it's the business of life. Loving.

Jonathan Lethem and Paul Williams

This past weekend we had a visit from Paul's longtime friend, novelist Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude etc...). Jonathan shared some stories with Paul, reminding him how they'd met at a science fiction writers convention in Berkeley in the 1980s... and how Paul had been wearing a Meat Puppets tee-shirt at the time. In fact, that same tee-shirt is still in a drawer here at our place, I never had the heart to throw it out. I always loved that he had a Meat Puppets shirt....and what a great underground band.

One of the charms of Paul and his wonderful brain, when it was working properly, was how open minded he was to music that was out of his realm of experience. For a guy that was so much a part of the 1960s he was not the least bit stuck there.

I was talking to someone recently about Paul as a music listener and recollected how Paul, when he was writing the One Hundred Best Singles of Rock and Roll-in the early 90s, wouldn't write off a single, (some suggested to him by friends with fannish fervor), until he'd listened to it nearly 100 times. He used to say, "you have to learn the language of the artist".

Paul introduced me to Jonathan in 1993, he was working at a book store on Telegraph, just before his first novel was released, Gun With Occasional Music. Jonathan let us stay at his place in Berkeley for the night and headed out of town, good thing, I was sick as a dog....high fever the whole bit, but I was wildly in love and Paul had a grand time combing through Jonathan's robust CD and record collection, playing stuff like Grant Lee Buffalo and Pavement for me while I broke the fever.

(photo by me at Paul's nursing home here in Encinitas,.... I might add our son Alexander-who just turned 10 this week,- was frolicking with Jonathan and Amy's boys Everett and Desmond while the boring adults conversed)

She Enjoys Her High Life

photo credit: Peter Meade

Randy Hoffman, CLB, Renata Bratt @NVA Theater 10/8/11

Thank you Brendan Coakley for writing and reminding me of this passage from Paul Williams book Das Energi. These particular words really speak to me right now as we approach a full moon in Aries.

"She enjoys her high life; does not enjoy anxiety. So she stops hesitating and does what she has to do.

She does not live in a state of bliss, though perhaps she feels herself moving toward one...

or toward...something, she doesn't know what it is but it is the way she has to go, the journey toward it is the only life she enjoys.

It is hard, it is exciting, it is satisfying, lonely, joyous, frustrating, puzzling, enlightening, real; it is her life, that's all.

She accepts it. Sooner or later a person begins to notice that everything that happens to her is perfect...." Das Energi, 1973

(Paul wrote Das Energi at age 22 while living on a commune off of Vancouver Island)