A Little Something From Paul On Das Energi (written 1998)

Das Energi Paul Williams
Das Energi-Where Did This Thing Come From?
by Paul Williams In the summer of 1970, when I was 22 years old, I was given a rather wonderful gift. I was allowed or inspired (filled with breath) to be the author or vehicle of a little book called DAS ENERGI, which eventually found many enthusiastic readers who have felt at times that the book speaks for them, so much so that they not only read it again and again but also are often moved to share it with friends and strangers. What a nice gift! Like getting to write a hit song. Do I know where this "consciousness handbook" came from? Not exactly, except in the sense that it came from the same place an unexpectedly wonderful jazz solo comes from. Out there. In here.That mysterious place. "The Source." But since this year [1998] marks the 25th anniversary of DAS ENERGI's publication (by Elektra Records, the first and only book they ever published), and since Channing asked, I'm inclined to share with you some of the circumstances of the writing of my only bestseller (500,000 copies sold so far, far more than any of my 24 other published books, but I'm also fortunate that the other books have not been too painfully jealous of all the attention their sibling still receives...). I was living near the ocean when I wrote it. I was a long-haired hippie living in a wilderness commune on an island in the Georgia Strait, 100 miles north of Vancouver. I'd been there about three months. My girlfriend and I lived in a tiny cabin built out of cedar poles and bark and shakes by a previous communard. The cabin was off in the woods, far from the garden and most of the other buildings, but still close to the water. I had a spiritual practice (though I didn't call it that) that year of jumping into the ocean every morning, regardless of my mood or the weather. I remember when I wrote the opening pages of DAS ENERGI ("The only sin is self-hatred"... "We are in the Garden, let us open our eyes") I was sitting in the sun in a favorite spot, a grassy bluff overlooking our private, nameless cove, where I often went after my swim, with a pad of paper, to write letters to faraway friends (it was a great ritual and adventure to row or sail five miles across Desolation Sound to Refuge Cove, home of the region's only store and post office, to pick up and send the mail). An important detail of the story is that when I found myself writing these intriguing lines of prose-poetry, instead of a letter to whatever friend had been in my thoughts a few moments earlier, and then when I realized later that day or anyway for sure by the next morning, that this could be the first page of a book, I was unexpectedly breaking a fast. In a typical fast, one abstains from consumption, but since I had been (and still am) almost addicted to expression, I'd decided in February after I finished my previous book, TIME BETWEEN, that I needed to undertake a fast from writing, a kind of abstention from expression. This at a time when I was caught up in a very energetic communication with my felt (and mostly unseen) audience. TIME BETWEEN was over a hundred thousand words,and written in two months. DAS ENERGI, which broke the fast ("Here I am!" "Oh, okay. I guess it's been long enough... Goody!"), is probably less than ten thousand words. It was written in 18 days. Once I realized this was a book I was writing (first, of course, I went back to the cabin to read those first pages to Carolanne, who responded encouragingly), I knew pretty quickly what its title was. That's because I recognized it as being a book I'd prophesied or imagined and announced seven months earlier. (This was an absolute textbook case of Intention resulting in Expression of Universal Spirit.) On the 8th page of TIME BETWEEN, on December 28, 1969, I wrote: "I Paul Williams have written many books in my mind:" This was followed by descriptions of five such Intentions, and the 5th said, "DAS ENERGI is my Taurus (Marx, Freud) masterpiece. a true collaboration, tour de force of economic theory, written (and read) by the collective unconscious. Property is out. Money ain't worth much to me. How do things really work in the world today? We all know more than we care to believe about the way energy flows... Which is all we need to know to be healthy & happy. Send for your free copy today." Where the F did this come from?? The acid I was taking? Something in the air? The collective moment? Hey, cliche though it might sound like, Carolanne and I had met the previous August at the Woodstock Festival. I know where the title came from. I was aware (had a good high school education) that Lenin had written a little book called WHAT IS TO BE DONE?, borrowing the title from an earlier revolutionary self-publisher named Chernyshevsky. I definitely was (and still am) attracted to the kind of broadside-booklet publishing Chernyshevsy and Lenin and Tom Paine were doing (you won't be surprised to learn that I later, 1982, wrote a booklet called COMMON SENSE). And I'd read Heilbroner's THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS so I had a sorta benign, very non-Marxist, appreciation for Marx's accomplishment as an author/visionary. The real visionary sees not the future (yeah Karl thought he did, but we've all had similar delusions) but the present. He or she sees more deeply into the present. As I understood Heilbroner, in my 12th-grade economics class, Marx was looking into and questioning the centuries-old fact that power in Europe had been organized on the principle that he who has the land has the power. But, Marx realized and pointed out, that had changed while no one was looking...now capital had become the real source of power in human affairs; if you had capital you could buy land and otherwise make economic activity possible. Marx articulated some new and very potent insights into how things actually are in the world we live in. And so I had the bright idea (I have a bad habit of falling in love with my ideas) that the paradigm (we didn't use that word then) had shifted again, and that now even though capital still held the visible strings and went on throwing its weight around just as land (the aristocracy) had done in Marx's day, actually things had changed, and if you looked closely (with LSD eyes, say) you could see that the real source of economic power in our brave new world was not capital or land but rather had become energy. I wasn't talking about fossil fuels. My vision had to do with the vital importance of human energy. Who's got it? Bob Dylan. Billie Holiday. You and me. The individual. Let's take charge..... So, DAS ENERGI as a parallel title to DAS KAPITAL. There were some flaws in my German, but oh well, poetic license. (It's spelled energie, and it's feminine, die energie, but that wouldn't have had the right ring to it.) This thinking about the title was back in December, or maybe it had been in my mind all autumn. But now, in July, I was writing the book...the way you walk across the snow or the desert. Each step follows the previous ones. I'd get up each morning and write a few pages, before or after my swim, mostly following the motion of the pages I'd done already, trying to clarify something, or vary the tempo, or bring in separate threads that seemed to belong to the same big picture. Gotta talk about fear now. And collective consciousness. And ecological responsibility. And the mental tricks we use to obstruct and confuse ourselves. All handwritten. Print, not cursive. Whereas TIME BETWEEN had been mostly typewritten. Although it was a precursor to DAS ENERGI in the sense that each typewritten page (or handwritten or whatever) was meant as a picture, and you could feel/see the dance of the words while you read them. DAS ENERGI very quickly became all about the negative space around its words, and the impact of placing a thought alone on a page. Especially after I wrote the 7th page, probably the 3rd day: "You are God." Aha! It was supposed to be scary as well as challenging. Awakening. The jig's up. Time to take responsibility! One of the manuscript's first fans was a French-Canadian woman who lived at the commune for a while, Therese, quite a bit older than the rest of us back-to-the-landers and sexual idealists and draft dodgers. She wanted to translate the book into French. I remember making a copy (by hand, by pen, no Xerox, no electricity) for her to take back to Montreal with her. Nothing came of that as far as I know. The book has so far appeared in German (quite successful, under a different title), Japanese, Hebrew, and Czech. And American. I think this is the most of the story I've ever put in writing; and there's more to tell. But my intention is to rest before blurting out more expression of what it was like to be a vehicle of universal spirit, in this case. I did always mean for the reader to think of the book as something he or she almost wrote themselves. Hence my decision not to put my name on the cover. 3/21/98   Encinitas

Recording!

Before I go into the particulars of our weekend recording session I want to thank those of you that made it possible through your donations. 

It's time to mix the 3 songs we have recorded and therefore I ask those of you that haven't donated to please consider doing so. We are at that point where we will need cash in order to move forward.

 Please help me realize my goal: first studio sessions (and hopefully full album) with the Garage Orchestra arrangements since 1996!

PayPal Donation Button on right > 

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Before our first day of recording I met up with Lee Ray and Renata Bratt at their digs in Santa Monica. They'd driven all the way down from Santa Cruz. My drive up from San Diego took only a few hours but I spent a good deal of time packing up the guitars and the 6 foot long metallic Wall Heater into my little Toyota Corolla. Somehow it all fit in.

Lee Ray and Justin going over sounds and tones. Lee came down from Santa Cruz to engineer the sessions for us. He is the recording/sound genie at  Open Path Recording Studios

Getting' ready to play Horsepower. We set up the Wall Heater and Nelson starting wailing on it. And I mean wailing

Here he is perfecting the Horsepower beat on the Sonic Monolith. Nelson Bragg and I met while he was on tour playing percussion for Brian Wilson (this past year he did the Beach Boys tour!). I was back stage hanging out with Brian's band, I met most of them over the years via mutual musical persuasions, and there was Nelson offering to play music with me one day. It took about 10 years, but here we see the day finally arrived.

Randy Hoffman has played vibraphone or percussion with me since before Garage Orchestra came out in 1994. He was mentored by one of America's great avant garde composers, Harry Partch. Randy played with the Partch Ensemble for 20 years playing some of the toughest instruments to bring forth noise : Cloud Chamber Bowls, The Bloboy, Quadrangularus Reversum...Randy told me the Bass Marimba was really dang huge and tough to play.

My long time friend Paula Luber has sub'd for Randy on some tours in recent years so I decided we might as well have two vibraphones playing at once. Later we had Nelson come in and all three of them were on the vibes at once. It was a rather Steve Reich moment. 

David's recording studio and it's fine array of musical toys. This photo was taken the night before we began recording and I'm pretty knackered. I'd spent the afternoon packing bags for LA, guitars, getting my son to his 4-day-sleep-over (thank you Hahms and Nena Andersen!), and foisting the 6ft Wall Heater into my Corolla. No small feat for 3 weeks out of surgery. 

I'm feeling much better, almost 4 weeks from appendectomy, I'm walking 2 1/2 miles and I did Four sit-ups today...(ha!)...I held my own in those 10 hour studio sessions.

Renata Bratt and David in the control room playing parts for Horsepower. Renata and Randy and I began playing music together back in 1993 and recorded two studios albums as the Garage Orchestra. Then Renata moved away. Now and then I spirit her back to Southern California or off on a tour or into the studio.... Such was the case here. She was the one take wonder. 

Congratulations to my friend and co-producer David Schwartz for his nomination for "Outstanding Music Composition For A Series (Original Dramatic Score)"

on Arrested Development

David is one of those rare birds that has had success in the field of music and is actually a really nice guy. He doesn't have to be, he's done so much good stuff. But he is. 

You can find David's music on the theme to Deadwood and the score to Northern Exposure as well as A.D.

Besides that, he has an amazingly lovely family. His daughter, singer-songwriter Lucy Schwartz, sang harmony with me on I Like Cats/You Like Dogs. She has a new album coming out in August and they were filming a music video on another part of the property while we were recording, starring animals. So it was an animal day.

Randy kickin' back by the Cardboard Box, which lead us through 2 of the 3 songs this past weekend. We recorded 3 songs in 3 days. Not bad. I can't wait to play it for you guys.

Freedy Johnston Hoisting the Flag For CLB's New Album

I'm very excited today. This weekend will be the start of a new era for me. I'll be in the recording studio  for the first time since 2006. And my last album, Beloved Stranger, released in 2008, was made under very difficult circumstances, at a time when my son was very young and my husband was becoming very ill. It was an incredibly difficult period. 

But now is a new time. It's a fresh start. I wrote a lot of songs over the past three years and it's time to record them and set them free.

Here's my pal Freedy Johnston, wavin' the flag and  

supportin' the cause 

Happy Appendix Day

here i am happy in the er on drugs

Two weeks ago I had a stomach ache. I had it the day before but not so bad I couldn't run my customary 3 miles before work. But by the evening time I was in a good bit of pain. I took two Tums and went to sleep. Surprisingly, I slept for a solid eight hours. My girlfriend Paula (god bless her), who some of you know as the doctor friend that often plays glockenspiel or vibraphone with me and is a medical doctor, called and asked how I was doing. I told her the hurt had moved down into my lower right abdomen, she had me press on the spot and when I winced she said "I'll be right over". When she arrived she said get your stuff were going to the emergency room, you have appendicitis. 

And so I did confirmed by both emergency room doctor and CT scan. By 9pm I was under anesthesia and feeling no pain (actually before I went to the OR I got this great drug called Fentanyl...I was ready to dance on table tops and go home). 

Anyways the anesthesiologist promised me a trip to Paris and when I awoke it didn't feel like she held true to her promise. I was groggy but Paula drove us home, to her place, draggin' in at 2am. 

For the first week after surgery, (laproscopic stylie), Alexander and I had a number of friends bring us food, flowers and fun. I thank you all from my heart for the help and the dinners. 

Alexander spent several nights at my pal/singer-songwriter/Nena Andersen's house, down the street, and her son Ellis showed Alexander how to catch a wave with a body board. 

Then Nena took the boys to the Del Mar Fair

Alexander did not find the animals spectacular

A division of interest in junk-food

Nothing like carnie games

And a shared sense of awe and wonder at old timey video games. 

*

I'm on the mend. Back to work this week. Taking long walks. Kinda tired but pretty much off the pain meds.

Not ready to run my customary 3 miles yet... 

But getting revved up about going in the studio to record next weekend. 

photos of the boys by Nena Andersen

Something To Smile About

Thank you roll-call to those of you who have (so far) contributed to my new recordings:

Philip Locke, Martha Lawrence, 
James Chadwick, David Feldman, 
David Williams, Sandra Perea, Scott Edwards, 
Timothy Daily, Monica Pasqual, Rob Metcalfe, Verb, 
Stephen Greenberg, Keith Shiraki, Kane Churko,

David Hartwell, Lizabeth Clark, Frank Soares, Franco di Totto, Eric Cocks, Rex Wilson, Eric Predoehl, Charles Samples, Steve Hochman, Douglas Farage, Brett Milano, Lucy Huntzinger, Robbie Tucker, Gary Schulstad, Gary Stewart, Robert Henkel, Rafter Roberts, Bob Colby, Todd Everett, James Cribb, Steve Holtebeck, Saint Cloud Computer, Simone Van Dam, Susan Hahm, Linda Smith, Richard Robinson, Richard Strell, Michael Brown, Jennifer Hanson, David Lakin, Anne Kuller, Kenneth Simon, Elaine Lafferty, Tahd R Frentzel, 

Barbara Sadak, Gene Brown

Yeah, I have something to smile about, more names on the list and things are looking up. Thank you friends....

Photo by Dennis Andersen June 7, 2013

Obscure Music Theme Park

3:20am...
Awoke from a dream very suddenly with my heartbeat at 200 beats per minute. It's a jolt and a shock but it's happened before, it's called supra ventricular tachycardia. I got out the bag of ice and dumped it into a large bowl, filled it with water and plunged my face into it. Holding my breath and counting to 50. Heart rate still up, I come up for air and do the plunge again. This time the heart rate skitters a beat and returns to a normal, if slightly high pace. I throw on some shorts and step outside into the damp, cool beach air. Only a few stars peeking through the marine layer. It's June. 

In the dream I was at a theme park with Paul. We have been looking back at obscure songs that are acknowledged in colorful displays here. A few Disney type songs, some Japanese girl singers, some 60's girl-group singers. We wander through the park with it's colorful and melodic dioramas. 

By the end of the dream Paul and I are hunting through shipping materials, stationary, and office equipment at  some kind of big box stationary warehouse. We are crawling through the stacks of stuff, over and under shelves. One of us says "remember the old days when we used to have to climb up to the top of these shelves to get the stuff we wanted?"

Then Paul was talking about the music we'd just experienced at the Obscure Music Theme Park and the artists we'd taken in and watched and positively interacted with, and then Paul said about himself "I'm very good at that".

I might not have been exact in my understanding, I wasn't sure just what he meant, but I agreed. And he was very very good at a number of things, but particularly; being supportive of artistry whether that artists work has been acknowledged by other pundits or not. 

Paul was usually one of the first responders on the scene of a new musical visionaries work. He was a fabulous Sir Lancelot to an artists King Arthur. 

Years ago I asked him what he thought about a local artist that we knew, that had gone national and he said "You have to wait and see the body of work to know whether they are an artist or not".

The dream ended with me hanging out with the "healthy, Paul-pre brain injury" again, climbing around the great big shelves of the stationary store, while he threw, sometimes handed carefully items he needed for the office.

Paul's remains live in a box now, not unlike the boxes of books he'd tape up and send out daily, usually first thing in the morning. The screech of the packing tape pulling from the dispenser, applied to cardboard, a little extra over the name and address of the recipient. 

When the cremation company had me come by to fill out various papers regarding Paul's death they had me look over their racks of urns. About two dozen urns. At the bottom of the shelf was a taped up box. I asked if Paul's ashes could go in there. The lady said "that's the box the remains come in darlin'"and I said "that will do then, that's what Paul would want". 

That box lives on a bookshelf now, that oversees the whole of the living room. The box has Picasso's Girl Before Her Mirror and a Krazy Kat comic and a few playing cards pasted on it. Stuff Paul liked. And his glasses, the last pair, are atop the box so he can survey the room and all the stuff we are doing-watching me scribble this down in a book at 3:20am. 

I think my heart has sincerely settled back into it's slower more regular rhythm now, and I can go back to sleep. 

Howlin' Wolf and Paul Williams

Photo by David Gahr

That's Paul Williams on the right, diggin' the sounds of Howlin Wolf, with Grace Slick on his right. At the Newport Folk Festival 1966. Though he looks kind of like a sound engineer (cupping his hand to his ear) he was just a fan that got to get up really close to the action.  CRAWDADDY The Magazine of Rock would have been out and in circulation, it's first issue coming out through Paul's dorm at Swarthmore in February of 1966. This photo was July of 1966 and Paul was handing out CRAWDADDY's like candies, everywhere he went, meeting Jac Holzman and getting him interested in placing ads in the magazine.

Below, may be the same performance of Wolf, with Paul dancing at 0:11-0:14

"If You Hear Me Howlin'" 

Three Generations of Williams- 2001

Paul holding one month old Alexander, must be November 2001. Paul's father Robert Williams came to visit us after the arrival of the new baby. Robert an Emeritus Professor of physics at the University of Washington and also a contributor to the physics work at Cern in Geneva, visited us several times over the years and stayed at our favorite beach motel a block from our house. 

Here little Alexander seems to be sussing out the situation from the two wise men. Years, earlier, in 1995 when Paul was in the hospital for the brain injury Robert came to visit and I spent many a dinner with him talking and questioning him about his time working under Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. I'd read the Richard Feynman books, loved them, and got a real kick out of these first hand stories of Roberts. 

One of the real 'take-aways' from that extraordinary time with Paul's father was how sad he seemed to be, or maybe a better word is 'lost' on how to be a father, especially in a crisis time. My job ended up being of a reassuring nature, helping him see how Paul was improving (and he was). Robert was quite unnerved by his sons injury, and I suppose fragility. Paul seemed to have a kind of invulnerable quality to his personality, an incautious, reckless intellectualism that made him seem sorta unbreakable. 

At any rate, here in these photos, 6 years after the brain injury, father and son are in a jovial mood and taking pictures with baby and a sunset over Moonlight beach. This was a time of so much promise; we had been separated and now back together, a beautiful baby boy, and Paul was looking deeply into himself finding new ways to create balance in his emotional life, and we were very active in the Buddhist community around Thich Nhat Hahn's Deer Park. A lovely, though mommy-tired time. 

Yep It's My Birthday Week

Alexander and multi-instrumentalist George Doering in David Schwartz' recording studio. 

This is where I will be recording 2 of the new songs on July 12/13/14 thanks to the help of the Patrons that have donated to the cause. In return you will each receive a copy of the recorded songs and out-takes. 

What I'd  like to do is raise at least $1500 before the first session to help cover some basic costs. To the right is a donate button that takes you to PayPal and the cash goes into an account I've set up just for these sessions. 

For now, I'm by-passing the Kickstarter type templates, which often take 10% off the top and then you have to pay out another, maybe 14% in taxes, because those companies have it structured like a business. 

I'm using the Paul Williams method here...On his Dylan books Paul asked for Patrons to buy the book upfront and he would send them the book signed, a few years later after it was written and bound. Sometimes folks would give him a little money extra and sometimes a lot but it would all come together and he was able to afford to write the book for a year and pay the rent.

Thank you to everyone so far that has contributed. I look forward to sharing our summer sessions with you... 

Some of the musicians playing on the tracks include 

David Schwartz, Randy Hoffman, Nelson Bragg, Renata Bratt, Paula Luber, Keli Ross-Mau', and more ....

Vision Carriers and The Sonic Society of the Stars

To Making of CLB's New Album

There are times when all things seems to be what they really are, and you can live with a sense of security in knowing that what you know is probably shared by somebody else out there. And then there are other times when what you see is not what you get, and the photographs are blurred and the suffering seems to be one thing one instant and quite another a minute later. And those times you wonder what is real. 

Those are the times when poetry, art, music become a real tangible thing. I had a conversation with a friend today,  Frank Lee Drennen, a musician, and he said "take carpentry, you can show someone what you've built out of wood and tiles and they can see it say, "Oh I need that". but it's something else when it's music. " 

When do we need music? When the carpentry fails. When Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel have cut the correct lines in the foundation and all things are squared off and right, but something is still wrong.  That's when we need a Steam Shovel of the soul. 

When I can open up my mind a crack and let the heavens fall in, I can hear music. Not the DJ that plays reruns of stuff I heard yesterday, but the music of  Dante's Angels. A sonic society of the stars. All I have to do is keep the mind open a tiny crack and something might leak through. And it's blurry and hazy and nebulous until it falls on the right instrument, a vibraphone, a voice, a cello. And then it becomes a thing, something almost tangible. 

Next month I will begin the process of making the new songs whole, fully realized arrangements. You've heard some of them straight out of the oven here on the blog, as I've written them (and posted them with little movies). It's been a good forum and now those songs get to grow up and become recordings.  

Twenty years ago, when I met Paul he was a very keen supporter of my musical vision of that time, the music that was  to become Garage Orchestra. He took me round to meet all kind of musicians-saints and angelic-helpers; Paul Rothchild (Doors), David Anderle (Brian Wilson's Smile), Van Dyke Parks....I called him my Vision Carrier.  Paul also believed that artists need patrons, bards need kings, and techies need venture capitalists. 

You, readers and friends, are my Vision Carriers now. 
I can use your help. I hope you'll help me see this vision through.

In return I will send to you the early unmastered songs and later, the mastered songs, so please be sure to leave me an email address on your Paypal donation

In regards to fundraising websites, which many of you have suggested for this musical project, I may indeed end up over at one of those Kickstarter type templates. For now, I thought I'd try this without the middle man taking a cut and appealing to those of you that I have known. 

(photos by Kirk Kelly at the Treehouse on Ave A and 2nd in NYC, the show was projected on a building across the street)

"A woman of Cindy Lee's capacity as a lyricist is unique.Her insight and raw ability to articulate the human dilemma and articulate it in short order is peerless. Somehow I get the impression she knows her legacy will outlive her."
-Van Dyke Parks