Dobrow, We Knew Thee Well

Tomorrow I'm in NYC for a couple of nights. There's no one in town who needs me to call and where I go from there I'm done packing for - leaving me time to get to Anon, who posted that I should blog more about the cassette music.

It all started with one inopportune Savomaniac. And then another, and another. Not so much victims of bad timing as stagnant space. But the main thing to remember is that karma had to be generated in order for there to be something to do, say, and feel ... things, that is, to accompany the open secret of  hyper-consensual multidimensional experience. So there I was one deciduous morning, toying with notions to write jokes about my phlegm, and the words welled up: "If all our hearts were with the heart of God, power would sort it and care ... "

Now that it's all over, the entire collection represents a larger tour of my life's work thus far. I've been listening more recently to the sound I got with one particular piano, tapes from a studio rented over a number of winters. Few of these songs are considered finished: the 2011-13 tour confirms that. The writing sure, but not the performances. "what more can i do" and "face the void" from the indie CD - absolutely, solo work over and done with, no need for further embellishment. A couple of the band demos too are not to be repeated, posited in the heyday of their day, "Pure as the Driven Snow" and "Better Tomorrow". The first is a three-way about cocaine versus good lovin'. The latter remains as my latest production piece. Of those four, "Better Tomorrow" received the most treatments on the Yamaha-driven exile-on-pain-street. "face the void" got but one version, reworked to a samba beat-box.

Yeah, I miss playing. For now, it's life in limbo land. The keyboard was showing signs of wear & tear anyway; didn't take too much ersatz Mitch Mitchell on the strip of drum pads to kill a couple cymbals halfway through. I was running out of one-off round the house percussion novelties too. Heaven knows what instrument I'm going to play from here (and i think i mean that literally). Singing aloud is a more private, infrequent affair. The truth is, playing and singing for myself had come to bore me enough to make listening to myself back worth doing songs at all. Like I've been saying for the last 8 years now, I'm into some other kind of sub-cellular music. That music IS flush in the tapes though, which does add comfort to having spent the last three years devoting to a medium in which all commercial product in that form ends around 1999: this music is new.

11 Water Fire

       Last time around - about 6 months ago - I started off looking to this blog's demise as if to the closing season in a TV series. Little did I know this blog was about to outlive the longest running reality show in the movie of my life: The Water Street Years.

      They began in the summer of '79, when I still had a term to go at the College. Was on the ranch-like second floor then, a wide apartment with both a balcony view of the waterfall across the street and level backdoor access to the yard. In '85 moved upstairs, the attic you rounded by the backyard to reach its set of steps. Took many a field trip away from that place, but never did give up residency. It too had width, and tho scaled compared to the flat below, the third floor had corners, crannies, and a cornice that lent my home infinite charm. The view of the waterfall from here was through the kitchen window - the kitchen being the room you entered once up the steps to a small landing and my door. I danced to the garden on that landing for years. Shazi initiated getting the rocking chair out there on nice days.

        What happened to finally end this rock'n'roll revery was something beyond my power.

       Nevertheless the 11 Water Fire was as perfect as I've been. It ended that tape-tour Jimi Hendrix style, that's for sure, and just when all signs indicated this solo amusement was itching to bite the dust. Plus, the fire broke out while I was away, on the rare coupling of Thanksgiving with the first day of Hanukah, browning out the Village of North Bennington's electric for 4 hours while they put it out, later concluding the flame at the top of the second floor water heater arose for an unexplainable reason. All but two tapes from the tour are intact - one of them accounted for but waterlogged; the other, the last one recorded ("Siege of Silence") and filed before I left altogether missing, again for an unexplainable reason.

      Kan/Li, my chosen Taoist meditation, is the relationship between water and fire. There is so much to say about this that I am saving the discussion for another time. The space is ceded to the press officer from Maine, who wants a view of the Water Street Years along the lines of my history publishing in The Bennington Banner.

      It's true, there's a legion of us rock-poets who like writing on the topic as well as singing and staging press-releases. History of John Savlove Bennington Banner 1980-1998 is almost as much my reviewing and letters to the editor as stuff about my music. Lots of letters admonishing for the ecology. One congratulating the Banner for ranking Zippy the Pinhead in its comics half-page. I wrote about Bill Dixon and the Rolling Stones - separate pieces. Can't remember who else back then, just that the Stones come up again years later when I wrote scolding the town manager for using only the first half of "You can't always get what you want" in his message to the high-school band Rabid Monks when he said you can't practice at the local fire house. It was an opportunity to ask if the band was getting what it needed for trying some times. 

      "On the Paved Part of the Planet" 45, co-op promos, CAT-TV, Genital Soul … the early stuff was back when I was John Savlov. In 1999 I changed the sur to Savlove, signed into effect by Bennington Probate Judge Doris Buchanan on December 7, later right down to my birth certificate. I didn't like the Pavlovian ring to my old name. Savlov was no doubt clipped from the original Russian. Why not follow through on the flight from Diaspora American Agnostic into a full-fledged certification of evolving self, a vibrational change in the very numerology of the SaveLove mission? So John Savlove - long a variant on plenty other print byline besides the Banner! - had his new Visa card stamped and forevermore the only people who used the old spelling were on automatic pilot (not nostalgic, save my dad, of course). 

      Where was I? John Savlove's name went on to grace the Bennington Banner's pages many more times from there. About him include Barbara Roan's Fall Fooleries, the feature on my Songs of Earth and Peace at the North Bennington railway depot/town offices, the photo playing for the kids at the children's library, and announcements of radio shows, pub dates and Sun Fests. By him - more letters, addressing GMO seeds, connecting the dots in the drug problem, endorsing Bernie Sanders, and so on. Late in the era comes one lone art article Anthony Cafritz asked me to write about his sculpture exhibit.

       Yes, the Bennington Banner and Bennington College too have records that go back thick with cultured association with John Savlove. We all intend to grasp concepts of honesty, accountability, and, ultimately perhaps, a caring morality.  The College more so than the paper, simply because the liberal arts traffic in sentimentality to a more integrated degree. A newspaper can be blatantly sentimental in one column and coldly demeaning in the next, and not be called to task. A newspaper is deliberately laid out in terms of compartments. 

      By speaking to my life-as-art as no one else would up to the point of my spontaneous eviction from North Bennington, the gods helped me clarify these issues. The gods spoke, and for now I am reflecting in Bennington-based quarters, listening back.