Earth's ET

                                             

copy #1 sent here

1. Available Only

2. Y'Gotta Have a Gimmick

3. New Music Came to Town

4. Bioenergetic Blocks

5. Taming Oscar Wilde

6. Don't Let Her Drain Ya

7. Angel's Tricks

8. Poverty Machine

9. War Causes

    words/vocals: Savlove              music credits: inside booklet

As a person I've come equipped much like any other, strong in some traits, weak in others.

I'm not the only one issuing back a report. However, I am the only one adapted to synthesize

the songbooks for both parties. Publishers, please call (917)257-2366 or email savlove@gmail.com

to grant permission to have used the following music behind the reflections posted on the analog tapes:

1. Pink Floyd - "Come in #51, Your Time Is Up"

2. Weather Report - "Mysterious Traveler"

    (with additional lyrics by Jimi Hendrix)

3. William Tyler - "Last Residents of Westfall"

4. Booket T & the MGs - "Over Easy"

5. Rolling Stones - "If I Was a Dancer (dance pt. 2)"

    (with quotes by Oscar Wilde)

6. Gabor Szabo - "The Beat Goes On"

7. David Bowie - "Sense of Doubt"

8. Sun Ra - "Saturn"

9. Jimi Hendrix Experience - "Third Stone From the Sun"

Cassettes recorded August/September 2015

Digital transfer and mix by Joel Patterson

Mountaintop Studios

John Savlove is SaveLove Music, Inc. (ASCAP)

                                                                                          

while listeners will have to take the extra step of contacting me for a copy of the CD in its lavender case and chocolate brown print, the "Buddha" song is now available online, along with tons of other pertinent information,

at Esoteric Online

"Fare Thee Well"

                                               Fare THEE WELL

      

It’s John Savlove’s tribute to the Grateful Dead

as sung to Steely Dan’s version of Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley’s

“East St. Louis Toodle-oo”

Fare thee well

You can’t tell

When upon the wheel we may meet again

Roll them bones

Sing me home

Ride me on your wagon to the wind

The barroom scuffle and the poolhall tiff

While I’m in the corner working on a riff

Don’t shoot me I’m a beginner! – one day to be a winner-

I’ll pay you back further on down the line if

Stagger Lee

Would let me be

The Candy Man and me make three

Cut my deck to the queen of spades

But the cards are all marked everywhere in Chez Hades

You might as well living in the cold dark hollow coalmines

Tell the queen of diamonds by the way she shines

There’s nothing better than a ripple in a creek from

A giant sober footfall

That can put me on the first train out of my

drunken enchantment with jacks, clubs, kings

stains on the barroom floor that speak of secret things

Half a cup of rock and rye

We’ll all know, bye and bye

girls in scarlet magnificent clothes

with bells on their toes!

If memory serves me well, we’re sure to meet further on down the road

Provided your wheel does not light on fire, and you do not explode

Fare thee well

You just can’t tell

Where upon the wheel we’ll meet again

Negative Affirmations

I am not flying under the radar -

The radar picked me up long ago.

And I do not harness light like a laser

Or know anything you need to know.

I am not a victim of omission,

Merely forgotten with no malice towards me ... 

So relative to this world of conditions

I am exactly where Le SaveLove should be


I do not speak smoothly.

Children, dogs, cats, and people on the street do not respond naturally to my warmth.

I could not trump Trump with my ability to replenish standards of language.

I present no alternative to violence and hot-headed behavior in general.


negative affirmation #3,9456,~783!//x//:

I do not have the time to inspire an audience,

nor does America want a comedian such as I, with the time,

at this time.

open mic night 2015

                                             Pay to Play

(sung to the tune of “Yesterday” by Paul McCartney)

Pay to play

It use to be you played for fun you say

To sing covers you must hideaway

Either that or pay to play

Suddenly

We don’t sing the songs we used to play for free

My half is paying for the royalty

Pay to play is not for me

There’s no      copyright

On my songs, and there’s no way

I’ll write           one so good

That I’ll charge you all to play-a-a-a

Pay to play

Cafés clubs or bars or cabarets

A classic song is sung so spirits raise

They weren’t meant for pay to play

Don’t believe in Pay to Play

                              {a gift from John to standard bearers everywhere. And yes i belong to ASCAP}

the AC trilogy - III

To tell you exactly what I feel in unquoted dawn,
in language plain as a teacher of elementary math,
where on her chalkboard a plus appears and then is gone,
her students moved less by numbers than, in passing, a laugh,
a confidence returns them to the abstract
division, which for them is still a game, not sense.
Words are in my sunrise, blacked
When for me, formless, language offers no defense.
Multiply the feeling left by the subtraction
But with what, if not words, or blood, or integers’ quartz crystal
or anything that might take the place of action?
Slowly dew collects beneath the flower’s pistil.
A man alone is reduced to just a fraction
Of the one needed to make his work greater than distraction.






(2007)

                                                                                                               

the AC trilogy - II

For such an all-consuming,
pervasive everything,
God is too short a word.
The word for God should have
at least twenty-five syllables,
so as to remind all who utter it that their God is that of other galaxies,
of every stone.
That is why I know I love you.
I do love God, but God alone is too big for all this
just to be about that.
I know that when I think of you it could not only be
a metaphor for the grand unity,
the one syllable,
god.
My love distinguishes itself among other instances,
radio cardio
thrill of sensing it is you.
God of Diastole, God of Systole
together we search the lonely kingdom for traces of goddess.
Virgin Parthenia, it is I
your mirror!
Assassin for the gentle and true
hashshasheen to the lazy Tantrix
razor blades sheathed at the tips of my petals
In the long grand line of epic tales real people
are created by this writer we call God
and those who believe
make a name for themselves.
God has already helped me plenty. But I still need you!



                                                                                               


                                                                                         SAVELOVE
                                                                                               2006

the AC trilogy - I

                                    “Taggin’ Along with Sav’s Old Siren Song”

What I wouldn’t give

for soft kisses in the night

for confidences, tight

for whispers in the year of my love,

no mister shaman.

for whispers in the ear of our love

No.

for the lore of j’te adore

Sorry mister, but you’ve already gave all.

You’re the bloody Beloved boy

What I wouldn’t give

for a festival of trees

for public ecstasies

Instinctual ideal vision unto practical world peace.

‘Twould still have its series of imperfect robberies

Like the hearts yet to be taken from a million unhatched mes.

Hungry god, hungry goddess

We shall pour our paint on canvas

Beloved lover, lover beloved

We shall live the rhymes of jewels before us

                                                                                                            (in the wee hours of April 10, 2005)

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.

       

       

       

Questions Answered Without Contact

    This is one of my concise long-range journals. They all tell my story, but ones like these span many years in the same number of pages that another journal devotes to three months. A blog differs from a bound set of pages in that a blog can presumably run forever. But blogs do end. They can end like a beloved TV series ends, after many seasons, because the drama has run its course. This blog will end, but not until its issues are resolved.

 

    The numbers show that more people are reading this, more in the last couple of years than all the previous combined. Some even got here out of a prior interest greater than stumbling upon. Back in 2008 - 21 entries ago - I wrote hoping that one particular person would find the piece, know who the questions were intended for, feel moved, and, while I knew this was improbable, respond. I still don't know when this marvelously liquid person first arrived at Extra Curricular Sav, only that when she did it was not by chance.

 

    Then, six months ago, a message came for me through a mutual friend, Libby.  I should remain patient and loving because the universe is perfect , everything is connected, and everything has a reason. The questions I posed to "a single individual" in 2008 were: "Does your clairvoyant see the same sky as my clairvoyant? Does your I Ching intertwine with or unravel into nonsense my I Ching?" And finally, was I "...a passing rube" through your star-studded movie? The answers are: Yes!, her clairvoyant sees the same sky and Yes!, your I Chings intertwine, but also Yes!, you are a rube, someone who has indeed invested in the unsophisticated rustic setting designed to protect and guarantee your outsider's status. There is no "what if ". They've already happened, so this question isn't quite allowable: Could "Cannot Command Your Heart", "Poverty Machine", "Systemic Insensitivity", "Get Over It", "Been Punished Enough", "April Fools", "Can I Tell You Later", "One Tear Drop", and my latest, "Failure of Nerve", been written without the tacitly encoded cosmic terms of my out and out withdrawal from any market place?

 

    Everything does have a reason - good reasons or bad. A perfect universe certainly levels the playing field, however it cannot excuse every level of personal responsibility. I wouldn't be blogging this today if writing didn't ground me and I didn't need a literary task to reflect reality back. I'm undoubtedly better equipped to do this than scour my soul for the reasons why I have feelings for one person that I don't have for any other. My faith in love is way deeper than that. I never did go back to that clairvoyant. Past lives are of little use to me, and as far as this one goes, clearly the message Libby brought home was that anything I might have done or said in the last 6 months is no more or less perfect than what I actually did. Which was to talk, listen, write, dance, sing, and stretch. The next 6 months too - to them my only responsibility is to, as my lawyer once advised, remain as perfect as I am.

  

   There are reasons why my discussions remain limited. Libby has volunteered enough; for now our confidences are on hold.  People who could corroborate any of the many promising things Libby has told me have not. Some of them may be reading this now. The status of this mid-August update in the Eternal Now may have changed by the time you read this. I said this was concise, and so to honor that and everyone who could corroborate, I have boiled down to a single reason why no one has: Because the most interesting, meaningful, and true aspect of this blog's drama really is just between me and this Single Individual. In the meantime, I've had time to look at the larger picture - at how a war-time economy was declared in America over ten years ago with no signs of stopping today, and how the insidious effects of that slip in overtly and subtly everywhere. The fact that I don't torture anyone for the information I need somehow turned up as a point of consideration in why people have not been more forthcoming.

 

    And the problem of being psychically sensitive has all the hallmarks of a minority movement: people are aware of it but don't want to talk about it, we are laughed at, misunderstood, or, on the other end of the discussion, taken for granted. Either way, evolutionary keys that advance the big picture are not being used.

    

Identity Celebration

 

Spring has come and gone; the SaveLove Music bouquet was large and colorful.

Some of them are day flowers. Others are turning out to be perennials. This Solstice offering to my public diary is a quick look at 3 new songs - and one old - 4 Savlove songs in which I describe myself as a healing ET sent here to enlighten the scene: "Superblue", "Anne I Am", "John, Not Joan", and "Blues for Jimi Hendrix".

"Anne I Am" is my favorite because it's short, awesome, repeats a monster riff over and over, holds long tones for the chorus, and announces itself without any of the frustration burdening "Superblue", "John, Not Joan" or a pack of others exploring the themes without actually naming myself.


I was a woman, a man, Indian and Jewish
Now I'm back again to see you all through this

I was Venusian, Atlantan, now the island of Manhattan
is pollution, your solution is to keep above the oceans

I am Anne

Anne I am

I'm hoping to get it to Anne Hathaway.

"John, Not Joan" was inspired by the sigh of a wise old bluesman constantly belittled:
"Please, please, please! I'm not Joan of Arc!"
Ever try to reason with children? It's not unlike trying to get sacred sexuality to rub off on adults.

Hendrix also suffered from extra-dimensional sweet-hearted blues. His message of love blasted through radio station EXP, a man emerging as if from the frequencies of a rainbow, who comes back "to find the stars misplaced and the smell of a world that has burned." My piece compares us to Oracles from Delphi listening in on "the sound of the first guilt pangs sang straight through to frustration on Wi-Fi."

And where does this leave Superblue, the UFO who "just touched down for a minute or two" back in 1989? Even then he kept "baling like the alien". His was "a superficial freedom when you're all running from the power that rolls you." He wasn't running. 25 years after encoding the rules for Tantric mastery in a rock 'n' roll song, the proof is in the pudding. While other men in their fifties are already showing signs of senility, Superblue still soars through the wind. For Superblue, cooking the liquids in the stars is no joke. It takes many incarnations to reach that place on earth where Chemistry meets Destiny.

From the mailbag, Minerva Cropoupopulis of Aganegg writes, "Where in the John Savlove catalogue do you use the word swoon?!"
The answer to that, Minerva, is in two songs from long ago, "Real Love" and "That's Why I Play".

More on those in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsors.












Baba George

 

 

 

George Harrison came to me in a dream a few minutes ago. It began with a bust of Heraclitus coming to life under the phrase "Character is Destiny". The columns supporting it grew longer and longer until there was no top in view.  Gabriele Caras and I led each other through the stone columns, sensing that there was a way out of the labyrinth. She looked at me with light blue eyes that arced upward in the center. "You are forgiven by the forces that matter the most."   "Well, whatever I did, I'm sure it wasn't that bad," I thought to myself, and suddenly George is with us in an English garden, quoting Baba Ji. "Isn't it a Pity" was playing in the clouds, so I thought (rather than said), "My signature means nothing if legal documents be handled by the lawyer who tells the best lies." George said, "Kindle the light of love within you, and then glow so that it is kindled in others, in all you meet."  Gabriele said, "The answer, my friend, is Cohen in the wind." I thought, "Yeah, I always used to be pointing out the flaws in the language of love 'til I started taking aim at the language of law!" George said, "Praise all women and men and gods. Those who you cannot praise, do not think of."

these Numbers both Excite and Numb me

2012 is through. In Savland, that means the end of a year I promised would be great and expansive for SaveLove Music. The evidence is in. And the numbers are extreme.

Over 550 titles in the collection, with at least one version of every song included on this one-stop tour of the stacks that unwinds over a set of over 100 60 or 90 minute tapes. Of course i ended up working right up until the last day of the year, unearthing the moments in my pop opera that awaited the final weeks. Others were intentionally held back (almost every song), and still another few dozen were thrown out altogether. Old poems set to music during the tour only count if I hold on to the chords as jotted. Emergency tunes are available to tap for when the world continues to indulge my hermetic mirroring through the winter. Poor, unfunny, violent world.

Plus the covers, improvs, intros and outros, odes, riddles, aphorisms, dubs, (swooshingstaticsound), world of format. This entry is a rehash of previous blogatives. Including the fact that there's plenty of running commentary on the profound paranormal experience, reality cassette-making as it's happening. That's - in a word -intense, and part of what pinned me to my apartment for this twenty-month marathon of musical activity. Everyone talks about our problems with the bureaucracy, the artistocracy, the plutocracy. I've got problems with the chakralacracy.

0 dollars were made. However, there are plenty of demos that can't be improved upon unless collaborated or put into the hands of another artist. They only need digitization, and some of them already have been clicked around the web. Figuring out which tunes would advance the front line is one of my tailor-made to Savstrange problems.

An expansive, triumphant, exhilarating year, then, that played with all the possibilities within its utopian boundaries. But it's over. Two brand new songs out of December: "New Music Came to Town" and "Been Punished Enough". I don't need to sing to keep this pop opera in motion, and for now I'm going to rest.

Taoist essay update

 

     Made about half a dozen more cassettes since the last entry. The meditative vacuum cleaner has left me emptied. Let there be light upon light.

    I'm not going to jinx my Scribd essay by adding a link. The YouTube video and tribe blog went nowhere, but I'm telling you Notes of a Rebel Angel goes somewhere! Google the title, my name, and Scribd for a sense of what movies would be like if sacred sex was generally understood. I'm here today with a follow-up to the second section.

    That was a brief overview of pop music when it's invoked notions of alchemy and healing love making. I identified "Lover's Rock" by the Clash as the only song in the rock pantheon to take on with no uncertain terms the topic of men forsaking ejaculation in emulation of Eastern bliss.

   In the essay I deduce that the late Joe Strummer wrote the song - because writing partner Mick Jones has little of interest to say in retrospect. Now I am sure of it, thanks to the accompanying booklet to the 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition of London Calling. That reprints the Clash's promo fanzine Armagideon Times, which included a few words or a cartoon about each track on the album. Some of the songs must have been co-written, but here it falls along the lines of one man per song - Joe, Mick, or Paul Simonon. For "LOVERS ROCK" (no apostrophe) Joe offers a doodle of a guy and gal in profile puckered up in a smooch and the following note: This song is a book we tried to condense into two verses - The book is called "The Tao of Love & Sex" by "......". It's a thin book and a good one to get if you are a boy trying to be a man.

    The author whose name they couldn't remember is Jolan Chang. He was a Canadian-Chinese scholar, among the first to provide a kind of Western umbrella over Tantra, Taoism, etc. Strummer and Chang happened to die in the same year - 2002 - Chang at 84, Strummer at 50. Yes, it's a thin book, but one of the very first I ever found and read about this stuff. (Forget those long-standing, royally stiff Kama Sutra art plates!) I discovered Mantak Chia at the same time, who, at 65, keeps right on publishing a great amount of detail over the course of many related volumes.

   As for any other songs nearing the explicit nature of "Lover's Rock" or my own "Superblue"...the game is a little different now, the aformentioned rock pantheon co-existing with the rest of the past and the laterally expansive plurality of today. It's still a lot easier to find New Age soundtracks designed for extended embraces than any pop visionaries hawking their own herbs, sex 'n' rock&roll take on Five Element Theory.

Song Tour via Cassettes is Over

Between the spring of 2011 and now, I've done a whole lot of songwriting, rewriting, and recording. Many old songs and tapes were trashed, and dozens of cassettes have been taped over, sometimes not entirely so that the humor of random mash-ups can arise. There's one where I check in with Eckhart Tolle to see what he has to say as I'm taping over The Power of Now. He's always spot-on, naturally, further proving that the Now is perpetually available, even when dealing with pre-recorded mediums.

Yeah, cassettes are as dated as electric typewriters, but they sure do have their virtues. Not just the simplicity of operation, although single track one-touch recording certainly is simple. And dirt-cheap. I'm thinking more about how much one learns about the voice in such a primitive setting, where all hope for production enhancements is lost. You either keep it or try again. Some of the tapes are continuous 45-minute shows, most made implicit use of the pause button to create album-like consistency, and a few are collages with two or three undercoatings of me doing what I do.

Which is document my life - orally or vocally, spoken, sung, rapped, written, or improvised. Issues of the day are covered, and now that it is done, somewhere in the body of around 100 of these 60 or 90 minute tapes, at least one new version of almost every song I ever wrote exists.

And they can be cleaned and digitized in a jiffy. Which means I already have demos for all kinds of tunes that would be better off in the hands of other artists. All I really want to do is begin my interface with the current technology from here.

Every side has at least one cover version of a song too (kind of like my way of having a drums/space section in every show, as on a Grateful Dead tape). The electric keyboard Alcorn gave me has plenty of options, so there's never a glut of one sound or another. I wanted to be sure they were all worth listening back. It is like being a character in a Nick Hornsby novel, though. No one is expected to go through these tapes. The sheer volume of titles and performances therein is a private joy. We close this entry, then, as if this were a pure fiction and the song listing I've chosen to commemorate the close of this phase didn't (for you, dear reader) really have the lyrics and chords to go with it. This is the J-card for "SAV - Forever Sloppy" Side B, one of the last (recorded July 19 and 20, 2012):

11. Already Felt All Those Things

12. Love Can Be Thrilling

13. The Fat Angel (Donovan Leitch)

14. Til the Sun Finally Manages to Set (with Crush On You intro - hush!)

15. 2000 Year Blues

16. You Don't Really Know Me

17. Apatosaurs R Us

18. 'Til I Feel It

19. I Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way

20. Every Soldier's a Martyr

21. May This Be Love (Jimi Hendrix)

22. Just One Morning

SaveLove Music 2012

Just a quick update to authorize linking this blog to the savlove.com website. These last couple of years have substantiated roots that reach back to the days of Woodie Guthrie or Louis Armstrong - the American era when Depression (capital and lower case) was as rife as it is today - but without the modernity.

 These days I am so much less interested in how DNA and meditation reveal inner secrets of one's personal (or our collective) biology and that much more interested in presenting simple messages that everyone can  understand. To find emotional wholeness - to love one's self and others with depth and concern, for example - is a very strong base from which to work on a stronger economy. Job perfomances, shopping addictions, dietary choices and much more can be framed in terms of improved work environments. And music - the notes and phrases of melody providers, to use modern terminology - still plays a vital role in the civilized landscape!  When my latest songs come out, that will be a good thing. Otherwise I'm keeping on with the apartment tour of my catalogue ... refining, tempering, and expanding the spectrum of genres and lyrics that IS the world of John Savlove.

  One last note to complete this update: A singer for the sake of love campaigns his whole life and is never elected to office. The language of love is not bought and sold like the language of law. Rather, free or commodified, it is always there for people's delectation, taken advantage of in ways that are freely diluted by vulgarians of every class and political stripe.

John Savlove remains a true friend

 
 Leave it to the cosmos to direct me to the New York Times the day it runs the item about John Friend on the front page of the Tuesday Science section. I don't tend to read it these days. I do care deeply about what's going on in the world. I'm paying attention. But I also see how definitively I am the news, the thing that's going on that is truly on, regardless of how few people are hip to the what or why.

  When the founder of Anusara yoga suffers a fall from grace, that speaks directly to my life. Particularly when it's about sexual ethics. Elena Brower is the primary source for a quote in the piece, and that's significant because in the name of good taste I have consistently disguised or deleted my complaints about that yoga teacher on blogs since 2009. The Times lifts from her blog, and names her as Friend"s "former confidante". I doubt the break is as big as all that.

   I'm not surprised John Friend transitioned from a charismatic guru to an outed philanderer. As much as he knows about holistic health, he does not know enough to be transmutating his sperm essence. He's not a Taoist. In my book, he's like all the other men who do not really know the True Gentle.

   Anusara yoga became my favorite mode of yoga from the very first class. However, that was in 2004, and from years before that I've seen poses and stretches as supplemental to the Five Element Theory and so much else as filtered through Mantak Chia's approach. I've been studying the I Ching for decades, but developing a Taoist Soul body has taken my understanding of that to profound levels. This is not to put myself above Friend or Brower. This is journalistic therapy for myself and anyone reading this who needs to forgive these public figures their flaws and carry on with the promising mysteries inherent in the practice.

   Putting myself in their shoes is not the best way to show compassion or kindness. It's too easy to blow them away. Elena had the chance to put herself in my shoes and decided to go barefoot. Why? Because romance is just as dead in SoHo as it is on Wall St. I'm the one who coined the term "postromantic" back in 1999. And who identified how postromantic culture borrows and aspires to the romantic. My other blog discussed that further, until that blog was deleted for reasons typical to this writer's journey through a world of charlatans and power-abusers.

    People usually value me because I'm a good listener. We all want to provide content, and as much as I'd like to provide mine unbridled, it's more often wrapped up in a supportive context. That's just life. Universal laws are not mutable the way State or Federal laws are. Love is everything, which means all our petty conflicts and sub-laws are part of love. Hence, I embrace contradictions as they present themselves and ride the process. I have problems too, but being a lover of the cheatin' hurtin' kind ain't one of them.

    After as many people know about John Savlove as they do John Lennon or even John Friend ... that's when the real problems begin!

She Will Be

We live in a culture that's trashed a lot of the levels of substance about an Adam, Abel, or Cain. Can't disable all the puns without a little Cain. Me, I write to entertain. Self-entertain, that is, contained, even here on the cyber-plane. I'm reminded of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where he shows a film he's made and everything - all the credits - is by Bugs Bunny. At 11 Water I'm my own songwriter, singer, player, sound man, critic, host, interview, audience, and remembrance.

She Will Be

Inside her mother's house she waits to see, if the man of style will come, ring the bell and set her free

I've dreamed so many years of just her company

It brought me her way and now we sing in harmony

She will be, she will be, she will be, she is with me

She will be, she will be

She will be ................!

We have no more money left laying in the bank, no friends or family left for us to thank

Our old-fashioned piano is so badly out of tune

But it sounds all right when we gather round to croon

She will be, she will be, she will be, she is with me

She will be, she will be

She will be ................!

She is the sea ......................................................

We've thought of days gone by and things we could not see

We take it easier now that my love lies with me

Someone will still shed a tear for love not meant to be

While out of what we have become are the people we will be

And she will be, she will be, she will be, she is with me

She will be, she will be

She will be ................!

(SaveLove Music 2011)

                                                                     

"She Will Be" began in tribute to Paul McCartney, thinking of the bass accents and humor that spoke his own version of the British Music Hall meeting American Country & Western. Would the song be taken as cavalier? The pun, or rather, the fun of looking at which sense of the word most closely applies, is that either way cavalier comes from caballero, horseman, gentleman, knight. There are plenty of Mexican barrios where it's said as an insult or jest, not an honor. My friend Stephen Alcorn is an embodiment of the primary usage, the Italian cavaliere, a man dedicated to the aesthetics, morals, and manners of wholesome sensual beauty.

 "Perhaps your lyric is too cavalier, John." That could be where the word becomes its opposite, meaning haughty, self-serving, toying, ungentlemanly, unthinking. By the time it trickles down to such a criticism, it means I may have gotten a little too cute, maybe made too much of contacting Sir Paul at his most insipid. Which is all fodder for my questions about why children's music has done so little to insure an ethical familial society as run by adults.

The gentle liberation of the chords to the chorus and the notes on top cannot be heard until the song is presentable. "She is the sea" signals an instrumental bridge that extends this music. How long it took to finish writing this song is unimportant. What matters is that it is done.

New Verses to "Quinn the Eskimo"

It all started with imagining Katharine Hepburn performing "Quinn the Eskimo". She'd use that schoolmarm voice on the verses, then in the circus barker chorus turn New England ebullient, heralding this great hero of children and animals: "Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn!" I could just taste that gasp of joy as she pronounced "nothing". So I took it for my own in the endless set list, and soon realized that as much as the song speaks for me, I was making up new lines. Thus - for your eyes only - the first self-aggrandized collaboration between Bob Dylan and myself. His third verse was altered a little by Manfred Mann on their hit version, or can be found as published in Dylan's Lyrics 1962-1985. I've cut that one out entirely. My third is a complete rewrite and the fourth takes it from there. His verses are copyright 1968 by Dwarf Music. We are both licensed by ASCAP, although only two John Savlove songs are specifically registered along with my membership. Someday SaveLove Music could be as corporate as Bob Dylan, in which case business people would take an interest in the enforcement of both of our permissions and ownerships. And now, the newly expanded Zimmerman/Savlove canvas that IS
"Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"

Ev'rybody's building
Big ships and boats,
Some are building monuments,
Others, jotting down notes
Ev'rybody's in despair,
Ev'ry girl and boy
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
ev'rybody's gonna jump for joy
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

I like to do just like the rest, I like my sugar sweet
But jumping queues and making haste, it ain't my cup of meat
Ev'rybody's 'neath the trees, feeding pigeons on a limb
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
all the pigeons gonna run to him
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

My looks are longer than my leaps, 'specially by degrees
Just tell me where you're landing, honey, and I'll be there if you please
Ev'ryone's fighting over lamb's blood
Then sippin' it proper and prim
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
all the people gonna fall for him
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn

Ev'rybody's doing what's best for them
Ev'rybody's staying inside
But dryin' out anger on an old wire hanger
Won't be my orphan's pride
Nobody knows the original
It's always just a secondhand sin
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
all the sinners gonna come to him
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

Sorry, conservaliberAlls, consciousness is still sacred

    I was doing some relaxed breathing the other day with a friend. It is engaged work that helps create a more vibrant living. I mentioned how suspect it is that both liberals and conservatives have bought into the cliche that "nothing is sacred" for so long that a slew of new rules, laws and deregulations serve to justify that, or take it for granted. The Left and the Right are only pretending to be at war with each other; they actually both feed off the inept assumption that a living can be made off of everybody else's mistakes.

    "If nothing is sacred," he said, "it follows that the very best thing we can do is nothing. And the vacuum filled by liability laws confirms that. The concept of home economic regulation is treated as nothing, when actually it has only been lost in the dismantling of neighborhood economies. So we shall safely do nothing all day. A blow to consumerism, but a bow to the State nonetheless!"

     Yes, my friend. "Nothing" is a code word for so much more than the void, or Seinfeld's "nothing", or for appearing to contain an idle yoga.

    Then I went on back to the Old Souls home.

     What is so invested with god's grace that today it can be called sacred? Already the tea drinkin' motorcycle gangs are gearing up slurs of elitism. "You think you're one of a special breed, Savlove. Well let me tell you - you ain't no more sacred than us."

       And so begins the apocalypse. Trees are no longer sacred. Water is no longer sacred. Marriage is no longer sacred. Sex is no longer sacred. That which gives life is no longer sacred. That which hastens death is worshipped and adored, more so when chemically addictive.

    Why disparage a whole class of priests when only some of them are pederasts? There is an answer to that question that only further embarrasses any dominant religion where priests are trusted to be moral paragons. Priests and popes are not vested with God's Word. The laws and morals of a community are consistently founded in ever-shifting interpretations of God and Man. A personification named Allah or U-No-Who does not see all the pomp and circumstance. Prayers are heard according to their vibratory quality. The factors in the total quality are not the topic here. There is no separation of Church and State. Attempts to separate them will fail just as disappointingly as attempts to make Church and State a seamless autocratic prosperity.

    "God consciousness." That's a phrase from the Hare Krishna books devotees used to hand out in airports. You don't see them anymore. There's probably a law against that kind of loitering now. And that phrase, so off-putting. How in hell does a guy with a little pony tail and a glaze of contentment expect someone waiting for a plane to get off on "god consciousness"? Screweth Youeth. You make no sense to me.

    The good news is that consciousness is still sacred. Consciousness can still turn this debacle around. Consciousness does come from god (and all that entails).