Letting Go of Letting Go of the Creeping Meatball

Josh Mead

Using the bands branded crassly across the fronts of fast fashion behemoths’ budget T-shirts mass produced in South East Asia as a barometer of what is currently culturally significant, you could be forgiven for assuming that the revolutionary sensibilities of late sixties counterculture are re-emerging. Like an unwashed phoenix from the patriarchal, overdriven flames, images of topless, long haired, Kerouac citing, shamanic demi-Gods with well publicised drug problems co- opting symbols of peace and love in the pursuit of record sales are seemingly somewhat ‘in’ right now. Their faces can be like totally paired with some vintage Levi’s and white Converse for that so West Coast vintage look (hashtag paid ad).

Whilst not all wide-eyed Arcadia worshipping 20 somethings care about the countercultural connotations of wearing say, a Jefferson Airplane T-shirt to the office, it’s exciting to see those flowery radical rhetorics and insurgent images lining streets being occupied by Extinction Rebellion protesters and marching on parliament. The Airplane, a band who (despite eventually becoming the face of the late seventies’ burgeoning Capitalist Rock scene, Jefferson Starship) put out one of the Woodstock Nation’s most important statements with ‘We Can Be Together’, the opening track of 1969’s Volunteers. Lifting its refrain from a pamphlet written by Catalan Dada-influenced painter, Ben Morea, a founding member of New York’s anarchist affinity group, The Motherfuckers, the song’s core sentiment (‘Tear down the walls, motherfucker’) is as vital on a global scale today as it was in the context of the conflict in Vietnam.

Great music maybe shouldn’t have to be the bed-mate of great philosophical or political ideas to be great, granted, but never has a period and a genre of music been so pinned to a cultural movement as the rock and roll of the extended sixties and the Hippy movement. ‘When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake’, Plato said in The Republic and, for me, there’s nothing that shakes the walls of the city, of my skull, or of my rib cage as hard as a great piece of music. The Woodstock Nation’s mode of music lost that power after Altamont which, for most, proved to be the death of flower power. Anyway, to paraphrase Morea’s Black Mask posters of the late sixties, flower power was never going to stop fascist power. That’s not important. It was never important. However gluttonously the record companies allowed revolution to become a fashion statement and however aware of that you become as a listener to Country Joe and the Fish or Hendrix or Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell or The Airplane in 2020, it doesn’t stop the walls of your brain from shaking. Yes, bands at Woodstock played along with radical rhetoric onstage to sap the last bits of life out of dehydrated runaway teenagers high on acid and then fought over their fees backstage, but it didn’t matter one bit to those teenagers and it matters very little to any listener until you overthink the thickness of the glass in popular history’s rose tinted Ray-Bans and the walls of the city come crashing down on you.

The nostalgia for a certain time or certain scene that you’ve never even lived through is beautiful whilst Jean Shepherd’s call to, ‘RISE UP AND ABANDON THE CREEPING

MEATBALL’ means something. As soon as it’s lost in Topshop Tees and hashtag vintage vibes, it starts to take something away from the music that stops you punching strangers in the face on morning bus rides and that scares me. If great music or great art makes you happy it shouldn’t matter that its creators don’t believe in its message, right? It shouldn’t matter that Jagger never had any intention of being a Street Fightin’ Man but knew that protest was trending in 1968, right? It shouldn’t matter that The Doors sold, ‘Light my Fire’ to the Buick car company and then preached ‘breaking on through’ to lost and desperate teenagers seeking somebody to follow? It’s a real bummer of a line of questioning to contend with. We are powerless to stop the flaws of other humans crippling this kind of vicarious nostalgia which we rely on them so heavily to experience. Realising that love of music relies much more heavily on real people you actually know and appreciate than hollow caricatures of initially interesting, plagiarising charlatans can be pretty liberating.

If the power music is imagined to have, in a sociopolitical sense, has been exaggerated all along and facades of songs endowing power to the people or leading to satisfaction past the purely carnal were conceived in mendacity, that’s not to say that music has no power at all. Truthfully, my pals and I got so deep into music, in part, because of a subconscious belief that a deep knowledge of lost, obscure Zappa B-sides would make us more interesting. To some extent, it did and, for the somewhat socially inept, pasty faced grammar school boy with the confidence of a baby bird being shepherded out of the nest by a mother who has just condemned three flightless bastards to the ether, intense love of music became my one discernible characteristic. Burrowing deeper and deeper into sounds and scenes became enmeshed in my definition of who I was and, beyond the superficial yearning to have something to separate me from other people, it allowed me to better understand the confines of my own head. If I didn’t know how I was feeling, Karen Dalton would, you know? If I

‘There’s something entirely unique about the understanding between two humans listening to beautiful music in silence. Breathing synchronises, nostrils flare in and out in unison, pupils dilate, hands shake, lips dry out and, for four minutes and thirty seconds, there’s no wind, no rain, no cold, no sunlight and no darkness (we would often be vastly underprepared for these ventures, clothing, torches and umbrella-wise), just a mutual understanding.’

couldn’t work out how to look people in the eye one morning, Metal Machine Music would blast the cobwebs out and guide me towards assimilation. Perhaps more importantly, if I felt lonely or afraid, there were not only dozens of bands wrapped up in paisley or suede or leather, there were my pals, who ‘got it’.

This notion of being ‘got’, of being on the same page, of being understood, of the workings of your brain and each cell mutation being mapped out and appreciated by another human, is as deathly important in adulthood as it was to a seventeen year old me, but I don’t know that I’ve felt it so plainly and unapologetically since then. The period of discovery between the age of fifteen and say, twenty, holds sky shattering potential. With an understanding by this point of how much effort you need to put in at school to get whichever piece of paper with whatever letter on it that your mother desires you attain, ‘free’ time increases and the scope of your interactions diversifies. You’re reading more broadly; you read Huxley because Jim Morrison read Huxley and he was interesting, so you develop an interest in experimenting with drugs; you (inevitably) read the early beats and the synapses of your brain erupt in thunderous excitement; you read Henry Miller and all you want to do is explore the bodies of strangers; you read Hunter S Thompson, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, Truman Capote, Malcolm X, Pablo Neruda and with a wild orchestra of their words bouncing around your brain constantly, you are presented with a blank canvas of a world and a million opportunities.

One particular buddy of mine and I approached this period influenced by a similar body of worthy works, with similar sensibilities and similar tolerances for whichever poisons we wished to experiment with at any given time. The town we grew up in has this quite unknown, under appreciated and rarely explored wasteland stretching out of its arsehole and into a Thames estuary where we’d just take these four or five hour walks, get high and drunk or whatever, sometimes talk of romantic dalliances, higher powers, football, the meaning of life etc but mostly just listen to music. There’s something entirely unique about the understanding between

two humans listening to beautiful music in silence. Breathing synchronises, nostrils flare in and out in unison, pupils dilate, hands shake, lips dry out and, for four minutes and thirty seconds, there’s no wind, no rain, no cold, no sunlight and no darkness (we would often be vastly underprepared for these ventures, clothing, torches and umbrella-wise), just a mutual understanding. ‘The Long One’ on the second side of Abbey Road (the medley of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ through to ‘The End’) used to bring on this state of chemically altered mutual understanding on a regular basis, as did Dark Side of the Moon on repeat for four hours, the first Doors album and each moment of superfluous Jimmy Page soloing wherever we could find it in the crevices of Led Zep I to III. Gazing out into the brown abyss of the river Medway and cracking open a third bag of budget corner shop brand potato based snacks/supermarket cookies, we ‘got it’.

The friend in question and I went to different universities, he’s since moved to China and both of us continue to search for that indomitable power of music in the shadows of every day existence. Through the dark magic of the internet, we communicate primarily through sending songs we’ve been writing back and forth and it’s a ritual I’d be lost without. It’s through these intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with real people that music reveals its true power, not through its half baked messages of political urgency. I’ve been spending time in my home town again recently and when I’m sat at my mother’s piano playing ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, I’m not lambasting the wasted opportunities thrown asunder by sixties rock and roll bands with the power to change the world who neglected to do so, I’m remembering bashing that same piano at three in the morning with my pal after getting through six litres of White Ace and two bottles of blackcurrant squash. It’s so easy to get caught up in assigning too much meaning to a whole bunch of stuff that gives human beings a reason to carry on - music, art, film, literature, sex, love, family, financial security, twitter followers - but it’s in the overwrought thoughts and contemplating on this meaning that real power and beauty is lost.

People who got too caught up in ‘tearing down the walls (,motherfucker)’, missed Jefferson Airplane play Woodstock because they were sat in prison cells after the Yippie protests at the Democratic National Convention the year before. Too caught up in abandoning the creeping meatball, in shedding the shackles of creeping capitalist comfort, in commune living, in anarchy, in ‘free’ love, people missed an avalanche of beautiful music in the late sixties. Sixty years later, I still get hung up on it and let it cloud my judgement and enjoyment of things which are objectively just great bits of music played by great musicians who are good friends. That’s the crux of it. Yes, music isn’t like it used to be, but there never was a ‘used to be’, it’s always been a business. Abbie Hoffman put it best; ‘loving rock music just makes you a good consumer. It was only revolutionary because we said it was’. Who cares that loving something makes you a consumer cog in the capitalist machine if it brings you joy? Being a cynic gets you nowhere and I’ve found that it drags you further and further away from cosmos colliding drug fuelled awakenings experienced in post-apocalyptic suburban wastelands after school, which can only be a bad thing.