VENUS
by Mike DeCapite

And I fell right into the arms
of Venus de Milo
Tom Verlaine

Someone who didn’t know any better might have gotten the impression, watching the opening installments of the recent PBS documentary series “The Blues”, that one bluesman is about the same as another, that to be Charley Patton or Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, all you had to do was be a black guy who came from a plantation in Mississippi. As though the great artistry of these men had something to do with working around mules.

The standard approach seems to be that the beauty and originality of this music depends on the humbleness and desperation of its origins. There’s always some character in a rental car driving down Highway 61 talking about how you can just feel the music down here, the “mud and blood” from which it sprang. It’s like riding around the English countryside on a horse talking about how you can just hear King Lear and Hamlet in the air. Like Shakespeare, the music made by a handful of these men is a miracle, and unexplainable by sociology, politics, nostalgia, or moral outrage. All that stuff-the poverty, the racial issues, the apocrypha-is just the mythology surrounding the blues, which has nothing to do with the artistry of the music.

Ry Cooder once described “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground” as the most transcendent piece of American music he knew. You’d have a hard time appreciating this, watching “The Blues”, because Wim Wenders doesn’t let you hear enough of Blind Willie Johnson’s version for you to get it. Instead, he cuts to a version played by a present-day blues docent on a soundstage. It’s like making a documentary about Rembrandt using modern-day artist renderings, and then further confusing the issue by shooting artificially-aged black-and-white footage of an actor at an easel dressed in shabby 17th-Century clothes. If the filmmakers were going to take subjective approach, they should have allowed the music to speak for itself. The profound, nearly abstract beauty of “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground” has nothing to do with the fact that Willie Johnson was blind, or that he played on streetcorners in Texas with a tin cup for money. Hence Ry Cooder’s term “transcendent”. The music transcends not only Johnson’s circumstances but the blues as well. (It finally transcended even the Earth, as Wenders affectingly shows by playing it against footage shot from outer space, in honor of the song’s inclusion with other important music on the Voyager mission.)

*

“...thy truth then be thy dower!”
King Lear

The other night I went over to the Fillmore to see Television, who are back in action. The bandmembers look like they’ve been living by the demands of their music for thirty years and it’s worn them out, drained them, prevented them from happiness or comfort. The four of them came out looking like a very unhappy family. While tuning up, Tom Verlaine let go a little private smile and he was missing a couple of teeth.

By the middle of the second song I looked around at the crowd and felt that something was happening. I told my friend Charlie, “This is like a cult meeting.” The interplay of the two guitars opened a space where something else could come to life or be revealed. Some animation took over the room and lifted me out of myself, and the crowd, with me in it, was now one organism.
Tom Verlaine builds time machines. He puts together songs as clever as the inner workings of a watch, contraptions which are capable of transporting you not to another time but beyond time. Television’s songs work in the same way that psychoactive drugs work: by altering your perceptions of time’s flow. The self stops where time stops. Where time stops, beauty starts.

The former Pere Ubu drummer Scott Krauss says that at one point during a Television show at CBGB in the 1970s he felt “like the drugs had just kicked in.” Tony Maimone says about that same show that by the encore he could see black lines bouncing in the air from floor to ceiling. (In their Television liner notes, John Piccarella and Robert Christgau attached the word synaesthesia to Television. When I saw them here in March at the Great American Music Hall, the band created a roar like a jet engine and I smelled jet fuel for about two minutes. There was probably some logical explanation for this, but my willingness to credit Television with it, even as a possibility, is evidence of their power. Over me, anyway.)

This kind of effect has nothing in common with, say, 60,000 people singing along with Bruce Springsteen when he plays “Born To Run”. It has nothing to do with familiarity or personal associations, it’s not a personal feeling. It’s different from that convergence of music and moment which makes you feel like you’re in a movie. This is an out-of-self, beyond-time sensation. It's not a sentimental fancy or something which can be faked or manufactured inside yourself. It either happens or it doesn't.

When it does, you realize that something in the music has taken shape, and stood up on two legs, and is staring you right in the eyes.

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