Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #239
Guest Post by Dave Dorsey + "New Year" by Joseph Washington Jr. - 09/13/21
Today we have a guest post from an old friend of mine’s father, who I’ve known for about just as long: Dave Dorsey. As fellow writers and readers, Dave and I have talked about books, music, movies, and spirituality/religion over the years, and he was with me and his son for a lot of our formative cultural adventures. Dave’s also a painter, and I have a number of pieces of his work in my place here in LA.
Check them out:
That last one is actually me! Moving Dave’s son into college. Sporting the orange of Syracuse University.
OK, here’s a more formal bio!
Dave Dorsey is a painter whose work has been exhibited over the past decade in the U.S. and Europe at museums, galleries and universities (CV). He's also an author and writer. His blog on visual art is at: www.thedorseypost.com. He's the author of The Force, published in the 90s, which was a critical and commercial success. The New York Times said it was "Highly compelling . . .The Force manages to combine some of the chilling fascination of David Mamet's play about Florida land salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross, with the sympathy of that play's forerunner, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman." Harvard Business Review called it: "A brilliant chronicle of life in the real world of contemporary business." He works with Peter Georgescu writing books and posts at Forbes.com to promote stakeholder capitalism as a new paradigm for how business can restore social and economic balance to the nation and communities around the U.S. and the world.
(That's [my son’s] dog Billy ([his wife] calls him Bills all the time) on my t-shirt: he's Buffalo Bills now. (A friend of [my son’s] made a set of the shirts for them and I think I'm the only one who kept mine.)
OK, take it away, Dave!
Unbridled energy
(The music that helped make my day this weekend wasn’t entirely random, and so synchronicity wasn’t entirely operative in our enjoyment of it, but its connection to what was happening in our lives when we listened to it wasn’t entirely intentional. My son as DJ was just playing what he happened to be listening to recently and then reacting to my comments.)
My son bought us tickets for the Buffalo Bills opener this past weekend, so we stocked up the car and drove the hour and a half from Rochester to Orchard Park, full of excitement, prepared for the start of a historic season for our football team. It’s expected to be the best chance the Bills have since the early 90s for winning a Super Bowl. We parked near where his and his sister’s friends from high school were tailgating and spent a couple hours enjoying the company and the elated pre-game football madness that becomes a part of your sense of the world if you live near an NFL team. He said, “We had to get these tickets. It will be insane. A year of no fans at the games because of the pandemic. The best team they’ve had in thirty years. Perfect storm.” It was indeed crazy. Whenever the Steelers had the ball on third down, the Bills fans cranked it up to 11, louder than the Buzzcocks when I saw them in Ybor City more than twenty years ago, and that’s roughly equivalent to a jet engine at fifty paces. Yet it was a weird, sluggish first quarter. By the second, it looked as if Josh Allen and his receivers had gotten their rhythm, but it faltered after the half and the defense seemed to lose the thread. It was a strange, Groundhog’s Day experience to see this ostensibly perfect team lose their first game. I felt bad for my son. He’d become a devoted Bills fan around the age of six, just in time to see them lose the Super Bowl repeatedly back in the early 90s and have his heart broken more than once in quick succession. It involved watching a little boy shed quiet tears. This game felt like a premonition of déjà vu, if that’s a thing, and on the ride home he was silent and sulking. Not exactly sulking, but he was hurt, if only because the game touched old, unhealed wounds only the devoted fan of an NFL team carries around.
I tried conversation, with no luck. As I drove, I got my wife on the phone via Bluetooth and Apple Play and told her, “Cheer him up.” Our call got dropped before that happened, so I told him to put on a podcast or something. Instead, I was happy to hear he’d queued up Bloc Party: Helicopter, Banquet and This Modern Love.
“Helicopter” by Bloc Party
“Banquet” by Bloc Party
“This Modern Love” by Bloc Party
When he sent me a link to a concert video of Helicopter a week or so ago, I texted him: “That’s punk basically. Love it.” It brought back to me how good they were when they emerged, but also how I hadn’t spent enough time listening to them. “This stuff is powerful, but it’s complex. Unpredictable. They make surprising decisions. But it’s just great rock and roll.” I told him it reminded me a little—not the sound but the quality of their unpredictable choices—of Vampire Weekend. We’d seen them a couple years ago—with Dave Cowen, as a matter of fact—at the Hollywood Bowl on tour for their most recent album; one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended.
Hearing Bloc Party again, I said, “This is so powerful. But for power nothing will ever equal Evil Empire. Nobody will top that.” He put on Bulls on Parade.
"Bulls On Parade” by Rage Against The Machine
And we went from there through a short playlist from Rage Against the Machine, and it sounded even better than I remembered. It got him talking a little. It isn’t rap and it isn’t heavy metal, but some kind of hybrid that is just more powerful than anything else in the last thirty years. Crisp, with little precise interpolations of silence here and there, guitar work that somehow manages to be music without ever once being melodic: Morello makes the guitar speak and beg and complain and keen without ever requiring it to sing. And it’s perfect for the revolutionary, Communist creed these true-believing incendiary musicians keep driving into your ears. It’s so good because it’s so honest and devoted to what they believed was the truth then, and probably still do. I think their faith in class warfare is more or less the enemy of what this country is all about, but their integrity, their fidelity to what they believe, as wrong-headed as it is, and their ability to turn it into incredibly powerful sound makes me want to hear them again and again.
We talked about all of that as my son was typing into his phone, calling up Bombs Over Baghdad from Stankonia.
“B.O.B. - Bombs Over Baghdad” by Outkast
(The weird thing is that I had been thinking about Outkast only a couple weeks ago wondering where they had gone.)
The brilliance of that track, the wit, the surprises, the production values, the intelligence that went into their frenetic, lightning-fast hiphop and then over-the-top demented but amazing official video for it (which I watched when I got home)
Were like a taste of something that’s all but disappeared in music. It’s just brilliant pop music, even though it’s also tongue-in-cheek, a send up of hiphop video tropes that ends with a church choir. At the same time it’s seriously great, the way Mackelmore is great: mocking but also embodying what it mocks perfectly in such a way that it’s irresistible, as a piece of music. I said, “I’ll bet when Dr. Dre heard this for the first time he said to himself: Well OK then. Duly noted.” There’s no way for Dr. Dre to assimilate Outkast, nor should he, and that’s part of what’s great about both of them, but they both sit at the top of their games in their own ways.
To finish off, as we took the exit to Rochester, my son played the latest John Mayer, a pastiche of 80s music:
“New Light” by John Mayer
“It’s a bit. It’s an 80s record. It’s a send up.” I said, “Yeah, but it’s also good. He’s saying to his critics, I can even do this and yeah, it’s a little funny but guess what, it’s good. Eat your heart out haters.”
By the time we got home, my son was in good spirits and so was I—at my age a football game is just a football game, and I’d been taking the loss in stride even before we got back to the back yard where we’d parked my Telluride for $15. Still, rock and roll hath powers to soothe the inner six-year-old. Undeniable, unbridled energy is what I wanted most from rock and roll and any pop music, when I was a kid. It’s been true ever since. That energy is harder and harder to come by in music. Yet it was there in the car on the way home after the loss. It was there in the stands at the Bills game, too. In our relatively cheap end zone seats in the stands, I leaned over once and asked my son, “Isn’t that Lenny Kravitz they’re playing?” It was actually hard to hear the song above the thundering fans. It was.
"Are You Gonna Go My Way” by Lenny Kravitz
Kravitz sang: “You got to breathe and have some fun . . . I play this game and I won't stop until I'm done.”
Dave! Thanks so much, my man!! Felt like I was really there with you guys reading this piece!!!
Something about it and the song I got today made me think of this recent New Yorker interview with Wes Anderson for his new movie The French Dispatch and Wes’s book, The Editor’s Burial, about the writing that inspired it (largely from The New Yorker).
Not only because I read my first New Yorker magazines at y’all’s house, but because the interviewer, Susan Morrison, says in it: “There’s a psychological theory that says what we tend to be most nostalgic for is a period in time that is several years before our own birth—when our parents’ romance might have been at its peak. The technical term for the phenomenon is ‘cascading reminiscence bump.’”
I first thought of this phenomenon when I heard the lyrics to my song today after I had read your piece:
"New Year” by Joseph Washington Jr.
Which talks about the years right before your son was born!
New year, I’m gonna do the things I didn’t do, in 1982…I’m gonna have myself a good time, this coming year.
It also made me reflect on the songs your son chose to play from Bloc Party from 2005, which is right around the time he met and fell in love with the mother of his own children.
Another synchronicity I noticed is that Outkast and Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine actually released a remix of B.O.B. (Bombs over Baghdad) that they did 20 years ago for the 20th anniversary of the 2000 album last year in 2020.
B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad) by Outkast, Zach de la Rocha
“Zack added an extra layer of grunge to a masterpiece,” Big Boi told Rolling Stone, while Andre 3000 added, “I’m a fan of the sound so it was an honor to have them involved in a remix.”
And the last synchronicity I noticed, but not the least, is that you guys played the new John Mayer album after driving to the Buffalo area less than a month after the three of us drove out to the Buffalo area to see John Mayer play with the Grateful Dead’s offshoot Dead & Company where we heard this:
“Friend of the Devil” by Dead & Company
To remix that song’s lyrics, I’ll conclude by saying:
A parent of a friend is a friend of mine ;)
Okay, that’s the two hundred and thirty-ninth Shuffle Synchronicities.
Today, in Other! Substacks, check out Harmony Holiday’s Substack Black Music and Muses recent post ‘Cancel Yourself’. I think it’s one of the best music Substacks out there, particularly in its use of memoir as well, and I’m currently a monthly Subscriber.