Since You Went Solo
"And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes/I'll see you on the dark side of the moon..." ("Brain Damage", Pink Floyd)
Hey Ian,
I'm having one of those bouts of insomnia again. I think this is the third night without any real sleep, and I worry I may just keel over on stage and slip right into that bright white light like one of those crazy Asian gamers.
As it often occurs in the late hours, my thoughts wander to wherever you are in the world. I’m sitting in some hotel room in fucking Helsinki looking out the window, where everything is black and white like one of those engravings of the Inferno by Gustave Doré I remember you obsessing about.
Things have not been the same since you decided to go solo. A lot has happened, none of it particularly related to the band or the new deal with Sony. Sally and Jamie got divorced, as I am sure you have heard, at least if you are following the gossip magazines. She did backing vocals on Time Warp, but we all felt kind of tense during the recordings.
Jamie is back on Citalopram, which does not do wonders for his songs. Nobody notices, when we perform live, but we argue more about the material he comes up with, and we discard more. It nearly came to violence in California last summer, between Jamie and Rocky Nisham. You know Rocky; he doesn't take shit. And Jamie certainly knows how to dish it. So, we pressured him to see a doctor, and he did.
The rest of us have been pretty much clean for 18 months. Pretty much means except for Daley, who commutes back and forth to the rehab centre and his Jungian-Hungarian shrink in Solvang.
For what it is worth, I see your point now, that we are all interconnected.
The entire "Bob Theory" you were developing makes more sense to me now: How the Jewish Bob was transformed into the Christian Bob. How the African Bob is the universal Bob, the part of the other Bob that was never fully acknowledged. Why the betrayal was two-sided and a backlash against the spirit of 68 inevitable.
It just didn’t make that much sense to us all at that point. We were all surprised that you became so fucking angry. I mean, to us, at the time, it all sounded like a lot of, well, Bob, Bob, Bob. And when you proceeded to talk about fucking Abba and Pink Floyd and Eminem, well, hey, my mind just couldn't contain the contradictions.
The rest of us did not want to take ourselves so seriously all of a sudden. We certainly weren’t thrilled to have the political content moved into a central position. It sounded an awful lot like preaching, and we felt there just isn’t room in the world for another Bono.
In December we happened to meet Charles Manson in Corcoran State Prison, and that was certainly creepy. I don’t know if it was me – you know how you can sometimes get fixed on one face in the audience, so it becomes almost impossible to concentrate – but it was like he was staring directly into my soul. He had this ironic grin on his face all the time, as if he was saying: “I will get you too.”
Somehow I don’t think Johnny Cash ever stumbled into strange callbacks like that.
One thing is certain: I will not be able to listen to Hotel California or Whiter Shade of Pale again in the same way I did before our conversations. You did manage to change that with your autodidact music history lessons. I figure that's why guys like you exists, Ian. The world needs people who will start a riot just for the hell of it.
Also, we have done a lot to try and break the sort of insular state we got caught up in. Jaclyn got us booked for a concert in support of the Iranian freedom fighters, and we thought: “What the hell”, and then we thought: “Ian would have liked that.”
So, are you still in Hobart? Have you played any gigs since Singapore? Are you working on a new album or just passing time on the beach? That was the last I saw of you, looking like a caveman or – no offense – some kind of Jim Morrison imitator with a cross dressing fetish (referring to the sarong and the sandals in the latest shoot on your website).
Anyway, we talked it over, the few of us who remain from the original ensemble, the old “brotherhood of jacks”, and we want to ask you if you’d show up for the concert in North Carolina. It is exactly the kind of deal you proposed, before you became sick of it all and decided to split. We are there right now – ready to strike a blow for the kids in Tehran. We’re pumped about the idea.
I know it is not a revolution, but maybe it is a first step towards change. These kids deserve to be able to speak freely, listen to whatever music they dig and dress the way they want to. Maybe someday we will be able to play in front of them on Azadi Square.
You can think of this invite as a last reunion, a token of goodwill between us, a chalice of good spirits offered in friendship, or maybe as a chance of things that fell apart coming back to Together.
It’s a charity, but I will pay for your ticket, and Aislinn offers to throw in a bottle of Knappogue. She misses you, she says, even if she’s with that dancer now, the bald one with the abs she met on The Cringman Show, if you caught that.
How about it, buddy? Are you game?
Your long lost pal,
T.