WE WENT DARK

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-17-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     In my other, other life, I've been a rock & roll musician for as far back as I can remember. Actually a lot further back than that, because rock & roll musicians can rarely remember back very far. It's been one of the great passions of my life, and as in other forms of art, there is no better way to process the trials and tribulations of life than to create something that says what normal words, such as "pandemics REALLY suck," cannot say. So I wrote a song about it. It's called "We Went Dark (love in the age of the coronavirus)," and I recorded it in my basement on my cheap 8-track digital recorder. I play all of the instruments on the recording, not because I'm such a great musician, but because when you tell your musician friends that you wrote a song about a highly contagious incurable disease and you'd like them to come over to your house and play on it, you might as well write a song about a dialtone.

     Not to be content with that (it's been a long, long quarantine), I decided to make a video to go with it. If you have four minutes to spare you can give it a listen at the YouTube link below, if you can fit it in between cat videos. I probably should have put some cats into the video, now that I think of it, penguins would have been even better. Or put the word "challenge" in the title and thought of something poisonous for people to swallow during the song. That would have increased my hits and made my song a hit. But it's just me, my camcorder and a cheap editing program, and if you want to swallow anything poisonous, that's hopefully not my fault.

     To mix things up a bit I had my two female bandmates sing in the chorus. I've never been in a band with two women before this one and it's a little different than playing with the guys. With the guys, you could drop a ten-foot Steinway grand piano out of a two-storey window straight onto the lead guitarist's head, and once the dust had settled the drummer, completely stunned, would say, "I didn't know we had a piano player." By comparison, when I'm in a band with two girls, I'm the odd man out, because I'm a man, and because I'm a little odd. I'll give you an illustration to show you what it's like: Pretend I just killed someone, like say, the guy who wrote the "Kars for Kids" jingle, and I refused to confess (although in real life I'd be kind of proud of that). The cops say we want you two girls to wear a wire, and  get him to admit it, do you have any questions? And one or the other would ask, "What color is the wire? Because I think I know what I'm going to wear with it."

     I bought a green screen and boned up on my special effects for the video. I'm pretty sure a nine-year old on Tik Tok could have done the same thing in about 15 minutes, but it took me three months. Part of the reason it took me so long was because of the facial hair. I play each instrument wearing different hair, and I remember sitting outside on the deck with my wife after more than two but less than six margaritas, thinking of different types of facial hair every band member could wear. The conversation was over once I realized how inane it was, and that fact that I ran out of margarita mix at the same time was purely a coincidence.

     However, I soon found out that I hate wearing a beard, and I can't believe that there are baseball players and sculptors and psychoanalysts and such that always have one. In fact, during the pandemic, just about everyone I know grew one, even the women. But I couldn't wait to get rid of it. After I took a shower it simply refused to dry, and food would end up in it, not even necessarily my food, and what if I got it caught in a metal lathe or broke off in an ice storm? A life with a wet, frozen beard full of food chewed up by a metal lathe was not for me, so I had some other variations on the theme, but nothing too extravagant. It's not like I could put my hair in a bun or anything, even if I had a bun that could hold all of it, and I limited myself to hairstyles that could be achieved in prison.

     The outtakes at the end of the video prove how valuable it is to have a qualified stunt man to do the things that you should have the common sense not to do. For instance, when I was walking my dog in the woods in back of my house I noticed this Tarzan vine, and I thought, wow, I should videotape myself swinging from this vine, and who knows, maybe it will give health insurance claims adjusters something to think about in their spare time. I don't know how people usually find out that you shouldn't swing from a Tarzan vine after you've had two knee surgeries, but I found out the easy way. Another shot I wanted to get was of me spinning around on a chair with the camera trained on me, so that it would look like the world was spinning around behind me. All of a sudden I'm Stanley Kubrick, only not as easy to work with. So I wedged a swivel chair between two logs in the woods and pointed the camera at my face. It's the type of thing that if your mother caught you doing, she'd say, "Don't do that, you'll break your neck." And if you kept on doing it SHE would break your neck to speed up the process. Long story short, I almost broke my neck.

     In closing, let me just say that as artists, we all suffer for our art. And during a pandemic, we suffer in solitude. So I can't wait until this whole thing is over and I can share my suffering with YOU.