Thorazine, Wire Art, Syd Barrett and Me
The flipside of that is the fact that the music can’t be any better than you allow it to be. There are many who think the only reason that Syd is a legend is that he “trashed himself,” in fact one guy once told me he can go to the psych center any day of the week and run into somebody who plays guitar, so what’s the point? Wild Man Fischer and Skip Spence are similar cases, and who weeps for them?
Ah, but that random loony wouldn’t sound like Syd. Which is not to say that it wouldn’t necessarily be good music--many schizophrenics happen to be great artists, even if relatively few of the Great Artists have been out-and-out schizophrenics. For the usual idiotic reasons, the criteria for being taken seriously as a Great Artist only occasionally have anything to do with the quality of the art. It doesn’t matter how stunning a painting or a piece of sculpture or a song may be, when word gets around that the artist’s perception of some of the more basic fundamentals of “reality” places them in a particular statistical minority, it’s no longer a lovely painting or a beautiful song; it’s the artifact of a “diseased,” pitiable mind--at best, to be slobbered over in some voyeuristic fashion but never to be valued for whatever truth it might perceive, whatever principle it might embody, whatever verity it could teach to its pale, dim, uncomprehending spectators. Even among the “creative community,” one can needn’t look far to find such bigotries alive and well, even though it’s one of the hoariest of clichés that the most creative people are precisely those whose mental processes most closely match those of the schizophrenic.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to imply that the random loony pulled from the psych center with guitar in hand would necessarily be capable of good music either. I mean, I’ve played with people like that (and not just in high school garage bands), just offhand I could name a “guitarist” who would change chords at random intervals (he glared at me when I got up to leave, taking it as a personal betrayal, “you’re just like all the rest of them!”), or a “vocalist” who was perfectly content to “explore the sound” of wordless, croaking death-rattles for upwards of an hour and thought that heavy metal music was a tool of human psychic evolution and felt that her own laryngeal modulations were put on this earth to accelerate the process.
These associations have been necessarily brief. One has to draw the line somewhere, and where I draw it is the person’s ability to function within a structure. (Or if they’ve invented a new system, that there be nothing half-assed about it and that others can gain something from using it.) It’s not that there’s something holy about any particular system, and in fact there’s nothing wrong with breaking all the rules of the form that happen to get in your way, so long as the end result is worth it. Once in awhile one should, at least whenever necessary to make a specific point. But such a gesture can only have meaning so long as there’s an existing structure there for the smashing. And that’s necessary for the same reason that I chop all these words so neatly into paragraphs; capitalized and punctuated, just as you like them. I could do without these things, in fact it may indeed be unnecessary labor on my part to press the space bar between words, but the cold fact is that you would move on from here for the same reason as I abandoned the “guitarist” and the “vocalist” mentioned above--neither they nor I would be putting out anything so utterly valuable as to be worth all the extra work involved in appreciating it.
Although having said that, I have to note that I have sampled thorazine, and learned to respect its power. It’s a great story--I was in a bar at 3 a.m. and struck up a conversation with the odd guy next to me; inevitable since it was just us and the bartender in there anyway. He’s a wire artist: give him a roll of wire, half an hour and twenty bucks and he’ll fashion a tugboat, a cathedral, a harpsichord, a Eurocentric view of world history, whatever you ask. I wasn’t in the market for anything, but wanted to know how he got his start.
“Thorazine,” he told me. “I was in the institution and they gave me thorazine, and you wouldn’t believe the dreams that stuff will give you. I was out of my body and floating down the tunnel of light, and there was this magnificent Being at the end of it, his head radiating every color of the rainbow. I was so blown away that all I could do was ask his name.
“‘I am Pharaoh,’ he said. When I heard that, I was scared, and got down on my knees to bow to him and pray to him. And he didn’t like it at all. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘I am no god; I am not so far above you nor are so so far below me, that you should be worshipping me. I am no god, I am a teacher.’
“I said, ‘Well, then...teach me!’ And Pharaoh did. He taught me: wire art!” Hmpf. Laugh if you want to, but the guy does wonderful work. Since he’s otherwise unemployable (more accurately, perfectly employable but unlikely ever to be hired), this is how he supports himself. If he says he has the Pharaoh of thorazine to thank, who am I to contradict him? Nobody at all, until I know more about thorazine and wire art than either him or his Pharaoh.
I can report on my experience with the thorazine he gave me, except that it wasn’t nearly as interesting. I met no Being, learned no new skill. I did have strange dreams, and was ridiculously docile for a few days, to the point where the return to “normal” wasn’t altogether disappointing. I never went out of my way to track him down and get some more--tripping on thorazine was not at all unpleasant, but I can see the devastation a steady diet of the stuff could inflict over time, and shudder to think how indiscriminately the stuff is prescribed. One size fits all? Hardly. One guy meets his spirit guide and learns a trade, the next can’t even play rhythm guitar anymore because even when he can remember where the 1-2-3-4 is he finds such constraints too annoying to bother with. Torn and fluttering between those two extremes was Syd Barrett.
Which brings us back to the topic of why I usually try to avoid making music with schizophrenics. (Although if the wire artist had been a musician instead, I’d have been interested to jam with him.) A more concise way of saying it is that the most of the ones I’ve encountered weren’t good enough for me, because their music wasn’t remotely as good as Syd’s. (Don’t feel bad, even Syd was dumped by his band...) Even though it would be utterly myopic to expect anybody else to sound like Syd. Nobody ever did before, and nobody ever has since (without owing him an obvious debt).
For those who find themselves utterly immune to his charms, I can only point to the hold he (not even Syd anymore--just the sad, shriveled ghost, condemned to sleepwalk the earth inside a body that calls itself Roger) exerts even now upon his fans: no-one buys everything an artist ever did, then runs out and scores every bootleg that comes along, for no better reason than that the artist “trashed himself”--they do so because it’s still possible to hear a bit of the magic that made him matter in the first place, and because the music he managed to make in that brief span of time allotted to him still speaks to people 25 years later, and will still be speaking to people 25 years from now, so much so that they will grasp at the faintest and murkiest of echoes, knowing all the while that there will never be enough and there will never be any more.
These are the kind of fans Syd has, and he earned them. And then some: even today there are fanboys who “know where Syd Barrett lives” and knock on his door, hoping for an audience with the lord and master. Syd did not earn fans like that--only in the sense that a ship earns barnacles. Would it be a comfort to him to know that some of Dylan’s fans are just as bad, and one of Lennon’s was even worse? They were two of his idols, way back when. A.J. Weberman rummaging through Dylan’s garbage cans is one of the in-jokes of rock’n’roll, but that’s the least of it--even before his born-again phase, people would show up at Bob’s house on acid and tell him the ten commandments. Or he’d wake up in the morning and find his windows painted black. (“Why me? That was Jagger’s song!”) I’ve heard of one fanzine that tracked his daily itinerary for a week or two; they did as good a job of surveilance as any private detective agency...no, it’s better Syd doesn’t know of such things; he’d never leave the house again.
There are plenty of times when I figure it doesn’t much matter either way. There’s a quote from Charles Manson that I’ll bring on, not because I’m a fan (I’m neither pro nor con--don’t play his album much, either) but because it’s so well-spoken, and eerily apropos:
It’s said that Sirhan Sirhan relieves the boredom of his life sentence via self-hypnosis and astral projection as well. I flashed that quote for someone who was writing a book on Manson, and she felt it was “exactly the sort of pretentious bullshit” for which she’s always wanted to tell Charlie “to go stuff it up his...” I told her, “Yeah, but wouldn’t you love to hear a conversation between him and Sirhan on the subject? ‘There’s this great deli on Saturn’s fifth moon, see...’”
“So for you people who are filled with the fear that I might someday be released: breathe easy, I don’t see it happening. And for you people who are victims of all the hype that portrays me as a charismatic cult leader, guru, lover, pied piper, or another Jesus, I want you to know I’ve got everything in the world, and beyond, right here. My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So, save your sympathy and know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.” --Charles Manson
Back here on earth, Syd would be the last person to encourage anyone to romanticize him. He won’t even answer to the name Syd anymore. (It’s Roger Barrett, by birth.) His family reports that he gets a little better every year, is fairly happy, and is doing fine so long as people give him his space and don’t mention the name Pink Floyd to him--he can’t comprehend why anyone should bug him about any of that at his late date anyhow; and he’s probably right. Though if I had five minutes and permission to speak freely, I’d tell him it’s all very simple: it’s partly the Legend, but also the fact that the music was just that good, that those who know will still make a fuss over it. And he should take some pride in that.
Sadly, there are rumors that his fans are the least of his concerns--that he’s been hospitalized again; not for his mental problems, but with diabetes. His beloved mother passed on a few years back, and his depression is such that he’ll either forget or can’t be bothered to take his insulin, is nearly blind and on several occasions has slipped into a coma. I’ve also seen that denied somewhere, but until the next biography or one of his relatives breaks the silence there’s no way to be sure.
However it ends, this is all that will matter: Syd Barrett was once a brilliant songwriter, and he was often a delightful human being. If some take him for a “hero,” it’s because he struggled daily with emotional problems that nobody would choose to endure. He managed, however briefly, to overcome his various impediments and create music that continued to touch people long after he was gone, music that will last. He deserves to be remembered that way and respected for these accomplishments, and many of us do just that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go play my Rhamadam boot.
--melodylaughter--
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