Passion and the Artist:
a meditation
by: Hubert O’Hearn
June 24, 2011
Alright, so I’m a YouTube junkie. I admit it. I enjoy it. It’s an addiction that won’t kill you. I’m of the mindset that there are two senses, or sense receptacles that are like Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine in that they can take you to an exact moment in time and open the grey steel file drawer of memory that contains everything you felt at that moment and allow you to re-live it like uncapping a bottle of fine parfum. The senses fill and the mind expands and for a moment you are not Here but rather There. In other words, the world’s cheapest vacation.
When it works - when the inner time travel truly opens the doors of memory and perception, you can walk through that past day while simultaneously see it through the eyes of the time that you are actually living - Now and Then. At once. It’s a shifting of perspectives. I see then as it would be now; I see now as the outcome of then.
I just experienced that kind of moment. I was drifting through old Fleetwood Mac videos. There’s a degree of regret associated with that. Big Mac was so, well, Big that they were under-appreciated. No matter how many millions of records the White Album and Rumors sold, Fleetwood Mac never had the ‘coolness factor’. I should know. I was there. My primetime was their primetime. Coolness required a certain risk of discovery - an undiscovered country - an easter egg hunt culminating in a cry of, “Look what I found!”
Of course, time teaches us that no one really discovers anything, or at least you and I don’t. The quirkiest bands in history - I’m thinking of a band you’ve never heard of called BeBop Deluxe - first ‘discovered’ themselves obviously, then an agent, then a road manager, then a publicist, then a label, then a producer, then an engineer and Christ knows how many studio stan musicians, cover artists, record store hucksters and radio payola providers there were before you (or me) in your (or my) dorm pulled off the shrink wrap, put the nedle on the record and yelled down the hall, ‘Look what I found!’
Yeah. Sure you did. You’re the guy who discovered that Wednesday follows Tuesday. Atta wayta go.
Fleetwood Mac never had that moment - or if it did, it was before Bob Welch left the band and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks signed on. Within months - months! - of the White Album’s release they dominated the Top 40 like no one had since The Beatles and no one has since, except for Michael Jackson for a few months in the mid-80s.
Naturally, they were hated. After everyone - and again, I was there - had loved every single’s first 15 plays the moaning started. Because Big Mac was everywhere, it was crowding out airplay for all the little engine that could BeBop Deluxe bands. It was the equivalent of a musical eclipse that left all the rest lacking in sunlight. ‘I’m sorry, your photosynthesis is on back order.’
And so it became and so it was that the self-proclaimed Smart Set ignored Fleetwood Mac. Everything immensely popular must face the backlash - which, it occurs to me now, is the curse unleashed on Barack Obama’s presidency. ‘You’re gig’, the Smart Set says, ‘We must find the flaws; for in the flaws there is TheTruth.’
Years go by. And I find myself in 2011 watching a video from 1975 of Fleetwood Mac performing Rhiannon in some cheap-ass bar or small hockey arena in Maryland. And it - yes! - it blows me away. I hear the band as though for the first time. I appreciate Mick Fleetwood’s drumming as though for the first time; similarly Lindsey Buckingham on guitar etc. etc.
This gets me to thinking, seeing the Then in terms of the Now. I find an answer to a question that has troubled me. You see....by profession I am a book reviewer. It’s a very nice job. I get new books for free, read them and express my opinion in a thousand words or less.
But.
I don’t file, post, or email negative reviews. I’m not big on wasting people’s time. Heck, I’m, not big on wasting MY time., Still, were I so moved I could positively (or negatively) lacerate no end of authors who send me books that are, in a word, complete crap.
This issue has troubled me. Every tine I read a horrible novel I question my own standards. ‘Why is this thing terrible whereas the last book was great?’ What in hell ARE the standards anyway?
I gratefully received my answer in that long-ago recorded Fleetwood Mac video. I watched Stevie Nicks sing and the rest play to Rhiannon and by the end I thought, “how did they do the next song after all that?” Seemingly and logically, every ounce of energy in the band should have been expended.
But that’s the point, the rub, the nut of it all. Fleetwood Mac became this gigantic force because it’s members, well, cared. The next song didn’t matter. What mattered was what they were doing now. They played each note with - yes! - passion.
That is what separates the great books from the weedy majority. The great books are a mix of skill, and passion and writing for the Audience of One. (Truly, every good book is a conversation) The rest....well, they try their best to get it right. In trying so hard to get the grammar right, they lose sight of the passion that first informed their original insight.
So if there is a lesson amongst all this, it IS this: care, be passionate, love your creation. In terms of what others’ think? Who cares! You are in complete control of only one thing......you.
a meditation
by: Hubert O’Hearn
June 24, 2011
Alright, so I’m a YouTube junkie. I admit it. I enjoy it. It’s an addiction that won’t kill you. I’m of the mindset that there are two senses, or sense receptacles that are like Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine in that they can take you to an exact moment in time and open the grey steel file drawer of memory that contains everything you felt at that moment and allow you to re-live it like uncapping a bottle of fine parfum. The senses fill and the mind expands and for a moment you are not Here but rather There. In other words, the world’s cheapest vacation.
When it works - when the inner time travel truly opens the doors of memory and perception, you can walk through that past day while simultaneously see it through the eyes of the time that you are actually living - Now and Then. At once. It’s a shifting of perspectives. I see then as it would be now; I see now as the outcome of then.
I just experienced that kind of moment. I was drifting through old Fleetwood Mac videos. There’s a degree of regret associated with that. Big Mac was so, well, Big that they were under-appreciated. No matter how many millions of records the White Album and Rumors sold, Fleetwood Mac never had the ‘coolness factor’. I should know. I was there. My primetime was their primetime. Coolness required a certain risk of discovery - an undiscovered country - an easter egg hunt culminating in a cry of, “Look what I found!”
Of course, time teaches us that no one really discovers anything, or at least you and I don’t. The quirkiest bands in history - I’m thinking of a band you’ve never heard of called BeBop Deluxe - first ‘discovered’ themselves obviously, then an agent, then a road manager, then a publicist, then a label, then a producer, then an engineer and Christ knows how many studio stan musicians, cover artists, record store hucksters and radio payola providers there were before you (or me) in your (or my) dorm pulled off the shrink wrap, put the nedle on the record and yelled down the hall, ‘Look what I found!’
Yeah. Sure you did. You’re the guy who discovered that Wednesday follows Tuesday. Atta wayta go.
Fleetwood Mac never had that moment - or if it did, it was before Bob Welch left the band and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks signed on. Within months - months! - of the White Album’s release they dominated the Top 40 like no one had since The Beatles and no one has since, except for Michael Jackson for a few months in the mid-80s.
Naturally, they were hated. After everyone - and again, I was there - had loved every single’s first 15 plays the moaning started. Because Big Mac was everywhere, it was crowding out airplay for all the little engine that could BeBop Deluxe bands. It was the equivalent of a musical eclipse that left all the rest lacking in sunlight. ‘I’m sorry, your photosynthesis is on back order.’
And so it became and so it was that the self-proclaimed Smart Set ignored Fleetwood Mac. Everything immensely popular must face the backlash - which, it occurs to me now, is the curse unleashed on Barack Obama’s presidency. ‘You’re gig’, the Smart Set says, ‘We must find the flaws; for in the flaws there is TheTruth.’
Years go by. And I find myself in 2011 watching a video from 1975 of Fleetwood Mac performing Rhiannon in some cheap-ass bar or small hockey arena in Maryland. And it - yes! - it blows me away. I hear the band as though for the first time. I appreciate Mick Fleetwood’s drumming as though for the first time; similarly Lindsey Buckingham on guitar etc. etc.
This gets me to thinking, seeing the Then in terms of the Now. I find an answer to a question that has troubled me. You see....by profession I am a book reviewer. It’s a very nice job. I get new books for free, read them and express my opinion in a thousand words or less.
But.
I don’t file, post, or email negative reviews. I’m not big on wasting people’s time. Heck, I’m, not big on wasting MY time., Still, were I so moved I could positively (or negatively) lacerate no end of authors who send me books that are, in a word, complete crap.
This issue has troubled me. Every tine I read a horrible novel I question my own standards. ‘Why is this thing terrible whereas the last book was great?’ What in hell ARE the standards anyway?
I gratefully received my answer in that long-ago recorded Fleetwood Mac video. I watched Stevie Nicks sing and the rest play to Rhiannon and by the end I thought, “how did they do the next song after all that?” Seemingly and logically, every ounce of energy in the band should have been expended.
But that’s the point, the rub, the nut of it all. Fleetwood Mac became this gigantic force because it’s members, well, cared. The next song didn’t matter. What mattered was what they were doing now. They played each note with - yes! - passion.
That is what separates the great books from the weedy majority. The great books are a mix of skill, and passion and writing for the Audience of One. (Truly, every good book is a conversation) The rest....well, they try their best to get it right. In trying so hard to get the grammar right, they lose sight of the passion that first informed their original insight.
So if there is a lesson amongst all this, it IS this: care, be passionate, love your creation. In terms of what others’ think? Who cares! You are in complete control of only one thing......you.
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