Blo Back Gallery Covered My Norman, OK Emotional Deficit
11.16.2022
—Laramie, Wyoming
While Dave and I are going 80mph towards Casper, WY I thought I’d give you a little snapshot from our first Pueblo show.
Neither of us had ever been to Pueblo, Colorado before… so let’ start there. It was as I had imagined it: wind blown, sun blasted, strangely calm. My only recollection of Pueblo was those public information commercials:
So the Blo Back Gallery is in a fairly sparse neighborhood, a little bit off the main drag of the town… dusty stuff… a bar and a Sonic sit across the way, waiting for folks to wander in. Dave and I got there early and ended up over at a place called Brue’s Alley… where they serve breakfast burritos all day… and like everything we ate in this region so far, it was smothered in green chiles… which, and to be expected, is pretty much the norm with anything in Pueblo.
For the show… a small crowd gathered in and with the help of a good sound guy, Zach… we launched into our set with a warm and welcoming response from the crowd. What a change… what a salve… balm… ipecac purging the stinging experiences we had just had. By the way, Kirby’s Beer Store in Wichita the night before was great… I mean super great… and then Blo Back was a one-two inch that helped TKO the bad feelings I had been navigating.
See… playing to an empty room is really something… playing to people is exactly the other thing… a true dynamic that creates a palpable energy… I don’t have to remind myself as to why I’m doing the thing I’m doing… I just do it… It’s not an adrenaline rush… maybe a drip, but I play better and it means more when there’s someone in the room with you.
That’s why online shows during the pandemic were so pathetic… it was pretense and artifice… if you were to see the real emotions I was feeling during the pandemic I would have live streamed me pounding beers, rolling my eyes at the then President, and shaking my head saying, “Man… he’s gonna kill a lot of people with his actions/inactions.”
By the way… so you know… I’m not bashing the former President, there’s nothing I can say about him that will change anything, it isn’t worth my time and energy… it’s the policies he enacted that I’m willing to bash and debate, and by debate I mean debunk and dismiss. Most of my news sources are triple checked, for twenty years I taught research writing and argument, and, and… I look at all first reports with a bit of skepticism… I usually wait until the dust settles before getting angry or happy about news… there is such a rush to get the scoop to please advertisers with views and clicks that the idea of disseminating pertinent information in a timely and responsible manner gets lost cuz everyone is busy serving their own master… and usually that master is money. Motherfucking money. I wrote a song about it…
That’s Roscoe Ambel producing and playing guitars… mixing and all that jazz… he’s a world class producer and called me during these remote sessions to tell me that I’m, “saying motherfucker all wrong.” Do pick up his record Lakeside. I’ll talk more about him later on in one of my “Friend of Mine” features.
Anyhow… back to money… even as we sit on a climate change precipice and people are ringing the alarms… we can’t seem to find a way to do the right thing in order to change our present course from disaster to one of survival… Here is a fairly radical perspective on how we globally address the situation… and that is to help all under-developed and struggling nations become energy independent with wind and solar… then work on our own shit to reduce our carbon emissions to zero. It’s not like we can’t do it. We could. Certainly this idea is radical because the conventional process is not going to work because all of our conventions are tied into the zealous fervor of money worship. The first argument someone would make is, “That’s impossible because it’ll be so expensive.” They are right, it wouldn’t be easy and it would be expensive… I write all this while hearing those questions in my head, “Who would pay for it, and why should we help out people who can’t help themselves?”
I’ll answer the second question first. Sitting in a small theater in Baltimore I watched a great puppet/play type thing from Alex and Olmstead called Marooned! and in the narrative a space traveler, in the future, gets marooned on a barren planet and one point, they meet the “Cosmic Peanut,” a seemingly omnipotent celestial being who has the voice of a child… and during their interaction the peanut says, “The meaning of life is helping…” And, as I sat in the audience it really became clear to me… the one thing that has brought me joy and satisfaction in life, other than Twix bars, is helping other people. All the years of teaching… was about helping… I think about all of my friendships and they were all about helping each other… and with music, it’s also a way to help people… sure my songs are sad, but how they help is by saying, “oh, you’ve been sad too… you’re not alone…” So for that… what truly makes us human is that are hardwired to be around one another and to help each other… that is our natural state. There is no survival instinct that includes burning fossil fuels at this point… because the end result if we keep doing that is half mass murder and half mass suicide. I’m not sure that’s helping.
And for money… who’s gonna pay for it? Does money really matter at this point? Does it? It’s an unnatural imaginary value placed on goods, services, and access. Tornado don’t care. Hurricane don’t care. Rising water don’t care. Earthquake don’t care. Honey badger don’t care. When it is all said and done, I guess, but I’ll be long dead when it happens, people who survive or some visiting alien life will look at our destruction and marvel at what we built and what the absolute unconditional love for our god, Money, destroyed.
Which brings me back to Blo Back Gallery… which wasn’t about money at all… it’s a small artistic effort in a small town… and we attracted a small crowd, and we were all there for a purpose. A small group of people convened to hear what we had to offer… it was an exchange of ideas and emotions…
And for that, I am grateful and rejuvenated.
It’s a drop of water to keep the flowers from turning black.
—Andrew
Oh yeah… Why post the video of Gwar? Gwar not?