My wife and I have three children, so going out on dates doesn’t happen more than twice a year at the most. Last month I bought tickets for us to see a great band called Medeski, Martin, and Wood in Northampton, Massachusetts. The first time I got tickets to see them, two or so years ago, there was a bad snowstorm, so my wife and I decided not to make the trip to the venue in North Adams and, instead, have an appetizer and a beer in a local restaurant. This time, we got another bad snowstorm, which provided for a bit of irony and an excellent conversation trigger for my wife and me. I mean, what luck! Who knew what we would have talked about otherwise?
One thing we tried to talk about was why Medeski, Martin, and Wood’s set list sounded like a garage band rehearsal. Jen hated it, was nodding off at intervals during the first hour, while we inhaled the gratuitous pot smoke floating all around us, but she didn’t really understand what they were all about. MMW form their songs by playing three seemingly disparate trains of thought until they start to make sense with each other. It sometimes takes them several minutes to come together as a trio, but it’s brilliant because you get to witness the creative process as it develops from literal notetaking to something polished. Or maybe it never ends up being completely polished, but that shit’s for the recordings they do. The worst song they have is their most popular one, the one they did for Grey’s Anatomy.
They’re inspirational, because all writing should be done this way. I suspect the best ones do it, too. Teachers, professors, writing advice echoists (these people, you know them, who repeat writing advice from Bird by Bird or some other best-selling manual for people who will never really write anything, and seem to take credit for it, like they’re some kind of brilliant writing sage, god, shut up already. To write poetry, one would say, you just open a vein. God, jesus, that makes me so sick) say that you throw a bunch of crap onto the wall and see what sticks. It doesn’t really happen that way. That suggests you pause and see what slides off, when the creative process better resembles more of a participatory element. Throwing things to the wall to see what sticks seems to be a lot of posturing instead of real work. MMW were doing real work on that stage, and how much more difficult must it be to try and create something cohesive with two other people? I had a friend as a teenager, Tim Garb, who liked to collaborate with me on poetry while we sat at Package Pick-up at Sears during our night shifts. Whenever we worked together, I had to do all the heavy lifting because Tim had (has) scoliosis, had a bar inserted in his back. Later he would work as a barback at the Shark Club in Las Vegas, thus coming full circle with his identity.
Anyway, Tim and I would write the worst crap you could imagine, and it was mostly because we sucked. It was partially due, though, to the fact that it is so difficult to create something with other people. If I may be a writing advice echoist here: Writing is a solitary art.
Jen and I are going out tonight. No band, no artistic discussion. Yes beer, yes appetizers, yes talk about kids, yes in love with her.
