The following is from another list I'm on. I want to see what people on
this list thought about this.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
From: Kurt Keefner kurt_keefner@yahoo.com
To: art@wetheliving.com
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2000 9:54 PM
Subject: ART: A Musical Odyssey, Issue Ten
A MUSICAL ODYSSEY
Issue Ten:
A long strange trip through the music collection of Dirk Douglas.
Ayn Rand claimed that our philosophical premises,conscious and subconscious,
give rise to our aesthetic preferences. If anecdotal accounts are to be
trusted, she went so far as to judge others on little more than artistic
evidence: So-and-so likes Beethoven-therefore he has a malevolent sense of
life - therefore he is not my kind of person.
I share Rand's moderate, "official" position, but not the extreme version
she appears to have held in private. Against Rand's private view one thing
that can be said is that Rand seems not to have considered the possibility
that multiple premises might lead to the same taste, or that the same one
premise might be expressed in multiple tastes. Instead of regarding
artistic taste as an unequivocal symptom of an unambiguous spiritual
condition, I regard it as more of a magnifying glass; it delivers no occult
knowledge, but it can help you see something you are already familiar with a
lot better.
An opportunity recently arose for me to put the Randian theory to the test.
A few months ago I was given the entire CD collection of a man named Dirk
Douglas, a musician of my acquaintance who died unexpectedly in June I
don't think he'd mind if I spoke frankly, even bluntly, about the lessons I
have learned from studying his collection: I knew Dirk for many years, and
candor was one of his highest values.
Dirk had surprisingly narrow affinities. At least 75% of his collection,
which numbered 72 discs, came from the 1970s or from bands whose heyday was
in the 70s. He had five or six albums each by Kansas and Yes as well as
greatest hits albums by Foreigner, Starship and the like. He also had a few
greatest hits discs from early 80s performers like Mr Mister and Kenny
Loggins who were essentially holdovers from the 70s. He had almost no
classic 60s rock - an album of Blood, Sweat and Tears from his own
brass-band days was about it. He did have a few more recent discs: one by
Tori Amos, one by Joan Osborne. He also had several upbeat white gospel
albums of recent vintage, presumably acquired during the last few years of
his life when his health was poor and he once again turned to Christianity.
There were a few classical and jazz items. Dirk's mother, I know, was a big
fan of Chopin and encouraged Dirk's piano playing. (Dirk was a keyboard
player, singer and arranger.) So there was a disc of Chopin performed by
Vladimir Horowitz, a soundtrack from the movie "Shine" and one or two cheesy
"Great Classical Piano Works" compilations. The principle behind his jazz
collection I cannot discern, but he did have the good taste to like classic
jazz like Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" and not modern anti-jazz like Kenny G.
It is obvious that Dirk favored keyboards, but he also favored vocal
harmonies. He had a couple of CDs he'd burned himself featuring songs with
tight harmonies, including one song by the Carpenters, a group he would have
little to do with otherwise. He had greatest hits albums by Queen and
Earth, Wind and Fire (among the rare black performers in Dirk's catalogue).
Dirk himself had a good, versatile voice, and was not only very proud of his
harmonizing but was also a connoisseur of other people's. I remember him
almost 25 years ago explaining to me how the Wilson brothers of the Beach
Boys and Freddie Mercury of Queen worked their miracles.
It should be clear that Dirk's musical taste followed his professional
interests with regard to the technical dimension. I suspect this is a common
correlation among musicians. But there are plenty of musical acts that
employ keyboards and/or tight vocals. Why did Dirk pick the ones he did?
Dirk started trying to make it as a pro when he was 17,in 1972. He only
attended a community college and that only for a year or two. Despite his
impressive intelligence, his formal education in music and everything else
ended in the middle 70s. The 70s was Dirk's era: he liked the questioning
of authority, the sexual freedom, the flamboyance of attire and hairstyle
and the drugs.
It is my belief that Dirk was so at home in this era that he simply stopped
growing when it ended. It's common for a person's tastes (and beliefs) stop
developing once they surpass college age, especially if drugs are a part of
their life. Dirk ceased being of college age around 1977. To be sure, he
did still follow trends after 1977, but not ones that *started* after 1977.
And this means that he missed out on punk and new wave. Whatever you want
to say about punk, it did clean out the system of its self-indulgent
excesses and made it possible for something ironic and worldly-wise to grow.
But there was nothing like the Clash, Elvis Costello or even Squeeze in
Dirk's collection.
And Dirk's limited taste was reflected in the music he wrote and performed
too. The boy was simply lost in the 70s and that fact along with his
personality and health problems no doubt accounts for his failure to make it
as a musician.
But even this biographical analysis does not peg Dirk and his tastes. If he
was so in love with the 70s why didn't he own any Eagles or ELO? Perhaps
the technical criteria would knock out some of the great bands of the era,
but not all. Here we need to appeal
to Dirk's sense of life and psycho-epistemology. Let me try to weave an
image of Dirk with the music he owned as the warp and my personal
recollections as the woof.
The groups most represented in his collection were Yes and Kansas. What
they have in common, other than the obvious, is that both use keyboards as
their foundation, both are "hyper" or strident in their pacing and emotional
tone, both have pretensions to the
"lyrical." The main point of difference is that Yes is more impersonal and
arty where Kansas is more intimate and "sincere."
Interestingly, if I had to pick a band that represented a synthesis of Yes
and Kansas, I would choose Rush. Yet Dirk didn't own any Rush and never said
a word to me about them. Dirk was no Objectivist, and his libertarianism,
if we may loosely call it that, was purely of the "Defy authority - do
drugs" variety. More importantly, Rush stylistically as well as
philosophically dedicated itself to reason: they were always crystal clear
and they never encouraged self-indulgence of an emotionalistic kind. In
this way, they were light-years away from Yes and Kansas. (And no, I do not
like Rush. But we can talk about that another time.)
>From knowing him, I would say that the decisive element shared by most of
the bands in Dirk's collection was "sincerity." Dirk hit his teens in the
late 60s and while he was not a "60s person," he was one of that era's many
heirs. Those of you old enough to remember the 70s or who have studied it
have surely gleaned that one of its key concepts was "the natural." Partly
this was due to the ecology movement, and partly it was due to the 1960s
rejection of process in favor of immediate, "authentic" action, experience
and emotion. Put these two influences together and you get a worship of
human nature conceived of as bodily functions and spontaneous feelings.
According to this "code of the natural," either you acknowledged those
functions and feelings or you futilely tried to deny them. Dirk's attitude
towards what was "natural" ranged from the matter-of-fact to outright
wallowing. In short, if Dirk had an itch he would scratch it -sometimes in
public.
Lest I sound one-sidedly critical of Dirk's "naturalism," let me say that it
made him a frank and open person, bolstered his sense of humor (because it
helped him puncture people's pretensions) and contributed to his largely
healthy pro-sex attitudes. That having been said, I hope it's obvious that
I do not take Dirk's beliefs at face value - and that I do not blame him for
the errors of an entire generation.
The attitude of "sincerity" and "naturalness" are clearly reflected in
Dirk's music. As I write, I am listening to his copy of "Starship:
Greatest Hits (Ten Years and Change 1979-1991)." For those of you who don't
know, Starship was the successor group to Jefferson Starship, which was in
turn the successor to Jefferson Airplane. Each successor represents a
diminution of its predecessor. The original Airplane was a band of
undisciplined geniuses fronted by two amazing vocalists, Grace Slick and
Marty Balin. Starship was fronted by a third-generation clone of Marty
Balin, an histrionic little man named Mickey Thomas, with Grace Slick as
little more than a back-up vocalist.
If Starship has one salient quality, it's a loudly-proclaimed earnestness.
With his trademark wail, Thomas squeezes every ounce of feeling out of songs
like "Jane," "Sara" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," the last of which,
improbably, seems to be intended as a wedding anthem for the trailer set.
Now I could see a completist fan of the Airplane in all its incarnations
buying such a disc, but Dirk didn't own anything by Jefferson Airplane or
Jefferson Starship. He headed straight for the trough of emotion that is
just plain Starship. This album is a particularly clear magnifying glass of
Dirk's values.
With the concept of "sincerity" we have a pretty good hold on Dirk's ethos
(sense of life or metaphysical value judgments), but what about his
psycho-epistemology? This is somewhat harder to identify, but again his
music can be of assistance, especially a group like Yes.
What distinguishes Yes is its motoric, almost impersonal drive and
complexity. I don't think it's the impersonality as such that attracted
Dirk, since most of his collection was anything but impersonal. Rather it
would seem to be the machine-like drive and the complexity. (Think of the
paradigmatic Yes song "Roundabout.") These qualities are shared by Kansas
(think of the relentlessness and the Bach-like piano of "Carry On Our Native
Son"). Starship and some of Dirk's other discs also share them to a lesser
degree.
There are three reasons why Dirk and the strident style were made for each
other. First is that naturalism in the 70s frequently took an assertive,
theatrical cast. (Dirk was largely indifferent to "mellow" groups like
Bread.)
Second is Dirk's personality. Dirk was clinically hyperactive and
congenitally melodramatic. Truth be told, when Dirk was "up" it was
difficult to share a room with him.
Third and most relevant is a more specifically psycho-
epistemological factor. Dirk loved fast, driving, complex, prestidigitation
in music. I call this esthetic complex "razzmatazz.:" I chose the
colloquial name because it seems to capture exactly what Dirk loved about
the music in question: its ability to impress by attracting the listener's
attention and then almost losing it along the way, like a game of three-card
monty. Razzmatazz represents the energy and enthusiasm Dirk loved and had
in his own life. (And Dirk would have liked it that I chose a colloquial
term, since he generally believed that a technical or orderly approach to a
subject was mere pomposity.)
Razzmatazz may help explain why Dirk gravitated toward synthesizers and the
like when he was also proficient on piano, guitar, drums and brass
instruments: the gee-whiz, high-tech factor appealed to the fast-talking
showman in him.
I suppose we could say that a composer like Bach displayed razzmatazz too,
but that doesn't seem right, does it? Bach was reflecting his view of a
complex, orderly universe. Razzmatazz, although it surely reflected Dirk's
ability quickly to take up information and to deal with multiple channels at
the same time, seems more to have been about Dirk than about a view of
reality.
In loving Yes or Kansas or Kenny Loggins, what Dirk loved was his own
feeling that he could bop through the world getting by on his sense of life.
His love of complexity was not primarily about the adoration of some
crystalline aspect of the world; it was always about asserting his own
personality. He was trying to impress, and the person he sought most to
impress was himself.
The history of Dirk's belief structure confirms this analysis: Throughout
his various ideological phases, whether he was a born-again Christian, a
free-flowing mystic, or a semi-rational student of psychology (a la
Meyers-Briggs), behind it all was always Dirk, the prodigy whose smarts and
intuition could discern the truth and deal with it, not by submission to
something external (like reality or God), but by sheer panache.
Now we are able to integrate what we know about Dirk's music with what we
know about Dirk. The linchpin is an intelligent yet rigid subjectivism.
Dirk had a concept of feelings as the ultimate authority and of conjuring
the right "groove" as the proper method for success. For him style, or what
I call pseudo sense of life, was everything.
And thus it was he failed. Not in a glorious battle with the forces of
mediocrity and conformity that he loved to fight, but in sad loneliness.
Botched back surgery and a low tolerance for pain (no doubt exacerbated by
decades of drug abuse) led him to incapacity and to dependence on
prescription medicine. The last and most pathetic in a long series of
damaged women whom he both financially exploited and emotionally bolstered
had died. His father, who had helped get him on public assistance and
provided some emotional sustenance when he was crippled, had died. Most
importantly, even Dirk could surely see that finally his
dreams had died.
One morning in June of 2000, the nurse who helped Dirk with his morphine
patches found him dead. He had six of the patches on him and over 100
barbiturate tablets in him. Whether as his friends believe, it was an
accidental overdose with pill after pill being taken in a daze, or, as his
family believes, it was a suicide, will never be determined with certainty.
There was no note.
I don't admire subjectivism, and I know it doesn't work. But I do have to
respect Dirk, subjectivism and all. Misguided and crazy as he was his whole
life, he did have a dream and he did pursue it. I am reminded of a song
from Dirk's collection, perhaps not so atypical as it first may appear to
be: "Deacon Blues" by Steely Dan. The song tells the mythic tale of a
young man who goes from being a "nobody" to being a jazz musician, very much
a part of "the life." The refrain goes:
Learned to work the saxophone.
I play just what I feel.
Drink scotch whiskey all night long
and die behind the wheel.
They got a name for the winners in the world.
I want a name when I lose.
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide.
Call me Deacon Blues.
I've always loved the twisted perseverance and authenticity of that song,
and I guess that's how it was possible for me to love Dirk.
So it appears that Ayn Rand was right, that your personality does determine
your musical choices, and one can use your musical tastes to get a handle on
your premises.
But Ayn Rand was wrong on another subject: : not all values are chosen
values and not all scars on one's view of existence can be avoided. Here I
am referring to myself. Dirk's life and death have a greater hold on me
than I would ever choose to give them. For you see, "Dirk Douglas" was a
stage name which Dirk took as his legal name a decade ago. His given name
was Dirk Douglas Keefner, and he was my brother. Perhaps I understand his
brilliance and his madness because they are partly mine as well. For the
rest of my life Dirk will have the power to tear me in two, as I laud his
intelligence, talent and decency, loathe his self-indulgence and blind spots
and lament his mental illness. No matter how I agonize over his memory,
however, I will always be grateful to him for helping to kindle the love of
music in me. It is a gift which can never die.
Now forgive me, gentle reader, for the deception of not revealing my true
relation to Dirk sooner. The only way I could stand to write about him and
the only way I could trust others to think about what I had to say about
him, was by making the subject seem impersonal. Dirk would have enjoyed the
gag.
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