“It’s like I know what they were!” Rev assured himself. “But how can I know what lyrics are supposed to be now?”
Alone and newly clean for days, bright spots behind both eyes along with a strange, constant thirst had failed to signal the return of a million forgotten feelings now coursing everywhere like currents through long idle pipes, wearing him raw. It was all too much for the old, bound free spirit.
He stared at his wooden counterpart leaning snug against the bed, hearing in his mind its calling swells of sweet simplicity.
But could he really say he knew his way around a fretboard map of tones any better than he had before the decades of ultimatums and every half-perfected “official” plan to craft his art?
What was music supposed to be, anyway? It was no longer an actual question, just a dismal reminder of one.
Rev sighed the troubled sigh of age staring back at a misspent life down new gun barrels pressed hard to its withered face.
He reached to flick on his laptop.
Through rounds of loading text and graphics, the recommissioned feelings continued their awkward flooding, bringing re-facilitated memories. These came without warning like fast, rich daydreams. And Rev couldn’t help but drift away to revisit grinning faces at crammed gigs after impromptu practices had morphed to full-scale house parties. He saw strings of forgotten cable fails, and cuss outs, and too dark venues with grubby floors and grimy bars . . . places where equipment and safety would be always held at risk just so fear and fun might wage their endless, winner-take-all war.
Further back, he saw Dale laughing like some crazy, howling wolf, ever mid-ravage on a path to freedom out from jail-cell corners of parents’ garages.
Rev even re-watched his bunch of idiot-dropout, burnout friends show up early that very first sunny Sunday morning to lug gear and thwack out the muddled riffs, beats, and screams all had of course assumed would soon be revolutionary.
No planning. No goals. No structure. No real knowledge, or…
The screen blitzed to life and color.
Rev clicked over to pull up a playlist of his favorite thinking songs. But glancing at the titles, he noticed almost every number on that list . . . over 200 . . . were from at least ten years before . . . most from 20 years or more.
How could he hope to figure out the secret to relevant lyrics if even the tunes meant to aid his quest were essentially relic etchings of a bygone time?
But they’re good, aren’t they? They were good.
He felt antsy, and his right eye began to twitch, which he chalked up to the hated absence sobriety could make of any ordinary afternoon.
Might voices from the past be holding Rev back from being open to new points of view?
Surely none of his dumb, shabby tribe had ever thought to appreciate the sheer cluelessness at the base of their free rumbling sound and built-in revelry back when faithfully occupying suburbia space-by-space. And with a wince, Rev re-realized how obviously desperate and childish he must appear now to everyone he knew . . . still planning and pining so fiercely for something only a child could be impractical enough to commit a whole life to.
The sound of coffin nails and dirt weighed heavy on inner voices, catching them in the act of merely going through the motions as they drearily begged their answers from a muse as yet unknown.
Suddenly a line from the song currently fuzzing its way through tiny, crusted speakers razor-bladed outward to blanket the room with melodic recountings of holding up hope in the face of uncertainty just to grasp at the chance to try.
Rev saw in his mind one like himself . . . an unknown artist seated on a bed, guitar in lap and pen in hand, reaching against all reason for any hints of a divine spark via pure abandonment to the absolute simplest of all progressions and rhyming words.
Nothing had changed in the least. How, after all this time, had Rev’s age-old yearning remained a shining star so impossibly bright as to keep him driven (sight unseen) in the face of mounting failure, age, neglect…?
The song ended, and one of that same artist’s newer efforts kicked into rushed and edgeless gear. It wasn’t fun to hear at all.
Rev considered the fate of many of his heroes from that playlist. Some had fizzled out fast after early big moments of glory. Others would seem to double down into strict commitments to dress, act, and sound exactly as they had at first, diligently following their own set patterns of initial success.
And though Rev had never come to experience their same trappings of fame or money, he could track his own decline toward a similarly dull and futile end. None of the benefits . . . all of the loss.
Another song came on, this one by a band called Light. Rev smiled to himself, remembering the night he had met Light’s lead singer, Jaylen, after some forgettable backyard show. It had been many years before Light would later rocket to one-hit-wonder-dom. Yet it now seemed sadly ironic to Rev, still piecing his way through many histories (both general and specific), how Jaylen had so openly, proudly copied the style and sound of many other, more prominent bands, even on into those bands’ later post-fame throes of wasted self-indulgence. Then unable to ride any farther on borrowed time or mojo, Jaylen had deteriorated to stark self-expression on record after doomed record.
Rev listened as sycophantic, oh-so-important words carried their forced profundity up and down every precise rise and fall. Boring. Fake. Funny, but only to the degree it wasn’t meant to be.
Had a shuffled playlist really just responded to some of Rev’s deepest, lifelong questions?
No, not really. Not likely.
And yet he forcefully swept open his decrepit notebook, and could not scrawl fast enough across the very last empty space left:
It doesn’t have to be anything you dumb-ass! You don’t have to be anything! Wouldn’t that be ultimate freedom: the boom everywhere, and nothing at the center? That’s real punk. No, not in style or sound. It doesn’t matter that your music is simple and you never learned to solo. Don’t you remember the way it brought people together? Even people in the band. Dude, that’s what it’s always been!
And some from Rev’s playlist would indeed live on, their real lives and stories ever captured forever in song.
I don't know anything 