Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others. In a general way, fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.
David Bayles & Ted Orland in Art & Fear
This is my Indian summer…I learnt that fame is an illusion and everything about it is just a joke. I’m far more dangerous now, because I don’t care at all.
Joe Strummer to Chris Salewicz in 2000
A couple Saturdays ago, I read Art & Fear while lounging on the front porch. The weather was great and I was enjoying the opportunity to relax. However enjoyable this was, I don’t remember actually relaxing. I was mostly procrastinating. I really meant to do some writing and recording that weekend, but I didn’t. I found other things that I *had* to do. I was going to work on projects later. Of course I didn’t actually get any serious work in. I never feel good about not working. I feel like something is gnawing at me. I feel guilty for neglecting what I can best describe as this nagging, uncomfortable lump in an unreachable part of my personality somewhere. The act of writing or rehearsing or recording leaves me feeling lighter and much less prone to the heavy sulks that I indulge in after a few solid days of idleness. And if I can get started, I can usually build up some momentum and actually become increasingly productive as I keep at it. But getting started – cripes. Why do I not start? Fear mostly. Fear that something won’t work out the way I want. Fear that I’ll need to go back and edit and tweak. Fear that what I write or play or sing or record won’t live up to my own idea of how I’d like to present myself. Ego essentially – the satisfaction of perfect plans not yet tainted by poor execution. Typical creative process bullshit.
I recently read the New Yorker piece on David Foster Wallace’s depression, unfinished work, and eventual suicide that was paired with a short excerpt from his unfinished The Pale King. Wallace – according to this account – had the same doubts and frustrations about his work that I have about mine and that everyone has about their own stuff. The excerpt “Wiggle Room” seems quite well done to me, but Wallace struggled with the novel. It’s humbling to realize that even the folks you admire are unsure of themselves. It’s also tough to stomach when they can’t resolve their fears in either life or art and succumb to despair. It’s easy to brood over idols who took themselves out before they were through.
It’s easy in all this misty, mopey romanticism to overlook a guy like Joe Strummer. Here’s a guy who basically commercially shit the bed right when he should have been cashing his check for big-ticket fame and fortune. He was a washout for a decade or more. Or course he’s a legend and a punk saint now, but for a long time he was an old fart has-been.
His return to form with the Mescaleros is striking given how expansive his records were. Resurrecting that old Clash sound would’ve been an easy way to cash in on the pop punk boom of the ‘90s. But psychedelic, dance-inflected, world folk punk records hardly seem like the surefire way to recapture your audience. Of course that’s why they work so well, they’re actual art. They aren’t product. They aren’t marketing move. They’re fearless Joe Strummer records – not all that different in spirit from the Clash’s restless eclecticism.
One of the most striking of the Mescaleros-era Strummer tracks is Global A Go-Go’s leadoff track “Johnny Appleseed.” It’s a fairly straightforward number, at its heart a strummy skiffle ditty. But the arrangement, the recording is both seemingly effortless and otherworldly. The simple verse melody is bolstered by a perfect bed of ambient sounds that gives way to a joyous pan-global sonic riot at the chorus. Wordess voices wash across the track as Strummer declares that we not “…go killin’ all the bees.” It’s a phenomenally happy recording without being needlessly strident or anthemic or pushy. In short it’s not U2’s “Beautiful Day” or Springsteen’s “Working on a Dream” or countless other attempts at capital-b “Big” pop uplift. (If anything, “Johnny Appleseed” is as legitimately joyous as something like the Breeders’ “Cannonball.”) Maybe it’s because the lyric is somewhat oblique. There’s some nostalgia hinted at – Appleseed himself, MLK, a Buick ’49 – as well as a bittersweet warning that you should take care not to do in the source of your honey. It’s a human song, an honest song, a worldly and adult song. It doesn’t preach, but it doesn’t candy coat either.
Lord, there goes a Buick forty-nine
Black sheep of the angels riding, riding down the line
We think there is a soul, we don’t know
That soul is hard to find
I find it fitting that “Johnny Appleseed” became the theme for David Milch’s lovely John from Cincinnati, which among other things is about getting over yourself, moving beyond your brokenness, and opening yourself to the possibility of the divine/transcendental/miraculous. When you go to the big board, that is after all what creating stuff is about – being human and sharing your little bit of the human experience with other people. The desire to be perfect, to be all things, to present yourself as shiny and perfect and special can be crippling. It also makes you a jerk sometimes. What is inspiring to me about a guy like Strummer or Dylan is how they managed to come out the other side of fame and failure with the ability to communicate that sweetly tart success of being able to get up and keep working on one’s own terms regardless of what previous, fleeting success they once had.
Suppose if you’re too concerned with weighing the issue of burning out/fading away question that you just stop, you’ll never really know what you had. It’s like killing the bees that make your honey.
