Shiftless Seattlite Tour : Red Rocks (Last Stop)

We were somewhere around Granby on the edge of the desert when the low-carb nutritional bars for women began to take hold…

My buddy and I had flown to Colorado, one of us from the east and one of us from the west. This was a Gonzo trip for certain, but here no hideous shadow-bats screeched along our earlobes and no trunk full of weapons-grade pharmaceuticals waited to be mixed into toxic conflagrations. Instead of the Red Shark, we were speeding along the edge of the Rocky Mountain foothills in a heat-shield-rattling, stunningly unintuitive, slug-on-wheels GM rental, clutching to a series of mis-drawn maps and guzzling whatever pricey-assed bottled water we could get our lips around.

By day, we roamed the savage landscape and fled the mid-afternoon rain. Deep blue mountain tops sank into the porous horizon, rose from valleys thick with begging chipmunks and wandering herds of elk, yawned wide arms around pixie-petalled wildflowers and rust-dust rock. The shipwreck phalluses, giant, jagged pillar stones were implanted in the dry dirt, crashed alien spaceships or beached whales with sun-cracked baleen. These sped by our open windows set against the random spew of music from the iPod oracle.

By night we processed our experiences, occasionally meeting at Gunther Toodie’s just down the street from the gaudy, gold lame Penthouse Club whose gates would swing wide and erupt with drunken giggling, the smooth-crease bend of folding money, and the discreet shush-click closing of vacuum-sealed car doors. We’d then retreat to one of our hotel rooms to hunch over laptops, video gear, and flashcard readers; jack into wireless networks and Linux portals; post pictures, write captions, and contact loved ones on cell phones.

We were the model of sensory input and digital output. We were undaunted by road signs. We were confused easily. We were out of shape. But surely, we did rock. The Blonde Swedes had taken Colorado, whether it realized it or not.



We had traveled to Denver, or more to the point to Red Rocks to see the thirtieth anniversary tour of the rock group Rush, the ultimate geek-guys-only power trio, music that had influenced each of us greatly in our youthful, idealistic pasts. For me, this was the close of a two month journey of rediscovery, a trip chosen for the specific qualities it would give the ending and for its deep connection back to the very beginning. And so, the freedom of the Blonde Swedes served as the backdrop and nurture-point for my own story arc resolution. And rock music was the perfect setting.

Flashback. You see, when I was a kid I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. I dreamed about playing the guitar, the long neck wrapped in my palm and the string tension bucking and giving under the pressure of my fingers. In my mind I would recline on green felt carpets festooned with white clover flowers and would plunk away at some bardic tune while the animals of the forest sat with watery, wide eyes at my feet. My voice would warble some now-forgotten melody, weaving around stanzas of thick treacle, tongue-tip sweet and sticky.

Yes, I’ve always been a bit poncy.

While I slept and dreamt, I was a guitarist. But every day, feverishly, I took all of the pots and pans from the cupboards, grabbed two firm-handled spoons and began a racket until my mother’s pleadings forced me to stop and retreat, hands twitching, to the overstuffed kitchen chair. Because as much as I wanted to learn to play the guitar, I was unable to not be a drummer.

My mother bought me my first kit and I began taking lessons at the local percussion shop. I joined the school band and rose to the rank of first chair drum, a position I would retain throughout the entirety of my academic life. My teachers were complimentary. My kit instructor told me that I was a natural, that if I kept playing the way I was, there was no end to what I could achieve in the craft. Surely I was young and green, sloppy and as uncoordinated as a pre-teen could possibly be, but there was something burning in me, and in the face of that fire, I literally could not stop playing.

Meanwhile in school, I had decided that I wanted to be a mathematician, perhaps a physicist or astronomer. I pursued this path for many years, enrolled in honors math courses, entered competitions, certain that my desire for numbers and formulas – the real and absolute solutions to hoary abstract dilemmas scrawled in ancient glyphs with chalk residue upon a slate tablet – was equally as absolute.

And then one day I was given my first lengthy writing assignment. Though I don’t remember the specifics of the assignment, I chose to meet the requirements by creating a fictional story about a man named Niles and the formation of the entire Egyptian mythological and sacred monument systems through his misadventures. My teachers raved. From that moment forward they began pushing me further in this direction, routinely excusing me from the maximum page length (can’t you tell?) and sentence structure rules (again, duh?), and encouraging me to shun normal assignment requirements to write poetry, performances or small stories about the subject instead.

At some point, some teacher told me that I was going to be a writer and that maybe I should accept this and truly plunge into the craft, let myself go with it. I told her that I was going to be a mathematician and that the very last thing I would ever want in my life would be to write, and that the second I left school I would never write again. She nodded kindly, and I went home to force myself to finish my math homework while secretly scrawling haikus and plot outlines in the margins. Because as much as I wanted to be a math god, I was unable to not be a writer.

One day, my next-door neighbor gave me a copy of Rush’s “Permanent Waves”. This is the same kid who started a neighborhood football league and decided the best position for me to take was slightly upright, carrying a clipboard. Through his gift I discovered Neil Peart, the legendary drummer for Rush, and in that moment I mentally smashed every dream guitar I’d ever owned. His technique, his compositions, the precision and artfulness of his strokes, the emotion and passion in his work stunned me, swept me up in a wave of possibility and revealed the wide expanse that percussion could be. I played through all of Rush’s albums one-by-one, mimicking as best I could. And when I was finished, I moved on to the rich, deep, throaty chasm of Manu Khate; the cymbal-addicted, fuck-you freneticism of Stewart Copeland; the impossible, measured, sandpiper syncopation of Bill Bruford; and the sage-smoke, slap-hand tribal breadth of Mickey Hart. Peart had singularly captured the soul of the experience for me and then catapulted me into the arms of his peers and into the great, unending cadenced beyond.

Back at my desk, I filled legal pad after legal pad with pen marks. My mind sharpened on detail. I awoke in the middle of the night to continue ideas. I lost sleep typing in the cave of my basement on the old Apple 2e, printing out reams of paper. I became enamored with words, so imperfect, so incapable of capturing the truth but so able to surround it on all sides and occasionally reveal breathtaking glimpses of the divine. I wrote puppet shows, stand-up routines, movie scripts, anything that allowed me to transform my imagination down the arm to the page, anything that gave me even the smallest chance of seeing that god horizon within.

But somewhere inside of me over the years, the schism grew. I hated playing drums. I hated writing. There were not the things I wanted to be doing, but the things that I couldn’t stop doing, things that were in control of me. They were hard, challenged me to work, exhausted me, required time and energy, and even with all this, I couldn’t do them well enough to satisfy myself. Other things, the things I thought I really wanted to do were safe, easy, and conquerable in a minimum of struggle, or they were things I didn’t care about achieving or failing and so were less risky emotionally.

This sort of conflict of desire and compulsion has repeated itself throughout my life, a conflict of self, the battle between what I am and what I wish to be. It would be years before I learned the solution to this quandary (Thank you, Pema). Back then, however, the only solution was to run aimlessly.

Exterior shot. A long view down a lonely Colorado highway. A cloud of dust is visible in the far distance. As it grows closer, it reveals a nondescript, whitish and baby-pee colored car moving at a snail’s pace down the center line. A bearded, puckish man at the wheel is flailing a whip out behind him, yelling “HYAH, you fat bastard, HYAH!” as the barbed tip strikes the back fender.

“Can’t this thing go any faster,” I yell as I look behind me at the long line of cars and trucks waiting for their chance to pass us. “And where are we?”

“The map says to go east, but if we go east, we’ll end up in that lake down there.” Shorn pointed out the window to where the asphalt crumbled into a sheer drop. Buzzards circled on updrafts. Somewhere, a coyote barked.

Now glued to my seat, I said, “If we take Alameda, it should intersect with Virginia around that Target store we saw.”

“Which Target store, the one next to the Applebee’s, or the one next to the Guitar Superstore or the one next to the Sheraton Hotel?”

“Which Sheraton Hotel, the one across the street from the Wendy’s or the one near the Barnes and Noble?”

Shorn paused. “Wait, isn’t there a Target store next to the Barnes and Noble too?”

I thought for a second, “No, I think that’s another Applebee’s.”

Behind us, the cars honked impatiently.

“I think you are lost,” Shorn said.

Fading Dissolve. And so it was that one day the darkness came in, the heavy mind-kill that seeps like octopus ink through salt water, an occlusion powered by some untouchable source. I’ve been subject to debilitating depression cycles for the entirety of my lifetime and have only over the past six or seven years learned what they are to me, what they signify, and how to be with them fully. Normally, they have no cause other than imbalance, some shard that splits the whole in two or some casual spark in the tinder brush, an unspecified anxiety that burns entire forests before it expires. Sometimes they come unbidden like a summer cold, with no reason and no cure other than time.

I remember sitting at the drum kit and realizing that for all the accolades poured on me for my drumming, I was unable to play the things I really wanted to play. I was too unskilled or even untalented to achieve what my mind was hearing and imagining, to translate that into the movement of wrists, hands and fingers. At the same time, work on my first novel had crashed with the realization that for all the high marks in verbal expression, I was unable to create a long piece or even any more short pieces. I was unable to capture what my mind was seeing and translate that into words and structure. I was failing. This was not something I had ever experienced and it wasn’t something I was willing to live with.

Keep in mind I was still only in high school. I’ve always been far too serious for my own good when left to my own devices.

Back then, if something was too hard it meant I would fail often, and the possibility of failing to me called for only one course of action. So, I had my mother write a note. I dropped out of band the next day. I stopped playing drum kit completely. And I stopped writing. Later, I’d enter college, shun any thought of journalistic or English pathways and focus on engineering. I’d never sit on a drum stool and play a drum kit again. And my passion for writing would swerve in and out of relationships and jobs, sex and drink cycles, manic extroversion and deep depression, at times vanishing for as much as three to four years before resuming again.

I’d move on to world percussion and perform on small and large stages. I’d occasionally join bands to sing cover tunes. At odd hours, I’d begin to try novels or poetry again. But these things were only temporary distractions, hobbies, flights of fancy, nothing be taken seriously anymore. For love or money, I’d give them all up. I gave them all up for both, for either. And then I’d crash and return to them, only to give them up again. For my desire was to never face them, to pursue instead what I considered a more “normal life”, the safety, security, and normality that those hard, different, frustrating things could not give me.

And so the road wound on…

In a tight-angle close-up, I looked at Shorn. Shorn looked at me. The ground trembled and the electricity shot from the dark clouds towards the low brush in the distance. The winds had picked up, ruffling the edges of cheap plastic raincoats and spinning ground debris towards the banks of speakers.

“If I die here, please remember that I rocked,” I said.

Shorn paused, “If you die here, I have to write your memoir and there is no fucking way I’m doing that, so you aren’t dying.”

“Can I at least have my smooshed tofu rollup and little juice squeeze?”

“You really are gay, you know that?”

The thunder rolled low and ponderous over our heads towards the grey shadow spires of the Denver skyline in the distance. Even in the hanging gloom, even with the instruments exposing themselves to the mist-wind as their protection was stripped from its riggings, roadies were beginning to scale the retractable ladders towards the lighting racks.

I moved back on my seat, trying to edge away from the tipsy blonde girl who kept putting her hand around my waist and talking to me with her lips pressed to my earlobe. Next to us, tiny little cigarettes were being formed from the contents of small baggies concealed in socks. Somebody was already screaming “Play Fly By Night!” and undercover female operatives were swarming the joint, being all female operatively with their sly undercoverness.

We freeze-frame here briefly, because this is the end of my story. After coonskin-capped beach bums in Ventura, ghostly beatnik poetry readings in San Fran, scorpioned death climbs in Austin, and lava walks with Pele in Hawaii, this was it, Liam and Shorn Swede in the rain, geeking. We had bumped along many soggy days, had almost passed out from the altitude, had consumed more iced tea than Ghandi, had been lost and found and turned around. And here we were again, we two. And I felt the same way that I had felt the last time I saw Rush, a show we had also seen together. Here I didn’t have to try to relate, to make conversation, to pretend. Once you are friends with somebody long enough, you can fart and curse and giggle at stupid things and stop chittering in all the unnecessary chatter because you know what is being said, and what doesn’t need to be said.

The clouds of sweet, acrid plants, the herb smoke haze fell upon my clothing and the stage lights lit. And in keeping with all the events of my life to date, the last lesson on this Shiftless Tour was given to me. I’ll try to explain it, but so much of it is deeply internal and transformative.

When Neil Peart took the stage at Red Rocks, July of 2004, I felt my stomach drop through my shoes. I remembered the first time I’d heard and seen him, remembered how his hands moved through the kit and the sounds that he rose from the heads and the gears and the diodes. For a long, long time there has been this sticky coating on the soles of my soul and upon my pale-skin back. I’ve written about trying to dislodge it, how I felt like it should be so easy, that something so simple would one day trigger the whole thing to release and fall away like a dried scab.

He struck the snare, and then the tom. And there were his hands. And there were my hands. And I thought to myself, “Wait a minute, I want to do this. Why did I stop again? What was I so afraid of?”

There was silence as the sweat dripped from his forehead and the set spun around in the lights, throwing handfuls of miniature diamonds into the sky. And I knew the instant I asked it out loud what weight was hanging from me.

That’s when it happened. As these things often do for me, my mind suddenly began to formulate around one idea and one thought, something emergent whose boundaries had been uncertain before but now were hardening and manifesting into tangible understanding. This was a truth, a big truth, and as rapidly and excitedly as it was being noticed and identified by the other thoughts in my head, it was being gleefully surrounded and hacked at. And maybe it was a combination of a contact-buzz, my community-sparked soft heart, and the slightly expired tofu I was eating, but I felt it. I felt something very large shift.

And before me suddenly were all the times in my life when I had given up what I was in exchange for what I thought I should be, what I wanted to have, or the people that wanted to have me, all the times I turned away because it was too much work to be who I was, too hard to stand up and be different, too hard to give up what I desired for what I already might be, too hard to save my core and my passions from the lure of any small paper fly or matchstick woman.

What an easy thing to do, lose yourself, easy to lay down, easy to stop breathing or stop fighting, to stop being. But the soul of life isn’t in the easy. Too hard? “Bulllllshit,” came the thought. I was no longer sure whose life I ended up living as a result of my long, ill-chameleon dance, but that person was clinging on to me with dried fingernails and leech-lips and I only had to look at him once for the truth to sever the skin.

And there in the bleachers, under a milky-way sky that shimmered and tossed flaming embers across the heavens, there between the two upended slabs of rock that even in the darkness glowed red from the slightest impact of light, there in the middle of the desert with the music punching sugar holes through my cellophane, I figured it all out. I felt, literally, a large piece of my soul come back to me in a flood of imagery and I was instantly full again. I felt a William return to me that I hadn’t seen in nearly ten years, one that was now missing a huge sheath of fear and confusion. I was no longer afraid. And as it did, something extremely heavy fell without a sound.

Neil finished his solo and I turned to Shorn, my longtime friend and music partner, dazed and dizzy. “I think I’m going to buy a drum kit,” I said.

He simply smiled and gave me the thumbs up sign.