Also included: Part 2 of The Book of Fables.

To Tits McVenom, my favorite metalhead.

I guess by now you’ve figured out a bit about the Avett Brothers if you heard one of their songs on the last NAPcast. Still, I’m gonna put them off yet another week. This week, breaking with tradition, I am going to bring to your attention a book. Jerzy Kosiński might be best known for writing Being There, the book on which the Hal Ashby movie starring Peter Sellers is based, and that is probably his best book. But the book I want to bring up is Pinball.

Kosiński’s life was full of contradictions and semi-scandals. His first publishing contract is said to have been gotten under the pretense that the book he was shopping, The Painted Bird, was based on his own real life experiences during the holocaust, when in fact the story was fictional. Later on in his life there were a number of accusations of plagiarism, and it has been claimed that he wrote in a way similar to the way Warhol painted, having his assistants do most of the actual work and sampling freely from other writers. And then he committed suicide in 1991, but during his life most of his books were best sellers and he lived like a euro-trash movie star.

When I was a young man with untainted rock and roll dreams I read his book Pinball (1982). It is about a rock star that remains invisible while still putting out hit after hit after hit. He is basically as famous as Michael Jackson, but no one knows the first thing about the man behind the music. All they know about him is his music. He never played live and neither his record label, nor his manager had ever seen him or spoken with him. The plot of the novel revolves around a woman who sets out to find out who he is for her own ulterior motives. In general the book is an easy read though it is fairly ludicrous and filled with cheesy spy novel intrigue, x-rated rock and roll sex-and-drug scenes and the usual fare you might find in genre-mixing national bestsellers. But the whole concept of the musician who manages to speak only thru his music has always fascinated me. There have been real life instances of similar, if less extreme, situations from Jandek to all the people who have run hit factories, and manufactured boy/girl bands, people who have remained in semi-obscurity while still getting their work out there for audiences. In the book ultimately the mystery of the person behind the music obscures the music as much as any of Michael Jackson’s behavior. This makes me wonder whether it is really possible to separate the music from the context in which it exists.

And now here’s a metalhead trying to let the music speak for itself.

And finally part 2 of The Book of Fables:
THE METALHEAD IN THE WOODS

From the edge of the nearby woods the metalhead watched the two A&R men eat the folk singer. The metalhead looked closely and took in every detail, the beauty of the folk singer’s desperate attempt to save his life thru a song, the cunning manipulation of the A&R men, the sound of the teeth bitting into the meat, the blood, the bones, the bloated bellies, the burps of satisfaction, the red sun of the sunset turning the fields blood red. The metalhead watched and listened and felt a great pain in his heart. Then he made his way back to the center of the woods where he made his home.

The metalhead lived alone in the very center of a very dense patch of woods. He had lived there for a long time, and was nothing but a distant memory in the world outside his patch of woods. The metalhead enjoyed the solace of his home. In his patch of woods he made his music and this brought him joy. Every night, alone, in the darkest center of the woods, he created his heavy music for no one. One composition each night, played and then forgotten. It was the only way he had learned to express the horrors he had experienced. Each night he let out a new horror, each horror compounding upon the previous ones, making each night’s music heavier than the previous night’s. He had experienced many horrors before deciding to retire from the world, a path that eventually brought him to the woods. At first he thought that leaving the world behind also meant leaving its horrors behind, but he quickly discovered that wherever he went, the horrors were there too.

He wrote one composition each night and would play it on the metal instrument he had built himself. It had a huge body of lead and cadmium, with copper and zinc pipes that blasted out the tones played by nickel and tin hammers on vanadium, cobalt and chromium strings. The hammers themselves were put in motion with foot and hand pedals made of arsenic and activated by hydraulic pumps running on mercury. The whole instrument itself was about the size of a cathedral organ and not completely different in shape. However the sounds that came out of it would’ve caused the congregation at any cathedral to fall to their knees convinced that the end of the world was at hand. The metalhead played his instrument every night and the music was so heavy that it imprinted itself into the wood of the surrounding trees, reaching down to the roots and resonating there, a rumbling echo in the bowels of each tree for the rest of the tree’s life. So night after night the trees grew denser, harder, heavier. And if anyone had dared entered the woods and dared to put their ear to the trunk of one of these trees they would have heard days upon days of the heavy music the metalhead had made as if it was coming out from the very center of the earth.

As the metalhead started to set up his instrument for the night’s composition, he was reminded of the bum years ago when the metalhead still lived among people and played music in public. The bum had approached him as he sat reading a book outside a club where his band had just played a gig. The bum walked right up to him and told him, “You are a metalhead.” The metalhead gave the bum a puzzled look, and the bum explained. “Good and evil are at war in the world, each fighting for the souls of humanity. You are a metalhead. Your soul will not be taken by either good or evil. You quietly observe and after good and evil destroy each other in a spiral of violence, then and only then you and the other metalheads will emerge to play your music to the wind, and the world will be at peace.” And then the bum was gone. And how right the bum had been. So far.

And now the instrument was ready and the metalhead sat down to his instrument and started to play, and as he played he lived in his soul what the folk singer must have felt while he was being eaten, what the A&R men felt while eating the folk singer, what the folk singer’s heart must have felt as it was being chewed by the older A&R man, what the younger A&R man’s heart felt as it filled with the blood of the folk singer, the gluttony, the deception, the hope, the horror. And in such a way the music began to flow from his hands and feet to the pedals and thru the heavy strings unto the leaden body and thru the metal pipes and out into the surrounding woods. And the trees stirred to their roots and breathed in unison to the rhythm of the music.

What the metalhead didn’t know was that a band of brothers had recently started gathering each night at the edge of the woods to listen to the faint echoes of the metalhead’s music. The brothers loved searching for new music and looked far and wide for it in their travels through the land. And one late night sitting by the edge of the woods, quietly listening to the sound of silence they suddenly heard the faint echo of the metalhead’s music that could be heard coming through the trees if one paid close attention and was as silent as a tree. The band of brothers heard the music and tried to enter the woods to find the music, but it seemed to be coming from every tree all at once, so instead they collected a few branches and twigs and took them back to their stable where they sat all night listening to the faint and distorted music coming out of the pieces of wood they had collected. And they marvelled.

Moral: Music has a life of its own and will often find an audience even against the wishes of its maker.

Coming in part 3, the band of brothers meet the dj.