September 26, 2009

A quick glance through my iPod will alert anyone to my musical preferences: blues, classic rock, and heavy wood. To many it may seem restrictive, but I personally adore it because it sums up what I love about music: rawnity. Before you scratch your head and wonder if my Microsoft spell check has busted, let me say that rawnity is a term that I have just invented. It can be defined as follows:

raw-ni-ty

-noun

1) a state of perpetual rawness
2) being imbued with ideals, techniques, or practices that are unrefined and unpolished.

In other words, rawnity is when something (in this case, music) is unperfected, dirty, and, um...raw.....

Raw music is when the musicians have little to no training, little to no mainstream appeal (at first...I doubt that the Grateful Dead are considered `alternative` anymore), and are not genetically designed and processed in a Disney laboratory ten miles below Orlando, Florida.



Pictured above: Test subject #321334-A43

Of all the musicians who excel at rawnity, probably my favorites are the old school Delta bluesmen. Some of the most infamous and influential Delta bluesman are:



Robert Johnson (a.k.a. The Man Who Sold His Soul to the Devil For His Guitar Skills)...



Son House...



and Robert Wilkins

I have not even mentioned my two favorite Delta bluesmen, Howlin Wolf and John Lee Hooker. I can confidently say that since I have come here to Japan, I have listened to those two artists more than anything else on my iPod. Hooker`s `Hobo Blues` has basically become my anthem while I am abroad. You can listen to it at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYrVwGxlcFA&feature=channel_page

Yeah...I should probably figure out how to embed youtube videos....

Well, anyway...why do I love their music so much?

I love it because it is honest. The old delta bluesmen played their music almost everyday of their lives. They did not get paid by any big recording studio. They lived from gig to gig. Most of the early Delta bluesmen recorded material, but almost none of their records sold well. They sang with mouths decayed by tobacco and whiskey, played with fingers calloused over from work, and stared with eyes that could melt a hole in the wall even in eighty year old photographs. They played old guitars that were basically bits of wire nailed onto pieces of plywood. And yet, when they played they could create some of the sweetest music that man has ever conceived. I find more beauty in Robert Johnson`s `Crossroads` than anything ever written by Debussy or Schubert.

I am not the only one who thinks this way. The classic rock heroes of the sixties and seventies learned their chops from the old bluesmen. Eric Clapton got some of his first blisters trying to perfect Robert Johnson`s songs. So is it any wonder that I want to learn how to play the blues the way the masters used to almost eighty years ago?

One of the big problems that I have with modern music is that too many musicians try too hard to sound clean. One of the reasons that I stopped listening to modern rock music was because I got to the point that I could not even hear the guitar anymore. It all started to sound alike. What with twelve tracks for a song`s vocals alone, it is almost impossible to distinguish the instruments from each other. And do not even get me started on who seems to pass for `guitar experts` these days......



Urge to kill rising...............................................

Anyway, it just confounds me how musicians these days seem to insist on getting the `right` sound from the `right` instruments. It is almost considered a sin to appear onstage with a cheap guitar if you have made it onto the radio. Brands like Gibson and Fender have become sacred fetishes for musicians nowadays. And why? I`ll tell you why. The label. People are willing to shell out an extra thousand dollars for a guitar if it just says `Gibson` on it. Again I ask, why? When I was shopping for my electric guitar, I tried out some expensive name brand guitars. They were okay, but the best (and the one that I eventually bought) was a small dark-red Ibanez. Here is the kicker: It cost HALF of what the other guitars did and sounded TWICE as good!

I guess what I am trying to say is that usually the best instruments are the ones in the back rack that have gathered a fine layer of dust because they did not have a label. Sometimes, to get the best sound, the cheaper something is, the better it will be. Another example is the infamous guitar slide. I have purchased TWO guitar slides in the past, one glass and one metal. Neither of them gave me a very satisfying sound despite the fact that they carried heavy price tags at the music store. It is probably just as well. I do not think that factory made guitar slides should even be used. Guitar slides are commonly referred to as `bottleneck slides` for a reason: the first ones literally were the necks of bottles!! Other than empty bottles of whiskey, the first slide guitarists also used KNIVES for their music. Just for kicks, a few nights ago, I went into the dorm kitchen, grabbed a dirty, miso-covered cooking knife, and slid it on my guitar strings. The sound was angelic.

So why have I mentioned all of this? I am sure my parents want to know how this has to do with my trip to Japan. Well, it goes like this...

On Wednesday, there was a national holiday in Japan. Do not ask me which one, not even my Japanese friends knew which one it was. Well anyway, we did not have classes that day, so I decided to go fishing with four other guys from my dorm. We went to a second hand store to buy fishing poles when I saw...Her.....

She was a beautiful old Legend acoustic with scratches on her body and chips on her head board. She had an old set of strings (at least I think they were) and made a truly heart-breaking sound when plucked. It was the guitar that I had been searching for ever since I first started to learn how to play the instrument. It sounded old enough to play the blues, and yet crisp enough to manage Bach. It was almost one of the best moments of my entire trip. I say almost because the actual moment that I will remember as one of the best of the entire trip was when I looked at the price tag and saw that it was marked for 3,000 yen.

That translates to $30.

Needless to say, only four fishing poles were purchased. Only four men went to the lake. And only four men returned to the dorm later that day, only to hear Howlin Wolf`s `Killing Floor` come echoing from the rooftop where a young musician deepened his relationship with his new love.