Wednesday December 1st, 1999 @ 8:43 PM
We had the pleasure of a visit from Maddog Miller at one of our recent gigs. He attended one set with his mother and sister who assisted him. He was on crutches and looked thin and anemic, but seeing him actually out and about was quite a surprise and certainly good news. He still cannot bear weight on his hips and won’t be road-worthy for a couple of months, but his progress is much better than we anticipated.
He told us stories of being turned in the hospital bed by unskilled and unsympathetic nurses who would do things like turn him for his rehab, then five minutes later come in and say they forgot to change the sheets, and turn him again. The pain was excruciating as you might imagine. Doctors peeked in and asked how he was, and before he could answer, they’d be gone, leaving behind a $90 billing for having said hello. He did have some good guys around, like the physical therapists who he admired for their skill, patience, and understanding.
Andy now faces boredom and slow mending of his many broken bones. He will, however, fully recover, we are almost certain. The margins between life and death became evident as facts came in concerning the accident. Had it been a couple of degrees colder, he would have frozen or died of hypothermia, lying exposed as long as he did. Had it been any warmer, the bleeding in his head would have caused swelling inside his skull and the damage would have been severe, even to the point of death. Had he worn his seatbelt, which I’ve seen him do many times, he’d be dead. Had he lit just a hair over this way or that his back would have been damaged far worse, etc.
When you put all the factors together, he is very lucky to be alive. What he does have to live with is no vehicle, no job, and thirty-thousand dollars of hospital debt. They never found the hit and run driver who abandoned the U-haul after running Andy down and leaving him for dead alongside the road, and of course, U-haul is balking at coming through with any money. I believe they will have to eventually, but the sweet gal who rents you the truck, and the smiling insurance man who sells people their policies are not present on this end of the deal.
Instead you have lawyers, knucklebreakers, and callused investigators, who make their living by making sure their company doesn’t have to pay. It’s loophole city.
In the meantime Blinddog has employed two bass players who take turns touring with us as their schedules allow. We haven’t been able to play many of our originals or arranged pieces, but going over some of the oldies but goodies has been fun and good for a change of pace. We can’t be as tight and polished as normal, but we are learning how to fake it really well.
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Our bus is still down. We are hating life without it as the Ford Van is falling apart and sounds like a WWII tank with damaged treads. The Van has poor shocks and pounds us over the miles like a Wagnerian Opera Soprano turned masseuse.
The bus seems to have rare requirements in its differential. We have inquired all over the country and finally found someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of all places, who has a collection of gears for our type of ride. You can bet we’ll be paying that guy a visit next time we are in Tulsa. He’ll be our new best friend.
Part of the reason we bought the bus was for our image. It is just so cool to cruise into your town in a colorful tour bus. People stand by and watch to see who gets out. We can make dramatic exits and stand around looking important afterward. But arriving in a fading bronze van with a plastic camping bubble on top, sounding like we were starting a civil war cannon battle, and bouncing to a halt with our muffler hanging down like a well wrung chicken’s head, is just not cool. If that weren’t bad enough, the inside gets filled with carbon monoxide and we step out cross-eyed like we’d been sucking campfire smoke from a police marijuana burning.
We hate to spend the money on the van when the bus bill is forthcoming, but–such is life on the road with a blues band.
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Good news for those who feel obligated to read the harptalk, but who don’t like essays, I’ll finish off today’s message with a top ten, blues world, pet peeve list. It is longer than you like, but it ought to be fun.
Peeve # 10: Drunken, male, water pump sytle, hand shaker’s. Why won’t these guys let go? I think they are trying to demonstrate appreciation, enthusiasm, and male bonding all in one great flapping, zig zagging, gyrating, out of synch, stupid looking, gooney bird flop, that rips the ball and socket joints apart and makes me want to amputate the dumb bastard at the shoulder. I think my solution is going to be working out with a hand grip so I can squeeze this grinning and drooling dolt until he either stops pumping or pees his pants.
Peeve #9: Drunken female hand clasper’s in yo’ face. This is the ladies counterpart to #10 and they get equal rights in my vilification. I know they are trying to express sincerity as they gaze at me with whirligig eyeballs that they are fighting to keep from tilting in opposite directions. Why won’t these ladies blink? The worst part is being able to smell fermenting alcohol on their stomachs as they talk to me close up in sentences that seem to use only the letter H: “Hello, Honey…I’m Heather, from Houston, Hail to you Handsome Hunk from Hhhhhhhhheaven…
Peeve #8: Dancing idiots who direct the band. These are the folks who think the band is there to make them look good on the floor for their imagined legions of fans who have come to watch them dance. If the band comes down in volume to build anticipation for the next crescendo, these people get impatient and start gesticulating like Zubin Meta before a Philharmonic orchestra. They raise their eyebrows in dismay at our ineptitude. Why can’t we realize their reputations as cute and bouncy party people are on the line? They shake their heads and sometimes stop dancing to put their hands on their hips and stare at us in wonderment, angst forming in the corners of their mouths as they get exasperated. They really think they are going to make us change our approach and style just for them. What they don’t realize is that all four of us are thinking the same thing as we look back at them dispassionately: “Fuck you dipshit!”*
*To my religious readers, please stay on my mailing list, just translate this into Baptist.
Peeve #7: People who think we are their personal request band.”Could you play something by Metallica?” They ask. “Whose that?” I answer with my best puzzled facial expression. “You don’t know Metallica?” They ask in shock, amazement, and feigned pity. You can substitute names like Lynard Skynard, KC and the Sunshine Band, Garth Brooks, Boxcar Willie, etc., it doesn’t matter as I have the same puzzled look for any of them.
“Is Mettalica that girl who wears the armored tits on the old Laugh In show?” I inquire.
“Come on dude, you can do it, I now yer good enough, just try, OK?”
“Really–that good?”
These thimblebrains think we rehearse millions of songs by hundreds of thousands of artists and we can switch voices and styles and special instrumentation at the snap of their fingers. To make matters worse, they come up and ask while you are singing another song or playing a solo, as though you’re just going to stop the whole band and bend down to them, and then in your immediate enlightenment and orders from headquarters, break out into death metal at a blues club.
These people need a brain transplant–doesn’t even have to be a human brain, a tulip bulb would do just fine and keep them from an early death.
Peeve # 6: People who tell you about their uncle. It starts with a compliment about our guitar player, then degenerates into a twenty minute harangue on how good their uncle is. “He played slide with Boots Randolph, man, at the Cow Pie Pavilion in Wichita Falls, 1961–with a lap steel he made out of a push lawn mower…”
Yeah, well, we don’t care about your uncle or your cousin, or even your blessed mother, you goofball. We have twenty people standing in line this break trying to buy our merchandise, we’re signing autographs, we’re trying to get the lazy-ass bar maid to get us the drink of water we asked for an hour ago, we’re trying to restring guitars and fix a broken monitor and we have to pee like the kid in the dunce corner at school, and here you are blithering about your broken-down uncle who’s probably in a nursing home playing slide on his pecker and doesn’t even remember who you are.
Peeve #5: Woman who pull us out on the dance floor. In this day and age of sexual harassment, a man can’t be too careful. That’s why I’d rather deal with an asshole man than an asshole woman any day. See, you can just bop the man on his head or have the bouncer’s throw him fifty feet into a fire hydrant. But an unstable woman is like nitro glycerin. The last thing we want is to see one of these volatile creatures go off on us in public. If a man behaved like that and remembered it the next morning, he’d do the decent thing and shoot himself. But these emotional black hole women call a lawyer and have you arrested. This is after having copped a few uninvited feels and suddenly latched both arms on your protesting body and started backing out on the dance floor like a dog with a rag in its mouth.
Nothing scares me more than this. I’d rather fight a biker with a tattoo of Attila the Hun on his forehead. One time in Greeley, Colorado, one of these unhappy wenches threw an apple at me while I was singing and hit me right in the mmh, mmh, mmh. The apple hit so hard in split in two and hit Andy as well. It took three big men to get her out of the bar while she screamed and kicked, and promised to sue them for touching her parts.
Peeve #4: Guys who run off the women. We have a rule of thumb in our band that one good looking woman in a bar attracts ten guys. A dozen of the gentler sex all wrapped tight in Levi’s and hair spray will fill your bar. That is why they have ladies night, and ladies drink free nights, and no cover charge on ladies night, etc. Now this will make some of you angry, but it’s true nonetheless, I know of bars where the doorman is instructed to evaluate how attractive a woman is and let her in free accordingly. Ugly women have to pay.
Anyway, there is this particular breed of man, closely related to mongrel humping dogs, not hunting dogs, who can single handedly run off all the good-looking women in ten minutes. He needs no help at all and unfortunately there is at least one in every bar. This poor dumb clod deserves to be locked in the town stocks and slapped by every woman who walks by for a year.
He has lines like this: “How come you don’t wanna dance, are you a lesbian?”
If you do dance with him he’ll try to hump you on the dance floor. These disgusting slimeballs who infest our nations dance halls with their greasy gazes must be eradicated. Why do bar owners let them stay inside to soil the atmosphere with their malodorous presence? They can’t possibly ever have a date. Even the women in my previous peeve wouldn’t stand for their obnoxious behavior. Notice that these guys all disappear after about age forty-eight. I think it’s because they masturbate to death.
Peeve # 3: People who come up on stage during a performance. Who are these people? Do they have jobs and function normally during the week? Or do they dwell in their mother’s basement in candle-lit shrines to George Carlin? They just climb up and start talking through the microphone or telling the band what to do. When you kick them off the stage they get mad or act totally shocked that you should treat them this way.
Sometimes they start emceeing the evening, sometimes they sing, sometimes they start telling people to applaud the band and scream out accolades and proclamations. They dance, they try to shake hands, they pick up the spare guitar, they help themselves to the tambourine or a harmonica, and they truly have an image of themselves as being the life of the party, the toast of the town. Women do it too. They are much harder to remove than the guys because you dare not touch any of their parts. The band is at the mercy of the club in a situation like this and most clubs wouldn’t know if Andre the Giant were onstage humping the bass drum. If the band throws these people off and a ruckus arises, then the owners usually blame the band for being troublemakers.
In Twin Falls Idaho, one of these stage crashers got us thrown not only out of the bar, but out of town. We can’t play anywhere in Twin Falls anymore. Now it’s true I did ease the guys pain for awhile, but he was smashing all of our CDs because we wouldn’t let him pull himself up on stage by using Jason’s leg. He then turned around and tried to sue the club and us for harassing him. Believe it or not ladies and gentlemen, this happens frequently. Who are these people?
Peeve #2: Drunken Club Owners. Talk about the blind leading the blind…
We set up for an evening in somebody else’s domain. The club owner is boss of this little realm and unfortunately some of them think it means God. Bacchus, perhaps, but little else smacks of godliness. I truly admire the bar owner who does his drinking in moderation or at home.
We’ve had to deal with owners being the jerk who walks onstage during a performance–then what do you do? We had one guy threaten to not pay us if we didn’t play an extra hour. He demanded free CDs for himself, his wife, and his friends. He ordered us about like deck hands and even told us what songs to play. Another one pulled the plug on us in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and ordered us out of his bar without pay. We had to march into his office and demand payment or else. He wrote a check, wadded it, and threw it at us. We went to his bank at opening the next Monday so he couldn’t cancel it.
We’ve had bar owners change the deal at the end of the night many times, and we’ve been unceremoniously canceled at the last minute as many times. I’d like to be able to remember how many clubs we’ve been kicked out of over the years by drunken club owners who just have to show the world who’s boss. Fortunately, we’ve reached a status where we can pick and choose the clubs we play. We also started a “Fuck You”* fund as well so we don’t have to lose our dignity because we are desperate.
Another problem with the drunken bar owner is the lady owner who thinks she gets the right to your privates because she is paying you for the night. I had one big German lady actually chase me around the room. She looked remarkably similar to Jaws, the giant actor in James Bond who had the steel teeth. She was announcing to the bar what naughty things she was going to do to me. Had she caught me, I’m not sure I could have won the fight. She was picked up for drunken driving later that night. I still have nightmares about that one.
*How would this be rendered in Baptist? The Screw you fund? No, still too rough, how about using the King James and saying “Screweth”? Thine screweth thee fund?” Just having some fun here. Don’t send me a nasty e-mail.
And at last, the number one pet peeve: Bad Blues Society Newsletter authors. I am convinced that there is a school for these people, or at least a class called “Cheese 101 or How to write with inside jokes and parenthetical statements.” If no such class exists, how can diverse newsletters from all over the United States have authors with exactly the same horseshit style of writing?
A reader recently asked me to advise her on writing for her Blues Society newsletter. I sent her what I thought was the perfect example, sure to be published immediately and with great proclaim. I made it up from a collection of actual statements I’ve read, names changed to keep me from being stoned when I come to your town.
“Well howdy blues lovers, buckaroos and buckerettes (har har), and all you out there in blues land who read Uncle Bluzer’s column every couple of blue moons or so (get it? “Blue” moon? Heh, heh). If your like me (and God knows that would be too bad, right Frank?) you ate too much at the old annual blues pig roast again this year (burp), but hell, didn’t we all? Like to thank our blues Aunt, Mable Bluezinski for bringing her bloodhound again this year to clean up the pile of bones Harold was making over by the beer keg (remember Herb, you were there all day (hey, relax, I won’t tell your pretty wife, Hazel))–sorry Harold about Bertram (the Bloodhound) hiking his leg on you, but then it was just recycled beer anyway (har).
Hey folks, did ya get to the Blinddog Smokin’ show out at the Booze ‘n Bluz Club Thursday night? Well, (If I must say so myself) you missed a humdinger. The moon was full and the ladies were out and the music was hot and you should have seen old Uncle Bluzer out there shakin’ a leg (don’t worry honey, I only danced with your sister, (oh hell, I confess, I did put a pair of Blinddog panties on my head and danced with Al Bains, but you know how it goes–he was a perfect gentleman, (harty har)). Hey I’m gone, outta here, sianara, hasta manana, and happy blues trails to all you bluz gurus out there in readerland. By the way, pick up copy of Kenny Wayne’s new CD, that boy ain’t black, but he sure is blue (gotcha!!!!!!!!) Hey the next meeting is down at Herb’s Wiener Bar, bring a deck of cards and an Albert Collins CD (Nothing’ like an Ice cold beer with the iceman, he?). Oops, wife’s calling. I’m history. Uncle Bluzer”
Posted by Carl
Tuesday November 9th, 1999 @ 8:40 PM
The day following every Carlzharptalk article, I check to see how many readers drop off the list. Since each mailing goes to many new people, some always drop off when it doesn’t meet their expectations. I was sad to see that I lost a few because of Doppelgangers. I had second thoughts about sending out something that heavy, but figured most readers wouldn’t mind a little food for thought. I received a few parting shots via e-mail. I thought you might be interested in some other people’s perspectives on my writing. It is not my policy to ever mention a reader’s name as I choose to be very respectful and sensitive to anyone who does me the honor of taking time out of their lives to read my offerings.
#1 Carl, send me something that matters…
#2 If I have to use a dictionary to read something on e-mail, I’m outta here…
#3 Are there really people who understand what the hell you’re writing about?
#4 Carl, when are you going to send us something funny again?
#5 …you’re a fuckin’ basket case, dude…
#6 This is a newsletter? Where’s the news?
#7 Stick to singing, man, a writer you are not.
#8 If I wanted to read a novel, I’d join a book club…
While most return comments on Doppelgangers were positive, I feel compelled to explain a couple of things that seem to come up as common questions week to week.
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On vocabulary:
I don’t write to the level of the intellectual bottom feeders. If the troglodytes of the earth dictated my choice of subject matter and vocabulary usage, I’d be no better than a barker at a strip club. I value words as precision tools that allow me to paint a vision exactly as I want it conveyed. We wouldn’t ask a mechanic to fix an engine with a crescent wrench and a screwdriver. If a particular bolt calls for a 5/16 wrench, I would expect him to use it.
Personally, when I read, I love to look up words with which I am unfamiliar. I find my understanding of the story is far more comprehensive than to just guess what they mean from the context. Words are the tools of thought. They allow the mind to go places inaccessible to the verbally handicapped. Shakespeare used over 27,000 words in his writings. The English language can be spoken and understood with as little as 500 words. Should we have told Shakespeare to write so the 500-word guy wouldn’t have to look up his five hundred and first word? One powerful verb or noun will do the work of several adjectives and conjunctions and make the read flow much smoother.
Here is an actual sentence I heard just last week: “Goddamn dude! You’re fuckin’ lookin’ like, fuck, I don’t know man–baaaaad, ya know what I’m sayin’–shit!” Interpreted: You look good.
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On subjects:
I try to be unique in my articles. Who needs another piece on who Stevie Ray Vaughn’s influences were? I not only want readers who respect me as a writer, but who I respect as a reader. How can I respect a reader who wants chocolate on every morsel of brain food?
I advertise this letter as “getting deep inside the head of a traveling blues man.” People who want newsletters about blues society picnics and the annual hog roast fund raiser, can find such publications in every town across the country. I have traveled to dozens of countries; played music on the coast of the Red Sea; walked the streets of old Jerusalem with my bandmates; jammed in Turkey with esoteric musicians; sneaked past Kurdish terrorists to climb the ancient walls of their capital; performed for the Italian families of Lampedusa–a miniscule island in the meditterean; been to all continents but Asia, and opened myself to adventure everywhere I’ve ever been. Why would I want to write about Bubba’s award for perfect attendance at last years blues society meetings?
I try to stay on subjects relating to our band and the music scene, and I try not to offend anyone unnecessarily, but I believe some people want to be offended and search hard for an excuse.
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Concerning Doppelgangers, one man wrote me this question, not in criticism, but in partial jest and sincere inquiring. “Does Alice Cooper count as a doppelganger?”
I would like to answer it to cover a lot of questions that arose out of “Doppelgangers”. Yes, he would. Anyone who intentionally cultivates his personality to leave the herd and bucks the tide to do it, would count under my definition. Adolph Hitler would count as a doppelganger who demonstrated the evil extremes of man’s potential. For good or for bad, the doppelgangers separate humankind from the cattle chewing cud and the cornstalks bending whichever way the wind blows. When I say “don’t slay the doppelgangers,” I’m not saying the evil ones shouldn’t die, I’m saying empower the desire in others to grow past the mundane.
The antonym for doppelganger in my view is couch potato. It is my hope that the readership would desire to live a life of challenge, exhilaration, and personal growth, and if they couldn’t, at least not desire to spend the rest of their lives sitting on a couch watching TV and hoping that when they died they’d go to that “Big Screen in the Sky.” If they are couch potatoes, I hope for them that they still read Carlzharptalk and exhilarate vicariously. And–if they can’t even do that, at the very least–don’t slay the doppelganger.
I am happy to announce that as of this week, one person in every million in North America, now subscribes to Carlzharptalk. If you’ve always wanted to be that one in a million, now you are. I absolutely love writing the harptalk and getting new readers all the time, and I deeply appreciate your feedback, which has been overwhelming positive. Perhaps an occasional heavy article will serve as a winnowing process to eliminate those who would slay the doppelganger.
Carl
P.S. I’ll try to make the next one funny.
Posted by Carl
Monday November 8th, 1999 @ 8:38 PM
Is there an apparition stranger than a man within a man, one the creation of the other, one seen and one not seen? This I wondered as I saw his eyes. Bright eyes, black and eerie in the smoky pall. Rings adorned his every finger and thumb. The stance was proud, the visage was stone, the smile–slow and chilling.
The eyes again, turning toward me under a flat-brimmed hat, focused from their corners now, piercing the haze to meet mine. Did he know me? Uneasy, I leaned forward to study the dark figure slow-stepping in the interior dusk. Something familiar limned into my memory, then vanished. The gray cloth of his suit hung elegantly from the lank frame. An aura was distinctly about him as he moved like an old panther, sure of its lair. I knew him, yet I did not. “Who is he?” I thought. “What is he?”
Suddenly I knew. I was beholding a doppelganger. Were doppelgangers like vampires, I wondered, with peculiar rules to govern their slaying? I knew that people sometimes feared these doublegoers and often tried to kill them. Society, as a whole, tries to kill them at birth, yet paradoxically celebrates them if they survive to maturity. But fear them, or glorify them, they remain a fascinating study.
I had met D.C. Minner in the day lit interior of his home from birth, also known as the Down Home Blues Club in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, a tiny black community, hidden from the main roads. A gaunt figure with a nappy gray head and stringy goatee, he mumbled through toothless gums trying to wake himself into sociability. He appeared many years older than his official sixty-two. It was hard to detect where the worn upholstery of his chair melded into his disheveled clothes, so homogenous were the artifacts of his life throughout this old jukejoint he called home.
D.C. is a storyteller, one of the two best raconteurs alive in my empirical knowing. It was he that introduced me to the doppelganger: “I put a hat on him and a fine suit,” he announced in third person narrative. “I put in his teeth–the ladies don’t want no gummy man singin’ to ‘em, and I git his rings ‘n shit, shiny shoes, an’ a red shirt. He a struttin’ man when I bring him out…”
What the hell was he talking about? Bring who out? I hadn’t fully understood until that night of the doppelganger when I hadn’t recognized the transformation of D.C. Minner himself. So concerted had been the metamorphosis that I had to percolate my vision in order to change my preconception. Was it really the tired and dusty old man staring in defiance and triumph as he galvanized the night air with his electric guitar and marched about in a soul-strut born and raised on a thousand stages like this one? “I’ll be damned,” I had muttered.
I knew that the doppelganger I saw that night was a survivor, not of wooden stakes and silver bullets, but of other torments, specific to these rare and beautiful doublewalkers: jealousy, conformity, fear, and envy.
Originating in Germanic literature, the doppelganger is said to be a spirit double, inherent in all people, but developed more in some. They can live apart or parallel to each of us. For my purposes it is the glorified self, honed and polished by fierce ambition, relentless drive, and torturing self-sacrifice. It takes years to create the mature doppelganger of my definition: years of rejection and adjustment, rejection and adjustment, rejection and adjustment–over and over again, throwing out what doesn’t work, keeping what does, but always innovating in a mind-frame of undaunted faith.
Once unleashed in their refined and burnished luster, they are hard to kill and march forward in an accolade reserved only for their kind. When their creator dies they often live on, and in so doing they shed all vestiges of human vulnerability. Look at Stevie Ray Vaughn, forever cast as the Texas gunslinger: spangled hat and serape straight out of a spaghetti Western–the mighty Stratocaster poised like a Winchester Rifle on his hip, all in confluence to a face drawn to dignified rapture through the mastery of his art and the conquering of his demons.
People fall in love with doppelgangers, not knowing that they only live when performing, and then as D.C. explains, “….I put him back away until it’s time to bring him out again.” Oh, the doppelganger loves to live and at times fiercely resists being “put away”. The more he lives, the more he loves to live, because the doublegoer lives in a rhapsody. We forgive the great doppelgangers almost any deed because they have vaulted above reproach, above the commonplace, and have secured a seat in Valhalla, and we live through them vicariously. As the high priest is said to be a vicar of Christ, these doppelgangers are the vicar’s of human exhilaration, and we love them for it.
To what is base and displeasing about human living, the doppelganger is no longer subject. We don’t see our image of Cher straining at an arduous call of nature. We don’t picture “Old Blue Eyes” humping the hostess like a mangy dog before he regurgitates his alcohol and passes out snoring. No, we forget the creator and immortalize the creation on stamps and paintings like the sequined Elvis. The doppelganger is an exclusionary vision, conceived as a dream, whetted by a million strops of scorn, and ultimately presented in an empyrean descent–and only the strong survive.
The Blues world is replete with doppelgangers in varying echelons of incandescence. At a festival one can observe all levels, from doublegoers freshly conceived in the minds of their creators, to vaunted stars, immutable and supremely confident. There are also the wannabes, who lust deeply for the glory, but are as yet unwilling to pay the price to unleash and sculpt their greater nature. They perform with a cool hat or a dangling cigarette and dump their shallow exhibition on us while lost in a daydreamed lie, in no way the great dynamic of the doppelganger.
As wonderfully mesmerizing as a fully developed doublewalker can be, we squelch that development all along the way. Think back to your childhood when you first tried to sing a song or dance in your classroom, or recite a poem or act in a play. Children laugh and scoff at each other–sometimes to the point of humiliation. Most teachers encourage conformity. It is rewarded, while individualism is punished, except by rare and courageous teachers. Parents want their children to be like all the other children, except for rare and courageous parents.
The slaying of a doppelganger can begin the day a child voices a dream, seeing himself or herself, as a glorious adult, in a state of being far beyond the parent who is listening. “Let’s be realistic, says the parent, we’ll put money aside for your college education so you can become an accountant. You can work your way through school at McDonalds, don’t you see?” Or the less sensitive parent who bellows: “Just git a fuckin’ job…”
Many parents fear the horrible disappointments that accompany the creation of a doppelganger. They wish to protect their precious child and nurture it. They don’t want to see their child rejected and crestfallen. They remember the scorn and ridicule they encountered before they gave up their quest to create the supreme configuration of themselves. Doppelgangers always walk uphill through a gauntlet of disbeliever’s who castigate them with clubs of doubt.
Maybe this is as it should be. I am not judging right or wrong here, only telling you what is and why. My friends of yesteryear, who knew me as I struggled to raise a family of four children, wish to slay the doppelganger. They see me as poor and bohemian, gathering no moss, and living an illusion. One wrote me a letter asking when I was going to quit hiding behind my stage persona and become the real me. He said I had come to a crossroads in my life and had chosen the wrong road, and implied that the world of blues was a false world, and veiled, a haven of self-deception, where I was slipping into darkness, and wherein dwell the doppelgangers. The implication was spiritual or religious: the creation of the doppelganger is vain and self-serving, ungodly and dark.
Have you ever lay awake at night and wondered if there was a better you trying to get out? As you look back on your life does it seem that at some indefinable point, circumstances took over, and the person you dreamed of becoming just vanished? Have you wondered whether the vanishing was the coming of reality or that perhaps the preferred someone lies dormant in your labyrinthine id?
When you hear yourself described by your occupation, do you ever ask yourself, “so that’s who I am? That’s what I’ve become?”–then feel a twinge of angst because you know that it doesn’t represent the pure and true definition of who you really should be? Then do you wake up in the morning and accept your role in life and for the next few months forget that you even questioned it? I have, and I know I’m not alone.
This mortal and mysterious life we have all happened upon has something a life governed openly and daily by a revealed God would not have: risk. Obvious risks like death, dismemberment, blindness, disease, poverty, war, rape, and subjugation. And subtler but equally vital risks, like humiliation, defeat, embarrassment, ridicule, and the despair from lost hope. Risk is what causes fear and therefore produces the need for courage, and the by-product is exhilaration. If you knew the roller-coaster could not wreck and that even if it did, you were immortal and couldn’t be hurt in any way, it wouldn’t take any courage at all to ride it, and it follows that the exhilaration would be greatly diminished.
The doppelganger, as I describe him, is a person who has laid himself bare to the judgement of others, has taken chances with his character and personality. One who has weathered the storms of criticism and ridicule and repeatedly pushed on, improvising, adapting, growing. A person who has demonstrated courage and faced his fears, and crafted a finer version of himself than he who is left to his own appetites, and the decisions of others, security, and the pulls of mundane materialism. The doublegoer can only exist where there is risk. He who constantly protects himself from his fears cannot go where the doppelganger goes or share the glory.
I submit that mankind needs the doppelganger. Mankind needs a vicarious vision of what is possible in human dimensions of emotion. We need the example of courage and self-sacrifice. We need the creative phenomenon. We need to be able to crawl inside the soul of our fellow man and experience ultimate exhilaration. That is why thirty thousand people will sardine themselves onto a levee every year at the King Biscuit Blues Festival and behold the doppelgangers everyday from noon ’til midnight, rain or shine.
One of the brightest doublegoers I ever personally witnessed was the late Luther Allison. I stood before him at the aforementioned blues festival in 1996 and was impaled by the puissant force of his shining spirit. His eyes shimmered with intensity. I don’t recall seeing such focused energy in a human being before. Wave after wave of adrenaline surged in my veins as he tore into the night air with vicious guitar attacks and vocal tone born in his deepest essence. A normal man could not do this. A normal man could not have guessed this kind of output was even possible. It was the unique quality of a doppelganger lost in song. It was song defined as the human plight, a crying out to the universe for understanding. Those humans who deny themselves access to this kind of passion are missing a trenchant dimension in their development.
I have never been the same since. I reached inside myself for renewed vitality. I saw a new path that lay open a vision of human vivacity that I’d never seen. I went away more alive than I knew was possible before that night, but Luther went away to die. Even as the doppelganger burned like a dazzling shooting star on the stage before us, his creator was dying of brain cancer and the end would come suddenly.
I have a tape from long ago, before his self-imposed exile in France, of Luther Allison playing drunk in a bar. I was amazed at the lackluster performance, characterless voice, and lifeless guitar work. The doppelganger had not yet formed. His subsequent rejection in America, and his years overseas, and his multitude of life experiences where he refused to give in, refused to conform, refused to stop believing and growing, had forged the fabulous product I saw decades after the tape had been made.
The doppelganger, though, needs us. Luther fed off the power and adulation of the audience. That is what a doppelganger eats–not food, but human animation and devotion. The more he receives the stronger he gets. Without us he cannot live, cannot exist in the first place. We have the ability to destroy him or empower him. Without the doppelgangers we cannot know what is possible nor feel the exhilaration of it all. We can ride them to places high and beatific, and we can follow in the steps laid down by the greatest of the doublewalkers. They are the trailblazers of the soul.
Now, of course, there are no doppelgangers per se, only we humans wanting to rise above our earthy nature. Some of us do despite the obstacles. A preacher I once heard, a doppelganger if ever there was one, said we all find ourselves on this earth and begin running the race, the human race I guess, and we go along comfortably until we trip on an obstacle and fall flat on our faces. At that point we realize it is an obstacle race. We get back up and run again trying to spot the obstacles, and once again we fall flat on our faces. It is then that we learn the obstacles are the other people in the race.
As a performer, I ignore those who tell me what I can’t do and shouldn’t do and didn’t do and will never do. Some people vitiate and invalidate, while others empower and elevate. I choose to revel in personal growth–my own, and that of my fellow man.
Last August Blinddog Smokin’ arose at the crack of dawn for the first time all year, and drove to the hay fields outside of Salmon, Idaho, where we met a sweet couple in their mid fifties, who decided to start life over together. They’d both come out of unhappy marriages with negative mates who made it their mission to devalue the other’s life, and squelch their dreams.
They had found each other and decided to become balloonists, par excellance: a far-fetched dream for a 300-pound man and his new wife afraid of heights. But they believed, and they committed, and they got married in a balloon. They took us soaring high above the dew-laden fields with only the occasional sound of flame breaching the pure quiet of a blue morning sky. We were a brilliant zephyr, resplendent in bright colors, musing above the muck and muddle of stressed-out humanity.
Our captain was in his glory, he torched the balloon to great heights, while he beamed in ecstasy, and roared on occasion with cheerful tales and adventures. We figuratively rode the back of this doppelganger like four monkeys on a stallion, and value the memory like gold.
I couldn’t help but wonder after my marvelous morning, what the world would be like if the doppelganger in all of us were allowed to live. What wondrous adventures we could share. But the call to material conformity is strong, fear of failure is deeply embedded, and indebtedness keeps a stranglehold on most of us. Perhaps worst of all, there are many among us, some in whom the doublegoer was once strong, then languished, who are envious, jealous, and scared, eager to slay the doppelganger.
*Footnote: I use the term Doppelganger within a framework of my own interpretation. If there be German literary scholars among my readership who would take exception to this or that inaccuracy, I urge them to lighten up and enjoy the read.
Posted by Carl