We don't play rock and roll. We play wrack and ruin.
Dread Clampitt
Cover art by Bryan Hand
Drawing of Charlie White by Blaster Al
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404
Copyright © 2004 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
Sunday at The Red Bar, Balder announced,
Hello, we're Dread Clampitt.
What kind of music do we play?
Roots music is blues, jazz, Cajun, zydigo, old-time country music, bluegrass, reggae--pretty much anything but Top-40 radio and pipi-tease disco.
And sometimes an amalgam of more than one, as they cross-fertilize each other.
We don't play rock and roll. We play wrack and ruin.
Ladies and gentlemen...Dread Clampitt!
They were calling their new CD, Live at the Funky Blues Shack, Wrack
& Ruin.
Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Art builds, but not on a blank page. What's there
must be erased, recast. Deconstructed.
Thomas Kuhn says a new paradigm does
not establish itself until the adherents of the old paradigm have all died off. There
is a generational component of open-mindedness. Young Turks are always young. The
dead hand of tradition has a rice bowl to defend. Perks to protect. The dacha and
the chit book at the nomenklatura store.
Apparatchiks in the Soviet
Writers Union voted to expel Solzhenitsyn, and East German writers informed on each
other to the secret police. Lysenkoism took over Russian science.
What happens
to rock-and-roll when it becomes elevator music, background noise for slick ads for
designer tennis shoes and pre-ripped blue jeans, when it is corporatized, and the
only bands that make the play list on the radio chains play what they know will get
played on the radio, so they can have the tour, the music video on MTV, the spot
on the televised awards show?
It goes underground. Hand-to-hand and word-of-mouth.
Self-produced CDs from garage bands with a local following. Hard-core fans.
Dread Clampitt don't play rock-and-roll. They play wrack-and-ruin. And I'm not talking
about role-playing, Dungeon and Dragon games. I'm talking about scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners,
head-cutting-contest music.
It isn't a battle of the bands, it's one band,
acting alone, against a co-opted multimedia establishment of concert promoters, A&R
people at record labels, record distributors, record retailers, radio and television
content programmers, and record reviewers, or rock journalists, if that isn't the
worst of two fields which are themselves a watering down of (1) Music, and (2) Writing.
Review it yourself. Tell a friend.
Buy the CD. Make copies. Spread the word.
Help Underserved Arts Communities (HUAC). Or I'll kill you. I'll sack your village
and salt your fields. I'll sacrifice your virgins. Lure your youth away with tales
of beatnik glory.
Buy my book. I need gas for the family car. To get to my
day job and back.
It isn't easy being a wrack-and-ruin journalist.
I play Dread Clampitt's Live at the Funky Blues Shack CD, Wrack & Ruin,
on my computer at work, and listen to it in my headset, for inspiration.
They're going to make it out of the trap, the quicksand bog, the maze. They have
slain the minotaur and found Ariadne's thread out of the labyrinth.
Follow
the one who knows where to go.
Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brew wasn't a rock journalist, or even a jazz journalist.
He was a wrack-and-ruin journalist.
He tore down what was there and built
it again, from scratch. In his journal. He kept a journal.
Every day he added
to it and everything he added changed the relation of existing pieces to each other,
and the whole.
The whole grew. Organically. Obeying the laws of its own architectonic,
which Brew discovered, in the work, rather than imposed on the work, a priori.
What was so hard about this?
A journal is like a log. Sometimes Brew called
his book LOG. Or F-LOG.
To flog the dog.
Solo Anchor. Wanker.
Journal is from diurnal, which means daily.
A journeyman
is a worker who can work independently within a day's travel of his home.
A master is a journeyman who has achieved mastery.
What comes after
master?
The post-masterpiece novel, by analogy with post-modern.
What you write when you cannot sell your masterpiece.
40-Year Run is
divided into two meta-metaseries, 30-Year Run: The First 186 Volumes of Jack Saunders'
Stack and The 4th Quarter: A Post-Masterpiece Novel.
Does intention
count?
Cyril Connolly wrote, "...the true function of a writer is to
produce a masterpiece," and, "...no other task is of any consequence."
If you don't think 30-Year Run is a masterpiece I can't convince you.
There are no unpublished masterpieces, Jane Friedman told Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.
No undiscovered geniuses. All good books get published.
Brew was a fool,
an egomaniac, a nut-case.
How could he be any good and not sell a book to
New York?
It was unlikely, statistically. As unlikely as catching a lobe-finned
fish.
More likely 40-Year Run was the ravings of a madman. Like transcribing
the rapping of a speed freak.
40-Year Run wasn't a journal, it was
a novel with journal entries in it. Among other things. A book he updated daily,
where each installment was related to the book that came before it and the book that
came after.
Not many novels out there like that. (Sure there are. They're
called a roman-fleuve.) No wonder New York couldn't find it. They weren't
looking in the right place, and didn't recognize it when they saw it. It slipped
under their radar. Even if Brew was pointing at himself, and hollering, "Over
here!"