Embodied Phenomena in Rock and Roll. Or, Touring the Imaginal Geography of Popular Music Performance

“Music, of course, has something. But it can’t propose solutions; it can’t solve anything. But it can make people feel less lonely. You can be somewhere and just hear a tune and just, ya’ know, you feel better that it exists.” – Elvis Costello (Looking for America, 2009).

A song has been playing over and over again. It has been blasting on the car stereo as I drive. It has been floating from itunes into my headphones as I browse the internet. It has been wafting through the speakers of the home stereo.

I wrote the song three or four months ago. The basic chord progression was discovered by accident while fiddling around with the guitar. But the song didn’t really take flight until I started working it at the piano.

Until that moment, I hadn’t really played that particular piano much at all. Perhaps I couldn’t find the time. Maybe I didn’t have the desire. It is not a Steinway or a Bösendorfer, but it is my dream piano.  A Boston built Ivers and Pond’s from 1924, it displays the structural integrity of an airship. When I bought the piano, bizarre lead weights on the back of each key kept the quality of my playing tethered to the limited physical strength I could muster from my fingers. After the weights were removed my hands could launch sound and timbre just by gliding across the synthetic ivory key tops.

However, it is not the instrument’s sonic, mechanical or decorative properties that give it its oneiric qualities. In fact, the piano’s tone lacks the jet-like speed, intensity and brilliance that place better pianos on runways of their own. Instead, its value is in the circumstances of the piano’s acquisition. This small grand is the first piano I purchased with my own earned income. This is the piano I imagined at 13 years old. The instrument is the culmination of boyhood dreams in which I lift off into an ethereal adult existence as orchestra conductor, rock star, or classical composer.

No matter that the piano was purchased not with proceeds from a professional career in music, but rather with money earned flipping pancakes in a diner. When the movers carried it into my house and reattached the legs and damper pedals, it represented an arrival, a landing. It was evidence that the slow conclusion (at 30 years of age) of an elongated adolescence was underway. Hard work and responsibility had paid off and the instrument was material evidence of happiness. Or was it?

In late 2007, the piano sat surrounded by extraordinarily expensive guitars crafted from fine Indian rosewood and Sitka spruce. I pushed my hair out of my eyes. The new haircut was intended to resemble John Lennon’s in Bob Gruen’s famous New York City T-shirt photo, or the mad-scientist-like locks that flew around Leopold Stokowski’s head as he set an orchestra afloat with the wave of his baton. But in its infancy the ‘doo looked more like the frizzy synthetic fuzz that sits atop a child’s troll toy. Whether I would have admitted or not, inside of me there was a ‘tween-ager acting like a new school year was about to begin; he believed that hairstyle held the mana of coolness.  So I ran my hands through my rock and roll coiffure and I glanced at the piano. It was clear that the instrument was more like an over-inflated balloon taking up too much space in the living room of my small Philadelphia row house than the beacon of maturity it was meant to be. Clearly the symbolism was not strong enough to provide a smooth touch down on firm individuated adult tarmac.  Instead, it sat unplayed — used mostly as a shelf on which to stack books waiting to be read.

Yes, I kept my emotional distance, but I physically played it often. After 20 years of practicing scales, arpeggios, jazz runs and blues riffs, any piano beckons to be touched. But I never had my heart in it. Sure, after studying the structural dynamics of counterpoint and harmony, I feel compelled to plow through the technical foundations of each song or melody that intrigues me, tilling the musical loam for buried treasure. But at that time the piano was nothing more than an abacus on which I counted seeds of theoretical harmonics and melodic ingenuity.

That is until this song brought the piano and me into the same atmosphere. The song reinstated my sentimental relationship with, not only this hunk of wood, felt and copper-wound steel, but also any other set of 88 black and white keys tuned to the western chromatic scale. Furthermore, it reacquainted me with the sonic, emotional, unearthly and soulful possibilities that those keys represent.

It is an old conflict. One where even the most stubborn of modernist rationalists are not afraid to use words like ‘soul.’ Music can be played with or without soul; and the majority of folks, aware of the expressive limitations of simple technical mastery, still tolerate the immeasurability of the mystical properties that define a ‘good’ or ‘soulful’ musical performance.

This paper focuses on ‘soulful’ performance.  Locating ‘soul’ in the space between performer and audience, I attempt to understand the lived experience of the performance relationship. I apply post-Jungian dreamwork techniques as a method to understand the experience of performing and I use of a variety of depth psychological concepts in order to describe the actual relationship between performer and audience. First, however, I must discuss what is meant by ‘soulful’ performance.

Tunnel Vision. Or: Pinch me, I’m Dichotomizing.

On Sunday, April 26 2009, I was sleeping beneath the perfect unwrinkled sheets in the Holiday Inn express in Carpinteria, CA. During the day I had flown from the east coast to the west to attend a 3-day long class on dreams that was part of my doctoral studies in Depth Psychology.

I arrived in Los Angeles around 1pm and drove the burnt orange colored rental car an hour and a half to the hotel. I quickly washed my face, changed my shirt and headed out to a local wine tasting room just south of Santa Barbara’s State street underpass.

The Kalyra winery tasting room pours for me whenever I’m in the Santa Barbara area. I have a long relationship with the place and sipping there makes me feel grounded, as if the city were not so far away from home.

That afternoon, I felt like a local. I knew the wine well and I was chatting with two women from London that were touring the West Coast. I flirted with the Brits — a short curvy brunette whose fiery personality might force me to categorize her as the tough-girl-next-door and a tall skinny nutritionist whose shoulder length blond hair brushed against her freckled shoulders as she moved like a pixie. I was waiting for my classmate to send me a text message that she was ready to meet for dinner.

Dinner never materialized. Instead, I stumbled into a local hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in which I was the only “gringo.” I order a burrito camarones, devoured it in my hotel room, took a hot bath and fell asleep.

A dream woke me at 4:00am: