Robert Hunter Journal update, 2/4/05 [long]
Michael Z.
to the newsgroup as a service to the last 2.887 Deadheads on
Usenet without Web access.
Web-enabled folks can find this at:
<http://dead.net> => Band Members => Hunter => Journal 2004
Unfortunately, he's removed all the old (pre-Sept. 2001) journal
entries from the site (but you can still find them through a Google
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(search rmgd for the words Hunter Journal)
MZ
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February 4, 2005
Just fixed my chair with Noam Chomsky's Reflections on Language.
Made a pretty good hammer.*
Performances? Knee surgery taking longer to heal than expected. How
long? Long as it takes. Decided on the strength of that knowledge not
to go for a shoulder fix. I'd just mess it up again by playing wrong -
instead I've cut my guitar practice down to a reasonable amount of
time, paying attention to weight distribution by using the strap and
making sure the guitar hangs evenly instead of pulling on the "bad"
side. It's ceased to be a major problem. Practicing long hours without
a strap while sitting hunched over the guitar on the edge of the bed
seemed like a good idea at the time, but didn't work out.
My extravagant New Year's Resolution to read "Finnegans Wake" from
start to end is well advanced. Four hundred pages into it my estimation
is that James Joyce drove words hard and put 'em away wet. The Wake
takes its place beside the Sphinx, the Kaballah and the heads on Easter
Island as a major enigma of this strange 3rd planet from the Sun.
Unreadability is only one of its many charms.
Dinosaurs bandmate Spencer Dryden once told me I was the last
significant player of the old San Francisco guard that was still
"underground". That bit of kindly perception has saved me from much
needless brooding about relative obscurity and I'll always thank him
for it. Subterranean . . .Yeah! I am, however, reasonably well known as
an "unknown". You don't lose labels in this business.
When I was a newsboy, I'd get out of my 7th grade schoolday at SF's
Presidio Jr. High and collect and fold my papers on the corner of 28th
and Geary, across from a sexy billboard of Jane Russell swimming toward
me in a bathingsuit and snorkel advertising a movie called Underwater.
I think this billboard was not fair to a 13 year old kid. Unlike kids
of that age these days, I knew zero about sex; was just beginning to
notice certain girls strangely compelling. Didn't know why. Other side
of the street was Spreckles drycleaning establishment which had a motto
in the window I often noticed: "There is nothing someone cannot make a
little worse and sell a little cheaper and those who consider price
only are this man's rightful prey." I kept accounts so badly I often
made no money at my huge 114 paper route, though I always had lots of
extras. Turned out I was carrying enough canceled subscriptions (due to
the newsboy I got the route from) that I was lucky to break even. When
the boss caught me hawking the overage on Geary Street (extra! extra!)
he took a look at my route book, discovered & fixed the problem, and I
finally began making some money - about $20 a month, which my dad made
me spend on shoes. What the hell - I'd spend some of the money I
collected on things like pretzels and cherry phosphates Fact is, I was
always broke until I got seventy grands from Workingman's Dead. I
thought that would set me up for life! Till then I was on a $40 a week
salary to write for the GD, which was sufficient for my needs since
Garcia paid the rent.
Got a streaming cold and drove to the store to get nosespray.
Picked up a plain, obviously transient, young woman hitch hiking. How
are you? She was terribly lonely she said, I said she ought to get a
good book, she said she was writing one, I said tell me about it. She
started off with the plot but it soon dissolved into first person, she
wasn't talking about a book but about herself. Life was very difficult,
but she had faith that soon things would open up and she would have the
revelation that made everything worthwhile. She banked on it. I agreed
but said there was always a certain amount of conflict before that
happened and that staying true to your best impulses would decide your
capacity to recognize opportunity when it came. She said yeah, she was
doing that. I gave her some bread and dropped her off. I felt like a
Tarot card in her deck, a symbolic person met on the journey who tells
you what you need to know at the time, feeds you and drops you off.
I was just thinking that, psychically speaking (the region of
weights and balances) there's a hundred percent of an outside and a
hundred percent of an inside. You can only actualize a hundred percent
at a time - nothing can be 60% outer and 50% interior - that's 10% more
than the agreement with life allows. Ratios (of 1/99% to 99/1% out and
99/1% to 1/99% in) are at work within any given moment, or within the
average of any given life. Lack of compensation to a 50/50 mean over
the arc incurs degeneration, which none escape. Literary traditions
insist that immortality, if choosable, is a big mistake. Why persist in
one minor region of the infinity of delusion? For the sake of
repetition and tedium? To do good? Don't kid yourself. In our little
corner of the snackosphere, a hundred percent out is dead, eaten; a
hundred percent in is something there's no word for since it relates to
nothing groundable in the experienciable. Is that how it looks to you
too?
Oof! Just finished scoring a song for Michael Mann's new musical
detective play Shakedown Street. All Dead tunes but he wondered if
maybe if I could write something specific for a character crisis scene.
Well now, I guess I could. The lyric part was easy but composition is
another matter. I got the verse melody right away, a jazzy blues with a
diminished five feel, but the chorus (though I could hear it clear
enough) taxed my chordal vocabulary. After a week of digging, Am AmMaj7
Am7 D7no5 Dm7no5 F7no3 Amb5 E E7 finally nailed it proper. Not complex;
don't mistake unwieldy nomenclature for the simplicity of music. Now
I've got to record it for the arranger. Mann's production of Cumberland
Blues, with a damned good acoustic band, premiered in San Francisco a
couple of years back and got thoroughly panned by the critics so he
rolled up his sleeves and rewrote it entirely, giving it some backbone
and depth which the original lacked, being more of a feel-good farce,
ala Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The audience loved it, big
standing ovation, but the critics weren't having it. The more serious
version, including a new song I wrote to define the main character, is
opening in London next Summer, directed by Michael Pennington, a
respected English director. Don't know when Shakedown will be staged.
Concerning my New Twilight Zone story "The Devil's Alphabet" (1985)
- it was a large charge to write something and see it brought to life
by professional actors like Ben Cross (Chariots of Fire) and the superb
British character actor Hywell Bennett, whom I met on the set. That was
just a plus, as I was hired to write the Serling-like intros to the
series, even auditioned to be the voice but (luckily as I now realize)
lost out to a honey voiced commercial overdubber. I was "under" script
advisor Harlan Ellison, one helluva dissident sci-fi author. One time
he happened to be staying at a motel near where a GD show was happening
and saw a cop trying to roust a fan in the hallway. He walked up to the
cop and said he was the guy's lawyer and what was his official police
business with the guy? - and the cop backed off! Harlan is a serious
science fiction god, and I but a rock and roll lyricist hired mostly
because the executive producer, Phil DeGuere, was a friend and a
deadhead. Phil made the charming and historic film Sunshine Daydream.
He created, produced and often wrote the phenomenally popular series
Simon and Simon as well as producing a host of other major channel
series and writing hundreds of scripts over three decades. Passing on
last week at Sixty, his vast and driven creativity leaves a vacuum. I'm
still grateful that a steady salary for the two seasons The Zone ran
helped make the house payments and put food on the table for our family
of five back when the GD was staggering financially and I was set
running around the country doing low paying solo gigs to support us.
"Touch of Grey" was soon to solve that problem.
No clue yet as to Summer plans for Dead shows, neither who, what,
where, when or if..This doesn't mean there aren't any plans, just that
we all live on different planets, after all, communicating by rumor and
carrier pigeon. Would you want it any other way?
Been hiding out at the Russian River for awhile, burning the
midnight oil on a couple of projects including two sets of lyrics for
some Phil Lesh compositions, one sweet and simple, one tough and
complex. Am getting good and tired of my own cooking, but have
discovered Smokey Robinson brand red beans and rice at the Safeway.
Other than that it's mostly chicken sandwiches and trailmix and double
salted licorice drops. Wonder how they'd taste mixed all together? Time
to head home! Miss my girls and real food!
* didn't work - the chair fell apart again. I later fixed it with glue
and a real hammer.
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--
-------------------Michael Zelner---
mich...@zoka.nosp*m.com
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