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This is an excerpt from a book I've been writing about what it's like to play music and why I think people dedicate their lives to it. The book is called*The Grease.*
 
(Somewhere, U.S.A., 2009*)
 
I want to describe the feeling, and it's grease.

Greased mind, cranking out the ideas. Greased wheels on the bus, on the trailer, edging up and over the million mile mark on a trip to nowhere that is never done. Greased body, shining under stage lights, pounding itself into a pain that won't be felt until the morning after. Meanwhile. That feeling of oiled muscles and perfect balance and infinite capacity when the universe aligns to strike that chord with the full resonance of life and death. That feeling when a glance from under tangled hair has the power to mutilate or to heal. My glance. My power. My grease.
 
The kids in the crowd, do they know? Some calculating how to steal this feeling for themselves, counting amplifiers, watching for a movement to imitate, a moment to repeat, some truth to bring back to the practice space. Some lost in reverie, blowing back and forth in a gentle wind until we hit a pause or a blast beat and they are jarred awake. Some greased with drugs or alcohol or maybe they've tapped into ours, grinning and fists raised throwing themselves into circles or neighboring bodies. When I'm filled with that power I rule them all, even the ones who sneer and say we're sucking. And who could blame them? I attacked first. Insults at a hundred twenty db.
 
I'm watching the nth rockumentary of my life and it hits me, opens like a spring in my head. Each one of these bands that I watch, I feel a kinship. I get it.
 
*We all need the grease.*
 
Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii was the first for me. I was fifteen, I fell in love with giant amplifiers and ancient stone and slow-mo gongs and skinny drummer arms. Imprinted. When I saw it then the movie was a revelation and an entrance to forbidden lands, sneak peek into Olympus. Home of the gods. Now I watch it and I know it. The hours of travel, the heft of gear, the cuts and bruises a constant from moving it. The ferry ride, the tired breakfast. The interviewers with the patronizing questions. The fans that scare you, the fans that succor you. The awkwardness of trying to re-create the power of a live show when your crowd consists of cameras and dolly tracks and boom operators and you hit it anyway, you rise above the awkwardness and you hit it but the shot was all wrong, the film jammed, director makes you do it again.
 
*Home of the gods.*
 
I love Freddie Mercury for saying so well how foolish it is to treat each album as a mission statement. It's not our "new direction" fuckers, it's an album! Just an album, a beautiful piece of our band's lifeblood. Not for you, it's for us.
 
I feel it for Jimi Hendrix when he's playing that dawn-damned Woodstock. The headliner gets screwed again when the show schedule isn't kept --- ah I know it well. And that guitar is cutting out and he's pulled down to earth with a whoosh, balloon popped, the audience doesn't know the difference but he's fighting.
 
The Led Zeppelin movie, *Song Remains The Same*, my GOD, so much work to put this show into fairytale context! The pastoral vignettes, the high art concept, the sloppy unsalvageable show. But you'll never hear a bad critique of that film because it doesn't matter. The grease transcends us, transfigures us, plays the music for us when we're too drunk too tired too baffled.
 
We watched the Pixies movie last night. About their reunion tour. That's when the spring opened in my mind, and I was looking at their sweat and the word "grease" expanded on the screen that is my mind's eye. Something about watching a band that was done, but they got another chance. And they're kind of old, at least by modern bullshit plastic surgified eternally 21 standards... but it doesn't matter. Because it's electric, when they're united. Because that fat bald guy and the lady that doesn't give a shit about her hair or her clothes chainsmoking and trying to kick her drug habits, when they come together, the world tilts. Even if they don't like each other that much, or can't work out how to relate.
 
No one can force a power like that. You can't steal it, you can't build it. It's the grease. I know that's a sloppy word. Gross even. But there is something so personally invasive, yet so life-giving and death-bringing, about this power that the word has to be nasty. Like blood, placenta, semen. You can't stand to look at it but you can't stand to look away.
 
And without it you don't get to live.

MySpacePhoto of Jucifer by Edgar Livengood

 

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