Decoding the musical secrets hidden within the traumatized mind
My memoir pitch and the creative power behind "Stringer," digging for truth in my cosmos of musical healing, illuminated by my eternal gratitude for it.
Levi Dean was the first musician to ask me how I came into music, writing about the emotional and cosmic effects it had on my New Mexico healing journey. Levi is an immensely observant human and I knew what he meant by the question; he knew I wasn’t a “traditionally trained” musician. I too, had become a bit curious about my ability to interpret songs, some instrumentals, and the cosmic obsession of it all, produced and received by the elusive power of human vulnerability that is music.
Only I had no idea how to answer the veteran musician raised in Virginia, steeped in Americana and alt-folk music, song writing, and story telling, who unironically relocated to the same high desert of metal music, tribal and traditional influences, and gritty outlaw country I resided after walking away from government and corporate life forever. Levi shuffled in after walking away from Nashville and a couple of other musical hotspots, by way of his own “blue-collar sensibility.”1 An authentic balance I am now beginning to embrace in my own journey between the creative-arts broke life and funding my unsympathetic citizenship so I don’t have to live in my car.
Levi Dean wasn’t the only songwriter to walk away from Nashville, but he’s the only one I know in “real life” and only after he curiously asked me to internalize how and why I write about music the way I do, am I now able to answer him. I think I may have told him “I’d write about it one day” or something to that effect. Usually when a true reader asks an intuitive question I cannot immediately answer, that’s become my boilerplate. Helps me dig and meditate to find the hidden truth, without submitting to my former addiction of people pleasing. From the findings, a little bit more about Joseph Smith, the creative child brought into this world, is revealed to me (in the now).
For whatever senseless reason, sometime in the summer of 2023, I found myself on I-40 westbound in Albuquerque on the fifth consecutive day I shoulda stayed my ass at home, and flipped on the radio to divert my anger. Nearly hurled out the window from the sickening noise it produced, but my road dogs in the stop and go traffic would not have visually accepted my gross evacuation. I quickly pulled up a few tried and true playlists I had created in 2019/2020 on that one attrocious app, from my early days of living in Albuquerque as a government worker, habitually searching for my purpose in life, post-military retirement. I heard static. Nothing. Bland. Even worse than radio. Flatlined. I could hear the words, yes; the dry white cornbread of rhythm, the lack of percussion in my face from standing 36 inches away from a kick drum at chest level, the actual levitating effect from a skilled and sadistic keyboardist, and most importantly, I couldn’t sense or authenticate its energy. The music was void of life.
Perhaps the very reason Levi Dean abandoned Nashville.
Sitting in my truck that day, I knew it was over immediately; the way I would forever consume music. Experiencing music would never be the same for me. Vinyl comes close, actually. But I prefer it live and loud is ok, but it’s clarity and conviction of music that bolsters my creative superpower. Not perfect music, produced perfectly, no, there is no such thing, but clarity, I found, accurately communicated transcending confidence in both the song, and the origin of it. Even happy, uplifting music comes from human experience of life. The human conviction and vulnerability of it all is what grabbed me in late 2022 to initiate my unusual music writing venture.
So what was so empirically transformative sitting in my truck that day, flatlined to recorded (digital) music, on Interstate 40 westbound, windows down, waiting for my turn to drop the hammer after reaching those far right two lanes labeled as Coors Blvd North? I began to sing. Out loud. To whatever came to me. And just as I hit the gas on my truck, the aluminum V-6 engine under the hood, notoriously known to pre-detonate in warm temps, began “rattling” under load, say around 2200 rpm’s, while driving at altitude, with a tank of cheap diluted gas from big corporate, and the title that would become my musicstack hit me.
“Cheap Gas, Thin Air.” Even had a one-line ditty to accompany the title. Nothing more.
The following partial memoir is dedicated to and made possible by Levi Dean. Written in response to his musical and cosmic curiosity.
It’s brutal and lengthy. And I don’t give a fuck.
The Early Years
From birth to puberty, my life hyper-focused on the man who drove a farm tractor for a living; to be the only wolf he knew how to be, on a large, corporate-owned crop farm in eastern Arkansas; the far west boundary of the fertile, yet violently racist Mississippi River Delta and the poverty that suffocated creative life. We now know the term as slavery, and it comes in many shades of melanin and destitution, but society politely calls it serfdom. I was born half white, half Mexican/American Indian to the most “I’m not Mexican, I’m American Indian” I ever met, who worked for $250 a week, plus an old 3-bedroom farm house to support a family of six. An uneducated (5th grade drop out), severely unstable, chronically angry, and pathological liar of an offspring from a long hereditary line of the same, my dad established the environment and vocation that shaped my values and sense of survivability coming into this world.
For me, the oracle of life was the farm tractor, once I figured out it wasn’t my dad, likely during or right after puberty. The diesel engine farm tractor supplied our income and became our livelihood, growing soybeans, long-grain rice, wheat, milo, and cotton. Unlike traditional farms, we did not “grow our own food” as most of the crop we raised in Arkansas, I learned much later in life, went to China. Back then, fighting for my life to figure shit out in a family who refused to nature or nurture, while being either ignored or abused by my father, I morphed myself into a farmer and became tragically intimate with the John Deere 4630 turbo-diesel tractor.
At 14 years old, I became the man on the tractor. It was my dream come true and my entryway into manhood. Or so I thought, raised on a 4,000 acre farm, where large, powerful tractors were used to till soil, plant crops, dig irrigation and drainage ditches, cultivate rows of soybeans and cotton, move dirt in laser precision for soil conservation, spray cancer-inducing chemicals to stop worms, bugs, and weeds, and to harvest the yield in the fall, closing the cycle of agricultural life as we knew it. All with industrial machinery coming into a booming age of high-power internal combustion engines and fuel injection advancements.
I figured out how to drive a stick-shift truck around 7 or 8 years old, on a wide open farm, instructed by dad to “figure it out and come pick me up on the other side of the field.” A traumatized child, born into a hyper-observant vector, figures it out real damn quick. I learn most things in life by watching others and my own tactile repetition and I watched my dad like a hawk. I knew very well the importance of the engine, transmission, gears, wheels and tires, and axles of automobiles well before I climbed on that 4630 for the first time. I knew the importance of mechanical comprehension and efficiency, but my hyper-focus to gain dad’s approval drove me to fiercely learn, practice, research, and innovate my intimacy with the 6-cylinder, turbocharged diesel 404 engine that supplied power to my livelihood to pay the bills; the life of a rural farm kid, growing up in the deep south, some time on the linear timeline between Vietnam and Desert Storm.
Early manhood on a farm began at 6am and went to 8pm. For this story, that is averaged out across the seasons. The foreman loaded us up right outside our house and took us to our tractors. We fueled up, greased up, and lit out; brown-bag bologna sandwiches and one gallon water jugs (no chips; no snacks; not even a pickle). Plows in the ground within a half hour or it was considered dragging ass. Not to be tolerated. Because I was the new hire, they didn’t rank by age oddly, I got the open-cab, John Deere 4630. No radio. No air conditioning. Just a turbo diesel engine blasting heat into the space already occupied by 95-degree temps, and 60-80% humidity in the deep south on the daily. No PPE either. Didn’t know what hearing protection was back then. But my “practice chair” for the next five years monitoring that diesel engine, sat just to the rear and slightly above the famed John Deere 404 engine.
When I tell people I drove a tractor as a kid, during my formative and adolescent years and for two more after high school graduation, I’ve never been able to quantify the trauma of it all until that day in my truck, lifetimes later, launching my Nissan Frontier from a dead stop to 70 mph on that warm, high-desert day in 2023. Hearing those valves rattle in the engine of my Nissan after Levi had presented his inquiry, gave me insight to reveal a memory of just exactly how much of my early life I “practiced” being somebody worthy of love and acceptance.
From 1989 to 1992, I drove that 4630 for 20 hours during the Mon-Fri school week; 28 hours on the weekends; 48 hours of tractor driving in a work week, while getting high marks in school. In the summer months, that number jumped to 98 hours, weekly. Fortynine years after the 40-hour work week was established by Congress. (Child labor laws were foreign to me; I didn’t care and neither did the corporate farm that took full advantage of the kid who simply wanted to work as hard as his father.)
If you ain’t working, you ain’t eating.
In 1993, my senior year, I only needed one high school credit to graduate. They let me out of school after 4 classes and I hauled ass to jump on the tractor, while excelling in my school work. My school-week hours on the 4630 jumped to 68, which included a half day of morning school. I rarely had homework; and when I did, I simply did it at school. I logged 4,104 hours on the tractor in ‘93, graduating at 17 years old in May; then driving full time from June to December. (I turned down the full academic scholarship offered to me by Arkansas State University, likely ushered by an insightful typing, business, and economics teacher who saw something in me that I kept hidden from the world.)
In 1994, my final year on the tractor, more or less, I accumulated 5,096 hours on a machine with a 150-horsepower diesel engine beneath my legs and no climate or comfort system to soothe my mental state, my body, or my future. I had literally morphed myself into the man I buried in the ground the previous December, and that workaholic version of me would carry on well into my late 40’s.
What is the harmful and traumatic significance of driving a tractor on a farm in a never-ending agricultural crop cycle for 5,096 hours in a year as a teenager? The math tells me that if I worked every day of the year, without a single day off, and I did, for twelves hours a day, that’s only 4,380 hours of labor. Farm hours go well beyond the 12-hour work day, especially in planting and harvesting season, but more importantly, I had no social interaction with kids/young adults my age. I was being developed by labor, not the love and guidance of my peers, family, or community. I was shut off from the outside world.
All told, I spent 20,816 hours on a tractor between 14 and 19 years of age. With no radio, cassette or CD player, no air conditioning, no noise protection from the loud turbocharged diesel engine, and no portable device whatsoever to entertain the monotony of all-day plowing, tilling, sowing and harvesting, I sang. I sang songs to the harmonics and melodies of an industrial diesel engine. I made up songs, sang oldies I heard on radio stations from my one-speaker Magnavox radio/cassette player, baptist hymnals, songs I learned in 8th grade music class, and memorized songs from the few vinyls we had in the house; an odd collection of Hank Williams, Ray Stevens, Red Sovine, and Fats Domino.
And I had suppressed those memories until now.
I learned emotional conviction from Red Sovine. I grew up in the American semi trucker craze of the late 70’s and well into the 80’s, but living in isolation in the rural south, I thought everyone listened to that stuff. Nope. But writing today, I now remember Red Sovine and songs like Teddy Bear, Roses For Mama, Giddy Up Go, and Phantom 309 and how that last one choked me to death while bringing me to my knees, even as a kid; especially as a kid. I felt the pain and admiration in his stories and I connected with most of Sovine’s music. I simply didn’t tell anyone. I was traumatically strapped to a diesel engine, so I related to the truckers that traveled the famed I-40 running through the middle of Arkansas. I often dreamed of becoming a trucker one day. Back then.
I became chronically intimate with the workings of diesel engines and the sounds they made. The rough, but rowdy cold starts; the lugging swing of a cold diesel engine at idle; the high-pitch whirling of the turbo spooling up under load; the loud and satisfying exhaust tones signaling all was well inside the torrent of compressed explosions in harmonic perfection under my feet. I felt the vibrations from metallic energy conduits of the engine up through the floor and into my feet, my butt, and my hands; left hand on the steering wheel and the right hand on the throttle lever and implement control levers. Changing the depth of the plow behind me changed the pitch of the diesel engine in front of me. Most of tractor driving is keeping the implement in tow from excessively lugging, or killing the engine while still effectively performing its function. Mechanical poetry, if you will.
I had my own mechanical symphony and all they needed was a singer. So I sang. Out of those 20-thousand plus hours, I reckon I cried about a third of them. Depression set in somewhere around age 15 or 16 and crying became my emotional escape. On the tractor, in the middle of nowhere, singing my lungs out til I was hoarse, begging the lord daily to make things better; make the pain go away. Begging anyone who’d listen. I sang poems from the ‘56 Baptist Hymnal while bawling my eyes out, dust and dirt caked up on my face so bad I sometimes had to use my drinking water to wash off before the douchebag foreman came out to check on the fuel level of the tractor (not my health or safety).
I sang to the tune of a turbo-diesel engine, often while crying, begging the universe to make it stop. Other times, if it was a good day, I’d make up silly songs and laugh at myself, just to pass the time. I had no mentor, no producer, no instructor, no peer feedback. Was barely introduced to sheet music and how to read notes, but other than that, I sang off pure emotion to whatever tone and key the diesel engine produced. I sang because the pain inside me forced it out. I sang naturally and unrestricted and never once pondered why. There was no why. It simply came out and I never told anyone.
Ever.
I departed the body of that little boy who grew up on a farm, singing on a tractor, the day I ran to the recruiters office and told them to put me on the next thing smoking. The US Air Force recruiter, a KC-10 tanker boom operator on a recruiting assignment asked me what the hell I was running from?
I said Arkansas.
I was “Boomer’s” easiest recruit and in two weeks, I became a slave to a new machine.
(See a pattern forming here?)
I buried my singing memories, along with every punch, kick, slap, whip, cut, and heartbreak in a vault the day I joined basic training and could no longer sense or identify with that boy on the tractor. Wasn’t even a memory. My psyche had blocked it out. Eradicated from existence. All it took was six-weeks of mind games by highly trained experts of deconstructing the individual and establishing a false sense of belonging and honorable purpose. I graduated basic training with honors.
A welcoming sense of tribe a young adult seeks while on a testorone-infused terror of hate and rebellion. Castaway of the oppressive deep south, I found what I thought was my purpose in life.
Twenty-seven years later, I stumbled into the Albuquerque music scene, on a south-bound diesel headed for suicide in the fall of 2022. I had enough of the pain and confusion of my mind blocking my sense of belonging. I had no connection, although many tried. Holy fuck did they try. Unknowingly until the following year, I had been reacquainted with the mechanical sound that I fell in love with as a little boy on that tractor.
Music revealed an instinctual (body) response that resembles a high, “similar to heroin, morphine, and cocaine, known as endogenous opioids”2 and I became hyper-intimate with it. Wanted more. Had to figure out what lured me from destruction, and rekindled my divine curiosity into harmonized sound that moved the body.
The symphony of a diesel engine and a boy with the same vocal ability most every human is born with, before the conscious idea of rejection or humiliation.
I do not remember the date, and I do not remember the venue, but it was Kari’s drumming that pounded my chest, blasted by thermonuclear waves of unconditional love (energy) while Mo’s bizarre left-handed electric bass and sometimes guitar, and passionate, yet relatable vocals that triggered a bodily response I haven’t felt since being on that tractor all those years ago. The Talking Hours had somehow unlocked a bodily memory for me but I was not able to (partially) identify it until Levi Dean gave me the key to do so. The Talking Hours had reproduced an industrial sound stored in my body, hidden from my traumatized mind. My body connected to their music, even when my mind couldn’t reveal to me why.
Levi connected with something in my writing and asked the right question for me to tell this story today. That’s how it works, with The Others (musical shadow workers), pocket players, and spiritual mentors. I was only missing the last “key” from the book, “Wired For Music” to put this story together because trust me, it has been eating at me for a while.
The human brain makes music from sound.3
Unexplained Emotion
Matthew Culpepper had been working on a damn song about a baby duck who gets its head stuck in a can of stewed tomatoes. I reckon he’s been working on that song his whole life, in some ways. Collectively speaking, 2023 was a bitch of a year for New Mexico musicians. We lost a few warriors and we half-assed came together as a community for a few moments to honor those gone on, no longer suffering the trauma of being alive.
During one of those tributes, Matt Culpepper and Carlos Steele quietly and humbly walked on stage and performed two songs. I became possessed by a power completely unknown to me and began to sing out with the lads on stage. At the top of my lungs. Just like I did on that tractor, lifetimes ago.
The camaraderie and unconditional love for another human, my experience gained in military combat and losing those souls who had my back, gave me the power to “jump in the pit” often with Matt Culpepper. That’s how the body works: instinct and love takes over and says “ok fuckers, if we doing this, we doing the damn thing” and when he performs “Down,” I jump in the pit with him every damn time.
Big deal. So what? Cool song, bro.
In Matt’s song, “Down” there’s a kidney-pounding, spleen-ripping part that sends me into a raging ancient masculine power to end the life of another human, including my own blood. Matt sings the same unanswered cry for help I sang all those years ago, sitting on that 4630, in nearly the exact tempo and melody (and perhaps volume) as that turbo diesel 404 engine that was my band. My safe space. For me as a boy, quite often, I cried out, just like Matt does in his song:
“As I lay my…..weary head to sleep….I pray the lord…..my soul to keep…”
“And if I should die…..before I wake….I pray the lord…..my soul to take…..”
As a boy, living the life of modern slavery, on a machine that governed my developmental years, I sang out over the symphony of pistons, rods, camshafts, and valves that was my 6-piece band of miniature explosions; over all the noise in the world; over the internal voices and pain to command the stage that was my diesel tractor and bellowed my soul into the void, begging them to make to the pain go away if I could just drive that damn thing good enough. And if I failed, which meant certain death, so be it. Come take me mother fucker.
Oh yeah, sure, please do have mercy on my soul if death came at my own hand.
My body knew what was happening during the Bellowing Bear song since day one, but I had not figured out why it was happening. Not even the Cheap Gas, Thin Air revelation I made in 2023 brought it out.
So I shelved it and tried to start a magazine. A non-profit business. I wanted the world, but mostly just tuned-out New Mexicans, to come out and experience the healing power of live music. All around the state. All music! Even if I couldn’t explain it (then). I researched venues, startups, non-profits, hidden communities who secretly support the arts with tons of money, and even small business loans, and when all that failed, I tentatively began closing out the outside world to simply do all the work myself.
I was about to become a slave, yet again, to a new system.
(See the pattern continuing here? And this was even after ego death.)
It wasn’t until I sat down to write this story today, the rough draft, on Tuesday, March 5th, that I was able to tie in the emotion from music I learned from Red Sovine, through my own singing and begging to die as a kid, to Matt’s own pain and conviction in his song, “Down.” Reflection spurred by an august musician and shadow worker in the form of a well-planted, curated question from Levi Dean. Only today was I able to tie in the thermonuclear energy of The Talking Hours last summer when I went through some hellacious sadness, loss, and confusion, to the very mechanical energy I absorbed from that turbo diesel 404 engine in my formative years, buried beneath a sea of mental concrete.
Music had begun to unlock codes, secrets, and portals into my buried past. Solitude would prove to be my ultimate healing stage and while on it, I accepted myself for nothing more than who I was: a boy who wants to experience the world and maybe write about it as I go along.
Current Life
For me, music is life, but no longer an unhealthy attachment; no longer blindly chasing the next inexplicable high. My hyper-focus (obsession) revealed its ugly side, several times in 2023, in the form of burnouts, disappointment, and failure. I became addicted to new music and I couldn’t get enough. I began to chase, yet again. With no warning whatsoever, I found the portal that illuminated my closest enemy.
My own identity and its propensity to servitude. Always for others. Now, I have no identity and my past trauma no longer defines me. I am now on a quest for balance; a healthy life of enjoying music (not chasing the next “high”), writing, and experiencing the love and beauty on this rock while I still have the freedom and ability to enjoy it. I am now living in a world completely new to me. Uncomfortable as fuck, yet oddly satisfying.
That’s how trauma works. I reckon. We become comfortable with misery and the moment joy enters our body, the traumatized mind will seek it out and pound it into submission, and we find creative, acceptable ways of glossing over it; ignoring it. Until we become the physical and mental ailment that defines us to gain acceptance from others; society. Anyone who will listen, I reckon. That shit comes out in medieval hellish ways and rips us apart and we look like that duck, with his head caught in a can of stewed tomatoes. It ain’t pretty. But it does make a fine rock and roll song.
I thought I’d at least make it to 50 years old before leaving New Mexico but we don’t get to choose when we fall out of love with energy that first drew us in and the spiritual clenches my ancestors had on my soul while beginning the journey of introductory bliss, spurred by the live music scene and human vulnerability (love) I experienced throughout 2023. Now I am on a healing journey that takes me inward. I hear music in water, air, and land now. Had I allowed myself to do so, I could have deputized the old “me” and turned the dogs of war loose on my music writing venture in Albuquerque. I’d become obsessed (again) and I would have missed the entire point of being alive. Simply existing within a healthy tribe, creating human art through suffering and existence.
Kinda like a band.
I am now writing my own songs, I reckon. My own story. You are perhaps reading the introduction to my memoir. The preface.
Guess I best get to work; living and experiencing this new (to me) world.
The creative flow begins early in these parts and they don’t take to dragging ass. Not to be tolerated.
Stringer
Levi Dean once described to me what he liked about New Mexico. To him, the energy supports human arts and creativity but has more of a “blue collar sensibility about it.” I never could figure out why I liked it so much, compared to visiting Denver, Portland, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and briefly living in Las Vegas, Nevada shortly before carrying on my journey to New Mexico in 2019. Levi Dean summed up his affection quite nicely and I always wanted to share it with others in my writing.
Wired For Music; A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound; Adriana Barton, 2022; Greystone Books Ltd.
Wired For Music; A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound; Adriana Barton, 2022; Greystone Books Ltd. Derived from Mendel Kaelen in an interview with Péter Sárosi; March 23, 2017; https://drogriporter.hu/en/mendel_interview/