Novelty, reality, and the liminal spaces in between
The imminent crumbling of our world will in fact, and rightfully so, spur more authentic creators in a truth-centric environment that heals the human soul. Do. The. Damn. Thing.
“There’s many a slip twixt a cup, and a lip.”
Somewhere between the first of twelve shows at Night Of The Living Cover Bands (NOTLCB) in 2023 and maybe night three, I stopped taking photos. I stopped being “Stringer.” I sat my camera down for a moment and shortly after, took a break from the music then wrapped the damn thing up, my instrument of choice, and put it away in my bag.
(For those unfamiliar with NOTLCB, click this link to read about it.)
I never took the camera out again despite going to all but two nights of the most celebrated entertainment event in New Mexico. The guy who was supposed to cover all things music, post-Alibi print in New Mexico, just got his heart broken. It wasn’t exhaustion that forced me to put it away, my trusty and capable tool of the journalistic trade. It was an awakening, similar to blunt force trauma to the cranium; my proven method of learning. It felt a lot like anger, or maybe disappointment, but I could not identify the source. A disheartening and shocking discovery of sorts unknown to my conscious being.
It felt a lot like anger swelling up inside me, and anger was one of the few [former] definitive forces that motivated my body to do a thing, or to not do a thing. Anger was once my unhealthy, but supremely trusted motivator; battle tested. Anger was my fly, fight, or freeze escape mechanism and it moved my body when my mind became electrically shorted out to do so on its own. Kinda like a board of 30 guitar effects pedals going out for no reason and ya just gotta plug your damn guitar directly into the amp mid-song. And then praying to the rock gods it’s not a defective primary cable. Ok, enough geek talk, let’s move on.
Anger was also the demon within me that I incorrectly and prematurely believed had died a permanent death the year prior, when I began to write about music from a platform of love and being of service to my newly-discovered passion. Independent music of all genres, specifically in the high, thin air of New Mexico, revealed a love inside me and the power from it enabled a bizarre spirit [energy] to create my own human art, writing exclusively about emotion embedded into music as it impacted me, the receiver.
But make no mistake, anger has a conduit of its own and exhaustion is one of the most direct and unobstructed pathways to the inherent and unique trait of all humans. For me anyway, exhaustion is the primer on the bullet, in the cocked firearm, held by a maniac with a hair-trigger finger prone to reacting violently to bullshit. In other words, I had not yet learned how to manage my emotions, 47 years after being brought into this world.
And by the first night of NOTLCB, little did I know at the time, I was drop dead tired. My body was screaming at me to stop, but like always, in the battle of life, I ignored it.
The Novelty
In early 2022, I fell into the Duke City open mic circuit by way of my love interest with a fascinating and authentic woman who, unbeknownst to me, was a goddamn closet-musical wizard, and by that winter, I had discovered in the music scene what [pure] love felt like for the first time in my life and the overwhelming energy within me said “hey fucker, you’ve been talking about writing your whole adult life, and now that you have experienced the power of others’ vulnerability, how about you go write about the emotional aspect of music.” (It wasn’t a question.) By winter of that same year, I became possessed with a power previously unknown to me, but the power traveled in the same conduit where my hyper-focus, labor addiction, and work ethic resided. My human art flowed out of me and I had very little public practice to establish or perfect any sort of artistic medium, but something had kicked the log [inside me] and the water had no choice but to flow. It just happened to be a very monstrous log.
Read my labor addiction story here.
Before I discovered the power of my love for music, the former and much angrier version of Joe Smith, many of you all have never met, drudged through almost every open mic, local artist showcase, brewery, and backyard get-together with unparalleled cringe before my awakening in the fall of 2022. As a kid who grew up blocking physical and mental abuse from my siblings, dished out daily by both parents, I became hyper-aware of senseless suffering among humans. And I saw a metric shit ton of suffering in those open mic sessions. I had an incredibly hard time stomaching a human, on stage for the entire world to witness, pour their ever-lovin’ soul into an original song, only to be ignored or worse, distracted [unheard and unseen] by some hateful, cowardly dick in the crowd, usually waiting impatiently for their turn to get on stage; or talking excessively in the crowd; all the things exponentially amplified by my own urgency for the artist’s pain to stop.
But mostly it was me. My unknown projecting emanating as empathy. I sort of took on the big brother role, the cool uncle roll, to help mitigate [their] pain by absorbing the blows myself. I was the unfortunate chowhound for emotional authenticity who could see beyond their nervousness and beneath their fear, while easily discarding technical ability, musical theory, and instrumental prowess and could see quite easily into the depths of pain, loss, and longing in their music. We don’t get to choose our initial paths in life and mine just happened to give me the superpower to extract suffering from the sea of artificial bullshit. I can hear emotional authenticity in music. And because I survived the violence in my childhood, I knew that whatever they were going through on stage, whatever fears they had, everything was gonna be ok. I knew it; I just had to figure out a way for them to know it.
Why is suffering vital to human art and existence? (Discuss amongst yourselves.)
For nine months in 2022, I endured countless songwriters in all genres perform their original music in sheer terror on the public stage; terror for both me and the select few artists who had either come back from the dead, or who felt the very real fear of dying by being vulnerable [seen] on stage. Subsequently, for the next twelve months, as a writer, focusing on shows and performances, after my music/love revelation in October, I lovingly gave my all to music in New Mexico, as best as I could, in a pro-positive, pro-human light; a very pro-suffering embrace. Working well within an arena of love and listening intently to give musicians some sort of light, hell, any kind of light, I wanted them to know I heard them; received their art. I wanted all of them to keep going. I couldn’t always “see” the artists, especially off stage, but I could damn sure hear them and their suffering that had once laid dormant beneath their fears.
Any human, without exception, who stepped to the mic, had already done the damn thing and was given a new set of fears or assurances to navigate. I was no exception as a writer.
In those twelve months of writing about music in New Mexico, I had the distinct and very rare power of novelty. Not being a trained or educated musician, nor an established writer/photographer, everything was new to me. There was no good or bad, positive or negative, right or wrong because the thing simply did not exist within me prior to 2022. Sure, I consumed music all my life, but I consumed it in those ~47 years in much the same way an alcoholic consumes booze: to remember the pain, or to numb the pain from a specific period of life; to associate with something else. I had no theory training, no formal training, and very much lacked the same familiarity in tradition and culture of the people in the beautiful state that I called home after globetrotting around the world for the previous ~24 years, chasing that thing called happiness.
During those twelve months of public music writing, a strong conviction within me decided to only focus on the good; the real; the very necessary and authentic suffering component of human existence. I wholeheartedly refused to write negative critiques, comparisons, and artistically-murderous associations to other artists. Hell, I didn’t know how to as I was very well aware of my cognitive capacity and musical library limitations. (I cannot easily or immediately recall song titles and band names, or band members from memory.) And as some of you know, my original goal was to write for citizens to encourage more crowd participation in a state that had very little (close to zero) entertainment and creative arts public support. It was never my goal or artistic endeavor to write for the artist. As authentic creatives all know, we don’t always get to choose our artistic medium, or our audience, but the musician and writer have a fiercely codependent and necessary relationship (loosely quoted from veteran musician, Tony Wilson), and I discovered how energy travels in a feedback loop and became hyper focused on writing [to the artist] in an effort to close that loop for many unheard, and unseen musicians. Subliminal people pleasing.
For a full twelve months of intense and life-altering music exploration and deep diving, I witnessed incredible musicians perform their art, with profound messages of every human emotion imaginable, and some even magical, mystical, and perhaps science fictional; existential in every delivery. By their shear artistic creativity and uniqueness, my own realm of artistic capacity grew in exponential proportion to the number and range of artists I listened to with fierce hyper-intention.
Put on your cosmic tin foil hat for a moment and imagine me, a hyper-focused, fully present satellite receiver of independent music, who received a very wide array of artistic influence from all over the state, and the result is a human who, sooner or later, will start to discover the deepest secrets of mystical existence. No scientist, or writer alive can quantify that sort of energy boost. Chloe and Gina were the first to unknowingly express that and I worked desperately to capture it as an amateur writer in the magazine so they could see their own power of human creativity.
I had nothing to gauge those twelve months from my journey of live music coverage because it was all brand spankin’ new to me. Much later, I learned it was a bizarre drug of my own human design craving: novelty.
How does one attain and sustain novelty?
The Reality
If my math is accurate, this brings us back [on a linear timeline] to my first few nights of covering NOTLCB in 2023 and the unconscious anger that mysteriously prompted me to put my camera away. And I wasn’t certain it was anger; just sort of felt like it.
Any guesses as to what made me angry? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?
For twelve months prior to NOTLCB 2023, I worked all over the greater Albuquerque area, Red River, Taos, Madrid, once to Kewa Pueblo, and sadly only a few ventures into Santa Fe, nothing south of Los Lunas, nothing west of the Petroglyphs (unfortunately), and nothing east of Edgewood, seeking new and independent live music. New and independent, I now know, was the novelty that powered my writing; my curiosity. It somehow, in a bizarre turn of events, became my drug of choice. We are all prone to some sort of attachment, which, if left undefined, becomes addiction. The trick to recognizing ALL addiction is to identify the unhealthy attachment our minds and bodies have on the soothing emotional effect, not the substance itself.
The trick to kicking any addiction is to rewire the mind to do what the drug does.
My one and only hard rule in those twelve intense months was no cover bands. Nothing against them, but I found the novelty of independent music was a much more powerful drug that provided a lasting high I needed to keep my attention and focus on the transfer of energy from artist to recipient, and for my subsequent journalistic calling, back to the musician. Besides, I didn’t have time to cover cover bands.
After abruptly quitting booze in May 2023, my adversity to cover bands, cover venues, and the cover-band crowds became ultra pronounced, and undeservingly so. (I would learn later why, but that will likely morph into another story. Stay tuned if you’re curious.) This may sound hypocritical and sophisticatedly dickish after writing profusely about unconditional love with music, and I assure you, it is, but what I did not know back then as I put my camera away that night last October, was the root cause of it all.
We often cannot detect our own blind spots.
The Spaces In Between
The unexpected phenomenon I witnessed the entire month of October, was an onslaught of musicians, seemingly coming out of the underworld, the far corners of nowhere, some of whom I covered while they, lackluster, mediocre, and unconfident, performed their own material the previous year, blow the damn thing up in a fiery and overwhelmingly proud display [performance] in tribute to their own musical heroes among capacity crowds who showed up to do the same. A large number of musical artists had just magically and effortlessly leveled the fuck up, in the eyes of a novice music writer. They suited up, laced up, and did the goddamn thing and blew the doors off in the process. Nine point two on the Richter scale. It was a mind-fuck of a thing to experience after covering twelve months of “local” music; a limiting term [label] I vehemently despise and strived consistently to avoid using in my writing.
After October, I was devastated and all I could feel in my heart and soul was:
“I wish you would put that much energy and effort into your own music as you did for your cover band performance.”
It was the beginning of the end for me and my honeymoon period with unconditional love, and it was a mother fucker to grasp and wrestle in my own head. It ripped my heart open and I can only just now, seven months later, reverse engineer the thing that swelled up inside me like an undetected brain tumor.
My own unresolved bullshit.
A very select few of you reading this have had the experience of me vocalizing my internal work; actively deconstructing my trauma using authentic music as the vector for healing and rewiring my brain to overcome toxic survival programming and conditioning. Music, from phenomenal artists around the state of New Mexico, and quite a few others from elsewhere, helped me highlight a significant amount of my own hypocrisy, judgement, learned and adapted behaviors, neurodivergent spectrum points, trauma conditioning, and many, many other “places in between.” I was able to resolve a ton of my own bullshit by asking myself “why” whenever something or somebody senselessly annoyed me, or troubled me. The growth process worked really well on all the issues I could see.
Where did my underlying and undetected anger come from? What was causing my body to reject some music, but praise others? What was causing me to run from the love and support I received all around the state from artistic humans and givers of light? What untapped trauma conditioning had secretly exploded deep within my psyche like emerging magma under the earth’s crust just before a volcano erupts? Why was I so anti-cover band, party crowds, and fun celebrations of life? Why had I become the thing [identity] that made me so protective and defensive of independent music?
What I have learned, after seven months of meditation, rest, heartache, deep and sober introspection, exercise, and a tremendous amount of pacific sea air, is that chronic and debilitating shame lies at the very core of my anger. Hell, it lies at the core of my existence. Undetected shame is the propellant to my anger and the primer for my detachment. It’s the self-induced emotion that ran in the background, like a virus, and I had no fucking clue it even existed. It was established well before my capacity of memory.
How in the name of Zeus’s butthole could I write so easily about unconditional love that is music, yet not possess it? Not display it? How could I not give it in the same manner it was offered to me from others around me, both in personal and vocational relationships, even though I thought I was doing the damn thing?
I reckon it’s called shadow work. And it is a proverbial and literal mother fucker of a beast to conquer. Perhaps impossible, fully. But it must be addressed lest ye be damned an eternal life of self-induced senseless suffering on this rock, in life as we currently know it, in a crushing society who rails against it. I am not interested in previous lives or the next; only this one. And when we can get to a place where we actually have had enough of the pain, and we do the shadow work to reveal our true and unapologetic authenticity, the shame surfaces to exposure, and by way of awareness and work, goes away and along with it, addiction. The unhealthy attachments. The never ending fight for acceptance.
We stop chasing and simply become.
The liminal spaces in between novelty and reality, for me, encompass a blueprint for my own artistic ability to create human art [writing] from a lifetime of human suffering. I will take liberty here and say that every human has their own blueprint. Take it a step further by zooming out a bit, and the trouble for those not doing their own shadow work is they are operating on someone else’s blueprint; the false identity they took on to gain some sort, any sort of acceptance in this damn backwards ass world of conditional love for human life. Shame, for me, was a natural and direct result of rejection at birth. (Others may experience it much later in life and will likely manifest very differently.)
By now, I have either lost a ton of readers, or you are glued to what I am about to say next. You probably think I’m gonna drop names, bands, or venues to support my cause or my discoveries. Nope. Not my style and my testimony is my art. Choke on it; I don’t care. But what in the ever-lovin’ quantum field of existence does my shadow work have to do with my disheartening revelations during the 16th annual celebration that was NOTLCB?
It’s easier and often way more fun to be somebody else than it is to be ourselves.
Until it’s not.
It’s an unsustainable reward system.
Why is it easier to be someone else? Why do we sing cover songs with reckless abandon yet are scared and insecure to sing our own? The answer lies in familiarity. We don’t fully know who we are, therefore, there is no familiarity and repetition to embed it into muscle memory. The super power of all cover music: we know covers better than our own shit.
Me, being the hypocrite who’s body said “hey, put the camera down and just enjoy the damn party” but then got all judgy during the celebrations of life and community because it was all unoriginal cover music from those not confident to get out more and perform their own music, I shamefully and reluctantly determined, seven months later, I too, was a goddamn cover band. Of sorts.
I wrote about music created and produced by others in effort to gain, or gauge acceptance as a writer, as a human artist. My selected identity, to only cover independent music, was my punishment to bear (Oscar Wilde). But it was the continuation of my own shadow work that awaited me, somewhere beyond the orange horizon of the west mesa, my body using the only thing it knew would work, by applying the appropriate amount of anger and self-internalized rejection, to move me beyond its own limitations. Beyond the line of conscious sight. Beyond “My Own Prison.” (Creed, circa 1997. You’re welcome.)
Curiosity is my healthy motivator. My healthy attachment. It’s been there since birth, but it was on the blueprint I stashed under 13 tons of emotional concrete once I learned they were not going to accept the real me. The me I was brought here to be. For me, a divine and prominent motivator, and now unapologetic about it, is my inherent curiosity to explore, to seek knowing, and to be bound by nothing but gratitude for the experience. I am no longer bound by an identity I created to gain acceptance.
All I have to do now is 1) write my own damn story, or stories and 2) learn how to follow my curiosities to influence human movement. If not movement, maybe human connection, which is often a silent, yet powerful energy exchange within the human spirit.
If you are in the midst of your own shadow work, pay very special attention to the liminal spaces you find yourself in and always be curious. Ask why and don’t fucking stop until you get to the truth. Your unique curiosity is your very own superpower. Sure, anger is an excellent motivator, but it’s not sustainable and it invites the very external rejection we violently despise and oppose. It’s an unhealthy attachment and death is the only outcome, as proven by our imminent state of senseless global annihilation.
Maybe live music isn’t meant to be journaled or chronicled. Maybe it’s just meant to be experienced. Toward the end, I became very exhausted trying to get outsiders to come to a show to experience the healing power of music through human suffering. At some point in my last days of work, I finally said to myself “fuck ‘em; they shoulda been there to feel this.”
I’m done. I’m going to go party with my friends. See ya wherever I see ya.
Oh yeah, sustainable novelty comes from being tyrannical and fiercely present in all things. If you are an over-thinker, or anywhere on the neuro-spicy spectrum, like me, good luck. I wish you well on your journey. Being sober, and worse, being sober AND present ain’t for sissies.
Peace, love, and chicken grease.
Stringer
Particularly enjoyed and appreciated this one. From my perspective it is starting to feel like your writing is starting to coalesce into something as a whole and carving out its own space
Pursuing truth and being present never gets easier, but it's worth the effort, as you well know. Be sure to be kind to yourself on the journey. One of my oldest friends reminds me of that almost every time he texts me because he knows I'm hard on myself (as think you are on yourself, too). Take care, my good man.