When 'Avalanche' Plays
'Wanted an invitation from a window or a woman's laugh, just a little something everybody else seems to have...'
I’m grooving on James Grant’s guitar solo — squeezing honey out of stone, sweet, sweet agony — in Love & Money’s 1988, semi-hit, “Halleluiah Man [above].”
If I could distill my soul into musical parts, it would be in that solo.
Also, “Avalanche,” with a “Dear John” PS.
Listen to Love & Money’s transfixed, outflow music and genius lyrics, where Grant always goes wandering until he’s fixating on a bottomless feeling. Timeless, prescient even…the song of my people — hard to find, harder to pin down, renegades in a construction zone.
Love & Money’s songs aptly describe my roller-coaster, Jekyll/Hyde extremes, the soundtrack of my dreams and nightmares.
Right now, as truckers bypass all roads leading in and out of New York, the Scottish band’s lyrics — skipping stones over disrobing strings — weep all around, wounding and reviving my broken heart:
“Wanted an invitation from a window or a woman’s laugh
Just a little something everybody else seemed to have
The cushion of love to help me take the strain
I hope it rains the day I die, it’s hard to explain
I was told the streets were paved with gold
I’ve been bought and sold on a millionaire’s plans
I don’t know how long I can just keep rollin’ on
Lookin’ for a miracle, waitin’ for a last chance
I’m praying for an
Avalanche
I’m praying for an
Avalanche
Some people just ignore what they don’t understand
And then go looking for Jesus,
With their checkbooks in their hands
When we have a reason, we don’t need an axe to grind
I don’t have the cash
I don’t have the time
I pray fate will be kind…”
— “Avalanche” by James Grant
“On the blind side and down the back ways
The roots of sadness crawl,
When you can’t get what you need
You feel like taking a torch to it all
All the sweet talk makes a bitter man
You can feel the darkness rise
Sometimes you don’t know what you’re fighting for
You don’t know who it is you despise.
I am the Halleluiah Man
Break all the rules, I’m the King of Fools
I’m the renegade in this grey town
And I’ll do anything to bring a government down
I am the Halleluiah Man
Yes my friends I’ve been born again
I’m the black sheep who while shepherds sleep
I’ll do anything to bring a government down
In a coat of a thousand colours
and a star spangled Cadillac
He picked up a rodeo queen
with whiplash marks all over his back
When dreams don’t become their people
People become their dreams
He didn’t understand at the time
But now he knows exactly what it means…”
— “Halleluiah Man” by James Grant
As gratifying as it would be to think of myself in soft, gauzy, Sara Bareilles ballads, or even a romantic jazz standard, along the lines of Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, deep down inside where it counts…it’s not me.
Throughout my star-gazing life, I’ve tried like hell to be what Hollywood wants: Betty or Veronica, the girl next door or the femme fatale…all to get the guy. But none of that’s real, just play-acting.
Besides, I never wanted the guy.
When the shit hits the fan, my thoughts turn to Peter Gabriel’s music video for “Digging in the Dirt,” the mean and ugly beneath the nice and beautiful facade that is life’s push/pull, yin/yang quandary…
“Digging in the Dirt” versus “In Your Eyes.”
“Something in me, dark and sticky
All the time it’s getting strong
No way of dealing with this feeling
Can’t go on like this too long…”
You have no idea how dark I can go. I keep 95 percent of what’s really going on inside my dark and twisted mind from you — for both our safety. The few times I let some of it slip…I paid for it dearly.
What’s this all about, anyway?
Music, if nothing else, brings out what we really want and who we really are underneath all these fancy designer threads, expensive make-up, and Gene Juarez cut-and-colors.
It’s why G-d made the world in six days to frequency, energy, vibes…music…and why, when the world is about to end, He will call us home to trumpets that intone our true natures.
That’s what I believe.
Despite my choice to deal in words (writer, editor, reporter) in this lifetime, it’s music that I turn to in the face of pure evil, absolute antipathy, and the deafening sound of hellish silence — when words fail me.
Every time I hear about a calamity about to befall us, I mentally put on Love & Money’s disturbing, romantic-dystopian soundscape, where the jilted find solace in watching carefully conscripted masks fall away, the faces of the damned frozen in monstrous stupor, and the whole world burn down.
Now, they will care, I think. Now, the bullshit ends…
The world is falling apart, in case you haven’t noticed, or refuse to. Savvy economists, once trained to study the numbers and the anomalies for their livelihoods, are predicting an economic collapse like no other in about an 18-month, scaled-down time, give or take.
“The Revolution will not be televised.”
The news you’re allowed to see — go do a Google search — is what those in power want and need you to see. Distractions, contemporary bread and circuses focused on the younger generation with ostensibly more time on their hands, compared to those over the “Logan’s Run” age of 30, aka those scheduled to go into Carousel Begins.
Ah, but the older generations know more. They’ve lived long enough to compare what was and what is to come.
We’ve been trained to throw them away like year-old software, the second wrinkles and grey hairs appear and they don’t answer us right away, all while bullshitting that “it’s not because I’m vain, I just don’t want to feel old.”
If you keep seeing the bad guys win without consequences that even defy the laws of physics and karma, then naturally, the most feeling and thinking among us will start checking out and turning up our favorite tunes, on repeat…tunes that give us validation, acknowledgement, a musical version of that best friend who catches your eye from across a crowded room, with a “WTF?” expression only you two understand.
This music gets me, especially now, when everything is falling apart, and nobody seems to care.
“…When you can’t get what you need
You feel like taking a torch to it all…”
Jekyll and Hyde.
A part of me wants to see the truckers boycott destroy New York and surrounding areas. I want more destruction.
Fire and brimstone.
I want the electrical grid to go down permanently — until every one of us feels the pain, and pain is all anyone can talk about.
I want every influencer, content creator, and other useless OnlyFan eaters screaming on podcasts and empty streets, throwing the mother of all tantrums, because their fans and followers and subscribers have abandoned them in droves — and they no longer have anyone to show off to.
I want suffering on a scale so vast and so deep that we’re never again tempted to take anything for granted…that we’re slapped back into reality.
I want people to start giving a damn, not just with their empty mouths and closed doors, but with action and open arms.
And yet…
…when a famous influencer like Doobydobap recently announced the permanent closure of Mija Seoul, her nine-month, fine-dining Korean restaurant experiment with Danish chef boyfriend Kevin, I felt horrible for her…I cried real tears.
I don’t mean it! I really don’t.
It’s just my own childish lashing out temper tantrum that the world isn’t a better place…that it’s such a bad place that maybe we need to collectively be punished to force-quit all our self-indulgent scrolling, and scroll off already.
Our parents and grandparents didn’t have it as good as we do now. We have never known of a real world war. We have never known true suffering, where we were forced to grow our own food, kill and drain and skin and dry our own meat and fish, scrimp and save and pinch pennies and, some days, eat nothing but stone soup…
We have never known what it’s like to lose loved ones to someone else’s ideological cause, taken to concentration or intern camps, raped and inhumanely experimented on…
We come and go at will, pretending nothing’s wrong with $30 ramen, $70 steak, and $10 milk. We still take trips to far-off places, splurge on truffles and wine on Valentine’s Day, go clubbing with our friends, and expect the clueless public to keep paying for our GoFundMe gas no matter the skyrocketing prices.
Something’s wrong, yet we refuse to see.
There are days when I’m nothing but “Avalanche” and “Halleluiah Man,” with a little Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” playing in a loop in my head.
Like today, as mainstream news and big tech platforms continue to ignore, dismiss, fact-check, and downplay the #TruckersforTrump boycott as nothing more than a political gimmick…and not a legitimately democratic response to a NY fiefdom misusing the law to punish a presidential candidate for doing exactly what every other real estate owner does from the East to the West Coast (valuing one’s own property as high as possible).
But keep refreshing your smartphones for signs of Taylor Swift and her latest boy toy, Kansas City hothead Travis Kelce and the occasional pussy shot.
Do I really want our eternal downfall? Of course not.
But it’s nice to imagine the karmic what-ifs, even a little bit, in a kick-ass song that encompasses all our thwarted feels.
Plus, the guitar solo. I mean…