Greg Proffit Writing

Category: Music

  • Listening To The Grateful Dead Will Teach You Everything You Need To Know — But You Must Also Dance

    Listening To The Grateful Dead Will Teach You Everything You Need To Know — But You Must Also Dance

    listening to the Grateful Dead
    Photo by Jay Blakesberg

    # 99 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: You can learn everything you need to know in life from listening to the Grateful Dead — but you must also dance.

    The Godfather is the i-Ching, I beg to differ

    My tip is a derivative of this Godfather scene in You’ve Got Mail, the 1998 rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In the classic scene, Hanks answers Ryans questions with references to the Godfather, assuring her it is the “answer to every question,” the “i-Ching,” and “the sum of all wisdom.” It is a brilliant scene Hanks pulls off with aplomb, throwing in some impromptu Brando imitations for emphasis.

    I love the scene, but beg to differ. My go-to source is the Grateful Dead. Within their musical catalogue is everything you need to know. Non DeadHeads don’t understand (and don’t want to know) how their music infiltrates, penetrates, and saturates a Dead fan’s mindset to the last brain cell. 

    “For the truly Deadicated, theMusic Never Stops” 

    My someday book

    I plan to write a book in which every chapter will be a life-topic with related song titles — like this sampler:

    • Love — They Love Each Other, Sugar Magnolia, Not Fade Away, Comes A Time
    • God — Hell in A Bucket, Lay Down My Brother, Wharf Rat
    • Family — Me & My Uncle, Brother Esau, Mama Tried
    • Relationships — Row Jimmy, He’s Gone, Cold Rain & Snow
    • Politics — Throwing Stones, Standing On The Moon
    • Philosophy — Terrapin Station, St. Stephen, Eyes of the World, Box of Rain
    • Justice — Dupree’s Diamond Blues, Stagger Lee, Viola Lee Blues
    • Economics — Deal, Loser, Easy Wind, Big Boss Man
    • Psychology— China Cat Sunflower, Brown-Eyed Women, The Other One
    • Death— Death Don’t Have No Mercy, To Lay Me Down, Brokedown Palace, Black Peter

    This partial, non-exhaustive listing is exemplary of how songs in their extensive repertoire have application to every aspect of life. Like I said above, you can learn everything you need to know from listening to the Grateful Dead.

    Discovering all these connections made the music the soundtrack of my life; and one of my favorite lyrics serves up advice for all life’s uncertainties:

    “If you get confused, listen to the music play”

    ~Grateful Dead: Franklin’s Tower

    One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

    As a young adult, I got lost for several years in the hippy lifestyle (including the drug use part). I travelled cross-country following the band from show to show. The community was like none I’ve experienced since. The traveling kaleidoscope of clowns was family — a home on the road. 

    On my journey in 1985, I met Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, himself instrumental in the hey-day of what is known as the 60’s movement, and equally pivotal in the Dead’s beginnings as the house band for the infamous San Francisco Acid Tests so marvelously chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s seminal volume, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

    I went to dozens and dozens of shows became more and more lost in the mysticism and mythology and mis-application of truths and nearly lost my physical and mental health in the melee. 

    A year later, I met someone even more famous than Kesey. At a show in March of 1986, I met Jesus. My life forever changed, though the music has remained the soundtrack of it. The accoutrements of drugs and touring, I left behind. They aren’t necessary. They really never were. The music itself is a healing gift. One I’m Grateful to God to still enjoy. 

    Dance as if your life depends on it

    So many Grateful Dead songs are about impending mortality. The idea is in their very name. A fellow writer on Medium wrote this beautiful essay Accepting Your Mortality is the Beginning of Living Well. I heartily concur. The Grateful Dead’s music helps remind me. And it reminds me that the only effective antidote against an encroaching death is to live, to sing, and by God, to dance.

    Is there anything more celebratory, more filled with life and joy, the kind of life-celebration powerful enough to mock death — than dancing in the face of it?

    I think often of the story in the Old Testamanet, when the Ark of The Covenant was restored to Israel and Jerusalem after spending months and years outside the city, a young King David danced in such ecstatic jubilation, he danced right out of his clothes. 

    I still dance that way — celebrating life — warding off death. Now, I spin and whirl and shake my bones in the privacy of my home. Almighty God is the recipient of my Gratitude as He watches the overflow of my pent-up life. Nothing expresses exultation for the joy of living the way dancing does. As I dance before my God, the band playing is “Jehovah’s favorite choir“, the Grateful Dead.

    Everything you need to know—Just remember to dance

    So yes, I’m quite convinced, you can learn everything you need to know in life from listening to the Grateful Dead… but you must also dance.

    “Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.”

    ~ Grateful Dead: Eyes Of The World
  • How Music Affects Your Emotions Directly

    How Music Affects Your Emotions Directly

    music affects your emotions
    Photo by Jens Thekkeveettil on Unsplash

    # 23 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Music bypasses your thoughts to affect your emotions directly. It is unique among art forms for this quality as far as I’ve discovered. Take care then, what you are inviting to stir your emotions.

    Music affects emotions and brain responses in emotional centers regardless of lyrical content, or whether the pieces are solely instrumental. There is a body of brain imaging and clinical proof that music bypasses your thoughts to affect your emotions directly.

    This topic is worthy of a book or a doctoral thesis on its own. I will limit my commentary to calling your attention to the facts stated. Of note is that one study linked above showed that hearing sad music provoked some people to deeper levels of sadness.

    “… the study found that for some people, sad music can cause negative feelings of profound grief.”

     ~ Memorable Experiences with Sad Music—Reasons, Reactions and Mechanisms of Three Types of Experiences published in Plos One

    Emotions usually spring from thoughts

    Emotions usually arise as the products of thoughts, and independent of willing them into existence. A person can choose to be happy, but cannot by willing it, make it so directly. One cannot will happiness. One must first think happy thoughts… or listen to happy music. Music affects your emotions directly, not needing the mind to act as conduit.

    I am listening to jazz by Art Pepper as I write this. This is the first time I’ve immersed myself in an hour of his playing. I am familiar with him as a jazz musician only because I’ve read references to him in some Barry Eisler books, and I’ve heard snippets of tunes while watching the Bosch detective series derived from Michael Connelly’s novels. (You can stream Bosch on Amazon Prime Video).

    Having no familiarity with Pepper’s music, I am enjoying his fluid, sensual, upbeat, even cheerful jazz clarinet and saxophone as the perfect accompaniment to writing. There is nothing melancholy or depressing about it. It is urgent and energetic—sometimes staccato, phrased like well punctuated sentences. He plays woodwinds the way a hummingbird flies, darting here and there—never still for long. There is nothing angry, and certainly no rage. I find myself carried along, fully engaged with the virtuosity of expression, the coolness of style that draws me in like a whisper rather than repelling me like a shout.

    Ray Bradbury said the best jazz musicians play as if they don’t believe in death. An hour or so in and I know Pepper is an unbeliever, too. Listening to him I don’t believe in death, either. Rather, I feel smarter, more sophisticated and cosmopolitan—more vibrant and alive. It would be the perfect soundtrack for a dinner party, or an art crawl. Perhaps to serenade a gathering of happy, comfortable friends as they sample wines, cheeses, and chocolates. I like it. It makes me feel good and I will add Pepper’s jazz to my rotation.

    You have your favorite music. Ask yourself what it does for you. How does it make you feel? Do you have a “go to” band or song?

    Music as mental health medicine

    I have a life-rule not included on my 99 Life Tips list, but it would easily be the hundredth tip. Never, ever drink when you’re down. That, too, is a story in its own right. You should, however, have some healthy alternatives for self-medicating your mental health. I find there is nothing better than music. The studies linked above cite the therapeutic value of music as well. Music affects your emotions. Just take care to recognize which emotions you’re inviting yourself to feel when you make your choice of music to listen to.

    “Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune

    Something to make us all happy

    Do anything, take us out of this gloom

    Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy

    You are the one who can make us all laugh

    But doing that you break out in tears

    Please don’t be sad, if it was a straight mind you had,

    We wouldn’t have known you all these years”

    ~Traffic: Dear Mr. Fantasy
  • What Do You Like & Why Do You Like It?

    What Do You Like & Why Do You Like It?

    What Do You Like, Why Do You Like It?
    Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

    # 85 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Know why you like what you like. Learn to identify the feeling of liking something before you have the words to tell yourself you like it. That resonance, that connection, that is your home.

    This one has been staring at me for a couple of days. I know what I mean by the tip I offered months ago when I created my list and posted it, but this one captures so much.

    What you like defines you

    Why do you like that? Why don’t you like this? Can your likes change—become weaker (?), or stronger? If they can change, did the thing formerly liked change? Or did the former “Like-er” change? Important stuff.

    We all start in infancy as blank slates. Yes, I know, the argument of nature vs. nurture. Sure, sure. Still… I have no Grateful Dead genes that make me resonate to that frequency, nor any Russian genes I’m aware of that make the slow, deliberated, painstakingly detailed accounts of Dostoevsky so appealing and full of life and truth to me.

    So, as for the accumulation of culture—which is really a fancy word for group or social liking of a thing—I’m on the nurture side of that debate. We like what we like because we get exposed to it by someone who convinces us that people like us like stuff like this. There’s a kind of peer pressure to like most of the things we choose. 

    [That, and the size of the menu in proportion to the size of our appetites, and whether we find good entrements (palate cleansers) between samplings.] 

    There are also degrees of liking a thing. You may wear the tee-shirt, but not kill bats on stage and drink their blood. (You can look up the old Ozzy Osbourne legend somewhere… Google it.)

    So, Greg, you’re 300 words in and haven’t told me a damn thing about why I like some stuff and not other stuff.

    True, dear reader, we are halfway down a proper electronic page and I cannot tell you what to like. I can, however, urge this—Don’t let anyone else tell you either!

    We all got our first likes because someone pushed sweet mashed pears into our baby mouths before they spooned in disgusting pureed lima beans. Someone played Mozart, or Miles Davis or Metallica before Beethoven, Benny Goodman, or Bad Company.

    We first gain likes and tastes from the people around us who expose us to them and usually because they like them too. (Maybe not with babyhood pears, but you catch my drift).

    Here’s the rub

    At some point, earlier or later, I don’t know, you will want to pay attention to whether or not you’d like Led Zeppelin at all if that delectable girl in the yellow overalls didn’t look so good wearing that logo emblazoned across her beautiful… t-shirt (what did you think I was going to type?)

    My mom was a member of the Columbia Records club. This was back when dinosaurs roamed North America and people still had turntables on which to extract sound from round plastic platters. She got several albums a month, and she used to sit dreamily and play one album called Go To Heaven by a band of long-haired men, standing in a cloud on the cover, wearing cheesy looking, white, polyester-velveteen Lawrence Welk suits. 

    Alabama Getaway and Don’t Ease Me In off that record sounded like countrified crapola to my 13-year-old ears. Hearing it made me gag and flee the premises, long before I got to hear Lost Sailor and Saint of Circumstance. 

    I couldn’t stand it! Yuck! 13-year-olds ought not be judged too harshly for underdeveloped anything. Puberty makes for a cloudy filter.

    But I did like her Fleetwood Mac, and Rickie Lee Jones, and Little Feat albums. I even liked Jimmy Buffett, and I wanted to like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young because they had the coolest album cover. (You know the antique looking, sepia-toned album where they’re posed with a dog, and Crosby cradles a shotgun, and Neil is draped with bandoleers and a pistol, and a guitar is lying on the ground — Deja Vu—and it looks like Matthew Brady took the photograph right after the battle of Antietam or something). 

    God, I loved the look of that album cover because I was crazy for all kinds of Civil War stuff. That picture was so cool! Who cared about hippies floating in white John Travolta suits in a cloud!?

    But the music, Jeez! My misanthropic mom would get drunk, put on Teach Your Children and slur, “Hunnneee, jusss lishen to theesh wordzz. Thish iss evertheeen I wanna  shay to you kidzz.”

    OMG!! Please No! — Likes can change

    I hated C,S,N,Y then. Association, ya know?

    Though, I LOVE their music now. Different association… ya know?

    The same reason I now love all things Grateful Dead. I had to grow into it. Then it grew into me.

    So, sometimes early exposure doesn’t take root. Germination takes longer. Circumstances change, and then, bam! You hear something, or see something, or taste it, and it’s like tasting and seeing and hearing home. Like gathering up fragments of self that complete you. I know, weird.

    But, they say there’s no accounting for taste. And truly there isn’t. If you will put on your Indiana Jones hat and do some personal archeology to dig up the reasons you’ve buried and kept your own personal treasures, you’ll learn a hella lot about yourself.

    Fact is, your likes and loves will tell you more about yourself than your dislikes.

    Shove over, I’ve invited God in

    Probably shouldn’t drag God into a story already crowded with Jimmy Buffett, my drunk mom, Rickie Lee Jones, and bandoleers, but I see [Him] as defined (bad word, I don’t think [He] can be defined adequately, else the whole God idea shrinks, but it’s the best word we’ve got) by what [He] likes, immeasurably more than by what [He] dislikes. Just like you and me are defined more by what we like and allow in than by what we hate and keep out.

    It’s the opposite of the way evangelical Christians think of God and themselves. These define themselves by what they oppose, what they’re against, what they resist and are afraid of. They never crack open Song of Songs, the most beautiful ode to physical, sexual love ever written (“kisses sweeter than wine”). It just sits there unread and unappreciated in their bibles. They conveniently forget Noah got drunk (after preserving humanity), David committed adultery—and murder (and was still called a man after God’s own heart), Jesus turned water into about a hundred gallons of wine at a wedding, and Peter denied Jesus (but Jesus restored him again over fish tacos on the beach).

    They forget God loved everybody, EVERYBODY so much, [He] paid the ultimate price to win us back. I don’t imagine [He’s] trying to keep anyone out on technicalities like who they love. [He’d] prefer to outfit us all in white suits, invite us to stand in a cloud, and Go To Heaven. Or maybe my God is just bigger and more full of Grace and Mercy than yours. I dunno. Or maybe I’m wrong. But I’d rather be wrong believing in God as revealed Love. Maybe you’re unflawed, and you’re loved for your perfection. That doesn’t apply to me. But because God loves flawed me as much as [He] does, my only response is to trust [Him.] That is what faith is all about, after all. The heart’s response to a God showing and proving [His] Love.

    If you’re curious about my brackets around masculine pronouns in reference to God, it’s because of my uncertainty of how to think of God and gender. I think of God as Father, the only real Father I’ve ever known. But God is called El Shaddai in the Hebrew scriptures, too, which means “the Breasted One”, or nurse. I love that image—of God being the source of life and growth and sustenance, of comfort, and warmth, and security, the way a nursing mother is to her infant child. You are welcome to your own images. I am convinced in my heart that my brackets aren’t offensive to [Him], or Him. End of disclaimer.

    Back to the topic at hand—Here’s an unlimited credit card

    Learn to identify what you like, on your own terms. Evaluate your preferences to see if you picked them up as the price of admission to some tribe or other, or thinking they’d be the key to some girl’s heart. 

    What do you like, the real you? Imagine you have an unlimited credit card. Your preferences and tastes are the only ones you need consult. You start with an empty iPod, empty media shelves, and an unfurnished home—no pictures on the walls, nothing in the pantry, fridge, wine cellar, or liquor cabinet. What’s parked in the driveway? What do you get? What do you like? Not—what does your wife, husband, lover like? No. What do you like?

    Go ahead, you have my full permission to fill your life with as many of those things you can. On the way, you’ll answer the question: Why do you like that? It may be this simple. You just do! It resonates. And it scratches the persistent itch, uncovers the empty spot, and fills up the void. Because it caresses your heart; and sings you, rocks you, swaddles you, envelops you, whispers you—home.

    It may as simple as the idea enshrined by Mick Jagger—

    “I know it’s only Rock n’ Roll, but I like it… yes I do!”

    ~ Rolling Stones: It’s Only Rock n’ Roll

    Mick likes Rock n’ Roll, and that like defines Mick. What defines you? What do you like?

    One day, I’ll invite you over to my own imaginary bare-floored, yoga-pillowed pad where we can have church listening for the whisper of God, blasting my collection of studio and live Dead performances on my megawatt stereo system, while we drink Napa Valley wine and Russel’’s Reserve and Grok out on all my Van Gogh and Monet and Mondrian paintings. Or maybe we’ll “ooh and aahhh” over my library of thousands of volumes of curated literature, housing everything from Brené Brown to Zane Grey.

    You’ll like it. Or at least I will.

    What did you ask? Oh, yeah, that Aerosmith you hear coming from the other room? Oh, that’s just my girlfriend rocking out on the sounds she likes. She calls mine alternately “Grandpa” or “Sleepy” music. If you prefer the Demon of Screamin’ to my sleepy tunes, you are welcome to plug in your headphones. To each his own. I can’t tell you what to like, I can only ask you to tell me, why do you like it?

  • MTV…not so much!

    Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas from the official music video for Smooth

    As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post on hot and cool media, I thought I’d share some of my opinions about music.

    I belong firmly in the camp of people who believe that MTV ruined music.

    Here’s why.

    Music is about sound and hearing and what happens in the brain when that’s going on. Studies show that music taps the brain’s pleasure centers in a unique way, even triggering the release of dopamine for the anticipation of where the notes are heading. And it has long been surmised that there is a correlation between music and memory in a way that is similar to the sense of smell and its association with memories.

    Video is also about sound, but it is a much ”hotter” medium in McLuhan’s terms. Because of the visual component, any imagination or personal connection that a particular song might evoke, is obliterated once the song is married to a video. The video becomes the vehicle for how the song is perceived, rather than your own emotional and mental state. The video replaces your imagination. This is a bum deal in my opinion.

    I can’t hear Peaceful, Easy Feeling by the Eagles, or Lido Shuffle by Boz Scaggs without being transported to my thirteenth summer. Thank God there was no video, or I’d never be able to associate those songs with Long Beach and the sweet-ache of innocent summer love I had for Ruth Ellen H, and a bus trip to Atlanta to spend a week with my cousin, Rob, and the sultry and out-of-my-league Heidi H…but I hear the first notes of that pedal steel guitar, imagine just how the ”sparkling earrings lay against your skin so brown”, and I’m right back there.

    I love the Santana song, Smooth. It is fantastic, has a great lyric, and what’s not to like about Carlos’ guitar, anyway?  But when I hear it, I see the video with Rob Thomas singing, and the sweaty chick in the window, and the Latinas dancing in the streets of Spanish Harlem. I love the tune, but because of the video, I have zero personal connection to it.

    When it comes to music: 

    ”Give me your heart, make it real, or let’s forget about it.”