Monday Minutes E5_On Creativity: Tour Thoughts on Bob Seger

In Plato’s monumental dialogue the Meno, Socrates tells us that when we learn things we’re not gaining new information but remembering things we already knew. This postulate supports a theme that pervades not only Plato’s corpus but many schools of ancient thought from Yoga to KRS-ONE: that which is most “real” is conceptual, and the “realest” (shout to Mobb Deep feat. Kool G. Rap) parts of the events we freeze frame with the snapshot “human” are intimately related to said conceptual, and therefore contain pathways to knowledge not learned by experience and also suppressed by the senses, which distract us from what’s most “real.” “Philosophy is nothing other than the preparation for death.”

What the fuck does that have to do with ANYTHING? Fuck if I “know.”

But I kinda do “know.”

When I used to listen to the velvet kaleidoscope of Bob Seger’s “Turn The Page” as a kid (live version, because, you know, any other is far below the feeling threshold able to cast orgasms without the need of bodies to gasp within them, not to mention not as common), I felt like I knew exactly what he was taking about. The traveling from stop to stop to explode on stages with the purest passion, turning words and vibes into broken beer bottles and slashing open the audience skillfully enough to insert souvenirs of yourself in DNA without inflicting mortal wounds. They may never ever see you again. They may petition a promoter to bring you back to their city. Or something not like that at all. As you’re intoxicated by the “…engine moanin’ out his one note song,” “…the woman or girl you knew the night before” fades into the wind on the trip to the next hole in the wall to blast it to dust. Somehow, before I did it, I knew I’d lived this song in a past live my parents waving the Pentecostal/charismatic blades told me couldn’t exist. And I knew I’d live it again. Several times over.

The things we do to ensure we throw pentagrams and shatter Pink Floyd prisms before cult followings. Staying in Pensacola in a hotel directly across from a Jefferson Davis memorial and after a “…walk into a restaurant all strung out from the road” enduring stares that scream “Is it a nigger or a coon?” Burning in rage that some feel Salt Lake City sound checks aren’t as important as vegan restaurants before shows. The enrapture of an unconjured chess game conversation with a fiery beautiful soul at a Munich show with ArOza Crew and Matthias that I wished stretched over 10 millennia only for it to be cut by a train ride to Amsterdam and retuning to München at almost midnite a few days later, pushing yourself to hit a studio session you promised to attend and breathing arrows into a mic before the dawn chases the darkness into hiding for 13 hours. I didn’t smoke, but all through that trek I was “…rememberin’ what she said.” Entrenched in the short distances of the East Coast receiving Karma for genealogical ups and downs I repeat alongside the Kids and Tomorrow Kings. Having to muster the energy to run the merch booth when the introvert in me would rather just run away.

This is grueling. This is pain. This is senseless. This is pointless. This throws your wages into wooden boxes with perpetual termite bites.

I’d do it again.

Why? Because I’ve always known it before I was aware of it. And that awareness is inseparable from the event I’m becoming. In lay terms, the road is me. Nepantla.

“Here I am
On the road again
There I am
Up on the stage
Ah, here I go
Playin' star again
There I go
Turn the page
Here I am
On the road again
There I am
On the stage, yeah
Here I go
Playin' star again
There I go
There I go”