The Book of John

John Gourley, singer for Portugal the Man, entered onto a darker stage. His band—bass and drums and keys—followed. They started right away. Portugal’s sound was a pleading gospel rock. John’s vocals frequently broke into sharply-pitched falsetto and then a semantic obscurity like back-country glossolalia against a blues rhythm. The guy on keys and the bassist both spilled their voices behind him. The blend was haunted and gothic, like all the bible was a rock opera and all the apostles were bright ghosts who sang acid-laced blues on the street at night. It felt like the South’s old mystical religion, but blasted forward, cradled in modern cities, anxious about guns and gods at the same time. The songs were hard energy, and the stories each seemed to end in quotidian apocalypse, like if you told the story absolutely right one time, you’d be so shaken open by the experience that it could never exist again. That was the urgency, the critical importance of watching and listening: “Once you crawl in you’ll never come back again.”

I tried to read the tattoo on John’s skinny arm, right above the place where it crossed over the body of his guitar, but couldn’t. I tried to listen for every lyric but the syllables blended so smoothly I couldn’t group them together, like trying to draw lines on the color spectrum. Show me where blue ends, draw a line, show exactly, but I couldn’t quite, and the whole stretch of it seemed fine enough undivided. I could read them later in little books or on a computer screen, but it didn’t matter so much then. It didn’t matter either the shape of ink on his skin. It was good just to see and wonder about it. I’d heard that the guy had spent a lot of time traveling around Alaska with his father. Not the tourist kind of traveling, but the lifestyle kind where it’s not about collecting flashy toys or replicating photographs you’ve seen somewhere else. Maybe so much time floating around made him want to keep a certain thing close. Maybe it was a story he didn’t want to forget about once it was over.

It was hard to focus too long. Alternating flashes of red and blue backlit the stage like speeding police cars. As soon as a person was visible they were hidden in black again. It made everyone on stage seem equal. People disappeared and reappeared and no one got a spotlight. The stage was always moving, and it was easy to feel part of that motion. Thin strings of green and yellow light appeared at random and tracked carefully between faces in the crowd. Penetrable darkness hung between all the lines, all the networks of neon and sound.

The space was too small for anyone to feel distant. Even the bassist on the other side of the stage didn’t seem far, like I could reach him, like anyone could reach anyone else. The last time I’d watched bassist Zachary Carothers on that stage, he’d been even closer. He’d stood right in front of me. The room had felt lighter, maybe it was summer. It was probably summer. I was in high school. Zach and John had played for a band called Anatomy of a Ghost, a harder faster band where John screamed more often. It was wild music that made the musicians thrash around onstage. They kicked each other and collided and played as fast as they could. I took a picture of Zach standing in front of me, bending his body over backward until his torso was parallel with the stage and his head hung toward the floor, all perfect limbo. This seemed in direct opposition to the commandments of physics or god but he never stopped playing his bass. In their new band, the guys didn’t move around as much, didn’t feel so overcome by the music as to fight each other. I caught Zachary once though bending over backward with his bass, not as far, not all the way, but it was close to the picture I had of him. Maybe he didn’t have the muscles to go back as far anymore or maybe he didn’t want to.

It seemed a miracle at all that musicians played together for so long. The album I put on once every other month, or that darker album I only played at the end of long winters because it seemed like that kind of album, the band played those songs all the time, in June and April and September. My best effort at imagining the life of a musician was to take the album I played once a year and imagine it on repeat in smoky bars and old passenger vans, like the musicians couldn’t rid it from their minds, like they wanted to run from it but couldn’t. The songs were just always present or they were always playing them, and no matter how exhausting that was they couldn’t stop. They weren’t allowed to stop, just kept playing and hearing the music all the time, new bar, new city, the same songs all the time, so other people could listen to it just once. My best effort at imaging this lifestyle was to create a bludgeoning tragedy where artists cursed what they wrote for the days it gave them. Because I imagined musicians that way, it was beyond a miracle that anyone could play music for five years with the same people or ten years or twenty. But I had it all backwards. I thought the lifestyle was twisted because the presentation of it was so lovely.