The fountain of mojo

A dearest friend.

A first rate humorist.

A musical prodigy.

An involuntary patient at a mental health facility.

The next time "no woman, no cry" plays on the radio listen carefully to the guitar solo. For just a second get past the fact that this -the most popular song in the world- has been played for you over 10^16 times. Listen to the guitar solo. It is one of the greatest moments of musical phrasing ever. It is entirely made up of the major scale, possibly the most colourless mode in music and yet some unknown genius crafts this particularly bland framework into a masterpiece of melodious, semi- blue note, emotional hooks.*
I once sat down with my dear friend Eric and handed him a mandolin. He had never even touched one before. To make it easy for him I backed him up on guitar and played the most popular and well known song of all time. After about thirty seconds of figuring out where to put his fingers Eric did a note-perfect rendition of that guitar solo on an instrument that he had never played before!** Every musician who knows him has joked about how much they hate him. This is why.

I have played in bands with Eric and watched as our audience impatiently sits through the whole song waiting for him to take a solo. My own attempts to impress through flashy guitar-work would go unappreciated but uneducated plebs in small towns in Iowa would stand up to applaud his piano solos.
My beautiful daughter responded to his playing in-vitro; the first noticeable movement of her life. Liddy (my wife) called me to feel her belly as Eric evinced music from the worn, detuned piano at my mother's Iowa double-wide.

You may think that I would be jealous of this man's abilities as they are far surpassing my own but I am not. In fact if you have never had the chance to be next to a true master musician as they bring transcendent creative force into the world I feel sorry for you. It is as though you have eaten those hard, bland tomatoes at wal-mart for your whole life whereas I have bitten the sweet, summer-fresh, heirloom variety from the garden of fertility.

All my life I've watched the most talented and brilliant people fall. Mostly it has been due to drugs. I thought Eric would be immune as a straighter edge could not be found. On the contrary what Eric fell to was his own gift. In the depths of excessive meditation he found a level of bliss that the world could not compete with. The same spiritual gift that brought him to the highest levels of musical expression took him to the taste of the enlightenment we all crave. Now he does not want to live in our inferior world; instead he just wants to get back to that state but can't figure out how. I feel like a flea trying to school a genius if I bring up a suggestion for him but I don't care. Here is what I think:

The love we feel for this man/boy can bring him back. The gift he brings to us can also nourish his soul. He is the fountain of mojo and when we are around him we can all feel it but somehow the mojo has stopped flowing back to him. It has stopped nourishing him. This is my own statement but also a request to of you who know him as well as those of you who don't. Give your love to this guy. If you live near him make the effort to go and see him. It's not scary. Stop living as though the police are watching you for signs of craziness. You're his friends dammit and you're supposed to love him. On the other hand if you don't know Eric then leave a comment here and I'll pass it on to him. I got to see him this weekend and I'll be back there again. Start to care. Bring your own gift of love into this world and you'll be more like him. Maybe then this world will be worthy of this great soul.


*I'm talking about the really famous live version that's on that compilation album that everyone has. This version, rather than the actual studio recording has become the de-facto standard that everyone has in their mind.

**Eric was already a master of two stringed instruments: the guitar and bass. They are both tuned so that the intervals between strings are fourths (do re mi fa). The mandolin is like the violin; tuned in fifths (do re mi fa so). The logical processing required to transform guitar knowledge to mandolin knowledge still crashes my brain after a year of playing both instruments.