body of work – The Conscious Pilgrim

I won’t lie… it does feel a bit ‘on the nose’ to write a blog post about Ozzy Osbourne, but I’ve been sitting with this news today and I felt compelled to wax about it.

Not necessarily about Ozzy specifically, though it’d be remiss of me to ignore the fact that if you picked up a musical instrument after the year 1977, you have been either directly or indirectly influenced by Ozzy Osbourne. You might not even like Ozzy, but I promise you that a whole bunch of your musical influences loved him.

But what an incredible legacy. This man; and he obviously wasn’t the only one, worked exceedingly hard at something that nobody really understood until he was approaching middle age, when all of a sudden, you could look back on the dozen or so albums he’d made; both on his own and with Black Sabbath, and conclude that he was both prolific and proficient.

I won’t put myself on Ozzy’s throne, here, but that’s a situation I relate to. A lot of musicians and writers probably do… but as I look back on my own dozen albums or so, and the artistic works I have ahead of me, I know what is to get into my fortieth decade and only now have people starting to put together the notion that I am actually fuckin’ good at this rock & roll thing.

Most of us leave this plane of existence, and all we leave behind are a few belongings and a name. Those of us who are fortunate enough to find our vocation might leave a little more. Life is not to be struggled through so much as it is to be lived with purpose, and it’s that purpose that gives meaning to our struggle.

Ozzy was fortunate in that he actually threw in the towel a couple weeks back. He played his final shows with all of his friends and was sent off… pushed out on the iceberg, so to speak… and for all I know, it was that sudden lack of purpose that put him under. I can’t and won’t speak to the notion that his death was assisted other than to acknowledge that there are rumblings to that effect, but I won’t join in the possible spread of misinformation. The more cynical of us might conclude that; one way or another, Satan called him home at the end of his contract, but I find that more than a bit dismissive.

If a shark stops swimming, it dies.

The same is statistically true for many retirees within a few years of their retirement, uness they find some new way to frame life outside of the career they’ve known their whole lives. Though, 10 days is a short time. I saw Ozzy in the neighborhood of 20 years ago and if you told me it would be his final tour, it would have made sense. He’d lived a life of excess, and been diagnosed with Parkinson’s years ago… so it’s probably more appropriate to attribute his survival to his final performance to sheer willpower.

At any rate, a Rock & Roll Titan has fallen, and I tip my hat to his prowess and his incredible legacy of music and influence. To say that I’m indebted to him and his small army of incredible performers and collaborators would be a gross understatement.

Rest in Power, Prince of Darkness.

One of the things about blogs that’s great is that I can throw down an opinion and nobody realllly gets to say a thing about it. People are welcomed to not like it, and/or not even read it, and it doesn’t phase me either way, because for me, the writing is the prize, and that often happens weeks before anyone reads what I’ve written. I’ve gotten into some abstract spiritual things in the past, and today is no different, really.

Rock & Roll.

Rock & roll, as much as it’s kind of a specific thing, is also not. It with a bunch of rebellious kids playing loud & fast music and racing hot rods and as much as it’s been packaged and sold back to us, and diluted a little bit each time, there are people who still dig deep into the back pages of what it really is and was and was supposed to become, and who truly embody the swagger and the spirit that was forged in the fires of Hell decades ago. These rock&rollers… their numbers are incredibly low. Lower than you think. They dispense with the slickness of the repackaging and leave that to the engineer, producers, and marketing teams who in-turn try to shoehorn these square pegs into round holes… and it kinda works, but in the end, the art and the artist win against the marketing teams.

See? Abstract. I told you.

Let’s start at the beginning – and no, we’re not going to start with Elvis Presley or Ike Turner or Sam Phillips, or even Buddy Holly. We’re going to start with Jerry Lee Lewis.

Jerry Lee was an absolute motherfucker. he was a phenomenal piano player whose skill is often overlooked and overshadowed by his short-lived and career-destroying marriage to his underaged 2nd cousin. He did his very own thing right until the very end, in spite of most of his performance career being in country music. If ever there was a performer who was unapologetically himself, who flipped the bird to the haters and the fakers right until the day he died, it was Jerry Lee Lewis.

Lemmy Kilmister, singer and bass player for Motorhead, and prompter of my personal motto: “If you think you’re too old to rock & roll then you are” built a reputation on excess of everything – most of all, volume. He wrote, recorded and toured relentlessly kicking off every show with “We are Motorhead and we play Rock & Roll” – an avid fan of early rock & roll by the likes of Chuck Berry and The Beatles, whom he preferred over the Rolling Stones as they were suburban rich kids who didn’t embody ‘the real thing’ in his mind. His defense of the true essence of rock & roll was unwavering as he openly criticised hair metal and nu-metal, and backed up his talk with 23 studio albums and 16 live albums – all after the age of 30.

Iggy Pop. Icon and artist, has released 27 studio albums – some of which are debatably unlistenable – starting with one of the most influential bands ‘The Stooges’ who; by his own account, likely played to less people in their years as a band than currently cite them as an influence. His honesty around the struggle to get The Stooges off the ground, his tumultuous friendship with David Bowie, his time in a mental institution due to his heroin addiction, and his open admission that he’s worked a number of jobs including as a real estate agent in order to continue to release music and art without compromising his artistic integrity, understanding that half-assing his vision is not an option. He’s the only one still alive as I write this, and he released one of his best albums “Every Loser” at the age of 75 in 2023… kicking off the whole record with an absolute pounder that opens with the lyric “I’ve got a dick & 2 balls and that’s more than you all.”

These are 3 examples, and I’m sure people would like me to talk about Dave Grohl or Jack White but in all honesty, they are too young and arguably too business-minded for anyone to really be able to say they “lived it till the end” or some such shit, because it’s not the end for them. There’s still plenty of time for them to water down what they’re doing, and maybe they already have.

I hope that when I am all done on this planet, that people can look back on my body of work and surmise that I did it exactly how it was in me to do. I’m sure many people already don’t like what I’m doing, but I really don’t give a fuck, because they cannot deny that I am doing it with intention, and skillfully, the way it’s in me to do. Maybe they’ll come around and maybe they won’t, but in the end I believe I will be satisfied with that I’ve left behind.