Feral Godlings Run Amok

     Walter Runge stood next to me on stage in front of a large, packed, thumping North Bay Area nightclub on a Saturday night, keyboard controller hanging around his neck so he could strut like the badass he was, up on the front line with the bass player and me. A wiry and athletic Irish-looking guy in his twenties, the ladies liked the way he moved and his perpetual smile. He didn’t belong tucked back behind a stack of keyboards and gear; not Walt. That would just be wrong.

     “HEY BYRON!!” he hollered off-mic over the band, a shit-eating grin on his face.

     “WHAT?!?” I hollered back, shit-eating grin on mine. I knew what was coming.

     “LEAVE!!”

     This was codespeak between us. He’d sometimes shout it at me, I’d sometimes shout it at him, and the result was always delirious fun. “Leave”, to us, meant to not only take a solo, but to leave everything behind: the band, the chords and harmony, all the stuff you learned in school, all the years putting that high level of theoretic structuring in place so that you could solo over difficult chord changes, all the rules and regulations, just leave it all. Put your ears back and go hell for leather, chasing those demons and angels up into the thin air while the band stayed on the ground, holding down the dance floor. Find your own keys, your own truths, your own Gestalt, your own Tao. Contrast anything and everything that might be expected of a cat who follows rules, or who stays within the confines of convention. Any Jazzer worth his or her salt is well-familiar with the concept. It’s a respected imperative among us that we call “playing out”.

     And behavior like that is not common to packed nightclubs full of pretty young people gyrating on the floor in efforts to get laid. It’s a jazz thing, more endemic to a setting of poised listeners sitting at candlelit tables, dressed in the understated finery of the urban sophisticate, than to a crowd of drunken hooligans jumping around while hooting and hollering, doing shots and puking in the toilet. But in rowdy environs, presented with screaming mini-moog and howling rock guitar sounds, it can bear wonderfully justifiable talons.

     The reason we could bring such antics to such a setting was that Walter and I were half of pretty slammin’ four-piece funk band, playing mostly around Northern California, sometimes also scaring the cows and their owners in Nevada. It was the gig where we initially met. We hit it off immediately, and in a big way: he had gone to Berklee, I had gone to Grove, we each immediately dug each other’s chops and had a common love of Miles, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and other gods of The Craft. We both had backgrounds in classical music that had long since taken a back seat to our exploding need for expression. We understood each other in many ways, and shared a perpetual unspoken need to run amok and burn the carbon out of the cylinders; any song was fair game. The bass player and drummer were helpless but to put up with it, and though it struck me as a bit odd–then as now–they kept their griping to a minimum.

     And the carbon in our cylinders wasn’t all musical. Out on the road, we needed a physical outlet through the days. That’s where we invented what we call “Take Off and Die Frisbee”. We were twenty-something wildlings, both of us part scholar, part coyote; part intellectual, part feral marauder. And we could both of us run like the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed wind.

     The concept of Take Off and Die Frisbee was not complex: one simply threw the disc as hard and far as one could, at a trajectory at least ninety degrees away from the recipient, who had to do whatever was required to catch it, even if it meant jumping off a cliff or diving in front of a passing semi truck, hence the name. Neither of us ever broke a bone while playing that I know of, which also seems odd. But we were young godlings, unbreakable in every meaning of the word. We had our whole lives before us, all the yawning potential of the future beckoning with promises of The Great Unknown. We could feel that unwritten contract between us and the universe, with all the nonchalant certainty of our age: it was as real as the sun on our shoulders and the breeze out of the west, blowing the clouds and our frisbees through the sky.

     Over the years we gradually lost contact, then reconnected over social media. We’ve both been up to good things so far. It pleases me to see Walt sitting at a piano nowadays, playing his ass off as always, blowing minds and hearts by engaging in a more elegant, pure form of what it is that he was put on Earth to do. Casting pearls before drunken yahoos is cool in your twenties, but at some point music gets a real effort at honesty and truth from the musician, or the bond gets severed and the musician dies. I know a thing or two about that, and will forever bear the scars from surviving those lessons. So it does my heart good to see Walter following what I can only assume is a more musically pure and elegant path than what tends to unroll behind musicians here in Los Angeles.

     For my part, I’ve gone from committing the crimes of a feral marauding guitarist / vocalist to more stately things, things that matter more, things more in keeping with my training: for the last couple of decades I’ve been committing the crimes of a composer / arranger / orchestrator / producer / guitarist, slithering through the greasy bowels of the music industry’s maggot-ridden remains. Fortunately, for both of us–for all of us musicians–the health of the industry, in the classic sense, is irrelevant in this brave new world. There are many ways to make a living while bringing great music into being, and Walt and I have both found some surprisingly cool paths through our respective forests.

     But for all the stately professionalism of what we’re doing these days, I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be snot-slinging fun to be standing on stage next to Walt in some thumping venue right now, and holler over the band, at the top of my lungs:

     “HEY, WALT!! LEAVE!!“