Some readers have asked why I put mood music in my posts and how I go about choosing the daily selection.
I use them because in my mind, music and writing go hand in hand. I used to require absolute silence in the room to do my writing. Now I can’t write without some noise.
Some days, the music will fit the theme of what I’m writing about that day. Other times I use music that has nothing to do with the subject matter. I put it on there simply because I’m digging the song that morning.
I also like to use this forum to promote local musicians I admire.
I do consider the music to be a soundtrack for the blog. I also like to use the blog as a music player while I work. I’ll open the blog and just play all the mood music selections of the past weeks.
The music is mostly the metal I grew up with and love to this day, but not always. I also mix in non-metal acts like The Decemberists, The Avett Brothers, The Beatles and U2.
Life is full of ups and downs, and this blog is all about how I confront it. Why not have a soundtrack to go with it?
For those who just want to hear the music, I’ve created a playlist on Spotify. There are currently 54 songs — 4 hours’ worth — though I plan to keep adding to it. I’ll also start creating specialized playlists for different moods and topics.
I’ve always been a big Van Halen fan. The music is, among other things, a remedy when my depression is running hot, especially during the winter darkness. The songs capture all the feelings of summer, giving my brain the necessary jolt to keep going through the cold.
Reflecting on that in the days since Edward Van Halen’s death, I’m reminded of something else I loved about the legendary guitarist: He reminds me of people I admire in the hacker community. Part of the hacker’s craft involves breaking technology to find and fix security weaknesses in software and hardware. They inspire me endlessly — one of the things I love so much about working in the security industry.
Just as they break things and develop innovative fixes on the fly, Eddie Van Halen was famous for destroying a lot of guitars and amps in his quest to turn the tones in his head into reality.
There is perhaps no better example than his Frankenstrat. He crafted the instrument using parts from Gibson and Fender guitars because he wanted to combine the sound of a classic Gibson guitar with the physical attributes and tremolo bar functionality of a Fender Stratocaster.
Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstrat
He ripped a humbucker pickup from his Gibson, potted it in paraffin wax to reduce microphonic feedback and bolted it onto the guitar in the bridge position, at a slight angle to compensate for the different string spacing between the Fender bridge and Gibson pickup.
He removed both tone controls, wired the pickups in a simple circuit and placed a knob marked “Tone” on the volume-control pot. He then covered over the controls with a pick guard made from a vinyl record he cut up.
He screwed a quarter into the body to stabilize the Floyd Rose tremolo system he used in place of the original Fender tremolo.
One of my favorite stories is about how he hacksawed one of the horns off his Gibson SG so he could hit the high notes of the song “Dirty Movies” with his slide:
For a deeper dive into many of Van Halen’s guitar innovations, I highly recommend this Popular Mechanics article from a few years back, in which he describes a lot of what he was doing at the time. It includes a breakdown of some of his patents.
There’s been plenty of debate over the years about Van Halen: Did Eddie really invent some of the things he claimed to invent? Which was better, Roth-era or Hagar-era Van Halen? (I loved both.) I have lots of friends who love the band, and many who hate it.
I also suspect some of my security friends will beat me over the head for comparing what Eddie did to what they do. Fair enough. But I can’t help but see the parallels.
In a rotten year like 2020, where Van Halen’s death is just one more cherry on top of a shit sundae, getting lost in the music and tinkering that defined the man has been a welcome source of mental shore leave these last days.
We need constant reminders that there’s still joy in the world, and this gets the job done for me.
“What’s my drug of choice? Well, what have you got?” —Layne Staley, Alice in Chains
This week marks 14 years since Alice In Chains frontman Layne Staley was found dead.
Mood music:
Like Kurt Cobain, Staley had a big impact on me in the early 1990s. But while I identified with Cobain’s depression, I identified with Staley for his inability to keep his addictive demons at bay.
I can’t tell you how many times I listened to the “Dirt” album while I binged myself sick. It seems like an unfair comparison, because Staley’s demon was heroin. Mine was compulsive binge eating — a destructive form of addictive behavior in its own right, but not necessarily from the same depths of hell heroin came from.
Staley’s lyrics seeped deep into my soul. When he screamed his vocals, I could identify the pain that came from deep down. I’m convinced that pain gave him the power to sing the way he did.
My writing taps a similar source within me, but the source is a lot more muted, less despairing, because I have something I don’t think he had — faith.
But as a 20-something, I couldn’t tell the difference. I felt like my demons were as vexing as his. When you’re younger, that’s the kind of self-important thinking you get into.
Before I found recovery, my demon would start harassing me long before getting to the scene of the junk. Forget the people who would be there or the weather and surroundings. All I’d think about was getting my fill of food. Then I’d get to the event and get my fill from the time I’d get there to the time I left. I’d sneak handfuls of junk so what I was doing wouldn’t be too obvious to those around me.
Halfway through, I would have the same kind of buzz you get after downing a case of beer or inhaling a joint deep into your lungs. I know this, because I’ve done those things, too. By nightfall, I’d feel like a pile of shattered bricks waiting to be carted off to the dump. Quality time with my wife and kids? Forget it. All I wanted was the bed or the couch so I could pass out.
I imagine Staley felt something similar much of the time, though I’m told by those who have kicked smack addictions that you don’t really care about anything when you’re high, because it’s like being under a warm blanket. The problem is that you spend the rest of your life trying to feel that way, and the only thing that works is more and more smack.
In the end, I know you can’t fairly compare the two addictions. I only know how mine made me feel, and whenever I listened to Staley scream, I felt like someone else got it, and that I wasn’t alone.
Thanks for that, Layne. I hope you’re at peace wherever you are.
I remember exactly where I was 22 years ago this week, when I saw the news flash about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I was lying in bed, depressed and reclusive because of frequent fear.
Mood music:
I was living in Lynnfield, Mass., at the time. I had a room in the basement, just like I had in Revere. But this space was much smaller — a jail cell with a nice blue carpet. But I did have my own bathroom, which I never cleaned.
Erin and I had been going out for less than a year, and I was waiting for her to come by after she finished work. I had been sleeping after a food and smoking binge and I still had a few hours to kill, so I turned on MTV, which still played music videos at the time.
There was MTV news anchor Kurt Loder and Rolling Stones editor David Fricke, holding court like Walter Cronkite following JFK’s assassination in 1963. Fricke expressed concern that depressed teens who listen to Nirvana might view suicide as the heroic thing to do; the only answer. “This is about your kids. You need to talk to them,” he said.
Erin arrived, we expressed our mutual shock, then we went out to dinner.
Though I was given to depression at that point, it wasn’t the suicidal kind, and would never become that. I’ve always been the type to hide in a room for long stretches, staring blankly at a TV screen, when depressed. Suicide was something I never really thought about at that point. It was an alien concept.
Then, a couple months later, a close friend attempted suicide. Two years later, he tried again and succeeded. In the 15 years since then, I’ve worked hard to gain the proper perspective of such things.
When Cobain died, I assumed he went straight to hell. I never gave it a second thought. Suicide is one of the unacceptable sins, like murder, the kind that gets you sent to the fire pit.
Today, I’m not so sure.
Kurt Cobain was unprepared for the crazy fame and publicity that came his way. He dove into heroin for solace. You could say the whole thing literally scared him to death.
Fortunately, he left behind a strong body of work.
When I listen to Nirvana, I don’t think of Kurt Cobain stuffing the tip of a rifle up his nose and pulling the trigger.
I think of how anxiety, fear and depression are universal things, how the sufferer is never, ever truly alone, and how we never have to be beaten.
I couldn’t let the day go by without acknowledging a grim anniversary. Twenty-nine years ago today, Metallica bassist Cliff Burton was killed when the band’s tour bus flipped over on a lonely road in Sweden.
Mood music:
The band’s first three albums had a huge impact on me.
In fact, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” album helped me get through my last major attack of Crohn’s Disease.
It might seem bat-shit crazy of me to intertwine these two things, but the fact is that the “Master of Puppets” album DID help me get through that attack. That, and the book “Helter Skelter.” I read that book twice as I lingered on the couch, rising only for the frequent bloody bathroom runs that are the hallmark of Crohn’s flare-ups.
I listened to Master of Puppets nonstop. It tapped right into the anger I was feeling as a 16-year-old still reeling from his brother’s death and under the influence of Prednisone.
I had plans back then. I was going to lose 30 pounds, grow my hair long and find myself a girlfriend. I was going to live a life closer to normal. Not that I knew what normal was back then. As an adult, I’ve learned that normal is a bullshit concept, really. One man’s normal is another man’s insanity.
When the blood reappeared and the abdominal pain got worse, I wasn’t worried about whether I’d live or die or be hospitalized. I was just pissed because it was going to foul up my carefully designed plans.
When I listened to the title track to Master of Puppets, the master was the disease — and the wretched drug used to cool it down.
“The Thing That Should Not Be” was pretty much my entire life at that moment.
I related to “Welcome Home: Sanitarium” because I felt like I was living in one at the time. I was actually lucky about one thing: Unlike the other bad attacks, I wasn’t hospitalized this time.
Though Master of Puppets came out in March 1986, it was that summer when I really started to become obsessed with it. At the end of that summer, the Crohn’s attack struck. The album became the soundtrack for all the vitriol I was feeling.
That fall, as the flare-up was in full rage, Metallica bassist Cliff Burton was killed in that bus accident in Europe. It felt like just another body blow. I found this band in a time of need, and a major part of the music was ripped away.
I recently found a track of “Orion” where Cliff’s bass lines are isolated. It puts my neck hair on end every time I play it.
I haven’t been much of a Metallica fan in recent years. I enjoy some of what they’ve done from the fifth album to now. But the first three albums were special. Especially “Master of Puppets,” which was there when I needed it most.
Being a metalhead, one would expect me to hate a group like The Beach Boys, yet I’ve played them nonstop for a month now.
Mood music:
I started taking an interest after seeing a preview for the film Love and Mercy, in which actors Paul Dano and John Cusack play Brian Wilson during two stages of his life — the 1960s and the 1980s. I started playing the whole Beach Boys catalog, particularly the album Pet Sounds, widely viewed as Wilson’s masterpiece.
That album was a commercial disappointment when it came out in the mid-1960s. People expected to hear more songs about girls and surfing, but instead they got a series of musical pieces in which Wilson exposed his vulnerable soul for all to see.
I’ve been listening to Smile a lot, too. That album was supposed to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds but was shelved as the band — and Wilson’s fragile mind — fell into chaos. Wilson ultimately finished the album a decade ago and toured behind it. (There’s a great documentary about Smile on YouTube.)
The attraction is that I can relate to Wilson’s struggles. I never heard voices in my head like he did, but I’ve suffered the kind of depression that kept me in bed, and I know what it’s like to overeat when depressed. His choice to explore his feelings on Pet Sounds was groundbreaking at the time and brave. It inspires me.
It’s also a great musical history lesson. Reading about the way Wilson wrote and recorded gives me a lot of insight into the techniques we’ve seen in more recent decades.
I won’t stop devouring heavy metal, but it’s fun to expand my musical horizons.
I am your main man, if you’re looking for trouble. I’ll take no lip, no one’s tougher than me. I kicked your face you’d soon be seeing double. Hey little girl, keep your hands off of me…I’m a rocker.
“The Rocker,” by Thin Lizzy
A lot of people are amused to learn about my musical tastes. My work space at home and the office is cluttered with political and history-based trinkets, which would leave one to believe I listened to country or folk or maybe even some 1970s rock.
Heavy Metal music? It just doesn’t fit my image.
And yet, some 30 years ago, that music saved my life. And to this day, I listen to it faithfully. In fact, it’s become one of the main tools of my recovery from a life of mental disorder.
Let’s start from the beginning.
1984
This is the year my older brother died. But even without that, life was pretty miserable. I wasn’t exactly popular in school. I was overweight and the subject of ridicule. Emotions were understandably raw at home.
But that was also the year I began listening to heavy metal music.
It allowed me to escape the pain around me. The aggressiveness of the music gave me an outlet to process all the rage I was feeling. Without it, drugs and violence toward others might have been next.
My closest friend at the time, who lived two doors down, got me into the music — introducing me to the likes of Motley Crue and Thin Lizzy. When that friend died 12 years later, the music would again help me process my rage and keep me steady.
I’d be angry, hurt or scared, and I needed something to absorb my aggression. Heavy metal was the punching bag.
One of my favorite songs in 1984 was “Knock ‘Em Dead Kid” from Motley Crue’s “Shout At The Devil” album. The lyrics go something like this:
Heard a star-spangled fight/A steel-belted scream
Now I’m black/I’m black/I’m black
Another sidewalk’s bloody dream
I heard the sirens wine/My blood turned to freeze
You’ll see the red in my eyes/as you take my disease
For me, it was excellent therapy.
Around 2003, as I was going through a rough patch at work (my own shortcomings at the time more than anything else), that therapy took the form of Metallica’s “St. Anger” album. The album itself is far from their best, but the opening song, “Frantic,” tore a path straight into my soul.
The song came out a year before I started to come to grips with the OCD, and the guy in the video WAS me. The lyrics were me. I was frantic. I just didn’t realize it at that point.
Today, I listen to the music more for simple enjoyment than as an anger-management device. The anger went away some time ago.
The nostalgia is a big attraction for me, too. It takes me back to a time when I was in pieces; to a time when the music literally saved me. It has become something of a security blanket.
A lot of it makes me laugh as well — no small thing when you’re struggling not to take life too seriously.
How can you not find a live Motley Crue clip funny? Vince Neil sings every fifth word of most songs live. It’s amusing to watch.
The spikes-and-leather dress code make me laugh, too.
It reminds me not to take myself too seriously. And once I’m brought down to Earth like that, sanity prevails.
An old friend from the Point of Pines, Revere, sent me a note some time ago. He came across my post on Zane Mead and another on the Bridge Rats gang. For him, they brought up more memories of kids from the neighborhood who died young.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/jX-yuZFVm34
I’ll keep his name and certain details out to protect his privacy, but here’s some of what he wrote to me:
I came across your piece in your OCD Diaries about Zane Mead. It stirred up some old memories of growing up. I was actually friends with Zane until I left for the military in 1985. He was a sweet kid with a good heart most of the time. Occasionally he would be angry and self destructive. This was usually followed by an attempted suicide.
I had many talks with him about it. he never would say what was eating at him. Not sure why but I don’t think it was an issue at home. I feel like it was a personal daemon. As you stated, our life’s experiences at the time didn’t give us the ability to see the problem no less the wisdom to offer any real help. I often wonder if there was something more I could have done.
It seemed that I lost a lot of friends over the five years I was gone.
We lost your brother, Scott James, Mike McDonald. Kenny Page. It’s like we lost a generation. For years I thought I was a under achiever in my life. The more time moves on I think we may be lucky for just getting out of the city. Revere was just eating people up back then. Probably still is.
I also read you piece on bullies where you mention the Bridge Rats. I’m sincerely sorry for any part I may have caused in your distress.
Thanks for the memories. Good, Bad and Ugly. I guess they make us who we are.
Indeed they do, my friend.
I had forgotten about Mike McDonald and Kenny Page. As a teen I was so self-absorbed over my brother’s death that I didn’t realize how much loss our generation was suffering. After reading my friend’s note, I thought hard about his points about Revere eating people up. Was there some kind of curse hanging over the city in the 1980s? Were all my adolescent traumas part of that curse? Was my brother’s death and Sean Marley’s death part of it?
If you asked me that about six years ago, I’d have bought the theory straight away. Today I tend to doubt it.
It was a sad and unfortunate period, but it wasn’t a curse. We all had our share of childhood happiness in Revere in between the bad stuff. And I know now what I didn’t get back then: That we weren’t meant to live soft lives devoid of pain and struggle. These things are tossed in our path to mold us into what we can only hope to be: good people. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. But let’s face it: Has life ever been fair?
As for the Bridge Rats, my memories are fond ones.
The last post I wrote about this gang suggested they were a band of bullies. But if you read all the way through the post, you’ll see some nostalgic warmth in my memories. As I’ve said many times, I was a punk like everyone else. I got picked on, but I did my share of picking on other people. For the most part, the Bridge Rats were a collection of pretty good kids. Some grew into happy, productive lives. Some didn’t.
That’s life.
I recently wrote about the time the Brenners nearly left Revere. There’s no question that for a time, I hated that city and would have done anything to get out.
But I stayed, and good things happened in the years that followed. A lot of good things. Precious, joyful things. I look at my kid sister Shira and the amazing, beautiful woman she is today. Would she have been that way if not for the Revere in her? Perhaps. But living there certainly didn’t damage her.
I’ve said before that Revere is where I survived and my current city of Haverhill is where I healed. That was and still is the truth.
But make no mistake about it: Revere helped make me who I am today.
The Prednisone is making me pretty stabby of late and I’m relying on some heavy-duty music therapy to keep my temper in check. Happily, there’s a new SIXX A.M. album coming out next month and four songs are already available on YouTube.
I’m digging the new material, and decided to make a playlist here.
So here you have it, four new songs from the upcoming album “Modern Vintage.”
