They turned up to eleven and i saw God.

I think the first time this happened I was barely 15 years old and people on the radio were beginning to sing "protest songs" and as usual that primal California band the Byrds, from hard and cynical Los Angeles, were ahead of the curve. In a year, they had evolved from folk songs to inventing folk-rock to Eclesiastesian biblical folk-rock, their own genre, to WHAT IS THIS?!!

Well, they were listening to the John Coltrane Quartet incessantly while driving around in an RV doing one night stands around America. But how that listening came out in their own music was just impossible to have foreseen. .And how it came out was Eight Miles High. Which was the first time I heard music that clearly wasn't rock and roll anymore, but resembled it, and though i didn't yet know what it was, it just blew away all the teenage protest music. It even made Dylan and the Beatles, for a short time, look kind of teenage and simple. Now I know it was modal and had shifting time signatures, but then I just knew it just expanded my universe. My father the former jazz drummer was smiling, though it took him a few years to tell me that he knew I'd been saved.

The next time I heard it, I was still only 16, and hanging out at the kids next door's house, in his mother's music teaching room with the really good stereo system, when I heard the roar. 1000 watt what the hell, what is that roar. ... simply, Jimi had arrived. Their "baby sitter" whose job, I think, was to watch over the younger siblings, but who was actually the source of the brand new "Experienced" record, ran out of the music room and was about jumping out of her panties with lust and excitement and well.... you all have to hear this, like we could have somehow missed it! Well we heard Third Stone from the Sun, and Foxy lady, and Manic Depression and the like, and suddenly all the suburban bluesy bands made absolutely no sense at all. This was primal blues chanelled through something cosmological. Howling Wolf, howling close encounters.

And God kept emerging. There was the young Clapton playing his guts out with John Mayall, taking Albert King licks and turning them over in a new way, and a little later channeling Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads, and in about three minutes laying down a challenge that few have ever dared to accept. No human could keep that wide a channel open, and Clapton couldn't, but the record doesn't lie. Then Jimi said I can get even closer and dug even deeper to Mississippi through Sun House and back to Africa and found the Voodoo Child, slight return indeed, but from what solar system? What constellation?

And by the next year, Miles Davis himself, my father's contemporary, the master of cool, didn't want the young market to miss him, so he found McLaughlin and Corea AND Keith Jarrett and Dave Holland, Zawinal, and all those geniuses together produced some wonderful In a Silent Way. Which almost prepared me for the next shock, the Birds of Fire by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It was pretty much unbearably loud, unbearably intense, and yet God had emerged again in the strange looking man in the crew cut and his powerful, frenetic wonderful drumming partner, where did this Cobham guy come from anyhow?

After that, louder and harder and closer to burning up completely was impossible, and Steely dan started to be smirkingly wonderful channelling a little Miles, and also Duke and Bill Evans themselves, but it sure wasn't the lord talking. Maybe the mob, but certainly not the lord. But there was also disco, and urban cowboys and just so much junk. Then Joni Mitchell, always sort of guilty pleasure for an aspiring hip very young man ( I mean the girls in the dorms played her out the window, she was just so sensitive), finds this simple Major 6th groove on an extended road trip, and behind her is this stacatto THUNDER on the bass. It was of course Hejira and my (and pretty much everyone's) first Jaco Pastorius sighting. Who had ever heard a bass player who made you cry? Of course there had been wonders before him, like Scott Lafaro, but they lacked the electric bass options and that rapturous use of echo delay. Jaco burned so brightly and yet so sadly.

The next time it was Coltrane himself that I found. i was working sometimes 50 hours a week and learning to relax in spite of it, and it was the 80's and career time and I needed something to nourish me. Suddenly, all those sheets of notes on the Saxaphone that my father had found so rapturous in the early 60's, but which sounded like noise to my very young ears, made absolutely perfect sense. It had been around for 20 years, but finally i was ready to receive it. First, My Favorite Things, and the most perfect instrumental solo, the last one, on the soaring Soprano Sax. My tears flowed like they had never before. Truly this was even better than what had, in my young experience, proceeded it. But it was really from 1960 and if only I had been able to hear a little earlier. A little later I was finally ready for A Love Supreme, and this time there was absolutely no doubt of what Coltrane and Elvin and Mccoy Tyner had intended. .

So much wonderful religion. Without the guilt or the thou shall nots. Just sound.

Slight Postscript: flash to the later 1980's, i was doing a little "new age" music seeking beyond electronic droning, which revealed-though I had heard him before, without paying much attention, the mellow midwestern country-raised genius with ears for Ornette Coleman and those flashing but soft hands. That was and is Pat Metheny, he deserves a tribute of his own for doing without flares and without drama what the world of music needed for nourishment, a reason to continue beyond tributes to the past. A tribute to Pat is planned for another day or night.