There used to be a time when musician's and writer's would meet on city streets, smoke stained stages and in front of music maker's displaying not a need to play them but to release the steam growing between their creative veins.
There used to be a time when poets with pens were the wind sending seeds across concert hall floors bathed in the memories of those that came before. To have the chance, an opportunity, to land a space in a race to make moments and it was your face fans began to see.
Music wasn't about phone calls collected during single night auctions of popularity.
Elevators fell from the sky exposing warriors of the night. The angelic whispers that calmed fear by smearing ink on the rings of a once living tree. Once soaked up by the sun's rays the chatter of birds would inspire a different in separate clothes to sing. Only to be followed by the tap of a toe, a whistle maybe even a hum.
From the street this was done.
No auto tune machines to make perfect for bending notes is what gave Dylan personality. Simmons didn't physically hide his face...he gave good reason to American dream. If Springsteen had been given a costume it would be covered in paint, motor oil and dirt from beneath the house...a working man's music can't be easily washed away with soap. The lyrics have to be war torn and unbalanced.
I could write all day about music and those whose noses are too deep to save. And yet it's their sweat when spilled upon a page that has a way to turn the hardship of living in darkness into a national anthem.
The greatest pieces of sound aren't found on the radio. Not any more...for the real musicians have hung up the earphones that once connected them to the universe. The personal cost of paying for fame has made everybody but them money... and for what reason other than adding seasons to a pot full of prostitute stew would you...want to sacrifice everything for nothing?
Hey hats off to Rollingstone Magazines Dan Hyman! The desire to find the fire has landed him in front of a new age of not making pieces parts music but peaceful shapes of art through music.
On a quiet street in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, only a short walk from Lake Michigan, local resident Billy Corgan walked into a bustling room. It was the grand opening yesterday of Madame ZuZu's, a Corgan-owned tea house, and a handful of friends and fans were on hand to help the native Chicagoan celebrate the occasion. To show his gratitude, Corgan treated those gathered to a short acoustic set of Smashing Pumpkins songs, while an overflow crowd watched through the clear-glass window out front.
"It's an exciting day," the singer told the group of 50 or so people huddled around him as if he were holding a press conference. The tea house, Corgan said, "has been a labor of love" – something created in his "idealized vision of what a Chinese tea house would have been like in the Thirties in Paris." With black-and white-tiled floors, a classic Art Nouveau poster by Theophile Alexandre Steinlen gracing the back wall and 1930s jazz billowing from the speakers, Corgan envisions the small parlor becoming a community gathering place that encourages the open sharing of art and intellect, the singer told Rolling Stone over sushi shortly after his performance.
"I want it to be a social hub that's interactive," he explained. "You're trying to draw in different people from different walks of life. We want a dynamic in there. We don't want a passive space."
For his intimate six-song set, Corgan mixed newer material ("Celestials," off the Pumpkins' latest album, Oceania, and 2010's "Song for a Son") with time-tested cuts, including "In the Arms of Sleep" from the band's epic 1996 double-album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. He opened with "Jesus is the Sun," which Corgan estimated he wrote in 1990 in Chicago's Wrigleyville neighborhood. The highlight of the mini-concert came when Corgan brought up an old friend, Greg Bates, for a sing-along-inspiring duet on the Siamese Dream classic "Today." Bates played guitar while Corgan took vocal duties, a circumstance reversed from the two friend’s first collaboration: Corgan said that he and Bates would write songs at his dad's house back in "'84 or '85," but because he didn't sing back then, he would write and Bates would sing.
Madame ZuZu's isn't Corgan's first non-musical venture: The 45-year-old in 2011 co-founded a professional wrestling organization, Resistance Pro, that hosts regular events at a Chicago bar. The tea shop, though, is a project from which Corgan expects to derive personal satisfaction. "There are just those Tuesday nights where it's like, rather than watch a baseball game on TV, I'd love to come down and hear somebody talk about homeopathy or archeology or see somebody's art show," he said. "And to have it right here in the community, I think was very attractive to me."
Corgan also talked about his excitement at the positive reception that greeted his band’s latest album, Oceania, the first full-length offering from the current Smashing Pumpkins lineup. At the suggestion that it may have caught some listeners by surprise, Corgan said he believes he knows why. "A lot of people had written me off," he said, bluntly. "I had all the skills; they hadn't eroded." He continues. "[Oceania] was the best received album since Mellon Collie. It was nice. But it doesn't solve all the problems."
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