Last night I finished reading In The Land Of Dreamy Dreams, a book of short stories by Ellen Gilchrist, most of which are set in or refer to New Orleans. My fantasy life is on overdrive. In this week’s riff I spend my evenings moonlighting on French Quarter balconies with free form jazz musicians, Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes and an unmarried thirty-something version of Colin Firth. Is my imagination beginning to reveal itself?  Because I further imposed my mental landscape on reality a couple of weeks ago when, in a burst of inspiration, I gave this book away to someone who came to see me for a massage. (I was only on page 60.)  Fortunately, my clients are usually pretty out of it when I’m done with them.  It’s a captive audience when I make with the literary advisement.

So I went home and got online and placed a hold on a copy at a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. (While on Gilchrist hiatus, I read IV by Chuck Klosterman, which I recommend. I read and recommend everything Chuck Klosterman writes. He eliminates the need to own a television.) I should mention: I already knew Gilchrist’s book. I don’t go around sicking books on people when I haven’t good and read them myself. It was given to me a decade ago by a writer friend and I read it twice then. (While we’re at it, read her books too: London Is The Best City In America and The Divorce Party by Laura Dave.)

I’m hesitant to say too much about In The Land Of Dreamy Dreams, mainly because I don’t read book reviews or take advice about books from people who don’t know me and for the most part, I don’t talk about books. I read them. There is also the ol’ taboo… Those who can’t do, teach… Here is what happens when I teach literature: we watch Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet; we analyze Dr. Dre’s explicit lyrics; we write and produce a play about Navajo shapeshifters who dress like the band KISS in full make-up; and we play a lot of basketball. Then I quit. Chances are, there isn’t a whole lot you can learn from me that would approach the satisfaction of reading Ellen Gilchrist’s book.

I will tell you which in this collection of short stories is my favorite. It’s called, “The Famous Poll at Jody’s Bar,” and it’s about a girl named Nora Jane who has a knack for redirecting destiny. To quote the opening page, “Nora Jane was nineteen years old, a self-taught anarchist and a quick-change artist…  Nora Jane didn’t want a decent home. What she wanted was a steady boyfriend…” I love this girl. I’m not alone in my affections. Ellen Gilchrist eventually published a book of stories devoted to her called, Nora Jane: A Life In Stories.  I’ll be getting into that mess soon. What else I will say about Ellen Gilchrist: she’s hilarious, and she’s not above the shittiness of human motivations. Quite often her characters–men, women, children–are despicable. But they’re terribly interesting, colorful, stylish and always more surprising than your average fatal wreck.

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(Several notable twists of fate since the inception of this article:  Michael Mazochi is now fronting the Los Angeles band The Widows.  The ranch where Michael Mazochi lived and worked in Tujunga, California has since burned to the ground in the summer 2009 wildfires.  Mazochi relocated to Los Angeles proper shortly before the tragedy struck.  The Cotton Mill Lofts in the Cabbagetown neighborhood of downtown Atlanta where I lived while writing this article were hit by a tornado in early 2007, several weeks after I relocated to Los Angeles on a hunch that, “If I don’t go now, I’ll really regret it.”)

Early September, 2006.  I’m mildly depressed about my poverty.  I’m also sexually frustrated since I kicked my now ex-boyfriend (7 years my junior) out for cheating on me with an esthetician (3 years my senior) who has the fashion sensibility and intellect of a fourteen year old prime time soap star.  This is the catalyst for weird impulsive behaviors on my part, including a small credit card induced shopping spree for succulent plants, which further depresses me about my poverty.  It’s Friday before the long Labor Day weekend and the power goes out at my place of work amidst torrential thunderstorms and hurricane threats from the coastline.  It’s perfect, I think.  Extended holiday weekend. We close work early and I grab my five-year old son from the daycare, throw him in the back seat of my ramshackle Volkswagen with a loaf of bread, peanut butter, six bananas, two sleeping bags and a tent.  We drive East into Tropical Storm Ernesto.  Rains downpour right on through ’til Savannah, where the sun splits clouds, peels off the grey storm in a tumbling wake of blue sky.  I spend the next three days sun-bunnying the Tybee Island beaches with my boogie-boarding child, after sunset roasting marshmallows over a campfire at our tent site, a nook in the Spanish moss draped backwoods of a local RV Park nestled in a gnarly old oak forest near the lighthouse.

Late October, 2007.  I’m mildly depressed about my poverty.  (I am otherwise “good” thanks to a recent and rather scandalous series of encounters with a twenty-year old country boy from the hills of Tennessee.)  I bust out the plastic for a reduced-fare cross country plane ticket and a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins.  It’s three a.m. east coast and I’m on a phone interview with nocturnal singer-songwriter Michael Mazochi in California, who’s at home in his cabin on a mountainside ranch in the Angeles National Forest.  We discuss Until My Teeth Turn Into Sand, his current release, Volume One of the two-volume album now complete after sixteen months of intense work.  West coast wild fires incinerate southern California as we speak.  Thus far, he tells me, 250,000 civilians have been evacuated from their homes.  Michael Mazochi and his band have a gig this Sunday night, so long as all of Los Angeles isn’t swallowed in raging flame.  It’s perfect, I think.  I’ll book a flight to L.A. Fires balloon in Santa Ana winds burning 695 square miles of desert to destroy 1,609 homes and reap what’s estimated by the state’s Department of Insurance at more than $1 billion in damages.  News reports ring of the apocalypse.

So, we talk about The White Album. “It’s the Bible of pop music for me,” he says.  “It represents the Beatles when they were at a point where they’d done everything.”  Michael Mazochi is infatuated with The White Album as he creates Volumes One and Two.  This double record is begun the day after his second album, California Bound, is completed, for which he won the 2006 L.A. Music Awards for Folk Album of the Year and Folk Singer-Songwriter of the Year.  This brought him to the attention of Billboard, who wrote an article about him under the, “Unsigned artists with the potential to break into the big time,” headline.  “California Bound is the first record I made that I was really happy with,” he says.  He began writing it his first full day living in California, where he traveled after releasing his first album, A Day Without the Rose, in upstate New York. (He wrote two unreleased albums previously, which he refers to as “practice.”)  “I’m obsessive-compulsive about my albums,” he says.  “And I can afford to be, because I do it all myself.”  This is our second phone interview.  Our first, several days ago, is the same day he begins mastering Until My Teeth Turn Into Sand. When I call him tonight he says, “Hey, I started writing my next album after our last conversation.”  In 2008, Michael Mazochi will release Volumes One and Two, an EP that will be produced by a new small indie label, and then another LP.  He also expects to record a collaborative album with his band.  “I love the idea of a band who loved a gazillion things in music,” he says about The White Album. “They didn’t make something that was super-clean and polished.  ‘Helter Skelter’ is a punk rock song, essentially.  It’s a warts-and-all album.  They didn’t need to fix it.  It feels like music that they loved making.”

Until My Teeth Turn Into Sand is made with money scraped together from fan donations and a barter system EP he produced for a friend in exchange for the exact balance due to produce Volume One.  He is best known as a folk rocker on his first two albums because acoustic music is easier to record within the parameters of financial realism.  “My favorite bands are The Stones, The Beatles and The Kinks,” he says.  “I branch out stylistically on this album in my pretension to try everything.”  We break a dam on the semantics of rock.  “Country is real life music,” he says.  “It’s very human.  I think that’s why great country singers, people like Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, become bigger than human beings… because they can say something straight-up authentic.  It’s like in that Hank Williams song when he goes to drown himself in the river and he gets there and the river’s dried up…  He was talking about trying to kill himself in that song and nobody called that Emo music.  What the hell is Emo?  What does that mean, anyway?”

One thing I’ve learned about Michael Mazochi, he doesn’t like a square box.  He doesn’t fit into one, has no use for one and would probably be embarrassed if you handed him one.  “When people in a position with money hear our music, they respond with genuine appreciation and positive feedback to what we’re doing but they don’t really know what to do with it.  Because it’s not fitting nicely into a genre it comes down to marketability and how accessible it will be to one genre of people.  Not many bands out there are trying to introduce new music to people because they, or their record labels, are afraid it will bomb.”  This is a man who writes ragtime music in 2007.  “We have enough faith in the music that if we just keep making it people will come back and want to hear what the next thing is.”  Volumes One and Two explore everything from Radiohead-influenced electronic fusion to Otis Redding-inspired soul.  He plays thirty instruments on this recording.  “What is rock ‘n’ roll anymore?” he says.  “I don’t even know.”  I tell him I don’t know either.  But here’s what I really think: It’s you.  Kick me in the fucking stomach, save me from the headband of indie rock gauze.  “To me,” he says, “It’s heart music.  It’s what you feel in your gut more than what you think in your head.  It’s music people can dance to.  It’s Blues sped up – you’ll find the same chords in Blues as you’ll find in an Elvis Presley or a Chuck Berry song.  Three chord punk is the same as rock ‘n’ roll… it’s a rhythm people can find themselves in.  It has guts.”

Forces of nature move me.

Saturday morning I sit in the Atlanta airport reading Songbook by Nick Hornby as I wait on a flight to LAX.  In Chapter 16 of his book, Hornby analyzes the value assigned to songwriters who are currently “writing songs at a time when nobody equates music with social change.”[1] This is true if you aren’t Neil Young and, sadly, illustrates the quality of our lives.  Music is just another piece of media in a tits-over-talent entertainment empire that has come to resemble an amusement park of bad manners and shallow sentiment.  “The Beatles had a context…” Hornby says.  “‘Yesterday’ or ‘Something’ weren’t ‘just’ songs.  The young men who wrote them were also, unwittingly or not, in the process of changing the world…”[2] This is what I think about on the plane.  I think about people who change the world and the fact that I haven’t been on an airplane since before September 11, 2001 and how depressing it is that we could fail to elect Barack Obama for President.  By midnight of this same Saturday I’ll be seated at a tall table in a bar in West Hollywood drinking a margarita beside Meg White, who will toss back a tequila shot and sip her Corona.  We’ll go outside to smoke cigarettes and discuss the fads and faux pas of contemporary Halloween masquerade attire.  (How many scantily clad nurses does one party need?)  This is because we don’t really know each other, we’ll be thrown together by manner of association and what else is there to talk about?  Social inequality?  Art?  Love?  War?  That would be… out of context.

On Monday I drive to the Angeles National Forest to the cabin where Michael Mazochi lives in quasi-isolation.  I call him from the 210 so he can drive into the nearest town to meet me in a parking lot.  I’m in a rental for the day, though at home I drive the same car he does.  He pulls up in a VW Golf.  A vaguely existential humor washes the scene for a moment when we get out of our cars like conspiring escapees from the Easy Rider movie set who time travel to the Sunland 7-11 in a new millennium.  We’re dressed in basically the same outfit – understated white t-shirt, jeans, leather belt with a heavy buckle, cowboy boots, sunglasses, tattoos – except his shirt is your standard male fitted cotton v-neck while mine has a notably feminine cut and he wears classic black sunglasses while mine are classic aviators.  Either of us could’ve worn the exact same get-up ten years ago and will still pull it off in another ten.  To be honest, I’ve been wearing a variation of this ensemble since high school.  (Yeah, the first tattoo landed illegally at 17.  Note to aspiring parents: Catholic school girls are bad.)  To be fair to Michael’s cutting edge coif, I do have to make note of his excellent hairstyle.  This is not your average Supercuts accomplishment and I doubt cities inhabited by less than a million people ever see a haircut this good.  We get back into our cars and I follow him through stunning mountain landscapes to the steep drive up to his ranch.  We pull up in front of his cabin and I tell him the truth.  “You picked the right place to live.”

He shows me the ranch.  There are several cabins and small buildings, a giant dome tent furnished with couches and the creature comforts of a bohemian lounge, a playground for nonexistent children.  He hopes to talk the landlord into converting an old garage into a recording studio.  “I’m the only one here right now,” he says.  “I guess everybody’s at work.”  We walk around.  He asks me to excuse the garbage cans, which are sort of hard to notice when the circumference of mountains rise in epiphany.  A day in the life of Michael Mazochi when he’s busy writing and recording looks like this: He wakes up, goes outside to smoke a cigarette, makes coffee, gets dressed and gets to work for about fifteen hours.  There is a theme in a lot of his songs that laments a forsaken love.  “The Tide of Earthly Deed” from Volume One is a perfect example.  He sings, “I won’t recall the tide of earthly deed once I am gone/But instead the hope I’ve placed inside a song.”  As the song progresses he sings about a love he’s left behind with the lines, “But her breath is sweet, in the dreams that I defeat/For the chance to choose the cross that I must bear.”  I ask him if love is a sacrifice he makes for his music.  “Well, historically, yeah,” he says.  “I tend to destroy everything around me when I’m working.  Relationships.  Girlfriends don’t work out when I need to go home for a year and four months…  It’s hard to have much of a social life.  It’s not that I’m not thinking about people.  It’s just that… I can’t be feeling really far away from what I’m doing.”

This is what fascinates me about Michael Mazochi.  He inhabits his music in a way most people inhabit the material world.  This becomes a pointed truth when I hear Volume One in its entirety.  The second to last track, “I See A Darkness,” is a beautiful construct of his manner of living.  The song opens with the lines, “Oh I see a darkness on the hallowed road up ahead/But I won’t change my keeping for a place to rest my head.”  In the chorus he sings, “And the words I choose are my comfort alone/My song will be my home.”  The following track, “Low and Lonesome,” is the final track on the album, a sad and gorgeous communication to his mother, in which he sings, “Mama, I been broken and I’ve been battered/Oh I’ve been shattered but I ain’t alone.”  His lyrics often also pay tribute to his band mates, who are his best friends.  When Michael Mazochi was thirteen years old his mother died of Leukemia.  He endured several years of awful hardship before discovering an early independence.  He moved from his hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY to Cortland, NY where he enrolled in a SUNY college.  At the age of 20 he claimed himself as a musician by staying home to make music.

He is generously open about his past.  “Certain parts of me became an adult really young while other parts of me stayed a kid,” he says.  “I don’t really feel like I had anything to lose.  I had nobody to answer to.  I needed to make my own life.  It’s all relative.  If this is the worst thing that’s happened to me, it’s the same as the worst thing that’s happened to somebody else, even if it’s that their dog died.  I couldn’t really go home at a certain point.”  Michael Mazochi’s self-awareness and empathic range of imagination about the people he encounters are that of an insightful and often gentle humanitarian, and we find this out in his music.  It’s fair to say emotional thresholds are established within a personal space.  But I believe it’s also fair to say that this theory of relativity he espouses, however noble a concession, is well-known bullshit to the deepest recesses of his soul.  During our second phone interview he goes outside to smoke a cigarette and is frightened by a friend, a resident of another cabin who creeps up behind him unannounced.  He thinks momentarily that his friend is a coyote.  He then comments that his beloved cat, Toby, has just gotten out.  He immediately returns the cat to the indoors of his cabin.  I ask him if they get a lot of coyotes on the ranch.  “Let’s put it this way,” he says.  “I used to have two cats.”  Herein lies my point.  Michael Mazochi is not making heartbreaking, culturally relevant music about his murdered cat.

Inside the cabin that Monday afternoon he thanks me for taking an interest in his music.  He says he can show me the new material he’s been working on for his next album.  Since we’ve begun this dialogue he’s written six new songs.  He sits on the floor with a giant binder of yellow lined paper covered in lyrics, picks up his guitar, puts on his harmonica and sings.  He tells me in each song what else to imagine… horns, strings, drums.  The night before I see him play a live show with his band at the Hotel Cafe.  It’s the first time I see him live and he meets my expectations with precision.  He exhibits a sincere and confident stage presence and a sense of humor that belies his upstate New York upbringing.  “I went to see Tom Waits last night,” he says to the audience.  “It was ridiculous.  I don’t know why I’m telling you this, aside from rubbing your faces in it.”  For the sixth of his nine-song set, he plays a brand new song, “Heaven Come Easy,” by himself.  In this moment Michael Mazochi is a rare breed of perfection that graciously hosts human flaw, vulnerability and an intensity so immense I wonder if a flock of sparrows inhabits his diaphragm.  This afternoon at his cabin he apologizes for his voice.  I haven’t got a single string of appropriate words for him.  A verbal abundance of gratitude is such a stupid expression.  So we do something normal.  He makes coffee and I drink it.

Michael’s cabin is essentially a one-room palace with a one-step rise to the kitchenette.  “I go around buying cheap coffee,” he says.  I hadn’t pegged him as the type to whip up cappuccinos for visiting writers so this comes at me out of the blue.  “If it makes you feel any better,” I say, “I don’t live in that world.”  Starbucks and I are not friends, so I’m on his side.  “People call me a hipster,” he says, full throttle New York accent.  “What’s a hipster?  What is that?  I’m twenty-five years old and I walk around my cabin talking about old movies.”  I’ll argue that Michael Mazochi is a totally cool guy, but I’m also at home in downtown Atlanta reheating my mug of cheap coffee in the microwave at 2 a.m. on a Friday night, writing a story.  (It actually takes you a lot less time to read an entire magazine, breeze through an art opening, enjoy a three-course meal with friends followed by a long night of specialty martinis and candid conversation than it takes me to construct one article, and this is how I roll.)  An experiential consensus among fashionable urban socialites would probably look like this: It’s cooler to dig Michael Mazochi than it is to be Michael Mazochi.  These same people will inevitably produce and promote silk-screen silhouettes of his excellent haircut and handsome profile, and this silhouette will appear on the buttons, stickers and t-shirts of vintage bicycle drivers with mullets who fuck-up traffic in every major American metropolis.  These people rule.  Every humble indie artist knows that without hipsters there is no initial audience.  Sure, hipsters are equally impressionable and fickle, they are often artists with no art form so they’re confused about their tastes and interests and whether or not it’s okay to eat sushi if they feel like they’re supposed to be vegetarian this year, but I’ve got high fives for these people.  At least they try.

We settle in with our coffee mugs to listen to his recordings of Volumes One and Two.  The 11th track on Volume One, “To Set You Free,” is easily one of my favorite songs of all time.  This is one of a series of really dark songs, he tells me, that he wrote when his girlfriend broke up with him.  (Said girlfriend has since made a pact to love him forever.)  “To Set You Free” opens with the lines, “Oh my love, please don’t turn your back on me/My heart falls in defeat and lands upon the sea.”  In every verse of this masterpiece, his emotional elegance takes you to the slaughter, coupling his sexiest, ballsiest vocals with a haunting melody woven with drums that beat like a human heart.  I ask him how the woman he wrote this song about responded the first time she heard it.  “I think it made her sick,” he says.  We sit on stools in front of his computer and listen to his music, eating candy.  “Well,” I say.  “It worked.”  The following track, “Oh My My,” is the album’s single, described as “a mid-tempo sludgy rock ‘n’ roll song.”  This is followed up by, “When Will It End,” a risky modern rock assault with a barrage of challenging lyrics.  “Maybe she’s trying to cope with the dying of news reports flying American crimes,” he sings, “As the President’s buying the whole damn refinery, what they do will not be called murder.”

“I’m breaking out of folk rock,” he says.  “I don’t want any genre barriers.”  He plays a new song that rocks harder than anything I’ve heard from him before.  He looks amused.  “Here comes the Black Sabbath…”  Then we listen to a series of outtakes from Volumes One and Two, which is another repertoire all its own.  During our first phone interview he says, “I have the hardest time with pop.”  I believe him when he says country-folk songs like “Georgia Line,” “The Gallows of Valor,” and “The Tide of Earthly Deed,” come most naturally to him.  But I don’t know if I believe pop is “hard” for him, especially since I am sitting here listening to an entire collection of pop songs he’s written.  “I don’t want to give that to people,” he says, mocking his own songs for their radio-friendliness, their hooks and catchy melodies.  “If I ever have a hit single,” he says, “I want people to work for it.”  It occurs to me that I am sitting beside an artist who is going to create a Springsteenian vault of music in his lifetime.  (I grew up in Jersey, by the way.  So if “Springsteenian” isn’t a real word, it is now.)

Nick Horby concludes Chapter 16 of Songbook like this.  He says, “The next Lennon and McCartney are probably already with us; it’s just that they won’t turn out to be bigger than Jesus.  They’ll merely be turning out songs as good as ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Hey Jude,’ and I can live with that.”[3] It’s my belief that I’m sitting on a stool next to a songwriter this uniquely gifted in a cabin on a ranch in the mountains outside Los Angeles, drinking his cheap coffee and petting his cat.  But if the popular majority is at home watching American Idol and crying over a dead dog while George Bush is elected President of the United States, twice, to leave a projected excess of 100,000 troops in Iraq to kill or be killed, then Nick Hornby is finally psyched to be British.  Because I live with this music every day, and it’s not enough.

[2] Hornby, Nick.  Songbook. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003. p. 77-78.

[3] Hornby, Nick.  Songbook. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.  p. 80.

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