Shredded and Restored

Hierophant: Ted, Bryan, Shooter, John, Bobby

I’d listened to Black Ribbons a good number of times, including the clips and bits that showed up in bootleg videos and audio, before I held the CD in my hands and unfolded the complex cover: a murder of crows, a dotted line linking a greedy man to a trusting child, and the words to the childhood chant I’d said automatically until a few years ago, when, for the first time, I listened: Row, row, your boat/gently down the stream/Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily/Life is but a dream.

What I heard only recently in that little tune was a distilled message, passed on in song from child to child, a time-bomb of a message that can be deciphered only by the experience of life, whatever that may be, as it explodes into the awareness of illusion. Not the trickster Illusion, whose sleight-of-hand reveals itself in moments all along the way, but the illusory world whose details we all agree upon and hold in common as real.

In his new album, Shooter Jennings sets off that bomb. From the warning “Wake Up” call of the first song to the expansive horror and potential for salvation—a heavy word, to be sure, but it’s suggested in the music itself—the songwriter lays out the whole agony of contemporary civilization. His exposé of society’s underbelly is poignant, terrifying, and heart-rending. Interlaced with his dark-side wanderings, he sings of his love for his daughter, his woman, and the circle of loving friends that has become his trusted world.

I stood at the foot of the stage last night in San Francisco, a few feet from Shooter on one side and, on the other, Ted Russell Kamp at the bass, a soulful trumpet, an achingly moving guitar. Between them, where my view was clear and the drum set was close, Bryon Keeling created a steady song-sound of rhythm, blending the group into unity, as he had when those three were part of the original .357s, before Hierophant came into being. The two “new guys,” with their healthy egos firmly tucked in their back pockets and not on display, are already part of the blend. John Schreffler, Jr., who dazzles at lead guitar, and Bobby Emmett on rockin’ keyboards, hail from Michigan, where they were high school friends.

In the end, the story-line tragedy the author Stephen King relates, in the guise of a DJ on the last night of free speech in a country that could be almost any country, reaches its foregone conclusion. I found myself moving to the rhythm of King’s words as I had to the music. When hope is lost, the music grieves, lashes out, then frees itself and begins to soar. Within the shelter of sorrow, triumph begins to move, and compassion. In the near cacophony of sound, I heard celebration as it might be echoed in some royal wedding at a cathedral--Westminster, perhaps--in the high arches of its ceiling.

These may be lofty words. But how else can I describe what I heard and, more, what I felt as I stood in the midst of din made harmonious, deftly structured, borrowing (and celebrating) musical influences of a lifetime? As I watched five musicians in accord with the music and one another. Laughed, cried, trembled in fear, felt heartbreak and praise. Both hands on the stage, I felt the rumble of sound as much as I heard it.

I’ll never listen to this music again without being there, with Shooter and Hierophant, somewhere beyond illusion.