This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Paul Williams’ book of rock music, Outlaw Blues.

February 1968

“A great many considerations and puzzles that one meets sooner or later in all the arts find their clearest expression, and therefore their most tangible form, in connection with music.”

- Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form

“I know you deceive me; now here’s a surprise…”

- Peter Townshend, “I Can See for Miles”

“I have never consciously written a song through a personal experience or an inspiration. I never write about things that happen to me. A lot of writers will say they did a song because they were in a certain mood, but that’s never happened to me. I can write happy when I’m sad or when I’m happy. I just get an idea and work on it.”

- Smokey Robinson, interviewed in Hit Parader

I got up this morning and listened to “Heroes & Villains.” Awakening from deep sleep, unconsciousness spills hesitantly away, aspects of the real slowly mixing in with the rest of your mind. “My children were raised you know they suddenly rise; it started slow long ago head to toe healthy, wealthy and wise…”[1] Last week, I was at Van Dyke Parks’ home in the Hollywood Hills; the week before, chatting with Brian Wilson at the Kennedy International Airport. He hadn’t heard Van’s new album yet. He’d been surprised to read about Smiley Smile in Crawdaddy! When Smiley Smile came out, I wondered why “Heroes & Villains” didn’t sound as good in stereo. Now I was listening to the single for the second time this morning. I stepped into the shower.

I don’t know how I get these things on paper. Thoughts in my mind form words on a page through my fingers; concepts come together and generate ideas, and what can I point to to say, “I intended that”? The reader himself has no certain idea what goes on as his eyes touch the paper. He receives. I have given. But how?

How do we get from one place to another? (Now I’m thinking out loud.) Space is conquered by movement. Freedom of movement is granted by lack of restraint. There are things I can move through—water, and air; there are things that detain me, like stone. I cannot walk through fire. How do we get from one place to another? We will ourselves to move through receptive media.

Then what are our vehicles for? They get us there safer, and faster, retarding our movement in time. We cover more space and less time. What is a vehicle for an image, a concept? Something that carries that concept, from here to there, in space and time. I hear music in New York that was recorded in Oklahoma; I hear it today and tomorrow; the musicians performed it last year. And the music itself is a vehicle, just like my words on the page. Pick up a concept, stick it in the music, send it on its way.

The medium. The medium. It’s all pretty complicated. The medium carries the message, but that’s not all there is to it. Some people relate to Bob Dylan’s vision of the world. That doesn’t have anything to do with the medium, that’s something that’s in his head. And now it’s in your head. The music—the medium—delivered it intact.

But suppose you say you relate to the music itself. Now you’re digging the package, right? But it’s the music that communicates—the feeling you get from the melody, from the beat, from the sound of the words and all that interacting with the words themselves, the specific concepts. So maybe the package, the medium, is the message, since we can’t quite separate Bob Dylan’s vision from Bob Dylan’s music. But… no, the music and the message aren’t the same thing. You can’t pry the painting from the canvas and the oils, but that doesn’t mean the materials are the painting. Just a minute, Mr. McLuhan.

Communication is transportation (uh, I’m just fooling around here; I wouldn’t want to perpetrate new slogans). Time and space are things to pass through, art is the rearranging of the universe into patterns reflecting the artist’s will. Message is a specific thing, a discernible thing. Will is not. Few artists deal with messages, few artists expect you to go at the physical body of their work with a scalpel and attempt to extract essence. The artist’s emotions and sense perceptions are transmitted by means of his work. He receives, and he sends so that you may receive. The medium is not important. The medium is inanimate, an object. What you receive—not a message, not a specific, but a sum of messages, an emotion, a vision, a perception—what you receive is part of the artist. It’s alive. It’s reborn in you. Music. The notes are not important. Virtuosity means nothing. No one cares how well you rearrange the objects. You gotta have soul, baby, which means it’s gotta be you you’re passing on, people receiving parts of people, living matter, animate stuff. The medium and the messages it contains are just so much nothing, trees falling in the forest with no one to hear, unless there is human life on both ends of the line, sending, receiving, transferring bits of human consciousness from one soul to another. Communication is the interaction between our personal worlds.

Stepping out of the shower, I put on the Byrds.

Dear Trina:

That song by the Who, “I Can See for Miles”, has meant more and more to me lately. I hear it in my mind. The song explodes in bursts of energy, from my brain, through my body, down the street by which I’m walking and out into the world, pulling me with its strength towards infinity. Peter Townshend’s guitar rings harder and faster, and I can feel for centuries.

[1] Lyrics to “Heroes & Villains” Copyright © 1967 by Sea of Tunes Publishing Co.