Sometimes you pick up a book expecting one thing and come away from it with something else. Something better. Take Keith Richard’s memoir, Life. Yes, all the sex, drugs and rock n’roll are in there to be enjoyed. But threaded through the whole affair is the quest tale of a shaman. Time and again, Richards muses on the “notes behind the notes” – the faint echoes and shimmers of phantom notes that transform the ones you hear clearly. Richards’ tuning system, an open G, is expressly deployed to conjure up strange, complementary harmonics with a minimum amount of conscious effort. For a few short years, when the Stones were firing on all cylinders, Richards found plenty of hidden treasure with a six string guitar missing a string.
Bob Dylan offers a similar story in his book, Chronicles V.1. Acting on the advice of U2 frontman Bono, Dylan enlists the Canadian producer Danny Lanois to help craft a record. Dylan soon comes to rue his decision as Lanois gets deeper and deeper in his trademark sonic witchdoctor routine that has produced interesting if uneven results for Willie Nelson, Emmy Lou Harris and Lanois himself. Watching Lanois fidgeting with all kinds of compressors and processors in his quest to build a bewitching soundscape, Dylan wonders what happened to the actual songs. Eventually Dylan buys into Lanois’ process but anyone who has listened to Dylan’s “Love and Theft” record, coming as it does after his second outing with Lanois, can hear strong vibrations of relief, release and good riddance.
I think Richards and Lanois exemplify a lot of artists, perhaps all artists, who seek to tap into an order of the material world that is hiding in plain sight. The great art critic and novelist John Berger suggests that “dogs, with their running legs, sharp noses and developed memory for sounds, are the natural frontier experts of these interstices. Their eyes, whose message often confuses us for it is urgent and mute, are attuned both to the human order and to other visible orders. Perhaps this is why, on so many occasions and for different reasons, we train dogs as guides.”
Evolutionary biologists tell us that our ancestors developed a keen radar for dangers on the ground as they hunted and gathered. Perhaps, the scientists contend, those fleeting glimpses caught out of the corner of the eye (apologies to Pink Floyd and “Comfortably Numb”) are the origins of the religious impulse. We sensed our inability to get a bead on the spirits of the material world and moved them into either mythology or heaven and hell for peace of mind.
For those of us in graphic communication, is it possible to find the notes behind the notes in 2011? We use so much design technology in our work, technology that can easily steal opportunities for true craftsmanship (or draftsmanship for that matter) in the name of efficiency and fad. The work we produce seems to be for smaller and smaller screens that do more and more things viewed by people with shorter and shorter attention spans, not to mention memories. The popular culture favors disposable novelty and clients are locked into it. Slapping together a smartphone ad for a Chevy is just not same as conjuring up a song that will haunt jukeboxes for centuries. Alas, the jukebox is now a glowing box on a wall that charges two bucks to stream one song from a server in Dallas.
Keith Richards is a man lucky enough to have done his best work in an age when the media world moved relatively slow and audiences had the time to join his worthy quest.
Written by: Timothy Dugdale