The Two Jakes

It must have been somewhere that the land meets the water, or maybe, where the mountains meet the sky.  It certainly seems like the city and the country collided but no one is really sure if it was where Truth bumped into The Lie.  


Still, we are certain that it happened.  The ‘it’ in question is the rather fortuitous meeting of Blackbeard and Yellowbeard that led directly to the sonic experience that is ‘The Two Jakes.’  My first, and hopefully not last, encounter with the Jakes was at a small club in Buffalo, NY that looked fairly traditional in it’s dive-bar aesthetic.  I was impressed by the sweeping announcement from the public address system for all patrons to make their way to the ‘War Memorial Stage’ in the front of the club.  What I saw when I got there were two bright, harsh spot lights shining on seated figures, hunched over metal slabs containing small boxes with lights and knobs. 

Blackbeard leaned into the microphone and almost whispered, ‘Tonight, this is the truth center’ and a gentle, rising pulse of sound began to fill the room.  Then Yellowbeard struck one mighty chord that sounded like, well, doom. 

A hush fell over the Buffalo night and things that were merely ‘real’ got ‘right.’

Finding beauty in chaos is a trick that only a few can muster and most of them have left us to our own devices via death or the dismemberment of how to achieve such sonic desires.  Those that remain must be more vigilant than ever to not let the secret art die out, to continue the madness perpetrated by Cage, Young, The Velvets, Silver Apples, Gabriel’s Genesis, Eno, Bryars, Sonic Youth, Branca, Spacemen, Shields, Kember and Pierce.  

The madness of jagged shards of sound hurled and then corralled into sweet songs that come from a time where wanting and having are parallel lines and the Jakes soon decide that they just might be able to make those two ornery motherfuckers coincide somewhere deep in the night       if they could just get the delay pedal set right, they might. 

So when you listen and when you hear (which, after all, are two distinctly different tasks) to their songs float up, out, over and around and when you hear the feedback howl, the Fender music box growl of the Jonny Greenwood special,the deluxe 85, the southern blues for dessert Rolling Stones with Mick Taylor Duane and Dickey dirty gritty Gibson SG on eleven with pretty little melodies that fell out of heaven.


When you hear all that
             When you listen to all of that
                                  When it really sinks in
                                                 That’s when the good life begins.  

true is trueis true

motel bathroom  soaking wet    the football notch on the old rust belt 

  i remember how it felt

                           how it feels

 how much hurt it takes to

 make it   real

you heard me norman    anyone but her

                   not    her

i tossed and turned  

and loathed the snoring that kept my mind   to her    on   her  

high expectations    lack of divine                                       

 the jacobean confession

don’t want to stand in the way   be in the way me in the way   but this   this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to high stakes in the great lakes   oarless lifeboats  

               heads at or below    

 waterlines   don’t even think ‘it’s fine’ 

it’s not

              the struggle just to float or to find your way back on the boat

                            these boys have got irons in the fire though   quite a few  whether they learned it from me or already knew    true is true

but the struggle isn’t with irons or industrialism it is with selfishness and       the expectations      damned twice   

but now sufficed and  only ‘ electric mainline’ high when i would            like them to be ‘lazer guided’  high 

‘ladies and gentlemen’ high

like the qualities ascribed  to a shy  relative-stranger who remembers so well nearly everything  i  say but still never truly looks my way just extends her arms at length to say  that  one       fucking        word       she said it        i heard    and  i    i just watch ohio      waiting for her to be   old-er or  bold-er or a certain kind of smarter     to realize the value of why it is we try harder                                  the ussses   

i wonder if it could be     truth   or merely the consequence of  overly lonely    the fall-back   only   but quiet is calling     the rain is falling

all the those  curls are whispering   ‘bony’     screaming  ‘only’  

negative    ‘feared’   ‘figured’   ‘weird’  

lacking the concrete nature of relation    pleasantly deflating each salutation       but still stealing my words     and phrases      entire weeks of days   

the whole of this settlement   is   betterment   

finally    we  knew       

we   could   see    

                       dead right foot tells me  heavily   that the dream doesn’t come true not for her not for you  

not  based on the force of the night-time feeling not on the amount of sorrow come stealing 

not on the boards pressed so neatly together 

made of coincidence gathered   bits of time

                            and the weather

there are ways to be wanted    there are ways

then   hypocrisy noticed that i don’t have the truth   any more than you  

and everyone knows that true is true

but   her   she heard it before  she knows what it was 

                                 how it faltered  the why    the because  

just a little bit more    right here   i think  

                     we’ll get the lines    to finally   blink 

  point to the end and actually get there

      have enough courage to stop and to stare

     at all the new light that gets in this room

wonder ‘how could anyone sleep until noon?’