Dude came up to me at a strip club in Miami and said he read my blog. In other words, by far the best experience I've had in a strip club.
— Shane Schleger (@ShaneSchleger) April 13, 2015
First, I am happy to report that the Dope Stories podcast is not dead. Pauly and I recorded a reunion episode just about one year after our first episode aired, February 6th, 2014, which is Bob Marley's birthday as well as the 20th anniversary of the night I first got high on cannabis--at William Kunstler's townhouse on Gay Street in NYC.
You can find the reunion episode (Dope Stories 028) at the normal spots--Soundcloud, iTunes and on the homepage.
I am grateful for the audience we found, who encouraged us to get back on microphone, and I am touched by the ongoing trickle of appreciation that comes our way. Although Dope Stories was not meant to survive in its originally conceived form, it seems safe to say it will live on forever in some way, and I can still stand behind our goal to establish a "rational conversation about drug use" and teach ourselves to think differently about drugs and society.
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Secondly, as I partly discussed with Pauly on "Reunion," I have moved past the vague desire to kill myself that plagued me daily for several months, a duration and severity of depression that I had never experienced in the entire history of my manic-depressive saga.
What happened? I'd rather discuss what rescued me rather than what threatened to drown me, especially since depression is a deeply entrenched state of mind, intangible, and so much larger than any sum of its parts. Also, not necessarily reflective of the external circumstances that incubate it.
Social media is almost completely useless when it comes to addressing depression, and I won't pretend to offer much more utility here. Even friends, however compassionate and intelligent, are ineffective at helping with your depression. That's partly to their credit, because you become temporarily less blue in the company your friends.
In the end, I found myself relying on whatever level of "default perseverance" I had stored up in order to push through. Then things started to click.
On his recent book promo tour, George Clinton leaned on a talking point when he was asked, "What is funk?" He explained something to the effect that: "Funk is that thing...that just when you want to crawl into a hole and die, instead you start to shake your hip and move your feet."
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| Brothas Be, Yo, Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You? |
Truly, the first thing to click in the process of freeing myself from depression stemmed from reading Clinton's memoir, Brothas Be, Yo, Like George, Ain't Thank Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?
I wrote something about the book, and my love for P-Funk, in the NY Observer, but I hardly scratched the surface of how motivating Clinton's story, and the music of the Parliamentfunkadelicthang, has been to me.
In a basic yet ineffable way, I couldn't read George's account of a brilliant 50+ year career in the music industry, complete with the gamut of glories and stumbling blocks that you might imagine, and find an excuse to sit around in my doldrums any longer.
It's the story of America (George can be found everywhere from North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Detroit, Toronto, Hollywood, Tallahassee to Bermuda), and it the story of art--a brilliance and dedication that George kept in motion for nothing more than the sake of the music itself--for the love of "taking it to the stage."
I also realized just how amazing a career it was and how much of the P-Funk catalog I had been sleeping on. I didn't even know about "Munchies For Your Love..."
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The next click took place when I was privileged to go to Jamaica for the wedding of some friends. My wife and I spent four days there, but it was more like "light years in time ahead of our time." Something about the lively spirit of Jamaican people, the majesty of the land and a full-force reminder of the beautiful, melodic wisdom of reggae music...something about it all reminded me of who I was and what mattered to me.
Something about the music.
Logistically, it was an important moment too because my wife and I got to spend some quality vacation time together, having been separated from each other for months at a time due to work obligations. That has been the central "external" struggle in our life: From my career as on online poker having been uprooted and moved to Mexico in 2011, to the various out-of-state production jobs that my wife works, it has been challenging to find the ability to come together and achieve the "old, married couple" lifestyle we desire.
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At least, after 10+ years of knowing each other, we still have a lot of fun together. When Sheila finally got back from her most recent production job, we had a wonderful trip to our favorite place in the world, Big Sur.
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They hardly relied on crowd-pleasers and even risked alienating the audience early on with a set of very raw material from Funkadelic's new Shake The Gate album--rugged lyrics laced over hard hip-hop and EDM-inspired beats. The type of beats, of course, inspired by P-Funk in the first place, re-interpolated and re-funketized for 2015.
For sure, the audience in Bend was not ready for TAPOAFOM ("the awesome power of a fully operational Mothership"), and I heard some kids on the way out say, "whoa, it was rough there at the beginning, almost a bad trip!"
The music gets me every time and in every way, though. The level of musicianship and stagecraft amazes me each and every time. Somehow, I cannot see Sir Nose D'voidoffunk come on stage and find the funk and not love it. Look, Sir Nose is dancing again, I think he found the funk!
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| Oh, but I will never dance: Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk (Carlos McMurray) faces Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton) in Bend, Ore. 3/19/15. |
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| I think he found the funk: Sir Nose stands on his hands, Steve Boyd on the mic, Bennie Cowan on trumpet, Garrett Shider (back to the audience) on guitar. |
***
TAPOAFOM was in even greater abundance when I met Sheila a few nights
later for the P-Funk show at the Independent in San Francisco.
I first saw George Clinton perform at Roseland in 1997 (billed as
"George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars"), and Funkadelic music has been a big
part of the soundtrack of our life, but this was the first time Sheila
ever saw them perform.
It was a beautiful sight to behold the woman I love
experience a slice of the same magic that I had first felt almost 20
years earlier (and thousands of Funkateers and Rubber Fans had
experienced for more than 20 years prior to that).
When George bellowed, "Free
your mind," Sheila yelled back to the stage, "And your ass will follow!"
One of the best nights of my life...
In the time when I drifted from Bend, OR to San Francisco, CA, P-Funk had traveled, by vehicle, down to Santa Ana, CA to play a show (Sly Stone showed up on stage), then back to SF, no less than 20 hours of drive time. Since then, the Mothership has flown to Australia, Japan and the band is now playing a string of shows in England.
That night in SF, in a simple and true way--as I danced around The Independent and witnessed my wife immersed in the sounds of P-Funk, the entire room putting weed in the air as George's granddaughter, Kandy Apple Redd, raps, "Something stank and I want some"--I felt so grateful for these performers,
who sacrifice their lives for the stage, meeting a grueling tour schedule in order to play these songs every night for us, for the benefit of maybe even just one member of the audience who's feeling it that night.
Something about the music, it got into our pants.
Something stank and I want some.
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| Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples: Sheila on the right of the picture, the hat and glasses belong to the guy on the far left of the picture. Ga-da-goo-ga. |
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| I think she found the funk: Sheila foreground, Parliament Funkadelic onstage. 3/22/15, San Francisco. Two of the great loves of my life in one picture. |