The Country That Wasn’t Earth

By afternoon, the screaming had stopped.

Yoga mats lay twisted across the sanctuary. Half-empty water bottles rolled beneath the pews. The air smelled of sweat, candle wax, and whatever leaves the human body when it has screamed itself empty.

Then the door blew open. And there stood Skye.

There was a wildness about him, a barely contained chaos that lurked just beneath his placid surface.

Purple silk disco shirt. Straw cowboy hat. His sneakers carried the grime of the downtown core.

For several seconds, nobody moved.

He had once only listened to bebop. Charlie Parker. Everything else was pretending.

Then he heard Under the Bridge.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers knew.

Not everything.
But enough.

Stravinsky knew. Cobain knew. Lennon knew.

Parker had known for years.

Different men. Different sounds. Different times.
Same information.

Skye had reached the only reasonable conclusion.

They had all been there.

“Where?”

He smiled.

He believed Parker and Cobain came from the same country, and that country wasn’t Earth.

This seemed reasonable.

Skye pursued music theory with the devotion other men reserved for religion, or narcotics.

He could talk for hours about harmony, symmetry, intervals, substitutions and the strange architecture concealed inside apparently simple songs.

But theory was not the source.
Theory was the evidence left behind.

“Footprints,” he said.

“Of what?”

“The animal.”

I looked at him.

“What animal?”

“The one making the footprints.”

For the next few weeks he disappeared without explanation.

He roamed the bustling downtown streets, forming a unique camaraderie with denizens of the urban realm.

The straw cowboy hat remained.
So did the purple shirt.

“Listen to this.”

That was usually how it began.

A chord.
A substitution.
A relationship between two scales.

Some hidden piece of machinery underneath a song I had heard a hundred times without noticing anything unusual.

Then Yes arrived.

The band.

Rock royalty entered Jonestown Sound with road cases, guitars, keyboards and the strange gravitational field that surrounds men whose photographs have appeared on millions of record sleeves.

The church changed when they came through its doors.

Everyone pretended it didn’t.

The equipment behaved better.
Coffee was made with greater care.
People who normally yelled across rooms began speaking quietly and walking with purpose.

King Dave became King Dave III in full ceremonial function.

Yes had come to write.
They occupied the sanctuary and disappeared into the work.

You learn things by watching musicians who have survived long enough to become legends.

Not necessarily what they play.
How they listen.

How quickly they abandon a bad idea.
How long they stay with a good one.

How silence changes when everybody in the room knows what silence is for.

Steve Howe was there.

He had spent decades extracting impossible things from strings.
Electric guitars. Classical guitars. Steel guitars.
Instruments that looked as though they should have come with operating manuals.

Then Skye wandered in.

He had been somewhere downtown. Nobody knew exactly where.

His cowboy hat sat crooked on his head.

He seemed high.

He also appeared entirely unaware that anyone was watching him.

That may have been the most impressive part.

There was a classical guitar nearby.

Skye picked it up.

No announcement.
No performance stance.
No explanation.

He sat down and began playing Charlie Parker’s Confirmation.
On guitar.

Note for note.

Bebop lines poured from the instrument, angular and impossible, phrases created for saxophone passing cleanly beneath Skye’s fingers.

Steve Howe stopped what he was doing.
I watched him watch Skye.
That interested me more than Skye himself.

Musicians recognize things civilians cannot.
They know the difference between somebody showing off and somebody telling the truth.

Skye kept playing. He did not look up.

When he finished, there was a moment before anybody spoke.

Not a dramatic silence.
Something smaller.

Howe looked at Skye.
That was the beginning of their friendship.

Or perhaps friendship is the wrong word.
Recognition might be better.

Two travellers discovering stamps from the same country in each other’s passports.

I thought about what Skye had told me.

Bird.
Cobain.
Stravinsky.
Lennon.

Different men.
Different sounds.
Same information.

This was becoming troubling.
I began to wonder how many people knew.
And why nobody had told me.

One night I found Skye alone in the sanctuary.

The candles had burned low. Purple and red light from the stained glass stretched across the floor. The church was silent except for the electrical hum that never entirely disappeared.

Skye sat with a guitar across his lap.

“Find it yet?” I asked.

“What?”

“The country.”

He smiled.

“No.”

“Maybe there isn’t one.”

“Of course there is.”

“How do you know?”

He played a chord.

Nothing remarkable.

Then another.

He let the second one hang.

“Because of that.”

I waited.

He laughed.

“You ever hear something that you know you’ve never heard before, but it feels like you remember it?”

I had.

Everyone has.

A melody appears and somehow carries nostalgia for a life you never lived.

A chord changes and something inside you recognizes the destination before you arrive.

A singer you’ve never met opens his mouth and tells you something you already knew but had never managed to think.

“That’s because it comes from somewhere else,” Skye said.

Every musician knows the strange humiliation of writing something good.

The bad ideas feel entirely yours.

You remember assembling them.
Moving notes around.
Trying chords.
Forcing words into places they resist.

But occasionally something arrives intact.

A melody.
A sentence.
A riff.

And there it is.

You don’t remember building it.
You become suspicious.
Thankful, certainly.
But suspicious.

Where did that come from?

Musicians often answer with false modesty.

The muse.
God.
The subconscious.
Drugs.
Love.
Sadness.

Skye considered these departments within a much larger institution.

He wanted the address of the building.

Now, Skye is gone.

Most people would say he died.
This is almost certainly what happened.

I think about Bird and Cobain coming from the same country.

And sometimes I wonder if he was right.

Every musician knows the feeling.

Sometimes a song arrives from nowhere, completely intact, carrying information I do not remember learning.

A melody.
A phrase.
A voice.

And when that happens, I think of my friend in the purple silk disco shirt.

The cowboy hat.

And the country that wasn’t Earth.