Peter Gabriel – San Jacinto
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When Peter Gabriel was touring to support Melt, he stayed in a hotel in the American southwest – New Mexico or Arizona or something like that. While there, he started talking to a bellboy who worked at his hotel. The bellboy, as it turned out, was a Native American, and they got into a discussion about what it was like to try and hold on to your cultural beliefs in a society that openly mocked them. From that discussion came the second track on Security, San Jacinto. The story of a young Native American man on a vision quest, it juxtaposes the crass commercialization of Western society with the spiritual truths of his culture. The song is very powerful, and builds its strength through a slow introduction, filled with delicate rhythms and fragments of images both sacred (red paint, eagle feathers) and profane (Geronimo’s Disco, Sit ‘n’ Bull Steakhouse). Halfway through this fragile pastiche, as the snakebite poison grabs hold of the initiate, the song explodes with huge guitar cords and drums, while Gabriel shouts
I hold the line – the line of strength that pulls me through the fear.
This song was what I held onto through those dark and frightening months in Chicago. A stranger in my own strange land, I knew that what I valued was real and that the world around me was poisoned. I was alone in this belief, but I was sure of it, and this song helped me to hold onto that frail thread. Gabriel’s protagonist doubts his ability, but he holds on too.
And the tears roll down my swollen cheek,
Think I’m losing it – getting weaker.
That was me in a nutshell, in a pebble, in a curled up fetal position, rocking on my bed. But right away again, the soaring chords and strong assertion:
I hold the line – I hold the line.
If he could do it, so could I. I wouldn’t let them kill me. I, too, would live to see the yellow eagle fly down from the sun.
I took great comfort from that song, and from others on the album. There was a deep spirituality buried throughout the disc, and it nourished my soul while I wandered lost through the valley of the shadow of death. I Have the Touch celebrates the joy and necessity of human contact with a catchy, stuttering drum pattern which still never fails to lighten my spirits whenever I hear it. Lay Your Hands on Me is a complex rhythmic fugue full of beautifully modulated textures that builds from a ghostly whisper to a thundering soul-shattering climax. Wallflower is a delicate love letter of encouragement to a victim of imprisonment and torture, and, in my darkest hours, felt like it was written directly to me.
A few weeks into the school year, I saw a notice proclaiming that there were going to be auditions for a televised talent contest later that month. I decided it was just the thing I needed to lift my spirits and give me focus and reaffirm the creative part of my personality – what I felt to be the most important part of me, which had been stifled and was suffocating in this cold, gray, windy city. I ripped the flyer from the wall and took it back to my room.
It was for a series to be run on the recently launched Disney Channel that featured college students from primarily academic schools showcasing their other talents. I briefly considered entering some piano pieces I had written, but knew that my real talent at that point was still dance. Plus, I longed for the kind of confidence and sense of self I had had as a dancer, so I decided to choreograph and perform a solo. The only problem was that you had to perform your talent for ten minutes and the audition was in three weeks. That’s not much time for a lot of choreography.
I wanted to use something from Security, since I loved it so, but was concerned about filling up the audition time, so I chose the longest track – The Family and the Fishing Net, which runs just over seven minutes. I combined it with the last track on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and I was there. Unfortunately, The Family and the Fishing Net was my least favorite track on the album. It was too long and too obtuse and it was ugly and awkward. But it fit my mood perfectly, and I happened to have a green fishing net in my room, so I choreographed an elaborate piece in which I ended up completely cocooned in the net, unable to move. It was dark and angry and I loved working on it and giving shape to my seething emotions.
While working on it one day, I took a break a sat down at the piano to play through a piece I had recently written. Leagues better than anything else I’d ever composed, the piece was given to me by the muses, and summed up a lot of my wistful and nostalgic feelings. As I finished, this woman burst into the room. She told me how she had been outside and had heard the Peter Gabriel piece and thought it was the devil’s music, dark and foreboding and wholly evil, and was just walking away in disgust when I sat down and played my piece. That piece, she said, was so full of hope and light that it was hard for her to believe that the same person could respond to these two extremes, and she just had to come in to see who this person was. She babbled on for a while and then ran away, leaving me to wonder again just what kind of place I had gotten myself into.
I auditioned the piece and was accepted, but when it came to the taping of the show, the producers decided it was going to be too expensive to try to get permission to use those songs. So, we quickly worked up a scene in which I improvised a dance piece to some piano noodling by one of the producers and they shot it as though this was just something they had stumbled across while touring the campus. The rest of the show was taped live in front of an audience, and they just pretended to show my piece, which was to be cut in later, and then they brought me out to get a warm hand from the audience. Part of the reason I had wanted to do this program was to show these corpses I went to school with what the real me was all about and why I was so unhappy there. But nobody actually got to see me dance and now they were supposed to give me a round of appreciative applause for doing nothing but being singled out and standing in front of them. It was stupid and humiliating and wholly appropriate for my year in Chicago.
They had said that the rights to use a Peter Gabriel track would be too expensive for a show like that, and I know they were right, but I can’t help but wonder if they also thought the piece I had choreographed was a bit strong. After all, everybody else was performing Flight of the Bumblebee, or balancing bicycles on their face (one of the actual talents), and here I was ripping out my heart and wrapping it in a bloody net to the cruel and disturbing sounds of Gabriel’s tortured song. For the Disney Channel.