"Civilization is quickly using up the earth's remaining supplies of fossil carbon, while turning our planet into toast," founder Chris Roth explained in a solar-powered radio address on Earth Day 2001. "By acquiring a bunch of recordable compact discs instead of burning another gallon of gasoline (one gallon of gas is equivalent to many CD-Rs), I can intercept that carbon before it enters the atmosphere, and make myself and many other people happy through music. I can stay at home and be inspired to play and sing songs myself. I can learn to appreciate the sun, which powers my home music system--not to mention powering my own self and my own musicality. I can steward a treasure trove of harmonic inspiration, and remind myself about what is most important in life, which is expressed nowhere more profoundly than in music."
By synchronicity and good fortune, Roth recently acquired an extensive collection of Beatles bootleg CD-Rs, being disposed of by a collector "for a song." He then discovered an extensive CD-R trading network operating in the best good-will barter tradition over the internet, and with the help of a friend with a CD-R burner, was able to trade for an extensive collection of Bob Dylan bootlegs. He now has many years' worth of listening pleasure at his fingertips. Though actually, he often just chooses to listen to the birds.
"By the way," he adds, "I don't believe in duplicating copyrighted material (the commercial releases)--I'll only copy bootlegs, which isn't illegal and liberates them from monopolization and sale by bootleggers, who shouldn't be making money off these stolen goods anyway.
"I like the authenticity that can be heard on bootlegs, and that is sometimes lost in the final polished product issued by the record label. I like hearing how the songs were put together, and how much fun as well as genius went into making the music that--in its more familiar forms--will last for generations. I like the spontaneity, the whimsy, the power of raw inspiration, the missteps, the intensity and the casualness that I find on these recordings. They remind me that we are all geniuses--that the Beatles or Dylan may be particularly gifted, but that the most important thing they ever did was to let their muses flow. Our muses too can flow whenever we let them--we merely need to unstop the dams holding back our creativity."
Like many other MLACC members, Roth still spends more time listening to frogs, songbirds, raindrops, the flow of the creek, and the wind in the trees than he does to recorded music. But by exchanging car use for strategic carbon sequestering in his solar-powered compact disc library, he is able to bring the authentic voice of nature and experience more closely into his indoor living space as well. "The scripture I like to read is written not in the pages of books, but in all living creatures, in the lines of songs, in the melodies and harmonies of the sacred world, as channeled through every one of its constituent members, from Bob Dylan to a hummingbird to the tiniest actinomycete, to that quiet inner voice that says, 'It's time to end this story here.'"
The Rev. Zimmerman Freed can be reached at [email protected]
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual