I believe the essence of faith, optimism, brotherhood, society, law, ethics, and whatever else you want to add to the list, is a belief in something greater than the individual. That something greater is what most people call God. Now there is an obvious practicality that exists as the basis of society's laws that men and women of reason and logic and secure circumstance will follow without any Greater Something to answer to. But, let's face it, most people need fear or a reward to do the right thing.

It doesn't really matter to me whether an individual believes God is the anthropomorphic God of the Semitic religions, or the Life Force, or the Unknowable, or the many manifestations and spirits of various cultures. Believing in God doesn't make you a good person and not believing doesn't make you a bad person and the fact that there has been thousands of years of bloodshed in God's name proves that religion and reason are not always compatible.

My religious questions in evaluating another human being tend more toward are you planting a tree for every one you cut down? Do you give something back or do you just take? Do you abuse people, animals, the environment, or not?

The separation of church and state is probably the single greatest contribution to world thought the United States has ever made, but a by-product of this may be the resultant lazy attitude most of us have about spirituality in America.

I believe our spirituality is the most personal part of our identity. If that is true then how can something so personal, so particular, so totally unique to each human being, be organized into religion? I already got a problem with that.

Religion is not something you can hand down to your children or inherit. It's not about visiting a holy place once a week, dropping a dollar in a plate, and singing some songs either. Although that may be a part of it. Public rituals are positive reinforcement but that isn't enough. It is very much an individual thing. Most of the prophets spoke in symbols, metaphor, allegory, analogy, and they did that for a reason. They wanted you to think. To work at it a little bit. To participate. Every religion has its rules and rituals but buying every detail of somebody else's interpretation of any religious book or ideology is not just naive. It's a million-to-one shot. It's the easy way and cannot possibly be deeply satisfying. Now you may study all the religions and end up embracing your parents' religion and that's fine. But I believe you have to find your own way to your own truth if it's going to mean anything.

I don't know about the origins of life, evolution, or the afterlife, Heaven, Hell, or reincarnation. And I don't care. I don't believe any of it or disbelieve any of it. It's like UFO's to me. Maybe they're real, maybe not. I don't give a shit. I believe in right now. Either you are trying to learn the truth about yourself or you're not. Either you are making this planet a little bit better for your neighbor and the next generation or you're not. The idea that you can spend your life abusing, and using, and taking, and then be forgiven and go to Heaven is nice and quite highly evolved but I'm not crazy about it. I don't have much faith in justice in general let alone the Divine kind.

Life is filled with contradictions and paradoxes and it's hard enough just to establish a set of values that you can live by. As difficult as that is in this transitional period of our culture, the real tricky part is having the strength and wisdom to know, having these established values, when to be flexible with them. I know as far as the road of my spiritual journey goes, I'm still in the gutter hitchhiking.

The more you look at all of the religions, the more similar they become. One of the ideas in this record suggests the need to focus more often on the common ground. A lot of problems and unnecessary suffering throughout history has come from organized religion's intolerance which, when taken to the extreme, resembles a football team mentality. We're right - you're wrong - we're going to heaven - you're going to hell - we don't care how divisive it is - winning is everything.

The truth is, the vast percentage of most religious content is the same religion to religion. There might be a different name for God, some different rituals, a different idea about the origin of species, or different ideas about the afterlife, but so what? By organized religion focusing on the differences between us, trivial and superficial as those differences may or may not be, blood gets spilled, prejudice is encouraged, and humanity remains hopelessly - and artificially - divided.

I haven't begun to understand it all, but even a quick glance at the mystics - the Shamans, the Yogis, the Saints, the Sages, the Lotus Sutra Buddhists, the Kabbalists, the Sufis, the Taoist Seers - suggests they have all had their own personal vision of the same immutable, eternal Truth.

One Truth, many names.

Early on in the process of learning about others to learn about myself, I found religion to be the key element in getting to the roots of a culture's identity. It really helped me re-examine my own ever evolving thoughts on the subject as well - which is worth doing every now and then. I knew when it came time for the fifth album I was in for the challenge of my artistic life and wondered if I'd be ready for it or not. But as the time approached, my political experience began to merge with my religious experience and it became obvious that it was time to write the final chapter of this particular book. So you dig and dig and think and test yourself and when you've done all you can, you let go. You give up control and walk into the warm waters of the river and let it take you where it wants to go. Faith does have its usefulness and in the final stages of the writing process it is faith that allows you to trust the waters will carry you to the truth.

So, having broken my own world's record for the longest digression ever, let's get back to the theme of the record, the political consequence of spiritual bankruptcy.

The essence of spirituality is a connection to something bigger than ourselves. It could be each other, Society, the Earth, the metaphysical energy somewhere out there (as Captain Kirk likes to put it) or the ocean of all souls deep inside each of us.

As this completely arbitrary and phony millenium comes and goes, we find ourselves decidedly disconnected. Confused about our identity, frustrated by our society's lack of evolution, constantly running to catch up, rapid technological advancement, receiving no spiritual nourishment from the arts or anything else, we are unsettled and living in denial. We have lost our center.

Everything changed in the 60's. I would not be surprised if a couple hundred years from now history is divided into the pre-1960's and the post-1960's. It was a revolution and a renaissance. Everything we think about and even the way we think changed in the 60's. As I talked about in my unfinished political book "The American Identity," the decade of the 60's was the birth of consciousness. Our minds expanded on a mass scale like never before in history. As our minds opened to new ideas in every area of interest, a new mass media disseminated the information like never before with a speed and a global coverage that would be equaled (and surpassed) only by the internet thirty years later.

Civil rights for minorities, women's rights, gay rights; environmental consciousness; Eastern thought in religion, medicine, and philosophy; homeopathy, organic gardens, Chinese herbs, a consciousness about everything natural from food to medicine; global solidarity; technology as an everyday part of our lives; the art form of rock music; a politically active youth movement; the end of colonialism; questioning and criticizing the government as a patriotic responsibility; the concept that governments lie, are incompetent, are dangerous, and can get you killed for not any particularly good reason; middle class drug use from sedatives and "pep" pills for mama to psychoactive mind expanders for little Johnny to death smack for Uncle Junkie - there was something for everyone. These things and a hundred others were introduced to our consciousness, invented, or popularized in the 60's.

As part of our new consciousness we have come to realize that the institutions we have depended on for a hundred years are failing to serve the public's needs. Government, the church, the medical profession, education, our economic structure, etc., are not evolving into something that reflects the future. They are stuck in the past - disintegrating before our very eyes - and keeping us trapped in an embarrassingly outdated paradigm.

We know we are not who we used to be (pre-60's) but we do not yet know who we are going to be (post-60's). It has been a 30 year transition so far and very little of substance has changed in terms of our institutions even though society's thoughts and habits have changed considerably.

We know our government should be providing a vision of the future and the specific strategy for making the transition as seamlessly as possible. The government should be taking the useless and obscenely expensive military industry and turning it into something practical. They should be replacing fossil fuel use with sustainable development and pollution-free energy sources. They should be reforming the prison system. They should be finding a way to help our children, as one out of three are born out of wedlock and another one of three is in a dysfunctional family even when they have a father. They should be retraining workers for relevant jobs, fighting the war on poverty we almost started in the 60's, making sure the arts flourish in schools and out, etc. etc. etc. Instead they spend all their time raising money for their next election.

We know organized religion could take a more public position on the pollution of this planet. If God created the Earth isn't every ounce of pollution a slap to God's face? They also could be less divisive and focus more on the common ground between all the religions and be far more aggressive in permanent solutions to poverty and homelessness. How effective has organized religion been in communicating one simple tenet common to all religious thought, Love Thy Neighbor. Religion should bring people together, not keep them apart.

We know the medical profession should be more involved with preventive medicine, natural cures, herbal remedies, acupuncture, massage, natural diet, etc. It would be nice if they could actually cure something every 1000 years or so too. I've always liked the idea of paying your doctor when you're not sick. You get sick you stop payment on the check.

We know we can't educate more than 12 or 15 kids in a class yet most classrooms have 30 or 40. We should be discovering and encouraging kids' inclinations as well as surrounding them with a loving, positive environment of infinite possibilities. At the moment our public school system can't even provide the basic reading, writing, and math skills we were taught 50 years ago and along the way have managed to eliminate most of the arts classes entirely.

We'll never know the degree of damage done to us physically or subconsciously by our continued use of energy sources that poison the air our children breathe, the water our children drink, and the food our children eat, but we know absolutely that damage is being done. As I talked about on "Revolution" the alienation we experience in the workplace and school and society in general does considerable damage to our quality of life, but our alienation from our very life support systems must be subconsciously profound.

When it comes to our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the Earth, a big difference exists between Western-Semitic religious belief on one side and American Indian, African, and Asian belief on the other.

Genesis 1:28 says "And God blessed them (man and woman), and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over the wild beasts that move upon the earth."

Now what God meant by "subdue" the earth and "have dominion" over the other life forms could be debated, but it has been accepted by Western religion to suggest a superiority of man over the earth. Man the conqueror.

On the other side, the American Indians, for one, believe humans are here not as superiors to the earth, but are meant to live in harmony with the earth. A notable difference which affects how we view our most essential relationship.

And by the way "subduing" and "having dominion" could be interpreted to mean bringing order and reason and reducing suffering and fulfilling the American Indian belief that the role of man is caretaker, not conqueror, of the earth. You have "dominion" over your children, but that doesn't mean you should abuse them.

So the loss of our faith in traditional institutions and infrastructure and the inability of these institutions to serve us and evolve greatly contributes to an overall alienation and confusion about our own identities and becomes what I believe to be the first component of our spiritual bankruptcy.

A second contributor is our changing relationship to time. It seems like there just simply isn't enough of it anymore. I believe the social disease of this decade will be something I'm calling "Time Deficit Disorder."

Now I'm not quite sure what happened here but technology was supposed to give us more time, not less. We were promised a four-day work week that was supposed to take effect in the 80's, then the 90's, then absolutely by 2000. Well you have to go back to the early years of the industrial revolution to find people working harder and longer than they are now.

Technology is being developed in ways the human brain cannot keep up with. Information is great but in this early part of the Information Age we feel the need to know everything we can as quickly as possible.

Our attention span is shrinking year by year. But this isn't giving us more time to do things. It just makes sure we don't understand things as deeply as we once did. We scratch the surface and move on. We no longer have the patience or discipline to learn.

When you consider both things, the shortening attention span with the constant feeling of being behind, being late, never having enough time to spend at work or with our families or both, the end result is we simply no longer have the time, the patience, the discipline, the circumstance, or the peace of mind to fully experience life.

A third contributor to our spiritual bankruptcy is the demystification of art, and a vacuum of art in general.

Art is not a luxury. It is an essential part of our life. The United States has never been particularly good at understanding that fact and supporting it the way other countries do, but the arts have never meant less to society than they do right now.

For one thing the price of admission to experience what little art we have is absurdly high. Theatre, opera, ballet, and at least half of the "important" rock shows are priced beyond what the masses can afford. Even the price of movies is getting crazy.

The Information Age has created an all-or-nothing scenario for society that I see as an unsolvable problem for the foreseeable future. Information, when needed, is a good thing most of the time. But not when it comes to the creation of art. Art, like religion, needs mystery. That is how we participate in it.

You cannot watch television without running into a program showing how the special effects are done in a movie. This is to insure the viewer will not experience the movie as the art form intended. And I consider movies the ultimate art form because it includes and combines all the other art forms.

The advent of the video clip was the beginning of the end of the importance of rock music. That kind of superficial accessibility forever diluted, and in many cases, eliminated, the full experience of seeing a live rock band. It has also allowed rock bands to exist without the essential prerequisite of being great live performers.

The corporatization of rock radio struck the art form of rock another severely damaging, if not lethal, blow.

Beginning somewhere in the 80's, the corporations took away the freedom DJ's had to play whatever they felt like playing (Richard Neer, an important DJ from the free-form rock radio days, is writing a book about this). Their personalities and ability to express themselves and, along the way, educate the public about this important new art form, went with it. Out of the approximately 3,000 DJ's playing rock music in America I only know of two, Vin Scelsa in New York, Jim Ladd in Los Angeles, that can play whatever they want to. All educated, experienced, passionate, and interesting personality went to talk and sports radio or was unceremoniously retired. Of course all ratings for radio programming went with it, but nobody in the boardroom seems to have noted this "coincidence."

The only vestige of personality left on rock radio is the adolescent and pre-adolescent variety and they are all talk - no music - shows, mostly in the morning.

As bad as we may think it is in America at least we still have rock music on the radio. Europe has none. Alright there is an occasional two or maybe four hour specialty show, possibly once a day but just as likely once a week! But that is it. In the 12 biggest countries in Europe I could not find one 24-hour a day rock station. It is like the last 50 years didn't happen. It is frightening and shocking. Why the millions of rock fans of these countries don't organize and demand the restoration of at least one rock station in their country is something I don't understand. Every great rock band that tours Europe does tremendous business. We know the people of every European nation love rock music. So what's up? It is impossible to comprehend.

Of course now the rock era that we thought would last forever is over (1965-1994 R.I.P.) and we have returned to a pop era that is more vapid, meaningless, superficial, emotionless, soulless, unmemorable, and permanent than any previous era in the history of music.

All modern pop music (post 60's) is wallpaper, background music, a short-term distraction for kids. You could make an argument that pop music was always so. You'd be wrong, but you could make that argument. But in the past there was always a balance and now there is none. Pop rules and that means the art form of rock is under siege and becoming an endangered species. We are living in a world whose music no longer engages our senses, our intellect. There are few artists we can emotionally invest in, have a long relationship with, trust, depend on, have our own private conversations with.

We don't have many art forms. We can't afford to have one stolen from us.

Books? Who has the attention span or time to read them. Statistics show us that we still buy a lot of books but we're probably doing it out of habit because we know we should be reading more. We buy them, but we don't read them.

Modern visual art has increasingly eliminated mass participation over the last 50 years or longer. It is too abstract to relate to for the general public. Warhol was an accessible breath of fresh air but ultimately all he'll be remembered for is trivializing a once important art form.

And now we are broadcasting TV shows that reveal how magic tricks are done. That's a good idea don't you think? Let's kill magic. Rainforests, animal species, magic, what the hell.

Whatever happened to "just because we can do something does that mean we should?"

People need art and music and mystery in their lives everyday. That is where our spiritual nourishment comes from. So let's just keep doing everything possible to make sure nobody experiences anything, has any heroes, has nothing to depend on or look up to, no involvement in the community or environment or the decision making process that effects our daily lives, and no time to think about it.

A fourth contributor to our spiritual bankruptcy is television. I talked about this at great length when the "Revolution" record was out and in the corresponding essay, so I'll just sum it up quickly here.

Television is humankind's most devastating technological creation since gunpowder. The act of watching it puts part of your brain to sleep just like a drug. It enforces a passivity the way reading a book demands an interaction. Television - death, books - life. Am I being direct enough about this?

Content? As that English philsopher Hugh Grant once said, "forget about it."

It is how the corporate media controls and limits what we think about and what we know about. It is also how people get to see all the things they want and will never have, and all the people they wish they were but will never be.

In twenty years you will either be in show business or not. What qualifies as show business? Anybody on TV, on the radio, in the press, in the public eye. Some people, too many, will be compelled, will be desperate, will do anything to be a part of what they consider the only way to validate their existence.

It's happening already. People go on Jerry Springer's show, and there are dozens of Jerry Springers. People go on Howard Stern's show, and there are dozens of Howard Sterns. Women extort celebrities by offering sex and filming it. Men impersonate celebrities. And there is far more serious evidence. Celebrity stalkers, celebrity assassinations, celebrity children kidnapped. There is no humiliation, no ethical boundaries, no pride or common sense that will stop it. And I hope I'm wrong but I believe all these things will increase dramatically because the infrastructure that created this insanity seems to be permanent.

That is what spiritual bankruptcy is all about.

Failing Institutions, Time Deficit Disorder, the Demystification of Art, and Television.

What is the political consequence?

Permanent generational poverty worldwide, ignorance, hatred, anger, violence, frustration, confusion, war, prejudice, school shootings, wife abuse, child abuse, pollution, toleration of homelessness, rapidly disappearing species of plants, insects, and animals and cures for diseases along with them, a permanent generational criminal class accompanied by an exploding prison population, disappearing quality of life standards even in the richest cities, and an inability to help the helpless because we are too busy trying to find ourselves.

So that's part of the story of the content of the record.

Musically, this record started out with a much different concept than it ended up with. I was going to combine everything I'd been into in the previous seven years. The songs were written as world music and I was going to use a lot of ethnic folk instruments, bring back the horns, integrate it all into African rhythms and keep the melodies very Middle Eastern/North African with a lot of crazy time signatures and rhythm changes. It was going to be a combination of various ethnic religious dance rituals and meditative drones creating one long dynamic mystical journey.

But then I started thinking about the 60's groups, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, the Yardbirds, and how they introduced me to Eastern music with a melodic flavor here and a guitar riff there and how that complemented my growing awareness of Eastern philosophy. I missed that and I decided I missed rock music period. So I rewrote the time signatures to be more straight ahead rock rhythms and played all the riffs on the guitar.

As I say in the liner notes, this is the record I would have made in 1969 had I been able and the whole thing is really a tribute to those groups and that time. Especially the Yardbirds and the three amazing groups that emerged from them: Cream, The Jeff Beck Group, and Led Zeppelin .

The world's newest art form, rock music, happened by a circumstantial cultural collision around 1965. I clock the rock era from the release of "Like A Rolling Stone" in '65 to Kurt Cobain's death in '94. But let's keep in mind that although the rock era is over, the art form, while admittedly presently under siege, is forever.

Bob Dylan would have preferred to be a rock and roller from the start but wandered into folk music instead, lucky for us. Lucky because the folk and folk-blues tradition put him in a world of lyrics that expressed personal feelings. Personal ideas. Personal observations. Insights, confessions, fears, passions. Lust and Anger. All the stuff art is made of.

So he puts out one record that was not particularly impressive and everybody in the business is laughing at old John Hammond for signing him. He puts out a second record and everybody stops laughing. By his third record in 1964 Dylan had revitalized and reinvented folk music, introducing a writing style and a wise-beyond-his-years-insightful-cynical-so-modern
it-wasn't-happening-until-he-did-it-attitude - and became the most important human being in the universe in the soon to come revolution and renaissance.

Around the same time Bob was making history in the folk world of Greenwich Village, the Beatles were doing the same in the pop world of England.

Before the Beatles there were solo rockers like Elvis, Little Anthony, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley, singing groups like the Flamingos, the Jive Five, and the Channels, skiffle groups doing acoustic folk stuff, and instrumental-only groups like the Ventures. But there were no bands. Alright if you want to be technical there was one. Everybody remembers Buddy Holly and the Crickets but their first hits were credited to "the Crickets" period. They toured England in 1957 and this is where the Beatles got their name; the line up of what a band is - 2 guitars, bass, and drums - yes the Crickets had a second guitar player Nicky Sullivan who quit to do a solo career; and probably the idea to write their own songs and in fact co-write like Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison. But nobody remembers that except Garry Tallent so it was the Beatles that popularized the whole band thing.

The combination of pop elements the Beatles communicated to an unsuspecting American baby boom generation, deeply mourning the recent assassination of JFK, was both profound and unprecedented. An amazing new sound, great songs that they themselves wrote, a simultaneous innocence and worldliness, a Marx Brothers-like camaraderie and playfulness, English accents, and a look no one had ever seen before. They were friends, family, community, and nobody ever has enough of that. They were an alien tribe from a distant planet and yet managed to represent the living embodiment of the very American paradox - how to be an individual and part of a group at the same time.

They would be the archetype pop band that opened the door of the renaissance and along with all their mutant and hybrid offspring that would follow, introduced technicolor to a black and white world. Because of their pioneering creativity, aided and abetted by their genius producer George Martin, they would be the only pop band in history to have equal credibility in the mainstream pop world and the rock world they were about to help invent.

Just a few months after the Beatles were introduced to America in late '63 early '64, the Rolling Stones rolled in. They would be the third essential element of this new art form that would evolve with lightning speed.

The Stones were never a pop band. They were a blues band, an R&B band, and then a rock band. Their most unheralded accomplishment was managing to cross over from rock to pop for thirty-five years. Try that trick sometime. Mick Jagger does not have a pop voice. Pop voices are happy, uplifting, lighthearted. Mick's voice is bluesy, stoic, dour, and cynical. He would bark, sneer, shout, cut off notes. He sang in a conversational tone that was normally heard only in the blues world. He sang low. Nobody sang low like that. His was the first rock voice. His attitude was the attitude that rock would adopt as its attitude. And this attitude would inform every single singer in the rock world to come whether they knew it or not. We'd been introduced to this attitude that said - yeah I'm singing and doing alright but deep down I know life sucks and by the way go fuck yourself - by Dion a generation earlier. But in the context of a band we got attitude times five and pop music went from pretty and light and fantasy to ugly and serious and real. And proud of it. Unbelievably, Jagger's non-pop voice, attitude and all, was accepted by mainstream pop radio. That's how great the Stones were.