This letter can be found in the inner sleeve of the “Live In Montreal” CD.
My young son sleeps soundly tonight. His lids have fallen and shut like locked doors to a fortress high on a hill. His breath deep and easy, his little body limp and sprawled tell me all is well on his mountaintop. Princess rescued and hero intact; enviable. I don’t know perhaps it is a question of untamed passions or unbridled desires but a courious incompatibility still remains between the night and sleep for me. It is as if only when the city sleeps I can hear the truest texture of the inner voice. I am in complete possession of my breath and heartbeat. It is as it always was, a kind of birthing process that first begins in the dark and silent womb of a solitary place. Where every thought, every motion, and every sound matters. Where the small becomes great and the great explodes and vanishes into the black of space and is born small again. Where the first and last battle is fought, legions of both higher and fallen angels merge and contract to a pinpoint and then blaze like the light of a thousand suns. It is the ritual of the deepest dreaming. It is the courting of the muse. A sense of grace and fortune overcome me. I am at ease. I neither bear the searing wounds of failure nor the weight and disorientation of overwhelming commercial success. I feel as Fredrick Prokosh, the novelist once wrote of his life and career; too much acceptance would have spoiled him, too little would have embittered his heart.
I am alluding to a certain kind of freedom, creative freedom, one of the rarest of all gifts that has only to be believed in and pursued in earnest to receive. From the day my brother Joe and I stormed the gates of A&M; Records and were embraced by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, it has been too easy to take for granted and artist’s inborn right of expression. I say this because once I was robbed of it. Only then did I realize the preciousness of my lost possession.
The boombox plays in the background. I listen to Enzo, Mike, Maxayne and brother Joe offering themselves to the music. I gaze down, shake my head and smile at the sound of familiar words and melodies that come from my own voice. I think back to those endless days of desire and determination, the idols of my past, the need to be like them, the dream to an accepted artist, whatever the cost. It is a time when the blindness of youth is a blessing, when the failings of inexperience are forgiven and compensated by the natural wisdom of instinct and willpower. It is strange, the songs not only kill me quietly with memories but inspire me to go forward in any direction undaunted by new impediments. Maybe I am falling in love with life all over again. Suddenly I don’t mind dog days and sleepless nights as much. I extend my hands outward in thanks to those who are listening and remembering after my twelve year absence from the stage. I turn upward and inward for still deeper thanks.
Can’t help staring at my boy, can’t help wondering what he’ll think of “I Just Wanna Stop” or “Living Inside Myself” in twenty or thirty years from now. I wonder how these times will fare in his eyes when he’s a man. the tape machine has switched off, no more thoughts. I will lay at his feet, close my eyes and join him in his hilltop.
Gino
