Well, maybe not.
But I’ve never been huge on major organized religious ceremonies. There’s nothing ecstatic about them. I prefer the ceremony, the bacchanal of a rock show.
And Nick Cave is high priest of my religion. He even dresses the part, in skinny black funereal suits that cling to his scarecrow’s frame, his white shirt unbuttoned, now with that faintly ridiculous mustache that can be seen even from the cheap seats.
He stalks the stage, high-kicks and gyrates, hips and legs in trousers stretched taut, gets grown men to shout “I love you Nick,” and laughs at them.
He plays all the great, dirty, sacrilegious, profane classics–”Deanna,” “Tupelo,” “Red Right Hand,” “Papa Won’t Leave You Henry,” and closes with possibly the filthiest track ever committed to CD: “Stagger Lee.” His chorus of black-suited backups with their clanging instruments howls along.
Nick is emblematic of one of my biggest beliefs about art: that it should be beautiful, strange, and frightening at times. That the messy is better than the perfect. The fuckups are more interesting than the stories that work out right.
“Only conflict is interesting” a thousand writing teachers have intoned, but it’s more than that. It’s that only a willingness to abandon oneself to the scary, the weird, the impossible, the heartbreaking is interesting. Is more than interesting.
So I love Nick Cave and Jean Genet, Mishima and Diane Arbus, Tom Waits and Lydia Lunch. I love crazy stories and things that fall apart. I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best love story ever committed to film, and I keep falling in love with the wrong guys.
But a great rock show leaves me feeling cleansed, focused, and happy.
And isn’t that what people go to church for?