Proof of Production

I believe Carl Barry is a beautiful man.  There are many imitators here—but few can replicate in sincerity the persona of a man with a persona wholly invested in the compilation of his production.  The trees are not dense enough, the pavement not authentic enough, the souls not scarred enough.  The sky is right, but it’s always alright.  I spoke with him on the phone earlier—as superfluous an action as always, but nevertheless stirring.  There are cadences, inflections, really, in his dialect that excite the senses and thump the ventricles.  From a purely biologic standpoint, of course, it comes down to his hands, as it does with any guitarist.  But as it does with every artist, the soul, the essence, is invisible, unspoken of, and irreconcilable.  I’ve heard of him delineated, or perhaps distilled, as a tragic figure.  I can see the truth in this description—the intensity of his voice and the acquiescent murmurings of a significant man in an insignificant world satiate that silhouette, but I am convinced of something more, something eternal about him.  It is what he has produced, what he has lost, in a sense, that has sustained him.  In an related sense, the translations of the silent spaces in our phone conversations explain with acclimation that he refuses to slip into degradation.  The slips of essence compiling the slate of his resume also compose the sounds filling in the silences inexplicable to the linguistic ear. 

Carl Barry seems frail now.  The open-collared shirts are sagging slightly and the silken fingers seem to be starting to develop a tinge of gout.  But that is only on off hours.  I saw him tonight, whirling and weeping with the great goddesses.  It was like that night in 1976, in Gulliver’s--that smoky joint off exit 13B in Jersey.  The sound pounded off the wooden walls that night: the guitar navigated the vortex of recourses against the raging roars of the human soul with precise abandon.  At the end of the set the band stood up and took a bow—the air hazy with the permeations of existence.  That was all, and a moon hung high in the New Jersey sky and faded with the coming of the following morning. 

Carl Barry, the man, died sometime in 1976.