I recently wrote about the ways that rock musicians model desire and its satisfaction, using the example of Reb Beach, lead guitarist of Winger, and the way he relates to the guitar as part of his body, as an integrated embodiment of the song, during live shows.

I have not yet mentioned how vocal chatter can comment on the bodily wherewithal during live shows. What a musician says during performance can interpret, supplement, sometimes replace, their larger bodily wherewithal.

And so it was fun to notice, at the Winger show in New York City recently, that Reb Beach mouthed a bit of a mock-parroting of lead singer Kip Winger’s opening line to the song “Madalaine,” a lyric that, devoid of irony, declares, “Tell you ’bout this lady!” As Kip Winger sang that line, Beach lip-synched it with just enough of a “Can you believe he is singing that?” smile to give the audience an interstice of irony in which to firmly plant one rock-stomping foot, as Beach himself was doing, while still enjoying a song like “Madalaine,” which includes keening lyrics like: “This is love too tough to tame,” “Beware of the girl! Beware of the pain”!

The creation of an escape-space in Beach’s silent vocality helped model how desire can work in rock: taste and see how good this sounds and feels to be hearing this loud, driving, melodic, musicianly music together.

To the degree that music is a conduit of salvation, and by salvation I mean, in a nutshell, the growing of a deep yes to reality, in, through, and beyond this world, then we have to learn how to feel that world in which we live, and these clues from musicians are part of the cues we get. We have to learn how to “be saved”; we have to learn how to be in and with our music.

To be continued (next up: Kip Winger)…

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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