|
Mystic Musician
An interview with 26 (formerly known as
Doc Dart)
By Bob
Ignizio |
In the mid eighties, 26 (then know as Doc Corbin Dart)
fronted the legendary Michigan punk rock band The Crucifucks. The
Crucifucks recorded two albums for Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles
Records before breaking up. Doc stayed busy, though, releasing two solo
albums and forming a new band in the mid nineties called Little Doc’s Eye.
L. D. Eye recorded an album as well, but it was released as a Crucifucks
album by Alternative Tentacles. More recently, Doc has changed his name to
26 and released a new solo album called ‘The Messiah’ through Crustacean
Records.
Utter Trash: Why did you change your name to 26?
26: That’s a good question for probably one reason.
On the sewernet there are people who have even quoted me as saying I changed
my name for a spiritual reason. Actually it’s the opposite. If anyone
knows the difference between mystical practices and spiritual practices,
spirituality is faith based and mystical science is experience based. So
we’re talking about the difference between materialism and fantasy. I
changed my name to 26 for mystical reasons, and there were many. I never
liked the name Doc Dart. There’s something very blunt about that. That
represents somebody I used to be, kind of a spastic individual. Luckily
I’ve made a few changes.
UT: Are you still proud of your early music?
26: I guess the only place I draw a line is between
the first [Crucifucks] album and all the rest. At this point I see that as
kind of what you might call a novelty album. We probably had no business
going in the studio and doing it. Everything since then, I’m with that.
That’s fine. I really think there’s such a contrast between the first and
the second album.
Before we go any further, this is
a really weird request. But all I’m asking is that… I kind of dropped out
of western civilization in March of 2001 at the equinox. Not that I care
much about equinoxes, but it just happened that way. So anything that’s
happened since then I’m in total ignorance of and would prefer to stay that
way. I don’t even know who won the election. I’m not recommending that
people do what I did, but I feel I had to flush everything out in order to
see everything clearly.
UT: I noticed on your new CD ‘The Messiah’ you had a
song about Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist. What are your feelings about
her?
26: I have an enormous amount of respect for Helena
Blavatsky and, as I tried to express in the song, in regards to her
scholarship about mysticism. As far as her actual abilities as a
mystic or an occult practitioner, there’s no way I can make a judgment about
that. That’s for other people to decide. But mainly it was just her
meticulous… and there are sources who would say she could be considered the
best scholar of the nineteenth century.
The comparative religion and her
esoteric interpretations of old text… it lays bare the so called evolution,
or you could say de-evolution, of religion. How it all just integrated from
thousands of years ago and became what it is today. People who go to
seminary school or any kind of religious school, they do not learned these
interpretations of old text. They have no business telling people that they
know what these texts mean, because it’s so deep and so rich, some of it.
Now when you get to the New Testament and all that stuff, then you’re
talking like forgery and mistranslation and stuff like that. It all gets
really, really messy.
When most people talk about
religion they really don’t know what they’re talking about, and that’s a bit
frustrating. People don’t define their terms. Even people who are into new
age and all that stuff, they’ll flap their gums for hundreds of pages in
these books. But they don’t define any of their terms. It’s just awfully
nebulous.
UT: Is there any mystical meaning to your name, like
in Kabala?
26: I happened to notice that 26 happens to represent
the number of the tetragrammaton or whatever they call it. Crowley said it
was just a terrible number. You add the letters of “Yahweh” together and
you get 26. But that was just an accident unless there’s something I don’t
know about that says it’s not a total accident that 26 came to me that way.
It started coming to me in dreams in the early seventies, and I’ve been very
aware of the number since then. But if it has anything to do with the
kabala or any kind of middle eastern/western so-called mysticism, all I
would say is that I’m building that number on the ruins of the old meanings
of that number. On the ruins of Judaism and Christianity.
UT: Well let’s talk a little about the music. When
was the album recorded?
26: Between September of 2002 and September of 2003.
So it’s taken a while to get out. It took months and months to get a record
company, and that was part of the delay. Then the record company didn’t
have a distributor and it took longer and longer. Very frustrating,
especially when I tried to do it all myself. I’m used to having bandmates
that won’t do anything, and now I’ve just got me.
UT: So you played all the instruments on this?
26: All except for bass guitar where I notated on the
last page of the booklet. As you can tell I definitely had some logistical
and precision problems when it came to playing all the instruments
together. I think that’s perceptible and I apologize for that.
UT: Do you wan to continue working that way, or will
you put another band together?
26: You know I’m scared use my studio again because I
just was not satisfied with the musical product. I know nothing about
recording. I learned a little bit, but I still know next to nothing. There
are some musicians in Madison that want to play with me, and that’s kind of
a dream of mine. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. The next album will probably
be done with some people from there. Hopefully we’ll follow it up with a
tour.
UT: I think the last time I saw you play live… the
only time, actually… was in the early nineties at a little club in Akron
called Magoo’s. You were touring under the Little Doc’s Eye name.
26: That would have been 1994. I wish I could
remember that specific bar. I liked that band. I would play with all those
musicians again, but we had trouble getting them out to tour.
UT: So why not keep using the Crucifucks name?
26: With my mystical work and stuff like that… and I
do work hard at it. I’m not going to apologize to anybody for thousands and
thousands of hours of mystical work since 1999. The work is slow, and it
wasn’t until probably 2004 it finally got to the point where I couldn’t in
good conscience say the word out loud myself. And now I see the “f” word,
and I see it as the vocabulary of rape. The vocabulary of adolescents and
football players and rednecks and so forth.
I think it was important to
Biafra to use that name, and all part of being a novelty act. It had its
place. As far as rape goes, that kind of went with the crucifix and the
Christian religion as a whole. Cultural genocide is rape. That’s what
Christianity was all about. I’m not ashamed about it at all, but I feel
like I’m creating some kind of bad atmosphere if I say stuff like that
anymore.
UT: Would you still do any of the old songs live?
26: Some of ‘em, sure. The song “Wisconsin” if pry
one I’d do, and stuff from that album like “Concession Stand”, things like
that, sure. Not a lot. People like to hear that. Someone got really
really mad in Milwuake because we didn’t play “Wisconsin”. When some people
think about me and music, all they think about is this old stuff. We’re
talking 20 some years now that stuff happened. I could roll over and die if
people don’t want me to do any more music. If it’s just the old stuff
that’s important, why should I bother? The Sex Pistols got back together a
few years ago and all they did was play a bunch of old stuff. That’s just
not my thing. I would be embarrassed. I’m embarrassed to play live,
anyway.
UT: You mentioned the material on your latest album
was actually written a few years ago. Do you have another batch of songs
ready for a follow up?
26: Well you know, I’d say I have the skeleton for
seven new tunes I’ve been working on. It’s a lot slower process than it
used to be. It’s not something I completely enjoy, but it’s something I
feel somehow obligated to do. I think the audience has shrunk since the old
days, and sometimes I wonder why I do it at all. That decision may have to
come up sooner than I think.
UT: Animal rights are a big issue for you, so let’s
talk about your views on that a little.
26: I’d like to tell you something that happened just
last week. I live right next to an animal reserve. My whole life has been
animals, and at least 50 percent of my mystical practices has been learning
to be a mammal. My claim is that they have more intelligence, more dignity,
more grace than humans. Humans are supposedly mammals, but they’ve
forgotten how to be that way.
My house is still boarded up
because of a siege that I had in the year 2001, and that’s a long story.
But to make a long story short, a week ago a sniper shot and killed the
smallest little deer out of the whole bunch of deer who live back here. The
only name I had for this one was “the little one who comes close”. And she
was shot and killed in my yard last week. So my paradise has been kind of…
things have changed a lot since then. I’ve got a lot to think about.
We’ve taken all the animals… the
racoony and the chipmunks and the rabbits and the deer… we’ve taken all
their places to live. Now they’re getting run over by the cars and… I don’t
need to be saying this, but I just saw two of my racoony brethren lying by
the side of the road today. So it’s kind of fresh in my mind. And I’m not
going to seize up and become numb because I see dead animals every day.
Well, you know, I can’t help but become numb. I was in shock, I’ve been
numb ever since that deer was killed last week. I can’t grieve but it still
bothers me.
UT: How important is it for you to spread your ideas
to others?
26: I don’t know. In a way I’m very very confused
about any kind of message. I don’t really have a faith based belief that
anything I say is going to make any difference to anybody else. I think
people have to learn whatever they learn from experience and not from third
hand information from 26 or whoever else is spewing stuff. I don’t know how
many people left are into experiencing things. I don’t know if that’s part
of human behavior anymore because I don’t see much of human beings anymore.
I don’t know what they do. I can’t assume I know what human beings do
anymore. Like I said, I dropped out two years ago. I can’t even assume
that cops are bad, because I don’t know. It could have changed in the last
2 years.
UT: Do you really see police in those black & white
terms?
26: Now especially that I’m against the first
amendment and against the right to assemble, I’m kind of in the cops corner
when it comes to crowd control. Not against the first amendment, I wouldn’t
say that. All I’m saying is that the first amendment is actually a trickle
down from Christianity. To be a Christian is you say one thing and do
another. And what the first amendment say is you can say anything no matter
how false, with the exception of slander and things like that… asinine,
immoral… blah, blah, blah… and it will be forgiven. That’s the way I look
at it. And that’s Christianity. And then you go to confession later. But
that’s not the way it comes down in real life. There are laws of nature
that take care of bad things that we do, and it usually happens in our own
head.
In addition to that, I see the
first amendment as cultural genocide. I used to be offended when they
talked about the United States being a melting pot. But now I’m back to
saying they were absolutely right. People can do virtually anything except
murder they want to do. And they completely destroy the culture of any
people who have culture who move here. They turn their kids into little
American automatons. So it’s a melting pot. And the first amendment has a
lot to do with it.
We don’t have culture anymore.
If we had a culture there would be taboos, and people aren’t willing to give
up anything. But they expect the right wing to give up all these things.
They expect the right wings to become environmentalists but yet they still
want to smoke their pot. And I think there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy
going on with that stuff.
UT: How would you describe yourself politically these
days?
26: The whole word politics is different to me now.
I used to say that everything we did is political, because everything is
connected anyway. The whole left wing thing has left me in a huge
quandary. I studied some of the history of Karl Marx and found out that he
was actually a Jew, but he was an anti-Semitic Jew. And he also hated black
people and used the “N” word.
And there’s an awful lot of what
you would call entitlement fantasies going on with people on the left. And
I’m not into entitlement fantasies for human beings anymore. For the past
20, 30, I don’t know how many years… but I’d say we’ve already had World War
III and it is a war against plants and animals and waters. So I think the
time has passed for humans to be whining about this or that human rights,
entitlement fantasy type of thing. The time has passed for that, because
there are over 6 billion people and the humans have become the vermin. It’s
time to start paying back to the creatures who have had morality all along.
Not to mention that every single
person who is left wing on this continent is living on an indigenous land
and whining about something that happened clear across on the other side of
the world. And it just makes little or no sense to me. There wouldn’t be a
legitimate left wing government if somebody cast a spell and created one.
If 10,000 left wingers died tomorrow there would be 10,000 more to take
their place in a week. And they’d probably be ex-right wingers who thought,
“gosh, maybe we can do something.”
I don’t like right wingers any
more than I used to, but I guess it’s just that I’ve been so nauseated
everybody else that it’s all kind of evened out. Once I emptied my mind of
all this junk I think I can see all these individuals more clearly. All I
see is an awful lot of mental illness, every single individual I run
across. That’s what I see is pathology and disease. And if people don’t
deal with their own disease first, they’re not going to do anything
constructive.
 |
