Just My Imagination

Seafoam green slim jeans. Black skull t-shirt. Skull ring. Turquoise ring. Onyx bracelet. Handcuff bracelet. Chain wallet. Rattlesnake charm necklace. Sunglasses. Chukka boots (though I really want snakeskin cowboy boots).

My wife is embarrassed by how I dress for gigs. My look has all the markings of someone in his (early) forties trying to reclaim his youth. And I won’t deny that some of that developmental psychology has to be at play. But, what I tell myself I am really doing is trying to find my persona: some Grecian mask I can put on to liberate myself from myself. To become something wholly different and other on stage — a vessel of sorts where the latent desires of performer and audience dissolve together in some phantasmic wish fulfillment. There’s something beautiful and true that happens in this collective myth-making. That’s what I’m doing.   

Or maybe it is just some midlife crisis. 

I would argue that every artist dawns a persona on stage. It’s essential to the performance, to the collective suspension of disbelief. Let’s start with pseudonyms. Some of my favorite artists are: Robert Zimmerman, Roberta Anderson, Stevland Judkins, David Hayward-Jones, Reginald Kenneth Dwight, James Osterburg, Jr., Jeffrey Ross Hyman, Shawn Carter, Edward Severson, Calvin Broadus, Jr., Alicia Cook, Josh Tillman, Elizabeth Grant, Christopher Breaux, and Kendrick Duckworth. Never heard of ‘em, right? We all know them as: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Elton John, Iggy Pop, Joey Ramone, Jay-Z, Eddie Vedder, Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys, Father John Misty, Lana Del Ray, Frank Ocean, and Kendrick Lamar. All these spellbinding, creative spirits — masked and notorious.   

Giving yourself a new name is a rebirth. It’s a chance to grow and evolve into something you are not. You become a fictional character. You can say and do things as this figment that you would never do as yourself. A portal is opened to a place of expanded freedom and expression. In this theatrical space, everything is magnified — reality is distended. In cloak and veil we can better examine all those gaudy axioms of our rather usual but complex existence. The truth is hiding in plain sight when we all just make believe. 

Fashioning a persona doesn't always require a new name, however. Take Keith Richards as the ideal example. He is the embodiment of THE MYTH: sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. This guy has been on every “Celebrities Most Likely to Die” list since the 70s. He’s been perpetually on the nod for the past six decades, right? We’ve all seen the photos. I won’t deny that Richards spent most of the 60s and 70s in a narcotic haze (still somehow alert enough, I’ll add, to write most of Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, and Exile on Mainstreet). What’s also true, however, is that the guy is worth north of $500 million and that he kicked heroin in ‘78 and hasn’t snorted a line for more than 15 years. (Warning: bumping lines in your sixties is not recommended for most senior citizens). He’s a father, a grandfather, and has a businessman's understanding of international tax codes (which comes with the territory of being rich, I guess). So why do we imagine that the 79 year old man on stage is something more than what he really is? From our vantage, why does he appear to be a rock god?   

Keith Richards’s persona has persisted because it’s necessary. First, it’s necessary for him. As Tom Waits put it in the Netflix documentary on Richards’s career, Under the Influence: “You have to have some type of armor so that you can continue to also develop as a human being, you know.… Inside that [persona] you’re still able to grow and change…. It’s kind of a ventriloquist act a lot of the time, you know, but it’s much safer than putting your own ass out there.” Personas allow artists to divorce their artistic selves from their practical selves. Personas also provide songwriters courage to charge through the emotional phalanx, through the immense fear that comes with putting your art out in the world to be consumed and judged. 

Second, Keith Richards’s persona is necessary for us. Carl Jung, the philosopher and psychologist whose exposition on the persona is seminal to our intellectual history, observed the following: “The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society.” As we’ve seen, the persona allows the artist to conceal her true nature, but it also allows us (the audience) to conceal our true natures. It permits us to believe that such unbelievable people really do exist. If Keith Richards can will himself into something transcendent, some spirit that expresses the totality of our emotional selves in a few strums of the guitar, then so can we. All our dreams and desires are projected onto that masked man stumbling on the stage.

But such masks also trap you in some version of you that’s you but not you at all. In his epic autobiography Life, Richards admits: “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me. I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl…. I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s thirty years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point that you can bear. It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.” All myths are really cautionary tales, in the end.  

So why the colorful jeans, the accouterments of death, the chain wallet? Because really what we all want sometimes is to be someone we are not. I want to be a rockstar. I want to be Keith Richards (even though I know Keith Richards isn’t really Keith Richards). Even Keith Richards doesn't want to be Keith Richards. “I just want to be Muddy Waters,” he confesses in Life, “Even though I’ll never be that good.”

In the end, we all need personas because they help us manifest and channel our hopes, dreams, and desires. So, I’ll keep trying on different masks — looking for the one that fits best. If you come across any deals on snakeskin boots in the meantime, send them my way.