So, here is the first entry into the new Sound Off feature where I basically give bands I dig free reign over SAL. Part 1 of the hopefully never-ending Oceans series is by guitarist Ryan Martin. Hey, that’s a cool shirt you’re wearing Ryan!

Today is one of those seductively sunny, mid-Spring days: unseasonably warm, solace after a long Midwestern winter. Today is the type of day that even the pretty girls smile back.  I slept maybe 3 hours last night due to an early rise for my mentally and physically demanding figure skating class.  I’ve returned rather manically inspired, but most likely just reeling from drinking until 4:30 am.

Now I’m no huge fan of psychedelics, or even drugs in general.  I mean, I’ve dabbled, but I’ve always had a better time tipping back High Lifes with my friends – it is much more conducive to nailing every lyric of Thunder Road at the end of a night, anyways.  But today is so nice, that anything you are doing right now, I’m sure I’d rather be collecting mushrooms with John Cage.  That dude really loved mushrooms.  Like an indiscriminating love. He hunted for all types of them, ate them, studied them, wrote scholarship about them, wrote short stories about them, and probably fucking just straight chilled with his giant mushroom collection from time to time.  Mushrooms were seriously this guy’s passion.  Odd yet nevertheless satisfying to Cage’s brilliant mind, it seems so fitting that an avant-garde composer of his stature wouldn’t have hobbies like you and me – you know, drinking beer, listening to punk rock, trying to pick up girls with tattoos, collecting records, or making freak bikes.  In fact, I think if I came home and John Cage was sitting on my couch with my dog watching The Wire, after the initial excitement faded, I’d just be pissed.  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something really fucking strange?” I’d think to myself.   Even with our culture’s celebrity fetishism and ideation of public figures, it is a rare and gratifying occasion to find a star whose private life parallels their work in character.  John Cage and his unswerving devotion to mushrooms lives up to about every weird fantasy or history you could fabricate about his social life (kind of like Chicago’s pride, the Worm, number 91, Dennis Rodman).  Cage’s bizarre passion for mushrooms validates his canon as neither specious nor self-indulgent.  I mean he was just an uncompromisingly, sincerely weird dude.  I’d like to think that his weirdness was the endearing type, not the type of weird where you wouldn’t want to sit at his lunch table.  Like Sam Weir, but a little more bizarre and a lot smarter.  There is this young kid I see every now and then around town, maybe 9 or 10.  His name is Sage, or some other crazy name where you have no fucking clue what his parents were thinking.  He is always swaggering around town, full of androgynous pomp, wearing second hand dresses and donning a bowl cut.  His parents, I presume, are the aging hippie types, and it seems they’ve raised him without stressing any semblance of gender roles or sexual orientation.  They’ve just let him develop, grow, and be moved by anything around him regardless of social convention.  When I see him collecting forks off people’s plates at the Hare Krishna buffets at the local vegan restaurant, I’m baffled and somewhat angered at how fucking weird he his.  It takes me a second to avert the confusion, but then I think to myself, “I bet that’s how John Cage was raised.”  Who knows, maybe someday 15 years from now, Sage will write an electro-acoustic masterpiece and fall under critical acclaim in the music world.  Maybe he’ll transform the musical landscape of the 21st century, and while he is off performing at Carnegie Hall, I’ll be bartending at the Empty Bottle serving beers to all the kids who think they’re fucked up, but they’ve got no idea. I’d posture, “Hey, you ever hear of Sage?”