BREEDLOVE’S NEW COMPANION TRAVEL GUITAR GETS A REAL TEST OF FIRE AT THE NOTORIOUS BURNING MAN EVENT IN THE NEVADA DESERT. BY MICHAEL ECK.
Burning Man.
Rich man’s paradise or Gonzo fever dream?
Drug addled nightmare, back to earth bliss or some kind of postmodern Brigadoon?
Perhaps Burning Man is best boiled down to one word, by one who’s been there, more than once.
Burning Man, says Jon Gambino, is “impossible.”
But he says it with a certain glee in his voice, a trickster’s trill shining with leave no trace insouciance.
For the uninitiated—and that’s most of us—Burning Man is more than just a festival, it’s a lifestyle, albeit one focused on and growing out of the event itself.
As the Burning Man website states, “once a year, tens of thousands of people gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression and self-reliance.”
“In this crucible of creativity,” it concludes, “all are welcome.”
Gambino is a musician, self-described as “John Mayer meets Post Malone.” He’s also a businessman, partnering in the Davidson County member space and arts incubator Helping Our Music Evolve; developing a non-profit called Music Art and Innovation; and operating a debauched Nashville bus tour dubbed Party Porch.
He talks fast. He’s from New Jersey. ‘Nuff said.
Gambino spent his second official Burning Man high in the Silver State’s northwestern desert last August. Is high a measure or a place? Ask the burning man.
‘Official’ because Gambino has attended smaller, similar sessions in his present homeland, Tennessee, three other times. These mini-man gatherings abide by the same principles as the big burning daddy, at least in theory. Dicta like radical inclusion, gifting, communal effort, decommodification, civic responsibility and participation.
Principles, mind you, not laws. Laws are too square—speed limits, gravity and the like. Still, a man must have a code he can live by.
Gambino’s purpose, it would seem, at least in part, was to get a new Breedlove Companion to Burning Man, the perfect place for a travel axe to receive a trial by fire.
“I didn’t think to put it in the flames, man!” He laughs when asked if he literally immolated the instrument.
“Oh, my gosh, dude, I’m not as smart as you apparently! That would’ve been incredible, I wish I had thought of it.”
Truth is, the guitar almost didn’t get there at all.
It was ready to arrive Wednesday. He’d left Nashville for Nevada on Tuesday. He had it shipped to Reno. He missed it. A message went out to a friend of a friend about picking it up at another friend’s house.
“I just went to Burning Man,” Gambino confesses, “hoping that it would find me.”
Some time later, it did, with only days to spare.
Black Rock City. Mirage or megalopolis?
There were plants and birds and rocks and things, there was sand and hills and rings. There was the epic, expansive playa, where Gambino spent much of his time; and his tribal home; and makeshift art vehicles flitting about, the offhand spawn of Easy Rider, Mad Max and Furthur. Burning Man is not Masonic-secret, but it is shrouded. Those who haven’t been speak of it in even more vague, mistier terms than those that have.
“The odds of this happening,” Gambino muses, awe still ringing in his voice, “were like astronomically low. But, sure enough, it happened. It found me. In a city of 70,000 people.”
Impossible, right?
He played it. She played it. They played it.
“For one girl, it was so unexpected. It was like she was wandering into the right moment, being in the right place at the right time, being exactly where she needed to be, wanted to be, and it found her, you know?”
So, yeah, the Companion sang a few redemption songs, but did it live by the code?
“You have to participate,” Gambino says. “When you play it, you’re participating, when you hear it, you’re participating. I mean, it’s actually the ultimate … If you think about it … it’s like the ultimate participation.”
Dreams end. So does Burning Man, come early September.
Some dance around the effigy, bathed in the squalor and light of its roar, timber turning to dust to turn again, eons on, in another clime, to timber. Others mourn in the glow of the temple, tears streaming as tokens of their ethereal lives—as puny or potent as they might be—flicker in the final conflagration.
Gambino did both.
Once he was out of the ‘pulse,’ the festival’s controlled release of energy and automobiles, Gambino had thousands of miles to cover. He had a duffel bag and a small guitar.
The latter, safe, for now, from temple flames, found much more use on the road, landing at house parties in Los Angeles, open mics in Philly and a hole-in-the-wall gig in Ringwood, New Jersey before returning to Nashville.
Using the nomenclature of the festival, rather than the vocabulary of fire, Gambino says the Companion would have burned whether it found him or not.
“That’s what they call it. Each time you go and come back, you had a ‘burn.’”
Where will your Companion go? Will it burn?
See More
Photo Gallery
