It’s 1997, and I’m standing naked, with my wife and guitar, on a stage a few feet above 800 naked sunbathers, and I’m about to make an announcement that will change my life. “Thank you all so much for listening! We’re Gaia Consort. See you soon!” Little did I know….
We’d done plenty of the naked things before. I coined the phrase “Body Modesty is Social Disease” and made it into a bumper sticker. A thousand naked hippies in the woods was one vision of heaven for us. “All acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals.” was something that rang true for us. Casual nudity was part of the life, and still is.
We go into a few of the new songs, and wow, people are actually *dancing.* Sue is hitting the harmonies like she was born to it, and the clapping at the end of the set has actual shouts and a few are even standing, as in “standing ovation” standing. This is not usual for sensitive-new-age-guy-with-an-acoustic-dude.
I do my quick “Thank you, we’re Gaia Consort.” and bounce off the stage like this happens all the time.
That was the first Gaia Consort show.
Inspiration and a splash
Before I decided to start calling us Gaia Consort, I had this idea sloshing around in my head, that I wanted to be a kind of “tentacle” in the larger “cultural octopus” of conversations we were having about our place in the natural world. I’d been reading people like Lovelock, Sagan, Starhawk, Gary Snyder, Ryam Nearing and more, and I was still full of the sparks they’d left shimmering.
I thought that we could use the language of Paganism to attract enthusiastic people who would get it right away – and we did. For a few golden years, locally we could get 100 to 400 people pretty much any time we played, even while we were doing house concerts.
We never had any label help, funded all the records with “Adopt-A-Song” and never had to mess with bars. We made the cover of New Witch, (and a five page spread) and eventually played for five years in front of 4000 people at Faerieworlds.
Four albums and all those shows later, what we thought was the first rung of the “ladder” turned out to be the peak, but it was still a heady time.
At no point did I think of myself, or my music as “spiritual.” If I’m forced to give people a label, “Pagan Atheist” works as an answer to “What church do you attend?” “No gods, no masters.” If Richard Dawkins can describe himself as a “Cultural Christian,” I feel fine calling myself a “Cultural Pagan.” It seemed to me that if we could remind people of the great cycles, we could help them build an emotional connection to the natural world. The stuff physicist Richard Feynman, would call “really real.”
Maybe by reminding people that there is life outside the boxes that we live or drive in, we’d remember our vital connections to an amazing objective universe, and with enough people thinking that way, we could pull ourselves out of our environmental crisis in a generation or ten.
At the very least, we’d get people in touch with stuff that would help them in their lives. Whether we’re on the trail or in the cubicle, we are all the dust of the Big Bang. We’re the eyes and ears of the universe singing to itself. It is good to feel connected.
I think that worked in small bright instances. It still keeps me going.
Bone what?
Two main things pushed us to change the name. I was advised that the only way to get past the level we were at was to get into festivals, and while we were getting into a few good but low paying gigs, the wider festival circuit was elusive.
Band names are basically marketing brands. I eventually figured out that the name of the band would get in the way in the “mundane” world. It’s one thing to get into Pagan festivals like Heartland or Faerieworlds and another into “mainstream” festivals, like Oregon Country Fair. (Much less Bonoroo!) I could see gatekeepers passing on the name alone, without ever hearing the music.
250 shows later, we changed the name to Bone Poets Orchestra in the hope of broadening our audience. It was maybe not the smartest decision I ever made, if making enough money to keep us playing out was part of the plan. Decent splash in a small pond, barely a drop in the big ocean. “Bone what?” Oops.
Secondly, eventually the god /goddess expectations that came along with a lot of Pagan events, started to feel like we were promoting something that was not what the music was about. I meant it when I wrote in Cry Freedom “…all religion lives by a steady trade in lies.” We had such loud sing-alongs on that tune that we couldn’t hear ourselves through stage monitors, but my cynical self has to wonder how many people got that “all” means “all”.
Still, after all the changes, BPO fits us better. It’s just that 1000 naked hippies in the woods just doesn’t happen that often.
And, in our next episode…
The future, of course is uncertain. The old business models have changed radically. The silver disc is no more, for all intents and purposes. Still, I write music, and I’m working on the next record. (working title “Murphy Shrugged”) I may be a little ambitious, but look for more horns, more jams, more percussion and even orchestral bits if I can raise the funds. Here’s one of the more simple ones: https://www.christopherbingham.com/murphy/Two-Billion-Seconds-pre-Master-Sep-1-44.mp3
After 40 years of co-producing, I’m earning my sound engineer hat and I’m starting to mix from home. After suffering a stroke just before a show in December 2019, and then Covid, I’m a little slower, and we don’t get out to events like we used to. But as many in our sci-fi nerd circle of friends would say: “you can’t stop the signal.” So far, the music doesn’t stop.
For more information about Christopher Bingham, including his collected articles here on Pagan Song, his bio, and links to his Bone Poets Orchestra and Gaia Consort sites on the web, check out Chris’s page on Pagan Song.
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Thank you Christopher, for this history and update. You two permanently altered my life, both through your music and by knowing you for a bit. You two have always made a difference, onstage and off.
Whoever you are, you’re welcome!