Ron Gallo Celebrates a ‘Stardust Birthday Party’ by Being in the Now

Ron Gallo‘s a real twisted fella. And in this all too straight world, that’s a compliment. He’s not afraid to contradict himself in the same sentence or combine totally unlike instrumentation together that never really coheres. He challenges his audiences to pay attention even though he frequently loses focus. Yes, he’s a real strange guy. That’s kind of the point. Gallo knows that we all think we are misunderstood oddballs. He celebrates that even as he confronts his own anxieties about being different. Gallo has also discovered the secret to happiness even though he struggles to behave accordingly. It’s simple: just be in the present moment.

Or as he says (quoting the words of Eckhart Tolle) in the middle of the feedback-drenched garage rocker “Always Elsewhere”, “nothing has happened in the past, it happened in the now, nothing will happen in the future, it will happen in the now.” Think about it for a second. Don’t let your mind just go to the next sentence. That’s hard. No reason to worry about the past. Don’t anticipate the burdens ahead. As the song title suggests, Gallo knows that we are all always distracted and end up in a prison of our own creation.

Which explains the power of his music. It’s muscular. One is meant to get lost in the clamor. His guitar playing is hard and often in martial rhythm abetted by pounding drums. This creates a dreamlike, trance effect that compels one to be in the moment. He knows “‘You’ Are the Problem” with “you” being him as he struggles to find his place in life and the meaning of existence. Gallo deliberately separates himself into two people; one is his consciousness and the other person inside who questions conscious thoughts. He’s literally never alone and paradoxically always alone. There’s something funny about that, and Gallo enjoys the dark humor.

He begins the track “OM” with the sound of harmonious male vocals chanting the word “om” over a police siren, barroom chatter, and street noise. The first words one hears is “oh shit”. The mix of holy and profane functions to illustrate the point of the term “OM” itself, which is the sacred sound of everything in the universe. After 10 seconds or so Gallo begins reciting in a hurried pace like one trying to leave a voice mail before the recorder times out with a message from his mind saying that even meditation cannot ever stop from thinking, but one doesn’t have to believe one’s own thoughts.

“The only thing we all have in common is that we don’t know / Where we are going just that we are going to go there,” he kvetches on “The Password”. We are bound by our ignorance and doomed to an unknown fate. Or actually, we do know. We are all going to die someday. That makes the ephemerality of our existence even more absurd.

He sings “I Wanna Die (Before I Die)” to a punk beat stolen from the Ramones’ songbook and ends the record with the satiric “Happy Deathday”. Gallo mocks work, ambition, education and conventional wisdom. Nothing really matters, success or failure, because, in the end, we all turn to dust. That’s also our greatest glory. Our birthdays and the anniversary of our death are the same. We are all part of everything. We just need to see understand this to find peace.