A female who is a relationship with a Dogass dude and loves him too much to Since the old game, combatgrounds, has went down- Torn has risen to power.
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Sometimes they want you to have these special forms, but I didn't have it for these guitars. Anyway, so I went to an ear doctor here, who right away saw that there was something wrong beyond ear stress. He sent me for an MRI [magnetic resonance imaging]. Five days later I had a diagnosis and had the operation about two-and-a-half weeks later. And just to make the story even more complex—it turned out that Frankfurt Research Hospital at that time was one of the hospitals unknowingly giving out blood that was tainted by HIV.
Just to put a melodramatic capper on the thing. The situation now is that tumor has been removed. I'm checked regularly about every six months for the re-growth of new tumors on the brain stem, which has not occurred, which is good. I have a lot of residual effects from the craniotomy, which are extreme headaches. These started out for 18 months and were akin to seizures. I can't do things like I used to be able to do. I can't exercise nearly as hard or as much.
I'm completely deaf on my right side. Basically, I'm legally deaf, which is kind of funny.
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The other ear seems okay. I have a hard time on the telephone. You learn to do things like lip-read, which is very hard to do when people are talking to me on the telephone and things are going on around me. Sometimes, I can't get a fix on what's happening out there. All in all, I'm doing pretty well. I thought that I would be working two-to-three weeks after the operation. But I went to work about six months later and under extreme duress. I had to warn everybody for about a year-and-a-half that I was subject to seizures.
If I was doing a session, I did not have the type of concentration that would allow me to work for more than four hours at a time without either having to meditate or go into a dark room and just sit there—sometimes for as long as four or six hours. I would have to take a break. I would just sit in a chair. I still can't lie down for long periods of time. I can't get horizontal for more than a few hours at a time because there's still swelling around the site where they put the titanium plate.
Lately, it's been pretty good. But I've gotten quite used to sleeping for a few hours, getting up, doing some work, meditating sitting straight up with an upright back, and then falling asleep sitting up. I'm great on planes, even though the pressure hurts me. I'm so used to sleeping in an upright position. But I've got a bunch of normal residual problems for this type of operation. When we were doing the Polytown record, I was still in really bad shape. I now keep my own hours completely. I used to live like a human being, but now, I work when I can. If I don't feel well, I sit down a lot.
For all of the bullshit that it entails and all of the difficulties [the physical circumstances] have put me through, it also has given me a perspective on my life that I didn't have before. There are certain things that I have always been passionate about in my life and still, no matter how passionate you are about things, people and experiences you have in your life are things you can take for granted.
Life kind of beats away at you.
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So, it gave me a perspective on music and my family that I wouldn't trade for anything. The people one loves are often taken for granted. I can imagine that if I was alone in life through that experience, that I probably would have seriously considered suicide after the operation. I know myself well enough to know that without the kind of support and love that I got from my family and friends, I pretty much would have gotten rid of myself, because it was so much to bear.
It was really pretty intense. And at the same time, I had to struggle to get back into music—to really sit down and learn how to hear again. Just the simple fact of hearing and getting through this period of incredible noise that occurred after the operation—and the deafening effect. And being confounded and confused by all the sounds and sights as well, because it affected my eyes.
Visually and audio-wise, I could get confused incredibly easily—if things went by me physically too fast and my eyes moved too quickly and the sounds were coming from all over the place. When you only have one ear and you're so focused on your hearing, you no longer have the ability to locate a sound in space. If you talk to me in a room that I've never been in before and I don't see you, I don't know where you are. That's a very strange and frightening experience. Well in the beginning, I couldn't really move my head properly for about a year.
It really affected me if I moved my eyes very quickly, like when I was in a city where a million things moved right by me, in addition to the sounds I couldn't locate. For instance, I went to a shopping mall with my wife and there was so much activity that I had a seizure in the middle of the shopping mall, and I had to sit down. I couldn't be moved. It was unbelievable—things you really never want to consider. I don't dislike talking about this. It's a difficult situation and I don't complain about it because I'm mostly through it and hopefully it won't happen again.
It may be hard on the outside for people to see that I feel so positive about the experience. No, it makes me feel great about life in a certain way. That may sound a bit confused or maybe just a little sick. It's a fairly rare disease—there are about 1, cases a year on this continent of this particular non-cancerous tumor.
Nothing like that, but privately and through the 'net, I talk to people. I've advised a guy locally and a singer down in Miami. I've talked to people before their operations. This is like a replay of something that I experienced vicariously through my youth, because my father has MS [multiple sclerosis] and it didn't show up until he was about His thing went into regression about four years after he was diagnosed and he had about a complete collapse as well.
And he did pretty much the same thing. He still advises people who are in the prime of their careers and lives. It's not necessary to give up or pander to the possible bitterness that one might face. I really disappeared for awhile there. I was in real decline. Nobody was paying any real attention. The record sales weren't anything. In the real beginning, when I was just getting back and we were getting ready to do the Polytown thing, I went through the bitter thing.
I read the magazines. There was an article in Musician magazine about musicians that came back from serious illness and I wasn't included. I got real pissed off. Steve Vai was on the cover and that pissed me off. It's a more skewed kind of ego thing. Part of me says that people who listen to music should probably pay a little more attention to music—that's music, not necessarily entertainment or athletic music.
It was a little less self-focused than that, but still that kind of ego shit, you know? I passed through it. It was pretty strange. It was my family, my friends and people who came out of the woodwork that helped me. I had no unemployment compensation in my insurance policy. And my wife is a painter, so there's no money there.
I had people whom I hadn't spoken with forever come out and do benefit concerts for us. David Sylvian was going to play, but couldn't get into the country. Andy Summers and Michael Shrieve offered support too. That really helped a lot—not only financially, but the expression of love and concern in itself was really uplifting. The guy who owns and runs CMP records came out of the woodwork for me too and I wasn't even signed to the label at that time.
We were still just friends. He did things for me financially that he refuses to speak about. It was just done. I had a problem and he helped me. He doesn't want to talk about it. You kind of find out who your friends are.
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Windham Hill on the other hand—there was no support at all. Well, that's not entirely true. He helped out with the benefit. But you get the sensation that maybe if I had kicked it, [Windham Hill] would have put the record [the now-deleted Door X ] into print, you know? I would say that's come out. I think in the old days, anything I said philosophically about life or music was really aimed politically. I was so focused on the extremely sorry state of the music industry. I really didn't let any of the philosophical ramblings go past that. I've always had this in my nature.
I've always been interested in the way things work, how things function, how to change things and especially how to change one's perceptions. But it is coming out a lot more.
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It took about three or four months before I could sit down and pick up the guitar without getting extremely upset. The first thing I did when I started getting back into music again was to practice listening. It was an extremely frustrating and very studied event. I would sit down with my older son's boom box, put on a CD and listen to things that I previously knew what they sounded like. It was really a terrible scene sometimes, because I would get really upset. I would grill my wife and say "Hey, no wait a minute. Are the cymbals too loud? I don't remember cymbals!
Do you hear any saxophone? I can't hear any saxophone! It took me months until I was comfortable hearing music, before I picked up the guitar. Thattotally freaked me out. I was so nervous. I had to fly to Germany. I had a seizure on the plane. I was basically frozen when I got to Germany. I had to sit in a chair for eight hours straight without talking to anybody or eating or anything, so that I could move my head without excruciating pain. Then I played this session.
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I had these special headphones made because the sensation of sound of going into the deaf ear—the physical feeling—drove me crazy. So, I made up these special adapters for headphones that would only allow sound into the good ear and it would combine the stereo signal into a properly phased mono signal. It was a wacko thing, standing in this room, playing my first session. I really enjoyed it and they seemed to really like it. I've listened to it a couple of times and there's some really cool stuff on that date.
It was actually stuff that I played. I changed my sound. I got a thicker, more full sound and really unfocused myself from that speedy kind of thing. Upon playing a guitar again since that period, I found an element in my musical voice that had been previously covered up. I don't know why, but there it was. It was a lot slower, a lot more lyrical. But at the same time, it was a lot more full and sometimes pretty nasty compared to how it had been previously.
I think that I now feel even further from that fusion mentality of "faster, louder, higher" and much more into the slower, more stately, ambient side of me, which I continue to pursue. The funny thing is that I have a friend here named Matt Henderson who is a pretty amazing guitar player and probably one of the more technically proficient players that I have ever heard on the instrument. He doesn't do anything publicly. He's kind of a gearhead—a real fanatic for guitars, amplifiers and equipment in general. While I was home during this whole time, he kept bringing old amplifiers and guitars over.
He would say "Try this.
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Then people just started giving me equipment. I went through this nutty little period. My wife got my very first electric guitar for me, which I had sold 15 years before to an ex-manager to pay the rent. She got me back the guitar I had played when I was, like 16 years old. Then she got me another one from the same period. So, I started being able to sit around my house and play and just listen to the sound of it.
I'm practicing getting my hands back on the instrument and getting some motor coordination back.
For me, it was a personally important period, because I had all this time to sit and diddle with things, instead of being a professional musician and having to go out and play a gig. We were struggling on that level, but I had a chance to woodshed again and in a much different way than I did when I was a youth. It was more about the tone of the guitar. It was "What do I like about the sound of the guitar? What can I change? He built me a special instrument and a couple of amplifier companies sent me their amplifiers to check out and keep if I wanted.
I would say that at that period of time, something coalesced. How did your emotional and physical circumstances affect the direction of Polytown and Tripping Over God? It really happened as a result of me not having it together enough that year to do a solo record for CMP. Kurt [Renker] really wanted me to do something on my own and stop producing other people's records for him. I said "I'm sorry Kurt. You've given me all this time to decide, but I just can't get it together. I just don't have the energy or motivation to do a solo record like we talked about on my own.
He was about 40 miles away in Dusseldorf and he said "Hey, let's do that record. Do you think Kurt would be interested? Yeah, a springboard to get my energy back up to the place where I could find my own path again. By the time Tripping came around, I had so much motivation and confidence in being able to deliver something that I would be proud of, completely on my own. It was a long time building up to that one. Tripping Over God is an intriguing title.
Describe what it means to you. I kind of left it one of those titles you could think of a couple of different ways. Probably the way that I thought about it was the one way nobody else did. I get a lot of "So yeah, you do a lot of acid when you think about God? I thought it sounded okay like that. The concept was more like, we are constantly presented with impediments and catastrophes that are kind of like rocks on the path.
You trip over them and curse them, and turn around and look at the thing and realize that it has got an element of—if I could be so pedantic—a life lesson. So, I was thinking "Was this thing a catastrophe or was it the best thing that ever happened in my life? I've got all these problems now, but so do lots of people. I became so much more confident in my perceptions as a result of that unexpected little genetic anomaly.
It is imperative for your eventual happiness that one looks for what one's purpose in life is. It doesn't need to be a grand purpose. It doesn't need to be something that other people validate as the most important thing they've ever seen, heard, smelled or tasted. But I believe it's important for the individual to come to grips with the fact that maybe there really is such a thing as the dharma and that fate is not completely decided. You do make your own reality. I guess in terms of spirituality, that's about as far as I go. I've studied a number of spiritual traditions with a number of different teachers.
I know and have seen a number of different dogmas and religions. I practice some of them. I studied Tantric meditation intensively for about eight years. That's a long time ago. I also hung around a lot with a couple of people that would be considered to be Sufis. I met a number of what people consider to be gurus and teachers and pedagogues of a supposed spiritual tradition. And pretty much since I was about 14 or 15 years old.
So, I don't really subscribe to anything now. Tripping could be interpreted as an audio representation of such a journey. It has a real stream of consciousness feel. For me, this record was some kind of huge mediation. The fact that it was so well-received kind of freaked me out. I was just out here sitting in this room by myself for like 20 hours a day. I'm just out here by myself. I have no contact with the world. I'm living here in my little cave. Sometimes it's really hard to sit still—even if you think that you're going to get something out of it or give something from it.
But I view that record as a real personal meditation. Tripping was pretty serious for me. I don't know if I would say dark, but it was certainly brooding. At that time, I was incapable of playing a note of music without thinking about how long my life was going to be. Even a year ago, I was thinking "Well you know Dave, we really don't have that long. And you of all people have even less than others—that's almost for sure.
What if it's next month and that's it? What if this is your last shot at producing something that you really love? I could be diagnosed with an unusually fast-growing tumor and then it's in decline no matter how you look at it. During Tripping, I couldn't escape that feeling. I would play one note and feel it intensely. That's the end of this life. A year ago, it was much more volatile than it is now because it had been a year less of testing.
I did not feel really great last year. I felt that something was really wrong. I've since been through two tests and the peak and the trough of feeling terrible and having—for all intents and purposes—psychosomatic symptoms. I really was psychologically wrecked too. I've been extra-tested this year, so I'm functionally in the clear for another six or eight months, then I have to test again. If I get through the next three years and test negative throughout, then they'll give me a clean bill of health.
For this kind of medicine, they'll say "Okay. It kind of makes you go up and down whether you want to or not, you know? Every time March comes around in particular, I get super anxious and very weird. I put off some testing that I didn't actually do until the end of August of this year, that I should have done earlier. I couldn't really face it. But I let it build up until I was ready to explode and had to find out if there was something wrong.
It was merely the build up. It's a weird thing to have to contend with. It's not volatile like cancer is, but it's this weird-ass kind of surprise. We see a little growth in there! So during Tripping, I couldn't escape that feeling at all. I was nuts and pretty fatalistic. When my balance was real—before I had to go through all of these cortisone treatments—and my weight was better, I was pretty deeply into bicycle racing.
I can't do that anymore, but I still follow the sport. Now, it's pretty difficult to get on a bike and get into that position and maintain that. It puts pressure on my abdomen, which ends up in your shoulders and your head. I've had some releases lately, because I have been exercising. I bought one of these stupid Nordictrak machines that you put in your living room. I got all pumped up. My only outlets are music, the arts, reading, bicycle riding, the family—that's about it. I'm a big reader. And I really like old instruments.
I also really like going to garage sales and finding crappy old things and collecting them. You mentioned that you were very depressed even prior to the physical scenario revealing itself. Working with those guys wasn't a problem. The problem was that the business of the tour was set up so poorly that I landed in Germany only to then find out that the whole tour was billed as "The Windham Hill Guitars.
A lot of my audience couldn't possibly have been at those gigs based on the advertising. The people who did show up were kind of genre people who go to see the Windham Hill name. They're going to see some kind of laid back New Age or New Age-fusion kind of thing. That's not the correct place for me. And on top of that, I was already very depressed because I knew that something was going wrong. The tour was going to cost me money. I was in a terrible mood. And I decided in my bad mood—I was so pissed off—that I wasn't going to prepare anything.
I decided that I was just going to improvise the entire tour. So, I got to the tour, and realized on the very first gig that I was playing for German New Age yuppies. But even then I wasn't so stupid or angry that I didn't realize that I'd better do something to try to sit with them.
So, I spent the first 10 gigs trying to develop a set. I wasn't playing with those guys. Everybody was doing their own thing. Alex started first, Michael played second and I played third. I think the whole thing was at the end of January of ' I crashed somewhere between February 14th and 17th. The first gig that I played was with The Snakes, later that year after I did the record.
It was somewhere at the end of November at a festival in Hamburg. It was a total gas. I was freakin' out! It was a TV thing. I was still walking with a cane for my balance and depending on it pretty much. The gig was a real festival gig with a quick switch-over of bands. My super-sensitive weirdo gear was there and it was incredibly hot.
Onstage, television the lights are so hot. I kind of freaked out when we got to the gig. I was a little nervous, but I was okay. I got to the gig and went to Mark and Steve, and said "I don't know man. I don't know what I'm going to do about these lights. What if, you know, it's going to trigger a seizure? I'm going to get all fucked up in the middle of a set. Just take it really slow. Take it at your own pace. I kinda got weird right before we played—physically weird too.
So, we went to play and by the end of the set I felt great. It was a lot of stress, but it turned out fine. These days, the biggest challenge for me is the exhaustion and fatigue of travel. This is tied to flying on airplanes, which I have to do. Flights for me are never less than a minimum of three to five hours somewhere from here. So, you're talking about getting up super-early in the morning here, traveling to an international airport three hours away, hanging at the airport, then getting on a flight for six, seven or eight hours.
It usually takes me a couple of days to adjust, whether I'm going through time zones or not, because of changes in atmosphere pressure. It just takes me a while to come down from it. Usually, I'm fine the first day I arrive. But the second day, I have a real bad day with real bad headaches. That's pretty much my major tribulation for the physicality.
Are there any issues with dealing with the mix and monitors? I use the stage monitors. I'm starting to have a problem because I have to be at a particular place on stage. I have to be fully stage right, otherwise I can't tell what's going on at all. Everything has to face my left ear. The monitors have to be completely set up on my left also. Everything's gotta come from the left side. It's real good if I'm standing kind of sideways so I can see the band. There are some weird things that happen.
Most stages of the bigger clubs are not known for their high quality and clarity of sound. I sometimes think that it's half a step higher than it is. And it takes me awhile to adjust to that. I think "Oh my God, the guy's playing totally out of tune!
It happened in Polytown too—where I just couldn't make out one particular note that would stand out. I'd think "Man, the guy's like a fucking half-step high. That happens to me anywhere where the sound gets kind of weird and there are strange phase relationships in the bass. You know, like a lot of rooms where there's a standing wave. That's when a room is not designed well for sounds at certain volumes or not even designed for sound at all. You get pockets in a room where a frequency will actually build in intensity or just be completely out of phase with another range of frequencies.
A lot of times if you go to like a professional studio, for example, there's always some place behind the big monitors where you'll find a standing wave. If you listen to the music from there, you'll hear these low frequencies just kind of building and building up like a trap. And I seem to experience that certainly more than I ever did before.
My sensitivity to it is kinda heightened. And that can be kinda weird. It's usually for a couple of minutes at a time, then it's over. Mick was originally in the Cloud About Mercury band, but he didn't record with it. He did tour with me though. The star of the show for me at the very beginning was Mick, because I had been just absolutely blown away with his playing in Japan—just knocked out. Harmonically, the lines he was playing inside of music that would be considered pop was so in tune with music that I was writing.
We're really good friends. We did four tunes and it was great fun.
That got the record company all kind of weird about Polytown. They said "You've got to do this! This is the band! My relationship with Mick has turned into one of the great friendships of my life. I guess it was real obvious that there was great chemistry in that band. The original Cloud band with Mick, Bill, Mark and me had fantastic, fantastic chemistry. The other chemistry with Tony was pretty magical too. Cloud was certainly the seeding ground for everything that came afterwards. Mark started getting all of this filmwork—I was functionally spending half my time in L.
Mark found himself a record deal and decided to put a band together. He had played with Terry [Bozzio] in the past with Group Those gigs with Mark involved a pretty controlled set of playing a lot of film music—and playing to the film crowd. But there were two or three spots in the set where Terry and I kind of exploded.
And we started talking at that time and thinking "This is just fantastic! This needs to happen! This needs to be a band! From my side, the concept going into the recording was "Okay. Nobody knows anybody there. We have limited amounts of time in the studio—two weeks to record, one week to mix and nobody comes prepared. No preparation at all. It was "We write together. It's a real band. Everything is split evenly three ways. And that will be that. It was done by all of us, but I think that the focus for the work side of Polytown was me or me and Mick.
The artwork was skewed more towards Mick because the artists were in London. But I came and went a couple of times. They're really great people. Mick and I wanted snake skins and maps. And Stylorouge [the design studio behind the art] are really fantastic. They came up with 27 different packages. We sat at a table for the last time and rejected all of the packages, except for approving certain concepts. They worked real hard on the Tripping package too. But CMP basically changed the package without telling anyone at the last minute because they needed to get them out to the stores.
For his work, Torn received 6 consecutive Emmy award nominations as Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series and won the award once Torn was the only actor in the series who won an Emmy Award for his work. He is also known for his voice work and has done voice-overs for many animated films. Torn's character was reportedly killed off as a direct result of his arrest, [14] though Tina Fey denied this in a DVD commentary. His first marriage to actress Ann Wedgeworth lasted from to They had a daughter, Danae Torn. In , Torn married Geraldine Page , and they remained married until her death in They had a daughter, actress Angelica Page , and twin sons: Torn apparently delighted in the fact that the doorbell of their New York townhouse read Torn Page.
Torn married actress Amy Wright in They have two children, Katie and Claire Torn. On January 29, , he was arrested after breaking into a Litchfield Bancorp branch office in Lakeville, Connecticut , where he maintains a residence. He was charged with carrying a firearm without a permit, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, first-degree burglary, second-degree criminal trespassing and third-degree criminal mischief.
The Connecticut State Police said Torn broke into the bank thinking it was his home. As a condition of his release, Torn had to be evaluated for substance abuse. On August 11, , Torn was denied special probation, which would have allowed his name to be cleared of charges. The judge in the case cited Torn's history of alcohol abuse and the possession of a loaded weapon while intoxicated, which carries a minimum one-year sentence. Appearing as an interview subject in Studs Terkel 's oral-history book Working , Torn confessed, "I have certain flaws in my make-up.
I get angry easily. I get saddened by things easily. While filming Maidstone , Torn struck director and star Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer. The fight continued until it was broken up by cast and crew members. Although the scene may have been planned by Torn, the blood shed by both actors was real, [26] and Torn was reportedly outraged by Mailer's direction. According to Hopper, Torn was originally cast in the film but was replaced with Jack Nicholson after the incident.
Torn claimed in his lawsuit that Hopper pulled the knife on him. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately , especially if potentially libelous or harmful.
December Learn how and when to remove this template message. Texas Co-op Power Magazine. Retrieved 1 January The New York Times. Retrieved 2 September Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Archived from the original on The Life and Art of Terry Southern. Retrieved 23 October The Lives of Norman Mailer: Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. In other projects Wikimedia Commons. This page was last edited on 15 September , at