THE GODDESS AND THE SITAR by Greg Vaughan

Zaghareet Magazine - Jan/Feb 2011

“There is no such thing as chance. And what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.” Friedrich von Schiller

While writing my last article The Eastern Road I found myself thinking “How in the world did I go from wanting to be a guitar hero to writing for a bellydance magazine?” In tracing my journey I made several magical discoveries. But more than anything else, I realized that everything comes back to a goddess, I always follow my muse, and I always listen to the gypsy.

In the summer of 2000 I popped into a store called Mark’s Guitar Exchange in San Diego, CA to say hello to the manager Rick. After chatting with him for a bit, I asked to play a weird green instrument hanging on the wall behind him. It was a Jerry Jones Baby Sitar. When I heard the sound, I was totally mesmerized. I started playing my song “My Serpent Kiss.” It was the coolest thing I had ever heard. I immediately thought “Well obviously I have been writing songs on guitar, that should be played on an electric sitar. This is my destiny, but now is not the time.” I played for about 15 minutes, then gave it back to Rick and said “I’m going to buy one of those someday, it’s going to make me famous.” I decided to try and put it out of my mind and simply wait for a sign from my muse that it was time to get one and start my new life.

In March of 2005 I played in a contest called “Guitarmaggedon.” Guitarists start by competing at a Guitar Center in their hometown. Then after 5 rounds of competition a National Champion is crowned. (It is now called King Of The Blues.) I did not want to enter, but after watching the finals in 2004 my student Donald Stewart had promised me that if I entered in 2005 I would easily win the San Diego Finals. I guaranteed him I would not even get past the first round. He dared me to prove it. So I agreed to enter, and said that if I won I would take him to a concert. On Tuesday March 15^th, 2005 at 2 PM I went to see Fred Morrotta at the Repair Zone and picked up my new custom Sacred String guitar. He had been building it for 14 months. I now had the ultimate machine that would allow me to become one of the most famous metal guitarists in the world. Just like my heroes Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Brian May, and Uli Jon Roth, I now had a guitar of my own design. I played it that night at 7pm and won first place in what was the third week of Guitarmageddon semifinals. I was stunned. On Tuesday March 22^nd I returned to Guitar Center with my army of friends and students wearing “Way Of The Sacred String” T-shirts. I played my crazy guitar solo again, as did the other 5 finalists. They announced the second place guitarist. Then with much buildup and hype I heard “First place, Greg Vaughan!” So Donald was right, I was wrong. I guess sometimes it’s good to listen to outside perspectives. (Or simply believe in yourself.) That night after winning I took Donald to see Motley Crue on their Carnival Of Sins Tour.

The next round of the national competition was in Cerritos, CA. As awkward as I felt about the contest, I figured there must be some cosmic reason I was supposed to go. I got to the Guitar Center 2 hours before the event, and decided to go to a nearby mall to kill time with my cheering section Hal and Heather Deranek. The last stop we made was a garden store. Upon walking in I was hypnotized by a statue on the floor to my right. It looked like an Indian women playing what I thought was a single stringed Sitar. The store employee could not tell me anything useful about it. But I felt her power, whomever she was. I wanted to buy it but did not have the money at the time. So I took a card and tried to mentally switch gears to macho guitar guy. I did not end up winning that day. All of us metal shredders canceled each other out and a jazz guy won. I didn’t mind. I had a goddess serenading my soul. Finding her seemed to be the reason for my trip.

I called the store a week later to buy the statue but they had sold it. That was their last one, and the owner had no idea where to get more. I was devastated. For weeks I looked online trying every search I could think of to find her. “White goddess statue”, “Indian sitar lady”, “sitar goddess statue”, etc…nothing worked. I could not get her image out of my mind. One day I had a moment of clarity, “I can’t stop thinking about an image of an Indian woman playing a Sitar. Maybe this is the sign, I need to go buy a Baby Sitar!” On Thurs May 20^th I went back to Marc’s and was delighted to find that they still had a green Baby Sitar there. I played it for 5 minutes and felt the same magic. I had to have it, the future was happening. I brought it home, and in the first 30 minutes wrote the music and lyrics for the song “Energy.” I was on fire! The next day I recorded the vocals and sitar parts for the song. I also recorded a drum part that I could use as a backing track to get a fuller sound when I performed the song live.

On Friday May 28^th I played a show at Twiggs Coffeeshop in Downtown San Diego. I had been bribed into playing for free by my singer/pianist friend Marie Haddad. She told me that if I opened for her she would take me to a bellydancer party afterward. Now you could probably get me to go into a cave and battle a dragon if you told me it was guarding bellydancers, so that’s not even fair. “Damnit Marie!” I was extremely busy, but powerless against her evil tricks, so I agreed to do the show. My parents were among the small crowd as was my good friend Casey Connors. I played 8 songs on guitar. Then for my last song I took out my new Baby Sitar and played “Energy” along with the CD backing track. Everyone loved it. “That was a successful first step,” I thought.

After the show Casey and I followed Marie a short distance to the party. There were probably about 75 people packed into a loft apartment. Marie quickly found one of the hosts, Leilainia Penix, introduced me, and walked off. Leilainia was very engaging, very focused, and very intense. In the first five minutes she had already learned quite a bit about me. She then asked, “Let me get this straight, you sing, have hundreds of original songs, run a guitar school that uses Kung Fu principles, won a guitar contest in San Diego, and just played a show with your new electric sitar?” I slowly responded “Yes?” She took a deep breath, grabbed my right shoulder, looked me in the eye and said “Listen to me very closely, you are my sitar player. You don’t work with other bellydancers unless I say you can. You are going to put on shows with my husband Gabriel, and my sister is going to move out from Texas so we can have a dance troupe. We are all going to be famous.” I leaned back and turned my head with a look that I’m sure let her know I thought she was crazy. I looked around and realized I was surrounded by bellydancers. The adventure that is my life had dropped me into a swirling vortex of inspiration. There were probably a dozen women shimmying in a circle around Leilainia and I as we spoke. As if on cue from her host, one of the girls winked at me. My gypsy was speaking to me, so I decided to pay attention. Maybe I should take this girl seriously. I came out of my trance, looked back at Leilainia and said “Ok.”

“The rest is history” as they say. The evolution and exploits of Danyavaad and the Shimmy Sisters have been written about many times (see last issue of Zaghareet) and are available on our website www.danyavaad.com, so I will continue with my process of discovery. In the first week of August 2010, as I was going over all these details, I found that everything seemed to go back to that alluring goddess statue. I had always neglected to tell that part of the story when explaining how our group came together. But her impact on me had set this whole journey in motion. At a time when I was very focused on being competitive and playing aggressive music the goddess had sent a messenger to redirect my path. After not having thought about her in years, I started to think about her everyday. I also realized, “This article would have a much better ending if she came back to me. I have to solve the mystery.”

On Tuesday August 10^th I awoke at about 11 AM (I am a guitarist remember) and went to start my day as I do every morning - by opening my front door, stepping out onto my porch, looking at my Japanese Torii Gate and Chinese Foo Dogs, and giving thanks that I have achieved my teenage dream of owning a home whose entryway looks like a temple. (I watched lots of Kung Fu movies as a kid.)

I was horrified to see that one of my foo dogs was missing. The female was gone! I collapsed onto my front steps and took a few deep breaths. My foo dogs had been stolen before. I used to have 13 inch versions. They had been secured to the porch with what was supposed to be powerful glue. One morning while performing my ritual I looked at them and thought “I really do need to get some bigger foo dogs. These are not obvious enough.” A week after I thought that, someone stole them. I was not angry at all. “Well, I wanted bigger ones anyway.” People had often complained that finding “The Temple” was not as easy as I had described. So I bought 18 inch foo dogs. I had my wonderful friend Jason Chase, who had also built my Torii Gate, insert giant bolts into the bottoms of the foo dogs that also then went several inches into the concrete. But there was no visible deterrent to taking them. The thief had probably struggled to remove it until the top broke off from the base. At that point they realized it was impossible, so the other one remained untouched.

I went about my day of teaching guitar lessons and tried not to dwell on the loss of my menacing female guardian and the baby foo dog she was protecting under her paw. (The male is smiling and playing with a ball.) Despite my attempt at detachment, I was reminded by all of my students asking “What happened to your foo dog?” I try to make the energy of my home part of my teaching experience, and now my day felt tainted by having to explain to several children that sometimes people steal. At 10:30pm I got a call from my friends Zoe and Zeph, who have a dark cabaret band called The Tragic Tantrum. They wanted to know if they could come over and get my input on the mixes for the 11 songs from their upcoming album. I said I was available but warned them I was in a bad mood because of the robbery, and Zeph jokingly suggested I get metal foo dogs.

My house was a mess as I had been touring for months. There was equipment and costumes everywhere, and I needed to clean up before they came over. Before starting, I searched online for giant metal foo dogs, and nothing came up. There did seem to be brass ones, but they were extremely expensive. I realized I needed to focus on the present, so I logged off and began cleaning. 15 Minutes later, in my bedroom, with an armful of clothes and microphone cords, I threw everything down, raised my arms and cried out “Ok Goddess, why has this happened? What possible good can come out of being robbed - for a second time?” In my anger I stomped back into my studio, logged on again, and did a search for “giant foo dogs.” The first site that popped up was designtoscano.com. I immediately saw some awesome 30 inch foo dogs that are replicas of the ones in the Forbidden City in China. I wondered what other cool things they had on the site. I started to innocently browse through the sculptures and then BAM! There she was! My Goddess! A wave of emotion came over me.

Here name was Mirabai. She was an Indian saint, and was playing a single stringed instrument used in Hindu devotional music called an ektar. No wonder I could not find her years earlier, I was using the wrong keywords in my search. She was not technically a goddess, but she was divine to me. She looked serene. I wanted to order it immediately but they were back ordered till Sept 3^rd. So I printed out the image. If I had to wait a month, I still wanted to be able to gaze upon her every day. I then did an internet search on Mirabai to learn more about her. I found an article called “Mirabai and Radha: The Twin Souls Of Krishna.” At the beginning of the article was this poem by Mirabai –

Guide this little boat over the waters, what can I give you for fare?
Our mutable world holds nothing but grief, bear me away from it.
Eight bonds of karma have gripped me,
the whole of creation swirls through eight million wombs,
through eight million birth-forms we flicker.
Mira cries. Dark One take this little boat to the far shore,
put an end to coming and going

At this point I almost passed out. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I thought. I had been working on a song called “A Boat Across The Water” for over a year. The idea had come to me on tour in March 2009 while taking a break at a river near Sedona, Arizona. I was writing from the perspective of a dark lord/wizard who is offering help to a woman who is seeking spiritual guidance and sensual transcendence. At this point I truly felt like I was in a movie. That is my barometer for epic moments in my life, when it is so overwhelming and cosmic it seems scripted. Just then my front door opened and in walked my guests. “Greetings Wizard, we have arrived,” Zoe chirped. “Aaaah…just make yourself at home for a few minutes. I’m having a religious experience!” I excitedly shouted back. “Ok” Zoe replied, totally unfazed. (She knows me well.) I continued to read and learned that Mirabai was born into a royal family in Rajasthan, India in 1498. She saw a statue of Krishna at the age of 3. She was so inspired that she ended up devoting her life to composing and performing erotic love poems for him. Some believe that in 1546 she walked into Krishna’s temple at Dwarka in Gujarat while singing in a state of ecstacy. After she entered the temple doors closed on their own, and upon reopening her sari was found wrapped around the statue of her idol. Mirabai had disappeared.

It was almost too much to process. Had this women’s spirit been guiding my life? Is it her energy I feel when writing songs? Is she my muse? I often try to imagine that I’m singing to an extremely passionate woman when composing. Mirabai seems to have been the archtype of a devoted fan, she is my target audience, and I want to feel that fire. It is a circle of love. Her life was inspired by a statue, as was mine. That is the power of art. That is the power of passion. And so because of her influence, I find myself traveling the country making music for bellydancers with my baby sitar.

I seek a union with every dancer I work with. The stronger my connection to the dancer, the more inspired I feel, and the better I play. If I can get on the same frequency as the dancer, communication is greatly enhanced. It seems like a psychic bond where each performer knows what the other is about to do. That is being in the moment, with pure unfiltered creativity. When I perform with a bellydancer, my musical phrasing becomes much more nuanced and sensual. I just try to open myself up and channel the dancers essence through my instrument. I even feel this connection with snakes. When I play the extended sitar solo in my song “My Serpent Kiss,” I am feeding off the energy of our snakes Masoko and Queztal. Without them I absolutely cannot play the same. It is in the fusion of our two worlds, the musician and the serpent, where the art takes place.

I don’t spend as much time as I used to imagining what it would be like to jam with all of my guitar heroes. Now I fantasize about working with various bellydancers. In my mind, my muse has always been a gypsy woman with twirling skirts, long flowing hair, enchanting eyes, a devilish smile, and a mystic aura that says she can read my every thought. I have seen that image since I was a child. When I lived near the cliffs in Ocean Beach, CA I used to go exploring on the cliffs at midnight. I would find a nice spot, then stare out at the waves and wait for my gypsy to appear over the water. Only when I saw her would my lyrics flow, and a new song would be born. Now I see every bellydancer as a manifestation of that energy. The goddess is right there with me on stage. All I have to do is be ready to receive her message, and I can play like I never have before. If I devote my time to making bellydancers feel inspired through my music, I will be surrounded by happy bellydancers. And that is my idea of heaven. So if you are also seeking bliss, then I am ready to play when you are.

Who wants to be my muse? Let’s have some fun!

The Wizard