The Donaldson Correctional Facility houses 1,500 of Alabama’s most vicious criminals. In 2002, fed up with their crappy rehab programs, administrators allowed 36 prisoners to take an intense Vipassana meditation course, involving 10 days of complete silence and soul-searching. The remarkable results are captured in the doc The Dhamma Brothers, financed in part by
Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, whose life was changed by Vipassana. “What struck me was how similar my experience is in the meditation course to how it is for these criminals serving life sentences,” says Cuomo. “A few years ago, I might have felt a tremendous fear, and now I can walk into things feeling perfectly peaceful.” He relates to a statement in the movie by a convicted murderer named Grady Bankhead. “He said, ‘I’ve been on death row for eight years, and this 10-day course was harder,’” says Cuomo. “I can relate to that.”
* * * *
“I know I sound like a fucking cock right now,” says
Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill, “but this is the first time I’ve really been proud of myself, track for track.” After a grueling 2007 tour, and Caleb’s recent surgery to repair his arm after a fistfight with his brother Nathan (”Nathan won”), the Kings planned to take a well-deserved break. But when we called them, they were at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio wrapping up their fourth disc, out in September. Three days after his surgery, Caleb says he removed his arm from a sling and began writing: “I don’t know if it was the pills or what, but the melodies were so much stronger than anything I’ve ever done — it’s just really beautiful songs.” In addition to the pills, the band members say they drank all day to fuel songs like “Cold Desert” and “Crawl.” (In the latter, Caleb touches on politics: “Let’s just say that Sean Penn is gonna like us more,” he says.) “We had to get drunk because we all have girlfriends to go home to and deal with,” he says, before passing the phone to drummer Nathan, who adds, “Caleb just blew a .12 on the Breathalyzer we have here.”
* * * *
“It felt like a historic moment,” says Colin Meloy, whose band
the Decemberists warmed up a crowd of 75,000 at the recent Barack Obama rally in Portland, Oregon. “I watched him speak, and I have to say, looking out at the crowd, I was proud to be a Portlander.” The Decemberists first caught a glimpse of Obama at a speech in Milwaukee, on the day of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, and were blown away by his “off-the-cuff, subdued and reflective speech.” So they threw their hat in the ring. “We’re never the most appropriate band for an upbeat rally — inevitably there are a few dead babies in a Decemberists song,” says Meloy. “But we were happy to be involved.” He adds that the Obama camp even provided a festival-style stage next to the podium. “They made sure we could do our full show practically,” he says. “I think that says a lot about what we can expect from an Obama administration.” Seriously? “Totally.”
[Photo: Getty]
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- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.
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