Aiming for a Broader Vision

David Lindley--target-shooting champion?

Actually, the multi-instrumentalist world-music aficionado finds shooting competitions to be just another type of meeting of cultures. Certainly there aren’t many other longhaired anti-nuke protesters in the bunch.

“I stand out a little bit,” Lindley said, “but people are used to me now. You learn to understand a little bit more about how everybody else lives. There’s a tendency to become insulated when you’re a pop star-musician-rock star thing, and you only associate with that kind of people.

“You get a little tunnel vision, thinking there’s only one way to look at something. You never meet the people who work in the lumber industry in Oregon. I’ve met a lot of those people now. I still disagree with most of what they say; however, you hang out with them and everybody’s tolerant.

“Pretty much like the musicians I hang out with, these people have their prejudices and weirdnesses. But that’s just like their outer layer of spray paint; you can also see that there’s a kind of core to everybody, and it’s a core that’s pretty good and incorruptible when you’re doing something like that, that takes the level of involvement that target shooting does.”

To Lindley, target shooting--he could never shoot a living creature, he says--is a sort of Zen thing, albeit a loud Zen thing.

“It sounds kind of silly, but you have to go into theta state to do it. You have to breathe right and slow your heartbeat down. I found I could do it real easily. It has nothing to do with the music business part of it, but it does have to do with the concentration you have to have when you play. In fact, when I get through with one of these matches, my playing really improves. You use circuits doing one thing that open up little channels in the other thing.”