Dave Arntsen is all grown-up, but feels like a baby.

Oh, he’s a full-fledged adult, no doubt about it: hard-working litigation attorney, responsible father of five, devoted husband of nineteen years. But Dave Arntsen’s experience at Camp MMW reduced the 6-foot-something New Yorker to a spiritual infant—soft-skinned, eager to learn, immensely vulnerable, and always a breath away from either crying or grinning.

This sensation of being a baby hit Dave hardest during John Medeski’s Thursday master class on music and the collective unconscious.

“I left that class in tears,” Dave told me, when I got a chance to speak with him about two weeks after camp. “I took me literally an hour and a half of walking by the brook and hearing the dirt under my feet—you know, listening to everything as Medeski had taught us—[to regain my composure].”

Medeski’s class was the pinnacle of his experience at camp, Dave says. He’ll never forget the moment toward the end of the class, when Medeski asked everyone to close their eyes, and you could the wind in the trees and hear the roof expanding and contracting…and then into that beautiful peacefulness, John began to introduce a few new sounds—the sruti box, the melodica….
“At a certain point, part of the music shifted,” Dave remembers. “It went from something a little discordant to a brief passage of something very pretty, melodic, moody. Johnny Sneed was sitting behind me, and I heard Johnny gutterally go, Uhhh…, a totally visceral response. And I just started crying. It was such an epiphany for me.”

He’d had plenty of similar moments of sudden enlightenment throughout the week. Dave says he remembers arriving and feeling this tremendous urge to jam, to get in there with the guys in the café and play…and then for a moment being a little irritated by how it was turning out, with some of the younger campers constantly putting themselves front and center.

“But then I realized, for some of these young guys, this may be their first opportunity to play with other people in this kind of situation. When I realized that, it became all good. And I also realized, I’ve got a lot to learn from these guys, too.”

Dave’s pre-camp expectations were pretty modest. He wanted at a minimum to come back home as a better bass player, and to bring his band some new ideas for rehearsing and composing.

But the effect of the experience has been a lot deeper and broader than anticipated. Although he’s been basically a “rock guy" for decades, and a pop-oriented singer-songwriter, Dave came away from camp saying he doesn’t care if he ever gets to perform again—he really just wants to compose. “Now I totally see a connection between some of the pretty structured melodic ideas I like to rely on when I compose a song, and the completely random and the cataclysmic way” that MMW invents music on the spot, he says.

The changes taking place inside him were immediately obvious the first time Dave got together to play with other people after camp. One evening his very talented, high-caliber band-mates got together to hang out and drink a little and play—it was Dave and one of his best friends, a fantastic guitar player, along with a drummer and another blues guitar player. Someone picked up an acoustic bass and started playing it, and Dave (perhaps thinking back to all the drum circles Billy had spawned with his stridulations exercises) was inspired to start banging on the aluminum Budweiser bottle in his hand. Then he picked up a stack of poker chips and started beating a nice little percussion pattern on the table. “My buddies were laughing at first, but one guy was looking at me and seeing it. He kept saying, ‘You guys, look. Dave’s not laughing. Dave’s not laughing.’ And it’s true, I wasn’t laughing, I was trying to get into it. And then everyone started to get into it, started to feel it.”

Eventually the laughter petered out and everyone really started improvising. “This is real for me now,” Dave says. “I used to watch MMW when they did their thing, and I couldn’t always connect to it. I always respected it, but now I understand it from the inside.”

That’s not to say the process has been demystified for Dave—far from it. If anything, he says, he’s even more in awe of the depth and spirituality and freshness possible in this music. “That’s why I say, I feel like a baby.”

I asked Dave whether he had any thoughts about returning to Camp MMW next year, and he had some fascinating things to say. First of all, he says he wonders whether the trio will even want to have the same campers back. He thinks it’s entirely possible that John, Billy, and Chris will deliberately hunt for a whole new crop of musicians with whom they can share their skills and vision.

But beyond that, Dave says, he feels almost as if he’s been initiated into something of a religious experience…that he was among the lucky seventy-six people disciples first invited into the temple.

And so now, what’s his job, his mission? Is it to return again and again, year after year, trying to do the impossible, i.e., recreate that amazing first-time-ever experience? No, Dave says. Although the baby in him may want to stay young forever, the grown-up in him knows that you can never go backward in life, only forward.

So it’s his mission now to go out and spread the word. Spread the music.