Okay, so, I know that I said in my last post that we should all embrace the science and technology that enables the production and performance of popular music, that we should learn as much as we can about it. But just this past Sunday, I witnessed a different, but quite practical way to deal with technical difficulties in the live setting.
On Sunday night I was lucky enough to be at 1087's second (hopefully!?) annual Anti-Valentine's Day Riot Grrrl Cover Band Show. This is an event in which our favorite local hometown heroines from bands like Carnal Knowledge, Homewreckers, Each Other's Mothers, Death First, The Measure (SA) and more come together in various combinations to cover songs by grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, and others. This year the show branched out to include non-riot lady punk and rock by The Muffs, The Breeders, and....Stevie Nicks?
The second performer of the evening, "Stevie" (who I believe is known to most as Saiya, bass player for Scantron?) took on both vocal and bass duties, and was backed by an older woman with an acoustic guitar and an accordion. Between the off-color between song banter, "Stevie's" tilted platinum blonde wig, and the unlikely arrangement, it was difficult to read the performance's tone. It had nowhere near the focus and serious of a 'real' set of original songs, but it wasn't entirely comical, either. As the performers went through the set, there were times when it was hard to tell if they were intentionally being funny.
The other thing about the set is that "Stevie" and the band couldn't seem to get through an entire song without some sort of equipment failure. Broken strings, dead microphones, falling microphones -- if it could go wrong, it did. Perhaps the one song that didn't face this fate was "Edge of Seventeen", which they didn't actually play; instead they performed a dramatic reading of the lyrics. (This, of course, was a moment of deliberate, pre-meditated humor.)
I'll admit to being a serious Fleetwood Mac fan, as well as a fan of Stevie Nicks' solo work. So when they started "The Chain", I was both excited and bummed. Excited to hear one of my favorite songs, but bummed because I didn't expect them to make it to the end of the song, which is of course the best part.
Before "The Chain", as the show's organizers and the band were struggling to make adjustments to the sound and the equipment to keep everything running, "Stevie" made a bold announcement: "Okay, everything is broken," she admitted, "so you have to help us by singing along! Come on!"
Believe it or not, it worked. The audience participated enthusiastically during the first half of "The Chain", myself most definitely included. When the wheels started to sort of come off during the last rousing round of "I would never break the chain!", I frowned, thinking of that great bassline, and how we were so close to it, but how "Stevie" wouldn't even get to it. The song screeched to an awkward halt, and the audience waited, unsure of how to react. It felt like an entire minute of silence elapsed, as the band tried to right itself.
And then, "Stevie's" bass boomed back to life, with that fantastic bass line that ends "The Chain", that bass line that I would argue is perhaps one of the most important in the history of rock music, one that I myself have played many times for my own personal amusement. (I know from experience: it's not the hardest line to play technically, but it is a challenge to play it with the right mix of resentment, aggression, and general dissatisfaction.)
Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain", from their 1997 video The Dance, which I totally own and have watched many times. Skip to 3:35 for The Bass Line.
When "Stevie" came back with that solo, I let out the sort of cheer that deafens the people standing next to you, and when the entire band came back on, we all joined in for the final refrains of "The cha-ai-ain will keep us together!" It was something small, an entirely ephemeral moment which somehow seemed to capture the very meaning of the the evening, the show, the entire New York City grrrl underground. The band, with the help of the audience, channelled the spirit of doing it yourself, doing it together, and doing it whether or not you have the 'right' equipment, and whether or not you know exactly what you're doing.
For those twenty minutes, Stevie and her band took a lot of risks, put themselves out there, put up with lots of problems, and asked us to help them deal with it. And we did -- we didn't judge them, we didn't laugh at them, we didn't go out for a smoke or to get a drink at the Dominican convenience store across the street. Instead we laughed with them, cheered them on, and sang when it was appropriate. We even sang when it wasn't appropriate; the audience forced the band to make an unlikely segue from "Landslide" to "Go Your Own Way" when we started singing it before "Landslide" was quite over.
And I suppose that the moral of this story is that performances will always be rife with problems. Standing up there in front of an audience will always be a risk; there will always be a chance that your equipment might malfunction, or that you'll just forget what you're doing. But "Stevie Nicks" and co. demonstrated, much to my delight, that there's no technical difficulty that can't be overcome by a willing, persevering band, and an even-more willing, present, participating audience.
So you're breaking up. Bummer. Mika Miko did some fine work, and made a real contribution to music with your arty, spazzy, lady-powered party punk. And even though I'm not completely familiar with everything you've done, I was sad to read on girlfriendisahomo that you're hanging it up.
But break ups aren't the end of the world; sometimes they're even necessary. I'm a musician, I've played with other people, I get it. If you need to move on to new things, I can accept that and be supportive. I read in the L.A. Times music blog that you kids will be occupied with "returns to school, new projects, jobs, and relationships".
Hmmm. Returns to school. Maybe I've been at this whole university thing for too long, but this worries me. It's a bit ironic that I'm concerned that some of you might be going back to school, and here's why: when I was in junior high, a girl at school tried to get me into Bikini Kill, but I just wasn't having it (don't worry, I came around a few years later), partly because of Tobi Vail's ideas about "school". On some ancient website that I can't find now, Tobi encouraged her young female readers to drop out of school and start bands because college can wait and you should do what you want. I was kind of horrified by this, and I even wrote her an e-mail, asking if it was maybe irresponsible for her to say something like that. Never got a reply.
Tobi's advice bothered me because it struck me as real Anglo middle class bullshit. Such people can afford to go to college, and they can also afford not to go. Frequently, they can get by on privilege where the rest of us need real credentials. I come from a large family of working class Italian Americans and Puerto Rican migrants, a family that saw an education as the most important means of upward mobility. Tobi Vail's suggestion that I abandon that vehicle, and disappoint my family, was unthinkable to me.
All these years later, I stand by my assessment of Tobi's ideas. But now I've been in university for almost a decade, and I understand what she meant. It might have sounded color (and class) blind, but Tobi was asking us to drop out of The Establishment, because that's what school is. School is the lay term for Academia, and Academia, I've come to realize, is pretty much patriarchy in its undiluted form. The way it's organized, the way it's run, the way it's funded: all of it is based on serving the needs of the mens. And that means hard times not only for the ladies but for people of color, people from lower tax brackets, people who sleep with people of the same sex, and pretty much anyone else who deviates from 'the norm'.
I could be wrong, but I don't think any of that could possibly appeal to any of you. You're too good for that! To be succinct, I'm afraid you kids might just be too cool for school.
But you know what? I had to figure out school and what it's really about on my own, and you probably do too. It was part of my 'process', and if some of you need to take this academic journey, to a bachelor's degree or beyond, well, who am I to try and stop you? Because it's not that I want to keep you from going to school. Really, for all my bitching, a lot of my experiences at grad school have been really rewarding.
What I want is to spare you the pain of realizing how brutal and disappointing school can be. Learning stuff and meeting new people, that's great, but there's a lot more to school than that. School usually also comes with arbitrary and ridiculous policies, useless administrators, reams of paperwork, and overwhelming expenses. It can be rough, and it can batter your belief system, and your understanding of yourself.
So I guess what I'm really saying, Jessie, Jenna, Seth, Jennifer, and Michelle, is this: go to school, but don't forget who you are. Don't forget what you learned together, as a band, and what you produced as Mika Miko, or the kids you reached at the shows you played, because that's real and meaningful in way that all the papers and exams and degrees in the world will never be. Go to school, but don't let it break you.
In celebration of having made it through my first term of school as an instructor/"professor", I present this surprisingly good video of Pretty Girls Make Graves performing "Selling the Wind".
It's hard to believe, but two years ago yesterday I saw PGMG on their farewell tour. They announced their breakup just a few months after my other two favorite bands, Sleater-Kinney and Rainer Maria, announced their breakups. As you can guess, it was a rough year.
That spring I finished my MA, and I had been accepted by my program to stay for my Ph.D. I didn't know exactly what I was doing, or even I wanted to be doing that; I just knew that three more years of school would give me enough time to figure out what to do next. This probably isn't the best reason to get a doctorate degree, and I wouldn't recommend that anyone else use a graduate program that way.
I still don't know exactly what I'm doing, though I have a much better idea of it two years later, but I can say this: spring comes again, and it might seem obvious, but it's easy to forget when you're bogged down in winter for so long. The members of Sleater-Kinney, Rainer Maria, and Pretty Girls Make Graves have all moved on to new bands and projects, which will soon result in new cds. But for now, listen to "Selling the Wind" on this hump day, and celebrate this seasons and all the seasons before, no matter how turbulent they might have been.
