He can’t write so much as punk

I’ve not written here in a while - probably the worst opening to a blog post ever, up there with quoting Jim Anchower’s Onion columns - but I decided to do so again after reading a book I didn’t like about a record I did like. I’m not naming names here because naming names seems like a jerk move given that I have nothing constructive or interesting to say, just that the book felt kind of light on content - so I learned little, if anything, from the author - and the prose wasn’t very compelling either. (I was in a band once that got a review sort of like that, they said we sounded like really bad Crimpshrine, which we were annoyed about but also were like ‘oh cool we sound like Crimpshrine.’ It just seems to me you don’t write bad reviews unless there’s a pay off. This isn’t quite the Thumper principle, really Thumper’s father’s principle, because sometimes it’s worth being negative but my point is that it should be worthwhile to do so, otherwise don’t bother. Anyway.) It occurred to me that this uninspiring book was basically just sort of like a blog post, in the dismissive sense of ‘merely blogging’, which may be a 21st century analog to the remarks by, I think, Truman Capote about, I think, Jack Kerouac that the latter wasn’t so much writing as he was just typing. I for one dislike this dismissive sense but also love it when it’s flipped and self-applied: I’m not writing, or rather, I’m not Writing, I’m just typing, merely blogging, hence I am free of expectations and can say what I like how I like, or at least more so. It’s like, I’m not Giving A Speech, we’re just having a conversation. And so I thought, hey I could do this. Thus the uninspiring book that was basically just sort of like a blog post became, by virtue of not being Writing, in its own way inspiring. I wonder if there’s a word for that. If not, maybe we could call it nonspiration. I’m still not gonna say what it was though. Get your own nonspiration, the source of mine reamains filed under Bees Wax, Yours, None Of.

I was sorta similarly inspired by my first real punk show, not in the sense of feeling like something was lackluster, far from it, I loved that show, but in the sense of feeling suddenly authorized creatively because the show provided a way for doing creative stuff to stop being an Uppercase Big Deal. The show was in the back of a record store when I was sixteen. I’d only been to Concerts before that. It seems like lots of people in the crowd knew the words to the songs by the second band, which felt like a Concert where I wasn’t Cool. Then the third band got on stage and the singer turned out to have been one of those people in the crowd, one who had been standing right next to me, and he wasn’t Cool, just like merely cool, just like a regular kid who was cool. The bands also played on the floor, no stage. If I remember right the area where the band played was actually in a recessed (depressed?) area that was like 3 or 6 inches lower than the rest of the room. After the 4th band played I bought records from all the bands. In my memory I bought all of them that night though I think I’m remembering wrong because I wouldn’t have had that much cash on me, and I know I drove back to the record store another time to get seven inches from each of the bands, so who knows. What I know for sure is that I came home and desperately wanted to start a band. I mean, the show was so much fucking fun, I loved the music so much and I loved being there with friends, and seeing other people who were there and feeling like I was in one something cool but not Cool, and in a way it was about shrugging off all the dumb shit about being Cool because we were all too smugly above it all (in retrospect well over 20 [!] years later I see that there are elements of uppercasification, of cool becoming Cool woven into this, stuff I would later get annoyed by as developed mixed feelings about punk, an ambivalence that would also sometimes turn over into being Too Punk for punk), but the deeper feeling was that someone like me, cooler than me but not way cooler than me (someone who was not, unlike Rock Stars, in a totally other category from me, in the way that I’ve been trying to mark by upper case letters) was capable of making things worth doing sharing, not just privately and individually fucking around in a way that involved no other people. (So Capote was wrong in that Kerouac wasn’t just typing, he was typing and sharing it. I’m feeling pretty smugly fucking Uppercase just now, by the way, dropping some Literary Allusions and shit, though I should say I’ve never read Capote.)

That capability unfolded into a provocation, a demand, ‘a kid like me could make music, I could make music’ became ‘why am I not making music, why have I not started making music?’ In a sense, it sort of became an Uppercase Big Deal to not make music. (Oh, the bands, the main two bands were Tricky Dick and Slapstick [the first band was called Suckatash and the headliner was the Suicide Machines, and I liked them both too but the holy shit moment came from the second and third bands], some members of whom later ended up in the Broadways and later the Lawrence Arms, a band I have a tattoo for and many, many cherished memories of seeing perform live and occasionally drunkenly talking shit with some of the members after shows.) Same thing happened to me with zines and writing though I’m not going to get into that here.

All this came after two or three years of getting into lots of new records too. That moment at that first punk show was the most intense moment I remember that feeling, and having it about live performance, but I had it about some recordings too. I remember especially being affected by The Germs, for one. The production values on the recordings on the Germ anthology affected me like standing next to Brendan Kelly (the singer guy who I hadn’t known was the singer guy when he had been just some kid standing next to me watching the same band as me) did at the show. The recording on the early Germs stuff was really garbage. It sounded like when a friend and I would record ourselves into my shitty old boombox. We played back the tape of ourselves and were like ‘fuuuuck dude we sound the Germs oh my god we’re so punk we’re so good let’s make up some more shit!’

That turned into a band that played one show. It was really fun. Loud, weird, made basically no sense musically, but it was the first time I experienced the feeling of playing music, music that I had helped make up, in real time with other people. Part of that feeling of, also part of the feeling of a really good show with a really good crowd, is of being in sync in time with other people who are acting together. In a way it’s a bit like a real version of the thing that some free marketeers fantasize about happening through the market, coordination of individuals all doing their thing individually in a way that generates a larger and virtuous order (with the market the state provides a key role in whatever order does exist, and the band provides that role for the crowd, though there are feedback loops and shit, both literal and metaphorical and anyway fuck this analogy and digression). It’s its own thing really, which is part of why I’m reaching for analogies, because the uniqueness makes it hard to describe. Maybe dancers have this experience, I dunno. Anyway, it was this amazing feeling of connection with other people, playing together, being in synch together and responding to each other, playing off each other - our shit was bad, to be clear, I wouldn’t buy a record today from a band that sounded like this (though I would totally clap and cheer for some young kids trying like we tried), and part of made it bad is what made it fun, because we were disorganized and amateurish enough that some of ended up improvised, bits of it deliberately and bits of it accidentally when one of us would get lost and would flail around until not lost anymore. That was cool too though because it was part of the playing off each other - as long as only person got lost at a time it was like ‘damn dude I got lost but then you guys found me’, another way to feel connected, and sometimes, very rarely to be sure, in that process of getting found one of us would find some new cool shit and then it’d be come a noise to make on purpose, a part to try to deliberately play again next time.

I was later in a much better band with someone who was a much better musician and I learned most of my at best moderate knowledge of playing music as a result. We made a seven inch and played what felt like a lot of shows for a year or three or so and looking back it was super, super awesome. I didn’t always appreciate it all at the time and I didn’t always deal maturely with the frustrations I would feel, and I’ve regretted that, though looking back now I had a bunch of heavy shit in my life including basically teaching myself how to be a young adult without much positive guidance while also sorting out a lot of garbage from earlier in my life, and none of that was a condition that set me up to succeed. After that I was in another band where I wrote most of our stuff. We played a few shows that were fun and recorded a really badly recorded record and it felt I was getting better creatively, or at least changing and developing and that was exciting, and I totally didn’t handle the interpersonal friction at all well. During all of these times I would also make noise with various people, that’s how I thought of it, making noise with instruments, merely typing not Writing, because that helped me dial down my nerves.

Thinking of it now I think aspects of recording and playing, to the ultimately minimal degree I did either, sort of uppercased Music for me in ways that amped up my nerves. Bits of that were fun and manageable in that I could feed off it and sort of act out a big personality while performing - I feel funny saying this but people would tell me I had good stage presence and that we were good performers - but it also made it all feel like an Uppercase Big Deal in ways that turned up the volume on my insecurities and on the irritation that went with the frictions, frictions that now seem really normal and appropriate. This was all when I was in college and a kid.

After college I got Serious about Politics and about having a job that Mattered and I mostly stopped playing music other than fiddling around on my own or occasionally with another friend, because playing music was just playing and wasn’t a Meaningful Contribution to What Really Matters. Laptop computers and laptop-based primitive home recording technology became a thing, or at least became a thing to me, in this time, so I was able to share bits of that goofing around and able to do some of that audio goofing directly on the computer. Some of that goofing around making noise was really fun and approximated toward the feelings of connection I’d previously had, especially when it was goofing involving other people in the music making, but only approximately. Now all my shit is broken down and I have kids and a busy job and not much money so I dunno when I’ll get around to getting any of it fixed. I have recorded some shit with a guitar and occasionally a bass, (part of what I’ve been doing is working on improving at single note picking because I pretty much always just played power chords for like 20 years and in the last year or two I was like damn for as long as I have played this instrument I should be better at doing more things with it), running the instruments into my laptop just playing the electric instruments unplugged using the laptop mic then adding distortion afterward on the computer so it picks up all the ambient noise in my house and the mic hiss and stuff. It sounds sort of like the recording quality on some Teengenerate records or that old Germs anthology and I feel like that recording quality is appropriate to what I’m trying to play. I’m not quite saying fuuuuck dude I sound the Germs oh my god so punk so good I’ma make up some more shit, but I genuinely like the low quality-ness of the audio quality. I have days where I feel regretful like it was a mistake not playing in more bands and really heavily downgrading the role of playing music in my life and where I really, really want to start a new band but I feel like I’m never going to get to do that again. That could all be true and that’s a thought that hurts. I like my life and I’m glad I’m where I’m at (even though I do sometimes wish I hadn’t taken the slow scenic route quite so much) so even if that is true, I’m okay with that, or at least okay enough with it, and anyways it doesn’t have to be true. I could eventually get my shit fixed up, practice more, be in a band again, play some covers, write a few originals, make noise with others and be in synch in time with people. I’d like that. Either way it’s not an Uppercase Big Deal. Maybe it is once in a great while, but only when I’m depleted by other aspects of my life, and only ever temporarily.

All of this above, my life so far as an intermittent noisemaker, has also been closely tied to what I was listening to at the time and what I was (or wasn’t) going to see live. I listen to way less new music and basically don’t go to shows anymore (I think I’ve been to two in the last two years or maybe five years), but that will change eventually too, as my kids get older and all the genuinely Uppercase Big Deal shit in my life eases up (because it looks like it will eventually do so, the line on the graph appears to slope upward). One of the changes I’m still adjusting to, learning how these clothes fit and how they feel, so to speak, is that it takes more conscious effort now to know about music and pay attention to it. I used to be able to keep plugged in through activities that felt automatic. I mean, I bought music magazines and fanzines and I grabbed flyers and I read events calendars in indie papers and stuff, but I did it without a lot of self-awareness or deliberation, I was mostly just absorbed into loving music and going to shows and buying records, and I knew enough people who did the same that we’d remind each other and tip each other off to stuff, and none of it felt like effort. Now it’s something I really have to make an effort to do and it feels like effort, and I feel unsure about how to steer my listening in a way that I haven’t felt since the very first times I was hearing punk records lying on a friend’s bedroom floor (‘dude you just gotta hear this Bad Religion band’ ‘whoa cool band name’) and exchanging tapes with friends (‘remember that Jawbreaker band that we saw open for Nirvana? I just got their record in the mail, I taped it for you’ ‘that’s awesome, I just got one by this band Green Day, they played a track off it on the new music show on the radio the other night, I taped it for you’) at a time when with those particular friends, and at that particular early teen age, I wasn’t totally sure of those friendships or my ability to make friends.

I steered through it then though and I’m more capable now, and it’s frankly way lower stakes now. To be honest I do kind of do care a little (and, to be totally honest, the kind of little that feels like a lot, like having a small sharp rock in your shoe) about not being punk anymore, but like, I’m a good husband and I’m a great dad, and everything else is so much smaller than that, and of course there are other things I’m good at and get a sense of self from too, so whatever. The volume knob on my nervousness about not being Punk Enough and on analogous nerves relative to other genres and milieus is so much lower now than when I was a kid and it was cranked up to eleven. I can’t think of an ending for this post but fuck it, I’m only blogging. Up yours, Capote, you’re not punk and I’m telling everyone.