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When The Music's Over,Turn Out The Lights
for release 02-26-07
Washington DC
One night several years ago, my band was performing at Club Dada in Dallas when I ran into an old high-school buddy whose band was on the bill with us that night. We were both pushing 50 at the time and both of us had been playing music since we were in our teens.
During a break we were sitting at a table nursing our tonics and gins. He said to me, "Lightning Rod, when we were coming up, it was something special to be a musician. Now there are three garage bands on every block in the suburbs. Any teen-aged kid whose parents can afford a Korean knock-off Stratocaster is a musician."
I knew he was right. At the time I was the MC at a Rave club in South Dallas. It was a huge warehouse where six nights a week we would run four to six acts. Totally under the radar of the law. The bands came out of the woodwork to play practically for free and they brought their own audiences and booze and dope with them. I couldn't believe that there were so many. Where did they come from?
They came from Garland and DeSoto and Plano and Richardson, anywhere where the boredom and pointlessness and institutionalization of American middle-class life exists, you know those places where they have excellent schools with cops in every hall to prevent one of the inmates from going postal and knocking off a few of his classmates with with daddy's deer rifle. Music is very popular in concentration camps. These bands were like mushrooms who multiplied in the garages of suburbia, growing in the darkness of contemporary culture and family life, living on the cooked manure of popular music.
These kids are not so much interested in music as they are about cultural expression. Music was the area in which they could get away from their parent's conventions and restrictions and be themselves. Being in a band has become a tribal rite of passage and inclusion. It is the gang instinct. Bands these days more resemble biker gangs or street gangs or social clubs than musical ensembles. The bling and the haircuts and the tattoos are more important than chordal structure and harmony any day. It's about the participatory rhythm, the tribal chant of adolescence and ambition and possibility.
I'm not trying to be a musical snob here. I don't have the credentials for it. I grew up on pop music too. I was initially more attracted to the cultural and social aspects of music than I was interested in the technical and aesthetic qualities of the art. For those purposes, two chords works as well as the cycle of fifths.
Humans have been making music since the first club hit on a hollow log. It is a primal instinct. Music mimics the rhythms of nature. It mimics the heartbeat and the walk and the run and the days and nights and seasons, menstrual cycles, the tides, the regularity of orbits, the ups and downs of emotion. It should be no mystery why the formative mind of an adolescent should be attracted to music.
As I write, my teen-aged cultural consultant is in the shower singing her heart out. She probably has her iPod in her ears too. She is singing the music of her generation. She mimics her world. All music does this. It's a combination of history and magic, a spell.
Have you ever noticed that the generations identify themselves with the music that they were listening to as teen-agers? If you were a bobby-soxer you think that Sinatra was the stuff. If you were a beat teen-ager, you identify with Miles and Charlie Parker. If you are a hippie kid, you think that Hendrix or the Beatles or The Grateful Dead hung the musical moon. Then there were the Punks and the Alts and the Grunges and the Gen-X clones of the music they found in their parent's album collections. Music is a rite of passage and we fixate on the particular style of music that was our world when we were growing up.
Garage bands are the apple of The Poet's Eye. If there ever comes a day when the young people of the tribe don't gather on the edges of the village and make wanton music and drink forbidden liquids and dance with abandon to their very own music, we are done as a civilization.
A long long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
----Don McLean
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