coffee + sun ra's "crystal spears"....
the last part of my thesis. listening to tons of sun ra today, hoping i get a call-back on one of my job applications.
Ever-Present Buzz
Richard is a living, breathing fairy-tale, unshaven, brown hair in his eyes, dressed in a hip brown jacket, and fitted, faded jeans. He’s drunk, which is normal for the last innumerable times I’ve seen him, or at least buzzed off of something, his eyes slightly dulled over, like his jacket. We’re sitting in the back room of the Melody Inn, the aptly-named PBR Lounge, in a big rounded, red booth. Free pizza boxes are piled nearby, and cigarette smoke hangs thickly under the low-hanging red lamp. The back room we’re in hasn’t been specifically designated “Bands Only,” but that’s what it is, the few booths sparsely populated with band members, girlfriends, managers, promoters, and a few local label representatives. It’s not that the doorway has any sort of aura keeping the random showgoers at bay, though, instead it’s probably because you have to walk through a part of the kitchen, and a strange strip of now-roofed in alleyway to get to the room. How appropriate then, that it’s the PBR Lounge.
“I’m telling you man, it’s worth it. $100,000 advance for the next record, $150,000 for the one after that. And we have complete control,” Richard is gesturing as he speaks, his hands trying to get the importance of his message through without spilling his beer. I try to remember our recording costs; Sunshine of Doom was basically free, recorded by the band, while Police, Police! threw us back a couple grand, half provided by the label but then recouped in album sales the first weekend it was out. Six figures would do wonders for us, especially when I spy our equipment in the corner, a ramshackle pile of amps with busted speakers or broken inputs, malfunctioning keyboards sticky with beer and old duct tape, torn drumheads, fissured cymbals, and a polyester suitcase filled with a snake-like tangle of mostly non-functional instrument cords.
Major label money would be nice, but getting at it is like looking for through a haystack for a needle that isn’t even there in the first place. But Richard and company did it, and their proximity to us, their high opinions on our music, could be played to our advantage. Still, even with big money tales, we’re skeptical of the loss of artistic freedom that is usually associated with a jump to a major label, the possible loss of choosing song order, album art, recording philosophy, all of which are extremely important parts of our records. There’s a little (or a lot) Steve Albini in all of us, and though the possibility is probably smaller than we could ever realize, it’s nice to dream about for a minute-the warm sound of fresh, new speakers, the reassuring thump of a four-hundred dollar bass drum head.
I try and squelch the thought as quick as possible. The music world is more fickle than a room of manic depressives; money there one second was never there in the first place, bands come and go as fast as musicians can make up newer, more witty names, and selling records is an absolute necessity if a band wants to keep tapped in to the world of six-figure advances, shiny new vans, and vintage equipment. Selling records has never been the focus point of Everything, Now!-we’d rather put out five records in a year by ourselves, than focus on one that would sell a few more copies. Beyond that, our line-up, always somewhere between six and eight, isn’t exactly too appealing to the streamlined world of most major label bands, because, after all, diversity of sound doesn’t sell to the masses. But maybe all of this reasoning is just a way for me to talk myself down from my highest hopes for the band-a dream world in which our van isn’t a van anymore, it’s a giant bus, and we can collectively make the music we want to while at the same time making a living. It’s a huge dream and a small dream all at once, since the collision of art and money is simultaneously impossible due to the demands of mass marketing, and so close that I could reach out and touch it, prod the empty plastic cup sitting in front of Richard. “Get this,” he’s saying, “they sent us this box yesterday, and inside were eight gingerbread men, all decorated with our names. They were still soft, same-day shipping!” It’s like he’s dangling the cookies right in front of us, daring us to cave in and reach for the invisible.
In the summer of 2005, we took our newly-acquired short bus to the East Coast, playing a string of dates that would culminate in New York City, playing the lower-level of a three-tiered venue called the Knitting Factory, a place we had played that Spring to a sweaty but enthusiastic Manhattan crowd. Before we’d even made it to our fifth show, an hour north of Philadelphia, our bus’s transmission began to go haywire, a likely heat-induced crack rendering our first and reverse gears badly damaged. By the time we crossed the Hudson Bay Tunnel, the bus was jerking in-and-out of gear like a Tourette’s-ridden fiberglass elephant. We knew this would be the last show on tour, that we’d have to cancel the final four dates and see if we could nurse the broken bus all the way back to Indiana.
At the Knitting Factory, a line of hip-looking kids stretched down most of the block, into the construction zone that made parking a mathematical impossibility. However, these kids were there for a show on the main stage; a show we weren’t playing. No, in the basement waited the two acts we were booked with: a singer-songwriter that sounded like Jeff Buckley swallowed a referee’s whistle, and an obese rockabilly chick who played lounge versions of popular songs on her laptop, and crooned over them while sitting down and making vintage Ronette hand-movements.
The crowd and the party that we expected to debut our re-worked songs to was nonexistent. At this point, the only redeeming point of the evening was that I knew I was due to play drums on at least three songs. Who could have known I’d get to play drums at the Knitting Factory, I thought to myself, silently proud though my beat-keeping skills were amateur at best. I sipped an icy Boddington’s and waited for the tone-deaf Mama Cass to wrap up her painful set.
While we were loading in with the aide of the ponytailed Puerto Rican doorman who remembered us from March, Richard and Andy, his bandmate, accompanied by Doog strode in, clearly intoxicated. They immediately ordered more whiskey, and stood near the stage, talking a mile a minute. Epic Records had brought Richard and Andy to town, and was showing them the New York life we probably couldn’t afford even after selling our crippled bus. Doog had been living in New York in a Manhattan commune next door to an unofficial Caribbean voodoo center, and had met up with the other guys that day, grifting as much money out of “the man’s” pockets as possible. “Shit man,” Richard said, “they took us out for pizza, New York-style you know, then drinks, paid for it all. Shit, they even gave us money for these drinks, and a bunch more.” He smiled and held his icy cup in the air. “Got us a hotel room in Times Square even, way up high, looks right down into the intersection.” We brush the celebrities-in-training off and continue to load-in, finally starting our set to a crowd less than ten.
The set was by far the worst of the tour. Justin smashed a tambourine by accidentally jumping on it during the first song, the monitors didn’t work or were inaudible, Richard and Andy were the only visibly excited people in the dingy lower-floor room, and I completely screwed up the beat on a cover of the Stones “Sweet Virginia.” We didn’t even get paid a single dollar, and couldn’t even assuage our transportation anxieties with the regular remedy of Pabst, the current hip beer in Manhattan absurdly priced at $4 a can.
Doog was waiting in the back by the now-closing bar, wishing he had time to get another free drink. “Yeah man, Richard was way drunk during dinner. The label guy kept asking, ‘So tell me about you guys, the band, how you formed, influences, all that.’ And Richard just kept saying, ‘You gotta meet my friend Crafty, he’s amazing. They’re called Everything, Now! If you heard them, you’d sign them, right away.’ And he never answered the questions, just kept talking about you guys the whole time, it was amazing.”
After this admission, Doog, Richard, and Andy left for the plush beds of their hotel rooms, while we attempted to find the afterparty we’d been invited to by the former booking manager of the Knitting Factory, who felt invited us after feeling bad about the shitty show we’d been stuck on. Not only could we not find the party, but when we headed to Justin’s girlfriend’s warehouse flat in Brooklyn, we got hopelessly lost. As Justin drove, we went ten minutes at a time without seeing anything that looked like a residence, saw whole blocks of boarded-up townhouses, and wandered around the endless pits of Brooklyn. Finally, we found the place, across the street from a Chinese noodle factory, and went to sleep on the dusty hardwood floors.
Jealousy isn’t the word to describe the feeling you get when those close to you experience the unlikeliest of artistic success-the milking of major labels for money, meals, and artistic freedom. Really, we were amazed, star-struck for a minute, then back to normal. The glamorization of rock and roll wasn’t a concept we were interested in, weren’t into theatrics, groupies, or gifts for being marketable enough to sign. We were striving to be a working man’s band, and if that meant sleeping on a hardwood floors, then that was okay. Those free dinners and drinks sounded great, but I wouldn’t trade them for the homemade pancakes that kids we didn’t know in Pennsylvania scraped together the ingredients to make before we left for New York.
Sometimes financial success seems like the most foreign of all concepts; and sometimes, talking to Richard, it seems five minutes away. But I don’t even know if I want to see what that other world is like, how people treat you when you finally are “somebody.” What will happen to all the good deeds people do for us just because they know we’re a band struggling to write music that adheres to our own artistic aesthetic, to tour on our own money, book our own shows; will they dry up and disappear or just become sugar-coated obligations?
I don’t want to lose the brotherhood that hard times have forced upon us, even with the rotating members, the constant fighting and random bad attitudes. If success destroys that, for me, it’s not worth it. Luckily, the outfit as a whole believes that. After all, it’s the sense of purpose, the sense of soul, each other, and belief in the music itself that drives the live performances, the desire to make records according to our own specifications.
There’s no guarantee that we’ll be together and touring in a few years, even in one year. But if it all slowly dims like a seaboard sunset, or blinks out like the popping of a fluorescent bulb, there are moments I can look back on that define the band’s existence. The train of kids we didn’t know carrying our gear from a busted living room to a different basement in Bloomington; Dan eulogizing his friend right after we’d ran through a sheet of decorated paper like a football team at the Police, Police! release show; Crafty playing his sax from his back on the floor at Nargile’s, to a crowd as small as the band; Jared and Justin playing catch in-front of a bewildered capacity crowd at the Mel; Rob hugging me after the last song of our last set before his move to San Francisco. I know the grandiose echoes will inevitably fade at some point in the near or distant future; but hopefully these moments will stick, the ever-present buzz in the back of my mind.
Ever-Present Buzz
Richard is a living, breathing fairy-tale, unshaven, brown hair in his eyes, dressed in a hip brown jacket, and fitted, faded jeans. He’s drunk, which is normal for the last innumerable times I’ve seen him, or at least buzzed off of something, his eyes slightly dulled over, like his jacket. We’re sitting in the back room of the Melody Inn, the aptly-named PBR Lounge, in a big rounded, red booth. Free pizza boxes are piled nearby, and cigarette smoke hangs thickly under the low-hanging red lamp. The back room we’re in hasn’t been specifically designated “Bands Only,” but that’s what it is, the few booths sparsely populated with band members, girlfriends, managers, promoters, and a few local label representatives. It’s not that the doorway has any sort of aura keeping the random showgoers at bay, though, instead it’s probably because you have to walk through a part of the kitchen, and a strange strip of now-roofed in alleyway to get to the room. How appropriate then, that it’s the PBR Lounge.
“I’m telling you man, it’s worth it. $100,000 advance for the next record, $150,000 for the one after that. And we have complete control,” Richard is gesturing as he speaks, his hands trying to get the importance of his message through without spilling his beer. I try to remember our recording costs; Sunshine of Doom was basically free, recorded by the band, while Police, Police! threw us back a couple grand, half provided by the label but then recouped in album sales the first weekend it was out. Six figures would do wonders for us, especially when I spy our equipment in the corner, a ramshackle pile of amps with busted speakers or broken inputs, malfunctioning keyboards sticky with beer and old duct tape, torn drumheads, fissured cymbals, and a polyester suitcase filled with a snake-like tangle of mostly non-functional instrument cords.
Major label money would be nice, but getting at it is like looking for through a haystack for a needle that isn’t even there in the first place. But Richard and company did it, and their proximity to us, their high opinions on our music, could be played to our advantage. Still, even with big money tales, we’re skeptical of the loss of artistic freedom that is usually associated with a jump to a major label, the possible loss of choosing song order, album art, recording philosophy, all of which are extremely important parts of our records. There’s a little (or a lot) Steve Albini in all of us, and though the possibility is probably smaller than we could ever realize, it’s nice to dream about for a minute-the warm sound of fresh, new speakers, the reassuring thump of a four-hundred dollar bass drum head.
I try and squelch the thought as quick as possible. The music world is more fickle than a room of manic depressives; money there one second was never there in the first place, bands come and go as fast as musicians can make up newer, more witty names, and selling records is an absolute necessity if a band wants to keep tapped in to the world of six-figure advances, shiny new vans, and vintage equipment. Selling records has never been the focus point of Everything, Now!-we’d rather put out five records in a year by ourselves, than focus on one that would sell a few more copies. Beyond that, our line-up, always somewhere between six and eight, isn’t exactly too appealing to the streamlined world of most major label bands, because, after all, diversity of sound doesn’t sell to the masses. But maybe all of this reasoning is just a way for me to talk myself down from my highest hopes for the band-a dream world in which our van isn’t a van anymore, it’s a giant bus, and we can collectively make the music we want to while at the same time making a living. It’s a huge dream and a small dream all at once, since the collision of art and money is simultaneously impossible due to the demands of mass marketing, and so close that I could reach out and touch it, prod the empty plastic cup sitting in front of Richard. “Get this,” he’s saying, “they sent us this box yesterday, and inside were eight gingerbread men, all decorated with our names. They were still soft, same-day shipping!” It’s like he’s dangling the cookies right in front of us, daring us to cave in and reach for the invisible.
In the summer of 2005, we took our newly-acquired short bus to the East Coast, playing a string of dates that would culminate in New York City, playing the lower-level of a three-tiered venue called the Knitting Factory, a place we had played that Spring to a sweaty but enthusiastic Manhattan crowd. Before we’d even made it to our fifth show, an hour north of Philadelphia, our bus’s transmission began to go haywire, a likely heat-induced crack rendering our first and reverse gears badly damaged. By the time we crossed the Hudson Bay Tunnel, the bus was jerking in-and-out of gear like a Tourette’s-ridden fiberglass elephant. We knew this would be the last show on tour, that we’d have to cancel the final four dates and see if we could nurse the broken bus all the way back to Indiana.
At the Knitting Factory, a line of hip-looking kids stretched down most of the block, into the construction zone that made parking a mathematical impossibility. However, these kids were there for a show on the main stage; a show we weren’t playing. No, in the basement waited the two acts we were booked with: a singer-songwriter that sounded like Jeff Buckley swallowed a referee’s whistle, and an obese rockabilly chick who played lounge versions of popular songs on her laptop, and crooned over them while sitting down and making vintage Ronette hand-movements.
The crowd and the party that we expected to debut our re-worked songs to was nonexistent. At this point, the only redeeming point of the evening was that I knew I was due to play drums on at least three songs. Who could have known I’d get to play drums at the Knitting Factory, I thought to myself, silently proud though my beat-keeping skills were amateur at best. I sipped an icy Boddington’s and waited for the tone-deaf Mama Cass to wrap up her painful set.
While we were loading in with the aide of the ponytailed Puerto Rican doorman who remembered us from March, Richard and Andy, his bandmate, accompanied by Doog strode in, clearly intoxicated. They immediately ordered more whiskey, and stood near the stage, talking a mile a minute. Epic Records had brought Richard and Andy to town, and was showing them the New York life we probably couldn’t afford even after selling our crippled bus. Doog had been living in New York in a Manhattan commune next door to an unofficial Caribbean voodoo center, and had met up with the other guys that day, grifting as much money out of “the man’s” pockets as possible. “Shit man,” Richard said, “they took us out for pizza, New York-style you know, then drinks, paid for it all. Shit, they even gave us money for these drinks, and a bunch more.” He smiled and held his icy cup in the air. “Got us a hotel room in Times Square even, way up high, looks right down into the intersection.” We brush the celebrities-in-training off and continue to load-in, finally starting our set to a crowd less than ten.
The set was by far the worst of the tour. Justin smashed a tambourine by accidentally jumping on it during the first song, the monitors didn’t work or were inaudible, Richard and Andy were the only visibly excited people in the dingy lower-floor room, and I completely screwed up the beat on a cover of the Stones “Sweet Virginia.” We didn’t even get paid a single dollar, and couldn’t even assuage our transportation anxieties with the regular remedy of Pabst, the current hip beer in Manhattan absurdly priced at $4 a can.
Doog was waiting in the back by the now-closing bar, wishing he had time to get another free drink. “Yeah man, Richard was way drunk during dinner. The label guy kept asking, ‘So tell me about you guys, the band, how you formed, influences, all that.’ And Richard just kept saying, ‘You gotta meet my friend Crafty, he’s amazing. They’re called Everything, Now! If you heard them, you’d sign them, right away.’ And he never answered the questions, just kept talking about you guys the whole time, it was amazing.”
After this admission, Doog, Richard, and Andy left for the plush beds of their hotel rooms, while we attempted to find the afterparty we’d been invited to by the former booking manager of the Knitting Factory, who felt invited us after feeling bad about the shitty show we’d been stuck on. Not only could we not find the party, but when we headed to Justin’s girlfriend’s warehouse flat in Brooklyn, we got hopelessly lost. As Justin drove, we went ten minutes at a time without seeing anything that looked like a residence, saw whole blocks of boarded-up townhouses, and wandered around the endless pits of Brooklyn. Finally, we found the place, across the street from a Chinese noodle factory, and went to sleep on the dusty hardwood floors.
Jealousy isn’t the word to describe the feeling you get when those close to you experience the unlikeliest of artistic success-the milking of major labels for money, meals, and artistic freedom. Really, we were amazed, star-struck for a minute, then back to normal. The glamorization of rock and roll wasn’t a concept we were interested in, weren’t into theatrics, groupies, or gifts for being marketable enough to sign. We were striving to be a working man’s band, and if that meant sleeping on a hardwood floors, then that was okay. Those free dinners and drinks sounded great, but I wouldn’t trade them for the homemade pancakes that kids we didn’t know in Pennsylvania scraped together the ingredients to make before we left for New York.
Sometimes financial success seems like the most foreign of all concepts; and sometimes, talking to Richard, it seems five minutes away. But I don’t even know if I want to see what that other world is like, how people treat you when you finally are “somebody.” What will happen to all the good deeds people do for us just because they know we’re a band struggling to write music that adheres to our own artistic aesthetic, to tour on our own money, book our own shows; will they dry up and disappear or just become sugar-coated obligations?
I don’t want to lose the brotherhood that hard times have forced upon us, even with the rotating members, the constant fighting and random bad attitudes. If success destroys that, for me, it’s not worth it. Luckily, the outfit as a whole believes that. After all, it’s the sense of purpose, the sense of soul, each other, and belief in the music itself that drives the live performances, the desire to make records according to our own specifications.
There’s no guarantee that we’ll be together and touring in a few years, even in one year. But if it all slowly dims like a seaboard sunset, or blinks out like the popping of a fluorescent bulb, there are moments I can look back on that define the band’s existence. The train of kids we didn’t know carrying our gear from a busted living room to a different basement in Bloomington; Dan eulogizing his friend right after we’d ran through a sheet of decorated paper like a football team at the Police, Police! release show; Crafty playing his sax from his back on the floor at Nargile’s, to a crowd as small as the band; Jared and Justin playing catch in-front of a bewildered capacity crowd at the Mel; Rob hugging me after the last song of our last set before his move to San Francisco. I know the grandiose echoes will inevitably fade at some point in the near or distant future; but hopefully these moments will stick, the ever-present buzz in the back of my mind.