HIGH AMBITION

After a series of train wreck thoughts – the ones that occur as quickly as the sparks can fire inside your brain, as you space out at work while making copies, and that cover a rapid and varied series of topics, free-associating at the speed of detuned thought – my ruminations solidified into one potentially inflammatory statement: I want to find a Dayton OH to be the Guided By Voices of. While some adjunct professor of Music Popular Culture Minutia at Bennington College might want to take a moment to scoff at and dismantle my audacity for even saying such a thing, I’m okay with the blaspheme and will continue on to my point –

I’ve been living in Austin for three years and, after a brief honeymoon, I’ve pretty much been lamenting it the whole time. Being involved in the music scene here isn’t fun. Its serious; its business, not personal. And, as a perpetually amateur musician, that chafes. I feel crushed beneath the weight of expectations for “musicians in Austin”; I no longer have the ambition to compete with the genuinely talented and the completely deluded. There are some grand bands here that I love, who deserve the hype they get (and “hype” that only counts as “hype” within the microcosm of Austin music-scene nitpicking; do people even still say “hype”?). And some beloved bands I really don’t like, and they don’t deserved to be judged by my narrow, biased, and embittered opinion. On one hand, Austin is serious about music and high on its reputation for quality and quantity in that department - and there are lots of good bands to see in Austin, doing their own unique thing. On the other hand, Austin's media is going to be hung up on comparing its bands to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Spoon for the next 30 years (if not 50) – and there are bands that only aspire to draw such comparisons. Some one told me "Austin is a great place to be a music fan, and a terrible place to be a musician", and its true – as a musician, its a place to be judged by strangely insular standards.

I was reading Jim Greer’s book about Guided by Voices and I was struck by some of the things that seem really comforting about Guided by Voices:

1. Bob Pollard was kind of an eccentric school teacher (he was just a guy with a regular job).
2. They partied hard for a bunch of old guys.
3. They recorded albums on a 4-track cassette (and really, it sounds like it).
4. They lived in the nowhereville of Dayton OH. (I grew up in town of 400 people and the nearest city was the ruins of Utica NY. I say “nowhereville” with some degree of experience, empathy, and love.)
   

In Austin, the music scene is immersed in ambition; people think you come here to “make it”, and its sort of unsettling to hear people say that or intimate it (since you can't say it out loud in indie rock), especially when you know they won’t. I’ve realized that I just want to be like Guided by Voices – minus the cult success – I just want to do my job, hang out with my friends and drink beer and make music and get old. Coo over pictures of people's kids and make self-indulgent laptop recordings in somebody's basement. And to do it somewhere without the expectation of ambition. Ambition prevents you from making friends and from having fun.

My longest running and most irritating-to-listen-to gripe about my musical hobby is this: I’m having a fairly productive songwriting jag, but only after having moved away from the music community that I spend years making friends in (central North Carolina). Even in California, the people I played with were people I knew from NC; even in Austin, the friendliest musician I’ve met spent her musical formative years in central NC. So reading about Guided by Voices, I’ve realized that my gripe isn’t really about getting the band off the ground with the ease and support a familiar place allows, or being able to play a small club that’s reasonably full instead of completely empty, or even about striking while the iron is hot…

My problem is: I just want to hang out and drink beer and make music with my friends.

It’s a tiny little adolescent release that I want and can’t have. But it seems so reasonable. I’ve made every other concession to adulthood – I have a good job and a happy marriage and my parents don’t worry about me anymore and I own khaki pants and unstylish shoes. And I don’t want to join a country club or have a mistress or go parasailing or have any expensive, dangerous, or morally compromising indulgences: I just want to hang out and drink beer and make music with my friends.

But – we’re all grown-ups now. Our responsibilities and our lives ensure that we live in different places – for medical residencies, to be near family, for graduate school, for jobs, et cetera. If I keep thinking and writing about it, I’ll get all maudlin – which is, in part, what I want. To sit around and bitch about how we’ve been cheated, tell each other we’re great, and then go down to the basement, pick up a guitar and prove it – most importantly and at the very least - to ourselves. And that’s all I want. Now that I’ve lived in Austin for a few years, I know some people here that I like, and who I like playing music with. But their own lives mean they’ll be moving away soon. Moving on, honoring their responsibilities. I just want to find a place – and a means – to be like Guided by Voices.

(Also, Guided by Voices is – in my opinion – the best band name ever.)