NICKEL CITY

I spent my collegiate years in Buffalo NY. I don’t look back on it very fondly. There are tons and tons of cool things about Buffalo – I hold it in high regard in many ways. But it was a dark time for me. Even the people who think they’re partially to blame for that dark time, well, they aren’t. It’s a long, long story that I’m just starting to understand and my tragic-comic rock’n’roll blog isn’t the place I’m going to get into it.

To the point: for about 18-months, when I first went to school in Buffalo, I was in a punk-pop band called the Happy Dogs (or just Happy Dogs). We played shows constantly and a few people really liked us, and although most of the indie/punk/hardcore scene was aware of us, I generally got the sense that we were widely considered a joke; dismissed, laughed at, or even reviled. This was really frustrating to me: I really, really wanted to be accepted.

In high school, I had sudden and liberating epiphany: I didn’t want to be popular. I wanted to be a joke, I wanted to be reviled, I wanted to be hated. Of course, I lived in a small, upstate NY farming community – my school was renowned for our championship football team and our vast FFA membership roster. Rebelling against such cliché and redneckery was a cinch. I was disheartened to arrive in Buffalo – a real city with a genuine music scene – and discover that the young punk rock scene was exactly like high school, but far worse, since it was pretending to be accepting and inclusive. I was further disheartened to find within myself a dormant and indefatigable need to be accepted. Like I said: there were people who liked our band. But it was the people who hated us or dismissed us that made me feel like failure – because they were the “cool kids”. I wallowed on my own failings and failed to identify the ways that we were being (perhaps) unfairly dismissed: our songs were funny and goofy but also kind of sad, our name was easy to mock (“more like the Crappy Dogs” rolled off more than one tongue; though it was an easy, jock-neanderthal joke we identified ourselves within minutes of choosing the name) but didn’t anyone understand the commentary on indie culture we were making by referencing an animal with blind obedience and unshakably devoted love? But we were living in self-serious times: the northeastern punk scene was rapidly being defined – in the wagon-circling wake of the early 1990s “alternative” explosion – by the privileged fortune-cookie politicking of suburban hardcore bands.

In this atmosphere, with my friends Jim (bass) and PJ (drums) and our utter naïveté (keyboards), The Happy Dogs took form. We wrote simple songs and we played them well. It marked the moment when the pubescent ambition to be a musician meets the ability and understanding to actually do it. We sounded like a real band – not just like some high school kids doing poorly-played Pixies covers. For all three of us, it was probably the best band we had been in, at that point. And – it must be said – there was some sort of magical spark when the three of us played together; though you don’t need it to have a band, but it helps.

After over 13 years since the last time we played together, we got back together to play a reunion show last week, and also to apply our old “chemistry” to some songs I’d been writing from my current project/nom-de-plume, Sinner Repent. Jim’s current band practices in the sort of warehouse space/loft that everyone dreams of when they imagine the life of an up-and-coming band – and we played there a few times before the show, remembering old arrangements and lyrics, taking a stab at a couple new songs. Saturday night we played for a roomful of old friends and – guided by maturity, better equipment, over a decade of playing in other bands – we probably played our best show ever.

My great epiphany in the past couple years has been accepting my own strengths and limitations with Sinners Repent, and in playing the Happy Dogs songs this week, I accept the strengths and limitations there, too. For years I felt very angry with myself for being - at the time – so cowed by the hardcore scene and the indie rock crowd. On stage last week, I felt like I’d found the “fuck you” that should’ve accompanied our performances and outlook all along. I felt proud of us for not being self-conscious and serious; for being three guys in our thirties playing goofy and naïve songs without shame; for being proud of what we were doing.

Buffalo was and (seemingly) is a bastion of self-seriousness. It’s a nice city with a low cost of living (and an economy so perennially depressed, you’d have to wonder if anyone even notices anymore) – it should be the kind of music scene that disconnects from pop culture (from American Idol to Pitchfork) and does its own thing. Instead it was and still is stuck on “being cool” – a collective sense of nervous peacocking, a scene looking over its arts-&-music shoulder to see if Brooklyn just looked in their direction. Buffalo has never taken advantage of its isolation to develop an identity as interesting as other non-NY/LA cities like Athens, Seattle, Chapel Hill, Minneapolis, Baltimore. Hell, even Detroit let the rest of the country fuck off long enough to spit out the idiosyncratic (yet incredibly popular) White Stripes and the insular, fuck-all garage rock scene that produced them.

After a long discussion about Buffalo and its place in arts and music and culture and sports, PJ and I hit on the word that summed up Buffalo’s underlying problem: insecurity. Buffalo Bills fans never managed to embrace their repeated Super Bowl losses and turn it into something to rally around, like the Boston Red Sox fans did for decades with The Curse. Buffalo’s music scene never managed to look past the success of the largely mediocre Goo Goo Dolls and aspire to anything more legitimately creative, original, and inspired – even in the most derisive indie-rocking corners, the Goo Goo Dolls success still haunts the hallways as the best that Buffalo ever managed.

I’m really not knocking the creativity that exists in Buffalo – it’s a matter of how that creativity sees itself in the world, and perhaps more importantly: how the potential audience sees that creative spark. Buffalo is a self-hating city – the audience (of Buffalo natives) will give less credit to a band from Buffalo than to one from NYC, but that’s not really that unusual. Since leaving Buffalo I’ve been involved in the music scene in Chapel Hill, Los Angeles, and Austin, as well as touring the country with another old punk band – and the bands put together by 18-20 year old in Buffalo, in the mid-1990s, were incredible. These bands were significantly more competent than any of their peers in more highly regarded music scenes. While I was involved in this scene, however, it was one of the most self-sabotaging and backstabbing and cruel that I’ve ever witnessed (or was party to).

Anyway, this post was really about finding the Fuck You. I’ve been operating with that sensibility towards the Austin music scene for quite some time now, but perhaps without much conviction. In part because Austin isn’t really as backward as Buffalo – yes, all indie bands labor in the shadow of Spoon; Austin’s music media can’t bear to write a single word or opinion that hasn’t been chewed and spit out (and compared to Spoon) by some higher media outlet or someone else in Austin’s blogosphere. I just don’t feel like participating in the music scene in Austin; people are trying to “make it” and I just want to dick around. And that’s ok –

Because the “music scene” – as stylistic, geographic, and popularity signifier – is disappearing or is going to disappear. It will take a while for people to catch on – but geography will matter less and less – and once free of geography, we (as musicians) will be free from the derisive stares (of other musicians) or at least free from our own paranoid delusions of a judgmental scene.

What I’m taking away from my week in Buffalo is a desire to keep my Fuck You alive and burning and close at hand. Perhaps an equally (or more) appropriate name for that sensibility would be that elusive and mercurial beast – self-confidence. To recognize that, driven by whatever it is that makes me want to create, I try to make something that I love and admire and feel proud of. I want to enjoy the process of creating. Art and music are created from inspiration, hard work, sacrifice, talent, and a myriad of other things. An glib opinion is made of nothing – its fleeting and impermanent and often spontaneous. Yet time and time again, I’ve allowed such brief and non-committal words to hinder my work and my attitude. Its a flaw in my character – a self-doubt that is easily shored up by unconstructive negative opinions.

Most people I’ve met over the years, in music, are from somewhere else. They come to these hotbeds and cities and college towns from someplace other – usually from a place so unsympathetic that what music really provided was an escape and a window into another life. However, once we all arrive in these hotbeds and cities and college towns, the only model for behavior we have are the limited social platforms of our youth. And so – becoming the hicks and homecoming queens we hated – we treat each other like shit.

It’s a pretty standard trope – the bullied become the bullies; the abused the abusers; the ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan and picks on the ugly swans.