This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 27, 2012 - Cutting right to the chase, Dana Smith asked me a deceptively simple question: “Did you get anything creative out of the act of having to produce a piece about local music once a week for a year?”
Smith’s a skilled painter of rock’n’roll images and was one of the early profiles of the Second Set series. He’s also been toying with the idea of joining a rock band in early 2013. The last time he played in one, the Baysayboos, he met his wife, Angel. As the group’s keyboardist (she) and drummer (he), they found a non-musical life together along the way, and now share two, quickly growing children.
To jump back into a rock band with a challenging day job (and all those trips back’n’forth to swim lessons, tee ball, etc.) is a different chore, trickier to pull off than when you’re younger, back when you’re without that full slate of real-life stuff. That’s without mentioning his monkish three-hours-a-night of painting, Smith’s primary creative escape for the last decade. It’s a lot to balance. A whole lot.
So, to answer his question, using his own experiences as an example, I’d say that it’s been interesting to drop in on people in different stages of life, as they negotiate the necessary and the meaningful. At core, the Second Set series, running every Thursday on the Beacon for the past 12 months, has visited with musicians who may have enjoyed their greatest moments of (relative) fame in the 1980s or 1990s. Today, they may mix music in with other artistic pursuits, or they’ve cranked up the old hits for one-night-only returns to the stage, with regular life superseding most creative pursuits.
It’s been intriguing to chart variations on the classic, old rock’n’roll tropes. Is it better to burn out than to fade away? Not quite sure. Still working on this assignment, so maybe I’ll figure it out before I finish typing.
Markers
If told to set down a list of memorable moments from my 20s and 30s, local music played an incalculable role in many of those. Not all of them are profound. Not all will be commented upon in this space; some things go to the grave with you for a reason. Interestingly, out of the dozens of people I’ve asked for interviews or insights to give context to those memories, only three have turned me down; one eventually relented and talked, one had good reason to not revisit the past and the last one’s a crackpot, so my batting average remained strong all year.
While it might seem as if all the stories have been told, there’s still room for more and the new plan calls for an expanded version of all this. Over the next few weeks, as my winter break from teaching winds along, I’m going to try to give birth to a few thousands more words, expanding on 13 of these initial 52 postings; for each, I’ll add updates, or added sidebars. There’ll be some more interviews. A whole bunch of lists. And some fun graphics. All will be bundled up and sold as an affordable e-book in the spring of 2013.
It’s likely that I’ll also begin storing information on a new, affiliated URL, where I can add links, sound and graphics. That’ll take up some more of these long, gloomy, winter hours. Luckily, a talented young recording engineer, label owner and scenemaker Ryan Albritton has signed on as my audio sensei, a largely thankless task that’ll me help digitize and load up some nice gems, currently stored away and unheard.
Most exciting to me, I’ll be back on the Beacon’s pages during the early part of the year, contributing a piece, or two, a month until the date of e-publication.
That’ll mean that some of the stories not yet told will get a hearing after all. And there are a few left.
Like that time that I wandered into Euclid Records, back when it was located on Laclede. In I went with a dreadful pile of merch, which I acquired as an RFT intern. The clerk wasn’t interested in much, maybe offering a couple dollars in trade (as in a couple, like two).
Figuring that no other shop would want this stash of trash any more than Euclid would, I accessed the situation and dolefully told the shop clerk that he could keep the rest and throw them in the dollar bin. Instead, he took the stack and immediately deposited the vinyl into the oversized trash can behind the counter.
After leaving the store, I walked back in, dipped my hand into the can, which was neighboring the door, and pulled out my dissed records. That clerk, Jeff Tweedy, would go to national acclaim in Uncle Tupelo, then onto even more fame as the leader and primary songwriter of Wilco, one of the most successful bands of its generation, no matter what metrics you use. Meanwhile, I’ve had a drink in every bar in South City, so we’ve been done something of note, I guess.
Then there was that time The Treeweasels first broke up. Not exactly defining objective journalism, I was the fifth Treeweasel for most practical purposes, showing up at enough gigs to share beer before shows, then load-out gear afterward. If social media had been around then, the set-up would’ve seemed even more insider-ey than it surely was, but everyone in the scene knew my connection to the band, back when we were all living in a non-24-hour-media cocoon.
On the night they were supposedly hanging it up, the Weasels completed their set with “Peace Pipe,” their regular set-closer. It seemed a good time for me to head up onto the tiny Cicero’s “stage,” where I grabbed the overhead pipes and swung like a monkey, pausing to sing along to the chorus and scrambling just out of way as the band demolished the stage to wrap it all up. Fun. Ridiculous fun. And no digital cameras around to capture it, thank the gods.
And speaking of fun on Delmar, there was this evening when the bandleader of a noted hard rock band invited me to Blueberry Hill, where I kept a near-nightly vigil on the “Terminator 2” arcade game. This time, though, we upped the ante and cut up sheets of acid on the bar top. Redefining the varied concepts of tripping, I flew down a flight of steps at home that evening/morning, but not before leaving a long, rambling, and probably kinda-hilarious message on said bandleader’s answering machine.
For weeks, he threatened to put the rant onto the group’s next 45, which I fully believed him capable of doing. It took some time, but I eventually wound up at his basement apartment and snared the tape, just ahead of memorializing myself on vinyl, angrily scolding him for gifting me that long night of the soul. Oh, well. Here’s the story anyway. (And now I’ll never get elected to public office. As if...)
Coffee Creek was playing at Cicero’s this other time and ... you know what? I’ll hang onto that one. For the book and all.
A false headstone
Here’s the point in the piece where I planned on writing some notes of finality. I was going to thank Beacon GM Nicole Hudson Hollway for entertaining this idea in the first place. And Donna Korando, the Beacon’s features editor, who’s edited virtually every piece since January and who’s rarely let me have it when my typos or gaffes needed a fix. And Brent Jones, the Beacon’s presentation editor, well, I wanted to thank him, too, for adding graphics, sounds and video inlays on a weekly basis, all without complaint.
Everybody’s been too cool. But I don’t have to thank them, yet.
There’s more work to be done. And more stuff to speil about. So we’ll push pause on our virtual tape player. Let these words freeze for awhile, hanging in the air on delay. Talk to you soon enough...