{"id":1170,"date":"2014-03-16T13:59:55","date_gmt":"2014-03-16T17:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/?p=1170"},"modified":"2014-03-17T13:29:48","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T17:29:48","slug":"music-for-being-notes-from-an-adult-rock-band-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2014\/03\/16\/music-for-being-notes-from-an-adult-rock-band-party\/","title":{"rendered":"music for being: notes from an adult rock band party"},"content":{"rendered":"

In urbanists’ excitement over music scenes and the desirability of “social and interactive street-level culture” (to invoke Richard Florida), it’s easy to lose sight of whether there’s any value to all of this besides promoting careers and urban economies.\u00a0 Does “enriching creative communities” actually involve extending the practice of creativity<\/i> into people’s everyday lives?\u00a0 Or does it just mean supporting institutions, businesses and performance venues that hire professional artists?<\/p>\n

The issue is cast in sharp relief by how most people generally consume creative products today.\u00a0 Whether we’re purchasing books, art and CDs in physical or digital form (and, a separate issue, whether we pay for these goods or illegally download them), or taking in concerts, festivals and other performances, most people engage creativity as passive consumers<\/i>.\u00a0 We watch and listen, letting others do the creating.\u00a0 This is the legacy of the 20th century’s culture industry, which in the case of music was epitomized by the recording sector’s eclipse of the sheet music industry.<\/p>\n

Sheet music<\/i> \u2014 really, who uses that anymore?\u00a0 The question isn’t necessarily about the decline of public-school music education… which, incidentally, is often protested in economics terms of professional livelihoods and economic opportunities being lost.\u00a0 Sheet music was overwhelmingly purchased and used by people playing on their home pianos, acoustic guitars and other instruments, often in collective performance with family, friends and fellow music enthusiasts.\u00a0 And of course we don’t have to narrow this phenomenon to people formally trained to read sheet music: another obvious example is the guitar’s role in traditional folk music, a genre generally transmitted through verbal training and face-to-face example.\u00a0 The point is that these are modes of active creativity<\/i>, and there’s a name for people actively create unmotivated by economic reward: amateurs<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Are our creative communities equipped to sustain and enrich the lives of amateurs?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Last December I saw this Facebook update<\/a> from the Community Music Space, a business for music lessons and recording located in Red Hook, NY.<\/p>\n

In January we will be offering a 10 week rock band session for adults focused on a particular artist.
\nIf you were going to take this class who would you want to cover?
\nSo far we have interest in The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, and The Band.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d never seen such an opportunity advertised before.\u00a0 And the Pretenders?!\u00a0 I was excited, but there was a problem: I no longer had an electric guitar, an amplifier, or any other musical equipment.\u00a0 No problem, they assured me, I could use theirs.\u00a0 So I took the dive.\u00a0 For $175, I signed up for the 10-week adult rock band party.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0330\"<\/a>

The author at Community Music Space<\/p><\/div>\n

A note of musical biography: I’ve taken music lessons since grade school but could never commit to any one instrument. \u00a0I started with clarinet but gave that up for piano. \u00a0Then I stopped piano lessons and started classical guitar lessons, eventually giving those up when I announced to my parents my goal all along of playing electric guitar.\u00a0 By age 16 I was a DIY learner, self-taught by listening to the Ramones and Cramps, which made for a very primitive band in high school<\/a>.\u00a0 In college I couldn’t get a band together, but after graduation they really started rolling: four groups, and three different instruments: guitar, then bass and finally drums.\u00a0 Always self-taught, I ended up a jack of all instrumental trades, master of none, but I’ve always enjoyed playing in bands and undertaking the musical problem-solving that came with it.\u00a0 Perhaps out of necessity, I also grew fond of the sound of a sloppy, little-rehearsed group.<\/p>\n

At the Community Music Space, I joined four men and one woman of ages (I’m guessing) between mid-30s to early 50s.\u00a0 They were much better on their instruments than I was, not surprising since I hadn’t played the guitar seriously in over 20 years. \u00a0We didn’t “form a band”; no one even tossed around possible band names, something I remember as an enjoyable time-killer from my youth.\u00a0 Instead, we quickly identified three songs we wanted to play: Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up,” and the Pretenders’ “Message of Love” and “Kid” and got down to work, using 1-2 of the two-hour sessions to learn and practice a single song.\u00a0 Lyrics and guitar tabs were e-mailed out beforehand, and our leader Josh, the seventh participant and a killer guitarist, would help me find the chords on the fretboard. \u00a0The objective of all this would be to build up a repertoire from which we would select a few songs to record in our tenth week.<\/p>\n

\"L<\/a>

L to R: Ben Hoen and Josh Colow<\/p><\/div>\n

To give you a sense of how much fun all of this was, allow me to nerd out for a minute about “Message of Love.”\u00a0 This is probably my favorite song by the Pretenders, a group whom I’ve dedicated many air-guitar hours imagining myself as their new hotshot guitarist.\u00a0 Besides supporting one of Chrissie Hynde’s most exuberant lyrics, the tune features the kind of idiosyncratic structure common to her early songwriting, with a sequence of elements (AABCAD) that don’t appear to compositionally reference one another but still sound fantastic in sequence. \u00a0As we discovered in practice, the song has other great elements: a tub-thumping 1970s glitter rock beat, a deceptively tricky swing in its two-chord verse (the A section), and a sublime middle-eight (the C section) that I’ll never tire of hearing playing. \u00a0To me, the price of the entire sessions might have been worth it just for Josh to me the ghost chords that you hear in the song’s last section (Dm7sus4\u00a0to Bbmaj6, the four bars before Hynde sings Talk to me darlin…<\/i>).<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0350\"<\/a>

Judy Schmitz<\/p><\/div>\n

Someone whipped out their smart phone and recorded the results of our session dedicated to “Message of Love.”\u00a0 Yeah, we sounded like a loud, ricketey train. \u00a0In particular, three guitars simultaneously strumming the chord triplets in the B section (Me and you\/Every night, every day…<\/i>) makes for a bracing experience \u2014 a sound I’m partial to, although I wouldn’t necessarily share it with anyone.\u00a0 (Oh, okay: here it is<\/a>.)\u00a0 When we returned to the song for our last week’s recording session, Josh rearranged this B section so the guitarists each played a different figure. \u00a0I happily accepted the job of strumming the underlying chord once per bar \u2014 “kicking footballs,” Josh called it.<\/p>\n