Sean X. Luo
Post-postmodern Nonsense
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| I want to be a rock star when I grow up by SEAN LUO January 08, 2005 It wasn't easy to find an electrical plug on the Amtrak lounge car around 8:00PM. After much futile effort, I finally settled to forget about my laptop and to read my left over New Yorker instead. The lounge car was filled up with nightriders who never managed to get a legitimate seat, mostly because the train got oversold. I scanned the wearily stagnant throng, and saw an interesting looking young man sitting a couple of tables away from me. He was wearing one of those strange light tan leather coats with lots of little tassels hanging off it. He had long brownish curly hair and a small amount of residual facial hair around his jaw that reminded me of a country musician. On the tabletop in front of him was a gigantic black CD case with hundreds of CDs in it. He was sitting against a dark red guitar case, arms crossed, eyes half shut, appearing absorbed in whatever was blasting away through his headsets. I thought, I’d be damned if he didn’t live in some beat up warehouse in Brooklyn. So, I turned my head, and forced myself to read. The train swaddled in the middle of the darkness across the Appalachian like a toddler, yapping and stumbling. Someone came up to me and said: "Hey, buddy, how are you doing?" I was pleasantly surprised. "What kind of music do you like?" He gave me his old CD player, and told me I ought to give his band a try, and if I should have liked it, it's only six bucks. It was an unremarkable and long metal song. But at that point I was much more interested in the man behind the music. I took off the ear plugs and walked over to his table. "This is good stuff," I said, "but I don't know much about metal to tell what's different between this song of yours and the rest of the metals I've heard in the past?" This question clearly threw him off a bit. He said that the band was going for some Caribbean influence and the percussion was mixed up with some African drumming techniques. I didn't quite catch all that. "I hear some techno at the start." I complemented duly. I didn't think it was a deliberate attempt. We started talking. His name was Ben. He's twenty three years old. He's from Atlanta but he was coming from Alexandria, Virginia, his fathers place, for Christmas. His parents were divorced. His mother was a base player, and taught him chords when he was little. "She never made more than $12,000 all her life," he said sardonically, "but I'm not really afraid of a life of poverty." He had already been involved in three bands. His musical pursuits started in high school, and the bands that he joined eventually disintegrated when people went off to college. The left behinds decided to combine forces and jammed together, and "And Faster We Fall" (http://www.andfasterwefall.com) was born. "I took some classical guitar lessons in community college," he told me, "but I had to drop it because it's really disappointing if you can't read music. I felt really inhibited when I was forced to learn how to read music. Real music must come from the heart, not the brain. And sometimes when I'm making a new song I'd have to resist the temptation of thinking in purely technical terms, but just let my feelings themselves talk." I resisted my urge to preach to him about Milton Babbitt. I was deliberately trying to be difficult. I told him that I think it's incredibly difficult to be creative these days doing music. Most of it was highly derivative and I wondered what his opinion was regarding this matter. His table mate, David, a big napping African American dude in his thirties, woke up to our conversation. He said creativity must come from "within, like Ben Harper. You know he can just show up at Madison Square Garden and he'll be sold out without putting out any ad." Or like how Maroon 5 made an entire album because the lead singer got dumped by his girlfriend. "Great music comes from true, authentic feelings," David insisted. I initially thought he was trashing Maroon 5, and subsequently trashed them too by saying how overplayed it was. Then I realized I misunderstood him. We determined that the trendsetters of our society were the pretty young girls, who were pursued by men and emulated by women. Ben told me about the trials and tribulations of getting a band going. According to him, there were three phases. In the first phase, they used up a lot of money to buy equipment, to rent studio time, to put out a record. In the second phase, they went around and toured in clubs and hopefully the clubs would pay enough to break even. They needed to promote their record as much as possible. Hence he was trying to sell his record to everyone in the lounge car. His CD player had by then rotated through a gentle, white haired divorced woman who told us about how she used to turn down her son's metal charged stereo (although she really liked whatever Ben gave her), and was now in the hands of a plump boy with bleached blonde hair. Ben pulled a sheet of paper out, with marks counting the number of CDs he sold over the past week or so. Not many marks. It'd be great if he sold one or two per day.He said that the band was almost done covering the Southeast,aAnd hopefully the third phase, where they'd make a little money, would begin soon. He had a mildly philosophical tendency. "Relativity said that you can spit a coin into halves infinitely, and that's how creativity in people will never be limited." He was convinced that there was an "underground revolution" that was about to blow away the musical industry executives with cigars who only wanted another million off the sated "young studs". I was going to say something about a "paradigm shift" but resolved not to. He pulled out his guitar. "My mother bought it in Mexico. It's 40 years old." David wanted to play it, and he handed it to him. "I think everything has a spirit and a memory, so I want it to be played by as many as possible." They played some catchy little tune. I felt manipulative to say the least, because I realized that I just have to eventually tell you all about Ben. We ruminated a bit about my medical career. "When you like it, it's not so hard." I said. "Bingo," Ben agreed. "I have this stuttering problem. And when we got started I really had to learn how to tell everyone about my music. How else to sell as many as possible? And it was really hard. But then gradually it became easier, and I wouldn't want to take a vacation anymore, because I'd be selling my CDs to people at the pool party. It's like it's my baby." I asked if he ever think about what would happen if he doesn't make it in the end. He said all he ever wanted was to leave behind a legacy, to contribute a little. On his dying bed he would have a good story to tell. And as long as he loved what he was doing, what else was there to live for? I got exhausted and said goodbye and went to a different café car to type down my thoughts. The car was filled with hippie looking people that it made me self conscious. The guy sitting opposite to me was pouring miniature Jim Beam with Sierra Mist into his mouth and writing painfully on his thick, red-covered diarybook with a sharpie in enormous letters. An old black man with a white beard was chanting "The Lord's coming! The Lord's coming!" with a Budweiser clutched tightly in his hand. Later that night, it started to drizzle outside. The train stopped in Greensboro, North Carolina. As I peeked out of the window I saw David getting off the train. I saw David’s girlfriend or wife greeting him with an embrace. I saw them climbing into a car and disappearing into the misty pall of precipitation. I closed my eyes. |