The Call-Up
I'm old, which means I wonder about kids these days.
I actually don't wonder so much about kids as much as I do about musician kids.
I remember myself as a teenager in Moline, Illinois in the 1980s, sitting on a stool in our basement and playing the bass lick during the solo section of Rush's “Tom Sawyer.” You probably know the lick.
Dee-do-de-do-de-do, Dee-do-de-do-de-do.
I quit trying to play it with the record because there was no way I'd ever play it as fast as Rush's bass player Geddy Lee, so I played it by myself over and over again, stumbling through the fingering, driving everyone in my house crazy.
I loved this song, and this music--Moving Pictures is one of my all-time favorite albums--but I loved other things about Rush too. I loved that they had this gangly bass player with a big schnoz who walked around the stage like he owned it, playing these impossibly complicated bass lines, some of which I could never imagine replicating myself. (“Tom Sawyer” was maybe in my league. “YYZ”? Forget it.) I liked that the band was from Canada. (Any foreign clime was exotic to me, even Canada.) I liked that the trio's image was carefully cultivated to make a Midwestern cornhusk like me fantasize about one day being like them: smart, amazing at my instrument, strutting around the stage like some cocky asshole. As a teenager, I was also a kind of gangly bass player with a big schnoz. Who was to say it couldn't happen?
After I moved to Tempe, Arizona in 1990, these two worlds—the world of normal me playing along with records and the celestial rock and roll stratosphere--collided. I moved to the area because I had a friend who'd moved to Phoenix the year before who would let me share his room if I split his rent. I didn't know much about the Phoenix area, but I knew it had 2.5 million people, and a college with 40,000 students in nearby Tempe. There must be some kind of music scene there, where I could play in an original band while finishing my degree.
My hunch was right. There were rock clubs in Tempe like Long Wong's on Mill, and the Sun Club, and Chuy's, where local bands played original music and acted like rock stars as much as the scene would allow them. Most of these bands could draw enough to cover their beer tabs, and a few in town were genuinely popular, like the Gin Blossoms, who could fill any of these club on any night of the week. People actually danced when the Gins played--like, guys with girls dancing; not some random chaos where people hold their hands above their heads and jump up and down. The tunes were great, the beer flowing, the sexual energy palpable. I couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
When I first arrived the Phoenix, four months before my twenty-first birthday, I used to watch bands play through Long Wong's back window. This window went to the outside of the club, right behind where the band played, and people would gather and watch and listen. Of course, I craved to be inside, but standing there in the dusk on Mill Avenue on Friday night and watching the Gins or Dead Hot Workshop play was the next best thing.
Cue collision.
The Gods of the Major Labels descended upon our little town the same year I arrived, and the Gin Blossoms signed a record deal with A&M Records, the first band out of our scene to get signed. A&M Records was the real deal. The Police had been on A&M. Styx. Squeeze. Tempe was being smiled upon, and suddenly, almost overnight, there was a conceivable path from my every day life as a local musician to the rock music stratosphere. I could imagine how it was possible to go from being an insecure twenty-year-old guy staring through windows at rock bands to some facsimile of Geddy Lee. I'd never felt that way before the Gins got signed.
And these feeling were even more validated in 1991 when bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam broke through to the mainstream from their own sleepy music enclave of Seattle. There was something happening in the zeitgeist, something started by bands like REM and Hüsker Dü a decade earlier and carried through to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, that would allow folks like us to occupy the top of the musical charts. There was no reason why the band you saw on Friday night at your local club couldn't be the band you saw the next year on MTV.
When I talked to Nico Holthaus, the producer of the upcoming movie version of my first novel, Stuck Outside of Phoenix, last week, I called this phenomena “The Golden Ticket”--you're just a normal schmo walking around town and then, suddenly, Kurt Cobain--but now I find that metaphor inaccurate. A Golden Ticket, á la Willy Wonka, implies too much dumb luck. You bought a chocolate bar, and you either got a ticket or you didn't. There's always been plenty of luck involved in landing a major label record deal, but luck's not the word that came to my mind when bands started getting signed out of Tempe. It was more a reward for talent and work, like a call-up of a hot hitter from the AAA to the major leagues. It was your soul and work ethic giving you a shot at your dreams. In those early years of the scene, 1990-1993, the only two bands to get signed out of Tempe were the Gin Blossoms and Dead Hot Workshop. They were also my two favorite bands. This didn't seem arbitrary choosings to me. Rather, it was fair judgment. If you were good enough and worked hard enough, you could get The Call-Up.
The Gins subsequent success nationally over the next few years greased the Tempe skids even more, and in 1994 my band the Refreshments got signed by Mercury Records. Mercury was the label of Kiss, John Mellencamp, and not so long ago, of a Canadian trio called Rush. My band would make two albums for the same label that had released Moving Pictures. I'd finally caught up with that lick.
Dee-do-de-do-de-do, Dee-do-de-do-de-do.
In Tempe at the time, much excitement centered around the Refreshments and our shot at becoming the next Gin Blossoms, and our achievements along those lines are noteworthy. We had a hit single in 1996 called “Banditos.” We played “Banditos” live on the all-new Late Night with Conan O'Brien. We wrote and record the theme song for the Fox television series King of the Hill. There's plenty to brag about, but the success of my band isn't really what I think of when I think of the Tempe music scene. This all happened in a different game, at a different level. No, when I think of the scene, I think of those early years of hanging out--inside and outside--Long Wong's, watching the Gin Blossoms and Dead Hot Workshop play, wondering how to get into a band as good as they were. I loved this time so much so that, when I set aside music in 1998 to write my first novel, I decided to focus on these early years. That novel, published in 2003, is Stuck Outside of Phoenix.
Flash forward to 2008. I'm at home watching Mill Avenue Inc., a documentary about the gentrification of the Mill Avenue area of Tempe, where much of the fun had happened back in the day. Nico Holthaus, the director of Mill Ave. Inc., had contacted me about a year earlier to interview me for the film, and I was watching it for the first time. In 2003, Long Wong's--because of economic pressures placed on it by the systematic gentrification of the area--had been forced out of business, and as the last of the great Tempe clubs to go under, it represented the final nail in the coffin of what had been the center of our thriving music universe. This gentrification happened so quickly and seamlessly it was a little scary. All our shared history, erased. Many griped about this, but it was Nico Holthaus who got film rolling, organized everything, and focused the message of the documentary. The result was a film that was entertaining, informative, empowering. A brief phone interview with me appears toward the end, and I'm proud to have had anything to do with it.
The message of that documentary--that gentrification doesn't have to happen; we let it happen--is an important one, and I sympathize with it deeply. But what I enjoyed most about Mill Ave. Inc. were the glimpses into the scene back in the day. Nico compiled film and photos of my cohorts and heroes back then, like the Gins lead singer Robin Wilson working at a record store in 1989 and gushing about his band's soon-to-be-released local album; and Sara Cina, scene queen and manager of Long Wong's, shedding a tear as she talks about the last days of the club. It felt great to be connected with Tempe again after all these years. The clubs were gone, many of the bands had broken up, but Mill Ave. Inc.--in a visual, visceral way--kept the scene alive. I learned from it that film had the power to put us right back there in a way nothing else can.
I emailed Nico in 2010 with the idea of making a movie version of Stuck Outside of Phoenix. I didn't know him well--we'd met face-to-face exactly once--and I had no idea how he'd react. I knew we were both Uncle Tupelo boys from Illinois who'd moved to Arizona in the early nineties and fell in love with the Tempe music scene. I got an reply back from Nico in a matter of minutes, nothing but the word “YEEHAW” written in bold caps. I knew I had him, and that he got it.
I wrote the screenplay for the movie in 2011, focusing on bringing back the palpable sense of a music scene on the brink of discovery. Nico is producing the film, and he has a director and editor and many of the other necessities lined up. He's ready to start rolling as soon as next month.
So, back to kids these days, and me being old.
When the teenage musician of today sits in his room and plays along with his equivalent of “Tom Sawyer,” what is he thinking about? More to the point, what is he dreaming about? Is he dreaming that someday he might play in a band and maybe that band will get signed? Is he dreaming that someday he might get tapped on the shoulder by some person from a record label who would be smiling ear to ear? I don't think so. I don't think kids see bands on major labels in 2012 and think, “Wow, maybe I can do that.” And if they do, they probably shouldn't, because the landscape of the music business has changed so drastically since I played in the Refreshments, winning the game for them is an entirely different enterprise. They need to embrace DIY and start making a name for themselves via the Internet. As an artistically viable force, major labels are dinosaurs, all but over.
And that's exactly as it should be! The Internet and digital technology have taken the game out of big corporations' hands and given it to each and every one of us. You can make a record, film a video, distribute both, set up a rock tour--everything the Refreshments thought we needed a record deal for--in your very own bedroom. It's the fruition of everything Ian MacKaye and Mike Watt ever dreamed of. You control your destiny, not shareholders. In 2012, making sure shareholders have someone to mess with is Justin Bieber's job. You're making art. So do it yourself, jam econo, and show us old folks how we should've been doing it the whole time.
But even though things are better now, that doesn't mean we didn't give something up. Change implies give and take, and we lost something when we screwed The Man. I think the main thing we lost is the dream of The Call-Up, the sense that our talents, if we work hard, can lead to someone important tapping us on the shoulder one day and saying, “Boy, have we got a deal for you.” It's how it happened for Elvis and the Beatles and Kiss and Zeppelin and Van Halen and U2 and Nirvana and Green Day. Take a look at that list. Kinda hard to argue with the system that brought those bands to most every one of us.
Nico and I have talked at length about Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, and more than anything we want the film to emphasize the sense back then that you could be a normal schmo in a band, in a scene, and that scene could get hot, and bands could get signed, and you could wind up on MTV with your face next to Jimi Hendrix's and Mick Jagger's and Kurt Cobain's.
Unfortunately, movie-making is a little different from running a rock band from your bedroom. Many of the same DIY tools apply, and many don't. For one, movie-making involves a lot more people, and if you want a decent end-product, those people probably need to get (very nominally) paid. In other words, if Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie is going to happen, funds need to be raised.
Luckily, the 21st Century has its own fundraising mechanism for these kind of things called Kickstarter. Click on this link here to read more about Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, and please consider donating to its Kickstarter campaign. Don't forget to take a look at the incentives for donating. As I learned while watching Mill Ave Inc., film can bring back what really matters to us like nothing else. It's called movie magic. Thank goodness there's still some magic out there.
(link again)
I'm going to be writing more about this project over the next week or three at my blog, http://artedwards-layindownthelaw.blogspot.com/, and I have a few surprises in store. Please keep tabs on me there every Monday as I unveil more events in the name of this effort. For now, give to the Kickstarter campaign, and thank you for helping to keep The Call-Up alive.