austinkleon:

Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
—William Blake

If you think life is rough for indie bands nowadays, you need to read this book. I especially liked the chapters about The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, and Fugazi.

Some favorite bits below.

On “jamming econo,” or, keeping your overhead low and accepting your limitations:

Corporate rock was about living large; indie was about living realistically and being proud of it. Indie bands didn’t need million-dollar promotional budgets and multiple costume changes. All they needed was to believe in themselves and for a few other people to believe in them, too. You didn’t need some big corporation to fund you, or even verify that you were any good. It was about viewing as a virtue what most saw as a limitation.

The Minutemen called it “jamming econo.“ And not only could you jam econo with your rock group — you could jam econo on your job, in your buying habits, in your whole way of living. You could take this particular approach to music and apply it to just about anything else you wanted to. You could be beholden only to yourself and the values and people you respected. You could take charge of your own existence. Or as the Minutemen put it in a song, “Our band could be your life.”

In other words, “Lowering your sights was raising your sights.”

Most of the bands in the book either held day jobs or lived on next-to-nothing. It’s incredible how frugal bands had to be—at Mission of Burma’s peak, they were only making $500 a month, split between four members. The Minutemen recorded DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME for $1,100. Interestingly, some of the noisiest and nastiest bands were the best at the business side: Big Black always made money on tour, and the Butthole Surfers “sold out” as soon as they could.

On promotion:

Mike Watt of The Minutemen:

“Where we had the most control was at the gigs. So the idea was to get people to the gig. We had divided the whole world into two categories: there was flyers and there was the gig. You’re either doing the gig, which is like one hour of your life, or everything else to get people to the gig. Interviews were flyers, videos were flyers, even records were flyers. We didn’t tour to promote records, we made records to promote the tours, because the gig was where you could make the money.”

On networking and sharing:

“There weren’t too many secrets back then,” said Mission of Burma manager Jim Coffman. “Everybody was just kind of helping everybody out.”

Sonic Youth was especially good at networking — Thurston Moore published a fanzine in which he profiled bands and musicians he wanted to connect with, they would figure out who the hot critics were and go schmooze with them at parties, and they would do everything they could to help out other bands, building up tons of good will. A lot of this was calculated, of course, but it also just was a natural outgrowth of the band members’ interests and curiosities. Here’s Lee Ranaldo:

We’re all voracious acquirers of information, whether it be books or movies or whatever, we’re just really vastly into what’s going on in culture aad trying to synthesize what’s going on. I think that was just a natural impetus, a natural tendency…

“A lot of bands are trying to present themselves as a singular entity in the center of it all. And I think we’ve always been the exact opposite, trying to present ourselves amidst a universe or a society of stuff going on.”

A few more favorite quotes:

• Ian MacKaye: “I didn’t know enough about the world to really sing about it. But I knew enough about my world to sing about it.”
• Bob Mould: “It wasn’t so much about ‘smash the system’ but ‘make our own system’.”
• Lee Ranaldo: “When you tuned a guitar a new way, you were a beginner all over again and you could discover all sorts of new things.”
• Mike Watt: “You need bad things to make good things. It’s like with farming— if you want to grow a good crop, you need a lot of manure.”
• Steve Albini: “The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid. You could be operating in a vacuum, you could be as fucked up an individual as you cared to be, and if you did something of worth, all these external conditions were immaterial.”
• Lou Barlow: “If you want something to happen, you write a song about it.”
• Brendan Canty: “No matter what you do, you’re probably going to be lost in the annals of music, so you might as well play what you feel like.”

It’s interesting to compare the structure of this book to Will Herme’s LOVE GOES TO BUILDINGS ON FIRE, which also covers a particular music scene in a set time period, but tell its story chronologically, rather than band-by-band. It’d also be fun to do a remix of this book and collage and juxtapose excerpts based on themes, such as “the van,” “in the studio,” etc.

Filed under: my reading year 2013