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The adventures of an accidental band manager. |
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Saturday, March 19, 2005 Teen Groove Goddess in Emo-Meltown.... "...another Saturday night an' I ain't got nobody
I got some money 'cos I just got paid. How I wish I had someone to talk to, I'm in an awful way." Terror-suspect and emo-extraordinaire, Cat Stevens Its a busy, busy night in the batcave. Guitars are going in and out of tune, keyboards and printers are rattling away, the odd "Pox on Bill Gates," type curse is muttered as the software coughs and splutters under the strain. Tommorrow is a full-band rehearsal and there's the usual mad over-preparation which goes with building a new band. Lee is frantically trying to perfect the various bits from this week's practice, trying to remember the words and the tabs and the chords and the timing and the arrangements and, and, and...and If I hear a Mellissa Etheridge riff one more time tonight I'm going to scream. Ah, the joys of the AOR covers-band. Meanwhile, the teenaged groove-goddess is busy birthday-shopping for several compadres and it looks as if adolescent gift-giving is as subtle and fraught with crypto-sentiment as ever. She WAS going to give some guy the latest(?) Story of the Year album but apparently, on closer listening, it has "too many emo-tracks on it." Uh huh. But he's already got the latest Greenday CD - ("The most AWESOME concert I've ever seen!!!") according to TGG. (It has fireworks and flames and everything!"). And he wouldn't be caught dead with a Good Charlotte CD....."SOOOOOOO emo".Actually TGG loves Good Charlotte but she says they're pretty ordinary in concert. "They're OK when they're playing, but they talked for a good two-thirds of the set." So the hunt for the musically-correct birthday present continues...and I'm amazed at how faddish late-teen-taste is. When I was a gel (pause here to laugh at the old lady. Finished? Good.) it was OK to switch musical tastes as often as you switched boyfriends...like once every three weeks. But by the time your reached 14 or 15 you began to develop genuine preferences and started to build some taste...seems like the marketing of music as breakfast cereal has made fashion-music something which lasts until your late teens or even twenties. (Addmittedly a small handful of TGGs friends are music-savvy and experimental without being fad-driven; but the rest of their posse looks at these kids as if they're kinda' odd and "way serious" about something which ought to be disposeable fun.) We AOR types (Aging Old Retros, apparently) get pretty fed up of this and wonder why music isn't given a bit of respect. (Kinda' hard to have respect for actual musicians I admit. Between the natural bad-behaviour of most musos and the E-Weekly marketing, there doesn't seem to be much to feel too respectful about.) ...in any case, we the AOR-people will just keep playing the music, loving the music and (hopefully) make some money of the music. We might have missed our big chance at the big time (apparently you have to be an anorexic 16 year old yo get that) but we're still here rocking the nights away. Roll on Suday. 2 Comments:
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