Raised on radio
Young music fans today don’t know how spoiled they are. Local rock is in its nth golden age; it’s all over the radio now. On any given station, they are playing a local band you want to hear, and that is an undeniably great thing.
The children of the late ’90s and early ’00s were not as fortunate. We were young in the glory days of acoustic cover acts — how exciting! To paraphrase C-3PO, thank the Maker for NU 107. I lived off what I heard from Zach and Joey on the way to school and from Francis Brew on the way home, and back then, that was enough. That little daily taste of the possibilities of local rock was enough to make me want more.
Still, my exposure to local bands was limited to whatever I got to hear on the radio — that couldn’t have been the entire range of the musical spectrum, and I wanted to know what I was missing.
Live gigs were out of the question, since I was barely out of my tweens and, like most parents, mine thought rock and roll was a little too crazy for their little girl. My high school banned Chicosci for “inciting riots,” and possibly for their abominably dyed hair. They banned Sandwich, too, because Marc Abaya took his shirt off in front of dozens of impressionable young schoolgirls, and by the time I was allowed to stay for the fair’s concert, we didn’t get the bands I wanted to see anymore.
Downloading was just as troublesome, since iTunes hadn’t been invented yet and OPM was rare on the Internet, but whenever I would hear whispers of local bands from the upperclassmen I eavesdropped on, I’d hit the keys and search. Ciudad. Dicta License. Kapatid. Sugarfree. Imago. Twisted Halo. And from the college circuit, F.O.E., Boy Elroy, and Sponge Cola. There were so many more I still hadn’t heard.
Clearly there was a lot out there, and I wanted in on it. I joined everyone’s mailing list and continually received updates on gigs at dingy music bars that I couldn’t go to because I was too young. I downloaded all the bootlegs I could find, made a few friends among the bands I liked, and, resigned to my fate as the delicate unica hija of my family, I decided that I would wait for my time to come.
It has been my time (albeit somewhat limited time) for almost three years now, and if anything, I am even more in love with our music than I was when I was a 15-year-old kid listening to Brad and Rainsong, pretending I was there. There is an energy in live music that never makes it into the studio recordings. There is a particular passion from both artist and audience that makes the music so much more meaningful.
You get to hear the songs they never play on the radio, the ones you love. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, your favorite band will play a song you yell for. In Case Of Fire! or Photocopy! and Sandwich will play it, and you feel like it’s just for you.
You get to hear the songs they wrote just the other day, and there is nothing quite like sharing in the excitement of a band as they unleash a new song into the world, into a small crowd of people who are ready to love it, mistakes and all.
You get to hear the bands whose music isn’t on a CD or on the radio; those elusive people whose songs get stuck in your head, whose lyrics you agonize over. The bands you’re excited to see over and over again because you keep humming their tunes but can never seem to remember the words over the guitar feedback and the drums.
Packed shoulder to shoulder in a small rock club with people you’ve never met, you get to be a part of something. Three feet away from the people whose music kept you company in the loneliest, most tumultuous years of your life, you get to be a part of something. In those moments of sonic bliss, you get to be part of something amazing. You don’t get that on the radio or on a CD.
Look around you, you’re home.
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You can e-mail me at bewaretheashtraygirl@yahoo.com. Next week, or perhaps next year, the Ashtray Girl’s favorite local acts of 2007. Whee!
