“Bands”
The Wytches live The Moth by Viktorija Berlickaite
The first band I was ever in lasted for two or three years. We recorded about 8 albums’ worth of original music in that time. We were insular, angry, stupid, smart, maladjusted, and just plain weird. We called ourselves by many names because we made music with different members rotating in and out, or for different ends, but the two most common names we made music under were The Corporate Whores (our punk band) and The Festering Sores (our weirdo noise band).
We played every day, which was easy to do since we lived together. Dennis and Phil would get home from work, and we would rehearse as the Corporate Whores. Most nights we would then eat dinner, do bongs, and start making strange cassette recordings, which we called “festering:” as in “Hey, you wanna fester?” or, “Dude, let’s fester!” To which one would invariably reply, “Yeah, should I play guitar?” or something similar. There were things we could say to each other that would have sounded like nonsense to anyone else.
I miss that. It’s been a really long time since I’ve been in a real band. I sometimes think I should just give up on the desire for that insular, mysterious connection, but if the opportunity came along, I’d do it in a heartbeat. When I talk about that desire, though, the most common reaction I get is no reaction at all.
Occasionally, someone will say something like, “I’m in four bands!” and I’ll think, “No, you’re not. You’re in four ensembles.” It’s a totally different thing. I’ve gone the ensemble route. That’s not anything I’m interested in. An ensemble is a group of musicians gathered together on an ad hoc basis, each player learning the music on their own and getting together maybe once or twice before a gig for rehearsal, if at all. They’ll play whatever gig the person who has hooked everyone up for has booked, often sounding shambolic and half-assed (though not always: sometimes you get a group of very good, experienced players together and things go well) and then everybody goes their own way afterwards: the very definition of a one-night stand. To my way of thinking, it’s a sure-fire recipe for mediocrity.
Here’s the best example of an I ensemble I’ve ever been involved with. I once put together a group to back me up for a benefit show: I gave everyone recordings of my songs and met with each musician on an individual basis to run through the material. The whole band didn’t actually meet until we’d each loaded our own equipment into the club for the show. I found myself introducing players to each other for the first time, right there on stage. After a brief sound check, we played an entire set of my original songs competently and without major incident. At the end of the set, everybody packed up and left. So far as I know, some of those players have never set eyes on each other since.
We sounded fine, everybody found “the pocket” – that place in the beat where everything matches up and the music feels unified, maybe even manages to soar a bit – easily. These were seasoned musicians, some of them with a jazz background. They’d done this sort of gig many times, in many combinations. Playing that gig was fun, but it was like dancing with a stranger who knows how. It sounded ordinary. Anything that happened during that set could have happened in almost any gig with good players. When the music stopped, everybody moved on. It was a perfectly satisfactory ensemble experience.
A band is something deeper: a relationship. It’s harder. You have to deal with each other’s quirks and prejudices. I get why people avoid such situations. The entanglements, the drama, the frustration of dealing with people and their problems rehearsal after rehearsal, week after week, month after month; these things are more trouble than most of us want in our lives.
But I crave it. Not because I need relationship drama in my life, but for something that comes of sticking with a band through all of that: let’s call it telepathy. A band begins, over time, to hear each other’s thoughts as music. You develop intimacy and a resulting camaraderie with your band mates that goes beyond what can be conveyed through language alone. You begin to be able to think, if I do this, then she’ll do that, without having to discuss it.
My last band was the Hexatonics, which played songs I wrote and had previously played solo. That band was Kate Devil on drums, Karen Elliott on electric guitar, and me on acoustic guitar and vocals. Karen and I would go out to Kate’s house and play in her basement, maybe twice a week. It was a weird little band, but it was a band. The songs were mine, but everybody wrote their own parts. We did a few covers – a Barry White song, a Hüsker Dü song, an old traditional country song – but most of the set was my material and I did all of the singing. The music was created by all of us together. Not only did Kate and Karen write their own parts to each song, but the songs themselves changed as we played them together.
We played two shows: one in Kate’s basement for a party, and one at a local indie rock club. But it was complicated; it didn’t last. All of the interpersonal stuff, all of the ways we were different in our priorities, our tastes, and our expectations: all of the day-to-day stuff of our lives came into the rehearsal space with us. It both helped create our performance together and made it more and more difficult to play, until we had to stop.
Those things are part of a band and are the essential difference between the two types of entities I’m talking about here. An ensemble avoids the interpersonal, except on the most surface level. Scheduling is the extent to which an ensemble considers its various members’ outside lives in any meaningful way. All baggage loads in and out with the instruments.
The Hexatonics were the counter example of that. That it didn’t last fits the model quite well. A band socializes the learning process. Though I brought in original songs, and other material was generated outside of our group, Karen, Kate, and I put the material through a process of reworking that was in some ways intentional and in some ways nonverbal, even subconscious, springing out of each of our idiosyncrasies as players and as people. That nonverbal, socialized learning and the accommodating of idiosyncrasy is the source of a band’s telepathy.
That telepathy expresses itself in moments, like a zap of static electricity, releasing its potential in a moment of contact. It can happen in the first moment when two musicians play together, though that is rare. And if it does happen in that first meeting, it may not happen again for a long time, if it ever does. Or it can come into the rehearsal space without the players realizing it, over the course of many meetings, so gradually that you don’t even realize it’s happening. The telepathic channel between the members of a band widens and becomes more robust over time. The risk is that anything and everything comes through that channel, if it is truly open.
By the time the world had heard of the Beatles, they’d been playing together for a number of years. Much of the time in those early years, they played in a little bar called Star Club in Hamburg, West Germany, 6 or 7 hours a night, 6 days a week. The situation had to be isolating and therefore brought their interplay as a band into sharp focus. Later, when they became the most famous band in the world, they were, as one associate of the band put it, incarcerated together full time. By the end, they were making the best music of their lives, but they couldn’t stand to be around each other. The channel was open, and all of the interpersonal tension was passing through that channel along with the magic.
But as they were finding the act of playing and being together impossible, at least one of them was finding that channel opening with a new collaborator. On the fourth album they made together, Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band, there is a moment when John and Yoko’s telepathy is plainly observable. In the opening section of the song “Why?” John is playing slide guitar and Yoko is singing. In the opening section of the song there’s a point where it is impossible to tell where John’s guitar playing ends and Yoko’s singing begins. They are one sound, together, a single tone made by John’s hands and Yoko’s breath. It’s a transcendent moment: an audible example of the sort of connection I’m craving when I say I want to be in a band.
The telepathy of a band in performance is to be shared with an audience. Through that transcendence of sound, there is a cosmic unity, that all in earshot – or more precisely, mindshot (heartshot?) -- can experience together.
It follows, then, that it should be possible to achieve that connection to an audience even as a solo musician, but when I worked alone as a solo musician, the repetition and loneliness of rehearsal made it a drag, the performing of my songs at gigs a rigamarole, rather than an opportunity to soar. I never achieved transcendence on stage alone. That cosmic, extraordinary connection –- that telepathy -- that I’ve experienced as a member of a band has otherwise eluded me.
A band already has the open channel between its members. The spark of telepathic connection that can become the blaze of transcendence lurks around the edges of insular references, the endless dance of each player’s whole presence coming into the band space. It even requires some strife; the butting of heads, the misunderstandings and challenges along the way lead to deeper concord, if the players can remain open and vulnerable. The giving of one’s self to the collective moment allows those flashes of universal connection to the infinite.
