Joe: Does this have anything to do with your questions?
So what do you think, dear reader? Did this have anything to do with my questions????
Find out... TODAAYYYyYyYyYyYyyy!!!
Me: Oh, totally! Actually, you kind of… answered half of them right there. So you stopped playing music when, like late 90s?
Joe: It was 2003. No, I’m sorry, 2004, because it was literally when I turned 30.
Me: Was that a thing like “when I turn 30, I’m done with the whole band thing”?
Joe: I started playing bands when I was like, fourteen, and we played at things like battle of the bands, fests, and some actual venues, and because we were so young there were very few venues that fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds could play. There was this place out in the suburbs, The Thirsty Whale... I think now, it's a service station. It was mostly a metal or hard rock venue, like if you were one of those, that was the only place you could play. That was my first experience with performance, and I did that all throughout high school, throughout college, and even though, like you said, I never had any illusions like “Oh, I’m gonna make a living off this, I’m gonna be on MTV" [if this sounds unfamiliar, this was part of our preliminary conversation, before we got down to actual interviewy things] – when MTV played videos. It was like if you grow up with a sport or growing up with some mode of expression or release; you do it, it’s therapeutic, and it’s social. I really like the idea that music’s social, which is very different from fiction writing. I really miss that element of “Ha! I have this idea” and another person comes with their own thing, and together makes a better, more interesting idea. I do love dramatic writing, for stage, and that has a similar vibe, where a director comes in, and you write the script, and there’s actors, and it feels familiar, but what’s different is – I just talked about this in my class last night with my grad students – playing music, for me at least, is this non-intellectual process. It’s more with your body. It’s a way of expressing things without necessarily having to put words to it. Even if you have a song where there’s lyrics, it feels much more abstract, less literal, less intellectual… It’s often out-and-out just a lot more fun, whereas when you write a book, it might be fun – sometimes it’s not-
Me: Should be fun.
Joe: Yeah! It is fun, most of the time, but sometimes it’s really hard and frustrating, and because I have my career wrapped up in it, it’s not something you do for pure amusement, for pure joy, and I miss that. I also miss just making noise, like the element of “we’re gonna get together, have some beers, make some actual sound that’s bigger than us”. It being this physical, non-intellectual expression.... I really miss that. I still go see a lot of shows as often as I can, but that act of spending a couple hours each week doing something that has no career goal or pursuit, where you’re just doing it to be around your friends and have fun, I kinda miss that.
I’m 39. It feels like the things that I do now, even if they’re fun, all come back to either my career as a writer, or my family. It’s rare where I go do something totally unrelated. I mean, I exercise and things like that, but there’s something about music and the age that I started playing it, I felt like it was its own pursuit. So I miss that.
So what happened was that I’d been in these bands, we’d toured, there was this great venue, and every so often they’ll still have shows maybe a few times a year – the Fireside Bowl, over on Fullerton. And in the mid-90s all the way to like 2004, 2005, maybe fifteen years or so, it was kind of the best all-ages venue. They typically had a lot of punk or post-punk or indie rock shows, and they had great touring/national acts play there. And it’s a bowling alley, right? There was this little tiny stage, the sound was decent, but the thing that was great about it was a lot of young people came, cuz it was mostly all-ages shows. There was this general sense of enjoyment and acceptance and excitement.
Sometimes in shows in Chicago, there’s a feeling of distance or snobbery, where the audience just kinda sits there in this kind of Chicago rock pose.
[Here, Joe crosses his arms, tilts his chin down and glares at the theoretical stage (my forehead), imperceptibly bobbing his neck. Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.]
Me: I usually try to avoid those kinds of shows.
Joe: Well sometimes they’re great shows but a lot of the times, people literally don’t know what to do with their bodies as they’re listening, so they cross their arms and it feels like they’re kinda disengaged. The shows at the Fireside Bowl were pretty unique. And there’s a bar or club like that in every big city where it’s this all-ages-show club and people go there when they’re like fifteen or sixteen and they have these seminal life-changing rock-and-roll experiences there, and that was that place for that particular time period. I saw so many bands, and the bands I was in, we played that venue so many different times… It felt like a clubhouse. You know what I mean? It felt like this great place of safety and comfort even though they’re putting on these really great bands, some avant-garde kinda music.
I’d played at those venues all throughout my twenties, and the older I got, the more I realized the people coming to shows were getting younger and younger. For a while, I was like, “These are like babies!” but I was just getting older.
I had started playing music just for fun, and this great almost therapeutic quality for me, like I started playing when my parents were getting a divorce. It was just some great release. By the time I'd turned 30, I’d started writing pretty seriously, and I’d had a couple books come out, I had toured, and that pursuit of writing had kinda taken over. I was doing all these things as a writer that I always enjoyed doing as a musician, like touring or performing. Also, there was something about playing these all-ages shows with like fourteen-year-olds or fifteen-year-olds that felt kinda odd or almost inappropriate, like I was holding onto this thing that had been really important at one time in my life, and it was really okay to let it go. So that’s when I’d stopped. I’d also promised my girlfriend, who became my wife at the time, that because I was touring with the books and touring with the bands, that when I turned thirty I’d kinda back off the music, cuz it was just for fun.
The only thing that I miss, like I said, is the non-verbal expression of people being in a room and making great noise. I have it with my kids sometimes, where they just yell and bang stuff, and that feels… familiar, but it’s not quite the same.
Me: It’s a little more destructive.
Joe: Yeah, stuff gets broken and then you’re like, “Ohhh, I gotta clean that up.” But it’s that release… You don’t even have to play a show to feel it, even if you’re just playing or practicing or whatever, there’s this real emotional release that happens. I have that in other ways, but it’s not as… hm…
Me: It’s like another outlet.
Joe: It is! An outlet where you’re not hoping to get money or fame from it, and that’s real important, I think. So that’s when I stopped playing, and that’s also when I started doing tons of music journalism, because I’d had all these relationships with these different bands.
Me: You started doing that when you stopped playing?
Joe: Yes, because I’d established all these different relationships with bookers, and venue owners, and bands, like I knew all these bands cuz I’d played with them, so I started working as a contributing editor at Punk Planet, and I was in this great position, cuz I never ran out of bands to write about. There were bands that I thought were great that we had played with that deserved national attention, so this was a way to take what I most loved, this music, and actually give an opportunity for someone else to hear about these bands that I was enjoying.
Once you start writing music journalism, your mailbox is never empty. I started getting ten CDs a day, and I would just have so much music, it was great. For seven or eight years, I just didn’t buy music, I just kept getting tons and tons of promos. It was awesome. I got turned on to so many great bands like that.
And going and seeing shows, it still echoes that kind of familiarity of playing in a band, it still does provide a kind of release in that way.
End of today's session! We moved on to more great topics from there, but this post is already long enough soooooo I'll leave the next great slab of awesome for later. 'Til next time!
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