I wrote the following while engaged in a summer marathon of rock and roll-based movies. While writing, I was watching a lot of movies about people making their music, their mythologies, and their typical cliched skirmishes. I adore these rock and roll clichés, but I cannot get away from the differences between the world of musicians and that of people that “make stuff.” Anyway, wrote an essay about, here it goes.
This is an essay about practice leading to final creation.
This is my second draft of this report.
Whenever I practice making things, I end up with a thing when I’m done. This might seem obvious, but it’s something that needs to be stated. That thing is right in front of you. It takes up space in your room. You have to find places to put them. You might cut them up in anger or you might set them on fire. If you’re an idiot, you might even try to sell them. The biggest problem with all of this is that they’re not all winners. So much of what you make, while you’re making it, is just shit. Once in a while you’ll pull something nice out of a pile of failure, but that’s not always the case. 10% at best. No matter, it’s there. You have to do something about it. You’ve created a thing that exists in the world for better or worse.
Musicians can practice and it all simply goes into the air and then disappears. There’s no body to dispose of. A day’s failure is just gone. A day’s success needs to be reproduced.
I am writing this to address the difference between musicians and makers. I say makers because artists seems pretentious, it’s actually hard for me to say it. Artists use paint, right? Sorry, an old association, artists stack dirty dishes in the corner of whitewashed rooms while trying to pay down hundreds of thousands of dollars to RISD, right? I’m not a crafter, that’s the worst. A crafter makes things that are clearly beautiful or well-defined, something to go onto a wall or to tie a room together, something that could be useful. On the rare times I see my things on peoples walls, I wonder why they have them up there. A few people have printed 16x20 images of my face on their walls, and I can’t understand how they’re able to look at that for months, or even years on end. I just call them “makings.” I like to use that word because it seems vague, but also a fun way to play with the language. The “makings” consist of collages, assemblage pieces, and weirdo digital / analog amalgamations called broadsides. They have little meaning except to exist.
I know a lot of musicians personally, almost all my close friends play music to varying degrees. Some have properly trained, some have toured, many have made records, but most still collect fancy guitar pedals for discussion at mixed company parties. Although I have a lot of musician friends, I don’t really know anyone that makes things. Not having that connection creates some communication issues, especially when I try and make things for musician friends.
It’s something I’m used to. Being that they make my favorite drug, this isn’t much of a problem for me. For these musician friends, I have carried their heavy equipment into the club. I have tried to lift heavy bass cabinets by myself. I have hauled drum hardware up thin stairs. I have sold merch, something I hate more than carrying gear. One summer, I even drove a band on tour for a month. For that whole time, I was paid $125.00 dollars. The RV I drove didn’t have air conditioning and I mostly slept on the floor after driving to the next venue in the middle of the night, alone. That was fun, no complaints there. I have stood and watched friends bands that I didn’t like very much, telling them they had a great show even if I was thinking of something else while they announced from the stage, “Thanks for coming out.” Best of all, you get to pay 5-10 dollars at the door for that support. It’s not all woe being a friend of dudes (almost always dudes) in a band. Periodically I’ll get drink tickets that go unused. Once that led me to playing drums outside a New Jersey venue on the sidewalk. Some dude kissed me that night. Maybe I got in free.
No one has ever asked if they could come over and help cut paper, or collect paper, or put addresses on envelopes…no one. I practice upstairs while listening to podcasts in a long thin attic that gets way too hot in summer.
There’s a public culture that goes along with playing music, one that I’ve been able to engage with for decades. I’ve enjoyed doing all those little things that help make like easier on a band. Like an idiot, I even volunteered (more liked forced) my services as “executive producer” for a band over the past couple of years. I chose that title for myself because it seems rather meaningless. Manly what my job title has entailed is designing T-shirts and flyers and doing a little light clerical work. I’ve even taken on trying to design record covers, not that anyone has really asked. I just make the thing and then text it to them. Sometimes they respond and other times they do not. Right now, I have dozens of collages made of them but I’m not sure what to do with them. Not that musicians, or anyone for that matter, know what they want when you design things for them, especially when they haven’t asked for them. People only know what they don’t want, not what they do want. Keep in mind they’re musicians, not always the smartest people on earth. Count to four. Tune the guitar. Go to a party and talk about guitar pedals for hours on end, that’s the sort of things they know how to do. They never seem to know if a collage is “too linear.”
When I text them things they don’t know I’m practicing. If they don’t like something, I’ll just make another thing. If that thing sucks, it doesn’t matter other than having a body left to deal with, a thing sitting on my desk or in a giant pile of things. No one said stop either, I just keep going, I need the practice. Maybe I’ll make the bodies? Maybe I’ll cut them up? Maybe I’ll add them to an assemblage piece.
Every couple of weeks I’ll print some new images of them and move them around in a collage. Sometimes I’ll play with the image digitally. My favorite thing I made from one of these sessions is an image that appears in my summer report zine. I think it looks amazing, but I have no idea if they like it or not. Who knows if anyone said anything about the image when I send it to then. Either way, it exists and that’s the most important thing. I’ll find a grave for it later.
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