A Life's Pursuit

For many people music is a way to pass the time, a background noise that accompanies a car ride, or a radio buzzing away at work. For others it is a hobby; a fiddling with a guitar or an ingrained habit of tapping one’s fingers on a countertop. For the rest it is a way of life.

Bill “Buckwheat” Young is an example of a man who has lived with a lifelong obsession of music and all things music related. He has spent the greater portion of his life collecting vintage and new guitars and perfecting his bluesy guitar skills. One step into his shop, the Antique Rocker, and one is instantly confronted by musical trinkets and memorabilia surrounded by walls plastered with acoustic, electric and bass guitars. For Buckwheat this isn’t a job, but a kind of retirement. He spends his days tinkering on his guitars and conversing with his buddies that make their way in after work or while on lunch break while classic rock and blues music fills out the relaxed environment.

His obsession with guitars has led to a body of knowledge that outflanks many music store owners and equipment junkies. He can tell the difference between two Stratocasters made in different years or tell you how a particular manufacturer changed their production in separate years. He can help you straighten out a buzz on your fretboard or adjust the action of your strings to get the type of playability you desire.

For all his years spent in absorbing music and its many facets, one of the most impressive things about Buckwheat is the way his fingers nimbly move up and down the frets in rhythmic pentatonic figures. Upon sitting down to jam with him, he instantly picks out the sweet spot of a scale and proceeds to hammer out ascending and descending licks supplemented by soulful bends.



In the living room of his house there sits a single guitar and a small coffee table filled with paper parchments indicating chord progressions for songs and even some lyrics scrawled out in the evening hours. Downstairs in the basement, however lies the real treasure, a robust collection of electric and acoustic guitars amidst other coveted amplifiers. While it is not uncommon for musicians to have a couple of guitars or amps, it is obvious that this is an obsession. Stacks of black guitar cases lean against the perimeter of the walls while some guitars sit out on stands. In the bathroom sits a small amplifier for him to jam on while he sits on the toilet with the seat down to jam. It’s his own personal utopia.

Some people find their calling in other areas of life, but I doubt there is anyone out there who can say that Buckwheat isn’t doing exactly what he should be. He is the epitome of what happens to some who take on music as a hobby and ends up developing a lifelong obsession. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that a few little notes can have such a lasting effect on our lives, but there are worse things to be addicted to.






Hear a work in progress on my podcast

Fanatic

Despite what some arrogant musicians may think, they didn’t make their own success. The fans did. If there isn’t anyone listening then there would be no need for bands to make the music. If fans didn’t buy CDs there would be no money for tours or incentive to continue to write new songs.

With this in mind one of the most important elements for a new band is developing a solid fan base that will buy recordings, tell their friends about you, and pack your shows. This is a simple process for a signed band; their label has the money and people to adequately promote you to a much larger audience.

But for bands that act as their own promotion and management, getting the word out about your group can be a difficult task. Things have improved as new technologies have emerged including the proliferation of free web profiles such as those offered by Myspace. On this site a band can add friends to their profile and send out bulletins detailing show information and recordings. Bands can also post several songs that can be heard by anyone who stumbles onto their page. Myspace is truly becoming a one stop advertising machine that can reach a wider audience faster.

But just using this site doesn’t enable you to get people to go to it. You have to get your name out there first so that people know about your band and go to the profile rather than hoping that people will accidentally end up there and like what they hear.

With a small budget and no representation, this is where the aspiring musician has to put his time in. What’s the point of spending money on recording if you aren’t going to get people to hear it?

In late January or February my band will be ready to begin our own promotional campaign. To begin we will try to get some free press in local publications, and hopefully a CD review. This will require us hitting the pavement and plugging a short feature story on our band. Reno also has an entertainment publication called the Reno News & Review that often covers local bands and would be a perfect candidate for this type of article.

The next task –getting airplay – is a crucial part of promotion but the most difficult part to obtain. We hope to go to KDOT 104.5 and get one of the dj’s to play our material. The problem with this is the fact that stations have pre programmed schedules and are not apt to play your material over that of an established act. This station, however, has at times played local band’s recordings late at night.

Finally, we hope to talk with some of the club promoters throughout the city and hopefully convince them to let us play when larger touring acts come through. Often times local bands are used to open a show, such as at the New Oasis. This would help get our name out to fans of certain genres that come to see a bigger band but maybe become interested in us as a result of the performance.

Ultimately promotion comes down to time and hard work. Although creating the music is an extremely important part of being a musician, promoting that music is often overlooked and should be considered an equally crucial step. Fans make bands.

Hear some new stuff on my podcast.

Metamorphosis

Last week I was thinking about musical growth and this week that theme sort of continued, but in a slightly different manner. I was thinking about the way an idea or a set of related ideas become a song. I was looking back at some of stuff that I came up with when I first started playing guitar and comparing it to the newer songs that my band had started putting together. It was interesting to see how something really basic can become something new and different yet retain a tie to the original idea.

Many music fans don’t realize that writing a song can be an extremely long process before the writers are even happy with it. One simple idea can morph and mutate into countless side branches before becoming anything worthwhile. It is rare for the writer to bring in a song idea to the rest of the band that is completely finished or to use an original riff exactly as it was written.

But the fact that things change when band members get together is one of the best parts about music. The interaction between members and the contribution of each player are what make a song what it is.

In the case of my band, each song (all of which are still unfinished) has been through what seems like 5 versions a piece, each with different structures and variations of the basic theme. Through this exploration we hope to make each song stronger by giving it a chance to write itself rather than being satisfied by pushing it in only one direction. Some of the best material comes from each member pulling the song in a different direction than the others, sometimes to the point where the song itself tears and the band has to start over again.

While this seems relatively simple, this process is in fact slow, confrontational, and sometimes agonizing. Arguments about how the song should go and how parts should sound are commonplace and can slow down the writing pace to a slow crawl. One of our songs, "Panacea", has been around in various forms since 2004 when I first came up with the root idea. It has taken up until this very day for the band to reach an agreement on the song. We have argued for hours on what we think should happen where, which instrument should shine in which part, and how the vocals should augment the piece. While 2 years may seem like a long time for a song to come into being, progress was delayed due to the distance factor between the band and myself and the college academic schedule.

I do think that the extra time has allowed the song to grow and find its own identity. I’m sure that some great songs have been written in less than an hour or even a couple, however, I think for the most part that time benefits songwriting.

Here is a link to my newly created podcast. I'm trying to get the files into the right formats to get some stuff up, but until then I posted a filler/intro track.

click here to go to my podcast

"I've watched you change"

If you were to ask an older adult, say 60 years or so old, about rock music most of them would display a kind of scorn for it. Many would say that these musicians are party animals who flip the finger in the direction of authority while simultaneously corrupting the youth. This may be true of some, but not for all. There are positive elements in some artists out there who become better people by continuing to write music and others who have journeys of self discovery that lead to positive outputs.

The Deftones released a new record this week and it got me thinking about this growth in terms of both music and personal development. It is their 6th album and their music has changed a lot since the release of Adrenaline in 1995. In today’s industry it seems that there are many bands that stay in a comfort zone and never push themselves to try innovative things. Others continue to express the same things over and over rather than tackling new things in their lives.

I was reminded of where I started out as a musician way back in elementary school with the violin and the snare drum. In middle school I focused on the drums and continued up through high school. As with most people I wasn’t great when I started out, I was just looking to make as much noise as possible. As time went on I improved and began trying things that I had never been able to do before. That was my first experience with purely musical growth.

When I joined my first band sophomore year in high school I ended up writing some of the lyrics while holding down my drum duties. As I look back at the words I wrote, I am reminded of the person that I was at the time and the limited experiences I was drawing on. Flipping forward in the spiral notebook at the things I have written recently, it feels as though I have in fact become a better person and expanded my views. I don’t feel like I’m the same foolish and naive person that I was at that time.

A perfect example of this type of emotional and personal growth is in the career of the band Tool. When they started out in the early 90's vocalist James Maynard Keenan was full of anger and even hate. His lyrics were bitter and biting as they erupted from his throat. Jumping ahead about 10 years, the band grew enormously in terms of musicianship and also lyrical content on 2001’s Lateralus. The album had many positive themes laced through the tracks and Keenan has also said in interviews that the record is largely about healing. When asked why he no longer seems as angry, Keenan said that if his music can help heal others then it can also heal himself.




Tool in 1992. Video from rev79 on youtube.com





Tool in 2001. Video from Beast6 on youtube.com


I hope that bands, no matter how known or unknown they are, will try to achieve both kinds of growth and continue to push music and their own potential. If this development ever ends then the art will be at a standstill. I hope that I can also follow that same path as I continue my musical endeavors.