SEARCHING FOR INSPIRATION
I
had a dream last night that I was hanging out with indie-rock hero Neil
Haggerty (who was in PUSSY GALORE and ROYAL TRUX) and who has a new hip solo
record) and somehow the conversation got directed to what music he was
listening to these days. He sheepishly admitted that he didn’t listen to
very much newer music. “It’s not that I don’t like some of it. It’s
just that I don’t find any of it really...”
“Inspiring?” I prompted.
“Yeah, you could say that.”
I was about to tell him how I’d heard his new record played almost constantly on the local cool college radio station for a week, but then I woke up and had to let the dogs out.
But those words haunted me for quite a while after my transition from the Land of Nod to the Land of Barely Awake. They echoed sentiments I wrote in a song over a decade ago called “1989” (which, ironically, was a highly self-conscious reference to the STOOGES song “1969” from 20 years before):
“It’s been so long since
I have been impressed
It’s been so long since
My boredom’s been redressed”
I remember that when I wrote those words, the big new musical influence in my life was the 8-track tape, which I’d recently discovered and which opened up a world of past music to me. I stopped buying much of anything that had been recorded after 1977, and I didn’t feel like I was missing very much. The big new music in the indie-rock scene at that time was starting to call itself “grunge” and grew out of the music of a few seminal bands from the ’60s and ’70s. I found my interests and my bands running along similar lines to the supposed new music explosion emanating from the Pacific Northwest and gaining its own identity through association with an independent record label called SUB POP.
My
band ended up breaking up in 1989, for yet more irony, after a tour of Europe
which left me with vivid memories of huge ISAAC HAYES posters in Amsterdam and
smaller NIRVANA posters just about everywhere we went. NIRVANA and a few other
bands captured the underground buzz we were hoping for, even though we were
accidentally tapping from the same musical source and the same sense of
boredom and listlessness. Perhaps if my band had stayed together it would have
been able to jump on the bandwagon of our cynical, backward-looking peers like
NIRVANA and URGE OVERKILL, but I was starting to feel that we were part of the
problem and not the solution.
Though I like some of the music from that era,
I wouldn’t necessarily call it “inspiring”. Most of it seemed like a
game of “spot the reference” where you 
could
pat yourself on the back for noticing a nicked MC5 riff or a stolen ALICE
COOPER phrase. There was a certain disingenuousness that was becoming
soul-numbing for me. So I basically stopped making music for going on a dozen
years, except for a few art-damaged terrorist experiments every once in a
while, and a short-lived but surprisingly popular disco band long before it
was considered even remotely “hip”. Music became pretty much a spectator
sport for me, and I tended to journey further and further away from new sounds
in favor of old ones.
I was having a problem of inspiration, one that I’m still grappling with. Now I find myself shoring up my vinyl collection, filling in gaps left by releases that just didn’t make it to 8-track, or that I was never able to find on 8 before the collectors made the market much tougher and more expensive to participate in. My backward-looking isn’t so much fueled by
nostalgia as a search for popular sounds that express values of diversity and creativity and soulfulness. Those values are pretty rare to find in any of the arts these days, maybe because they go against the values of marketing and commodity, which remain the catch-words of the day.So I’m having to look inside myself for inspiration, with a few guideposts from 30 years back to give me a bit of direction. It would be more exciting if I felt there were a scene of like-minded musicians and writers and artists I could get some prodding and energy from, but I’m getting tired of waiting for some scene like that to develop. Perhaps I can light a match that will start a bonfire. Or at least make some music that gives ME a sense of inspiration during lonely hours in my room. It will be a noble experiment, in any case. Wish me luck....
Dazit for now,
Russ
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