lifestyle maintenance

now playing: styx, "crystal ball"



so last night, we finally got around to watching the director's cut of almost famous...and man, there are some edits that were made that i sure as hell don't understand.


there's one scene, in particular, that almost had me in tears.

the scene where russell hammond and william miller walk out of the hotel towards the pool, and "simple man" by lynyrd skynyrd is playing in the background - the "just make us look cool" scene?

well, here's the dialogue as it originally appeared in the movie....


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russell to william: see, i grew up with these guys. and i can't play all
that i can play. i'm past them as musicians.

(looks out at pool)...but, the more popular we get, the bigger their houses
get, the more responsibilites, the pressure, y'know....

...the harder it gets for me to walk out on 'em.

(looks back at william)

then you forget. you forget what it's like to be a fan. you hear it, when you're
in bands all the time, it doesn't sound like music anymore. it sounds
like....lifestyle maintenance or something.

(william chuckles)

i used to be able to hear....the sounds of the world. everything. to me, it
sounded like music.

and...now, i don't hear it....


...i don't hear that anymore.


do you understand what i'm tryin' to say?

(william nods)

(laughs) what am i doing? i'm tellin' secrets...to the one guy you don't
tell secrets to.

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for some reason, i thought that i'd written a post about this particular feeling before - i felt, when i saw the movie, as if cameron crowe had been reading my blog. but i just finished going back through the entire archives, and i couldn't find it. where i did find the sentiment i was talking about was in my ill-fated NaNo attempt from last year:


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to call him a rock historian would be something akin to calling bill gates a computer nerd - it was a slight understatement. he had picked up the bug from the time he'd gotten hooked on the radio. he kept a running, written list as a kid, later as a teenager, of all the songs he'd heard, by title and artist. it was as if he was afraid he'd forget them, or that he needed to keep a record of having heard them and wanted to have a point of reference. later he would discover the midnight special on friday nights with wolfman jack and company, which he stayed up to watch religiously to see who'd be on the show any given week. he vividly remembered crying when he saw a jim croce clip on the show, a new grief stemming from actually seeing him perform and knowing that he was gone...and that footage like this was all that was left. he remembered seeing jackson browne and james taylor perform on saturday night live as a teenager, seeing bands play on the old soundstage program on pbs...for a kid growing up in his particular set of geographical conditions, it was all there was - the only means by which to put faces to the voices on the radio. it was a time before mtv, before radio had been dethroned as the peoples' outlet - when stations like WKIR still existed, and corporations like clear channel hadn't yet bought them all up. his only connection to the music he loved was the radio and the occasional copy of creem or hit parader bought at the grocery store newsstand...and he eagerly devoured it all.

these were the days devoted by so many his age to discovering girls, to dealing with hormones, to finding ones' place within their social structure - and it was no different for him, but he traversed those trials with his unseen friend always at his side. music made his adolescence equal parts better and worse - they tempered the angst and punctuated the victories, these songs that peppered the air around him almost constantly...whether by their actual presence or the memory of them in his head. these songs were full of mystery to him - rock and roll was brand new, as far as he was concerned, and he wanted to know everything there was to know about it. the radio was on from the time he got off the school bus until the next morning when he got back on.

so it was only natural that he would eventually pursue the deeper mystery of how to play it.

he remembered sitting in the front row at church on saturday nights as a kid, watching the gospel groups who came through and feeling that sound wash over him...they looked like they were having so much fun. it certainly didn't look difficult. but the music they were making was a million miles away from the bands he heard on his radio.

for instance, everyone he knew at school seemed to have a KISS t-shirt. he had never heard them on the radio, but when he saw that they were going to appear on paul lynde's variety show, he watched with his grandparents...and sat horrified at the spectacle that he couldn't really name - blood, fire-breathing, makeup-wearing half-men, playing incredibly loud music that, in the presence of his grandparents, scared him to death. later it wouldn't seem so threatening, but he could feel the judgement hanging heavy in the air in front of the tv that night.

it was too late, though, to deter him...he spent hours listening to the radio, watching music on tv when he could, trying to break the code. he'd listen intently to every nuance of the songs he heard and wonder, "how did they get that amazing vocal sound?" "how do they make the drums sound like that?" "why does the guitar on that song sound so much different than the guitar on the other song on their album?" every new song was a new chapter of the perpetual mystery waiting to be explored. every band was brand new, every album a new path to explore, every day brought a new singer, a new sound, something that he hadn't heard before.

now, though, after over ten years as a professional musician, there weren't many mysteries left. what remains to be deconstructed of your favorite songwriter once you own all their albums and you've read all their interviews? he used to have dreams about the "missing dan fogelberg album", convinced that there had to be a record between captured angel and netherlands because of the huge stylistic differences between the two of them. in those dreams, he could hear the songs as clear as day, as if they actually existed...but his subconscious made them up for him, just the way he'd pictured them.

now, after studying rock and roll and the means by which it's made, he could often tell by listening to a record what kind of guitar was used on it...the out of phase honkiness or the neck pickup throatiness of a fender stratocaster, or the midrange-laden power of a humbucking pickup on a les paul - he could hear it. that mysterious whoosh heard on the drum break on journey's anytime? a flanger. he remembered how he thought as a kid that the difference between the guitar sounds on boston's dont look back were the result of two amps, one far far away from the stage and one right up front and turned up really loud. he had to chuckle at that now...now that he knew better.

for him, now fifteen years older and a lifetime removed from the sense of wonder he took to bed with him each night as he tucked himself into bed next to the glow of his trusty clock radio, there were few unexplored mysteries anymore. the magic created in his mind by those records he heard as a thirteen year old had been replaced, a little at a time, by the knowledge of how that magic was created.

and how he yearned for the ignorance that drew him down this road in the first place.


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i think i need to finish that book someday.

right after i send a nice, polite what the fuck email to cameron crowe.