I want to tell you something, Amanda.
I had no idea what was coming, but I trusted him to be kind. God, I trusted him more than anyone or anything else in the world at that moment. But I was so afraid.
Yeah? I said, nonchalantly.
Your songs are good, Amanda. And I’m not just saying that.
I stared at him in disbelief.
I get given a lot of music, he continued. It’s like that on the road, you know, we get handed mountains of demo tapes every night. And they’re, you know, not always good. Your songs are good. I don’t know what your plans are. But I hope you keep going. I just wanted to say that.
And he stubbed out his cigarette and went back into the house, leaving me on the porch, feeling an emotion I can only describe as ecstasy. I stayed on that cloud for days, walking around in a fog, thinking that my fate had somehow been decided for me.
Nobody had ever said that to me before. Nobody qualified, at least. Nobody who really counted. I try to recall the enormity of that feeling every time I’m talking to a younger musician who summons the courage to play me their stuff. I bear in mind that I may be the only full-time musician they’ve encountered who’s ever directly said:
Yes. You’re allowed to go do that. Go ahead.
The next time they came through Boston on tour, I was in college a few hours away and came back home for the show. I talked my parents, god bless them, into hosting five English and Dutch indie rock stars (plus a merch guy and a sound guy) in our suburban house. Some of them slept in the attic, some in the van outside, and I slept over at Jason’s so they could take my bed. Early the next morning, I hurried back to fix them all breakfast before they drove off to the next tour stop. Seeing my favorite band eating in the dining room where my family celebrated Thanksgiving made my brain turn upside down. I had never put so much love into a batch of scrambled eggs.
I’d learned that it was pointless trying to tell these people what their music had meant to me. It meant everything. Their songs were the landscape of my inner life. I was modeling my own style of songwriting after theirs. It would just sound trite if I tried to explain it out loud.
But I could make them eggs.
By 2002, Brian and I were touring more and more, and we started earning real cash money at the shows. At the end of each night, the fans would ask us for CDs, but for a while we had nothing to sell besides some T-shirts and a bumper sticker that we had designed ourselves. No music.
The ability to burn CDs was a brand-spanking-new technology. So instead of taking our first cheap recording to a duplication house, we decided it would be more economical to just burn our own.
We made our first recording for free, thanks to a sound-engineer friend who snuck us into a studio after hours. I pasted together a collage I’d assembled out of old paper dolls to use as our album artwork, while Brian made endless OfficeMax runs in The Vulva to purchase boxes of blank CDs and empty jewel cases. We sat in the kitchen burning batches of our songs in a three-disc CD tower. On a good day we could make a few hundred discs, and we only needed a few dozen at a time to sell at shows: five songs for $5. The fans were eager to have them and they sold really well. Soon, my whole apartment in the Cloud Club—which was small to begin with—turned into a CD-assembly workshop. I got very friendly with the local post office, where we stood in line two or three times a week to ship batches of records to our fans with handwritten thank-you postcards. The fans used my home address to order everything. They paid by personal check and we sent the CDs before the checks cleared (or didn’t).
Meanwhile, I worked weekends as The Bride, got the stripping job as well, and Brian took shifts at the MIT student center branch of Toscanini’s, where he asked for and received Gus’s kind blessing to make a display stand for our CD at the register. At every shift, he wound up selling a few CDs to ice-cream customers.
GET THEIR EMAILS! I’d remind him.
He did. A good percentage of our initial hardcore fanbase was MIT grad students and professors, who stood happily at our gigs next to the twenty-two-year-old punk kids with their pierced septums and turquoise dreadlocks. Brian and I took great pleasure in the fact that we seemed to have created the most eclectic community of fans in Boston: art college students, vegan punks, drag queens, metalheads, academics, people who listened to National Public Radio. That meant the world to us. We didn’t want to tap a particular crowd—we didn’t want to be a hip indie band or a goth band. We wanted the people who came to the shows to feel like they were part of our weird little family, that they would never be turned away at the door for not being cool enough. Brian and I had both been insecure freaks in high school; we’d already spent our entire lives on the outside of that door, and we didn’t just want to gain entrance. We wanted to smash the door down completely.
Things started to catch ablaze. We couldn’t quit our jobs yet, but we were close. We won the local Boston battle of the bands. I quit smoking, because I wanted to take care of my voice, which I was constantly losing. We drove the van, we gigged, we drove, we ate metric tons of bad gas-station food, we drove, we soundchecked, we drove some more, and when we needed to sleep, we slept on the couches of old friends, out-of-town family, local fans, or crashed with other bands. In a pinch, we got a cheap motel or slept in the van, which was tricked out with a futon in the back.
In turn, we hosted countless musicians and friends at the Cloud Club, whether they were playing shows with us or not—it was a karmic couch-circle. I’d get photos emailed to me on the road of bands in the back garden, bands on the roof, bands in the bathtub. Bands left thank-you notes, drawings, books, CDs behind as gifts.
Our fanbase grew slowly but steadily. We’d go to a city—Philly, Portland, Northampton, DC—and play to fifty people, then a hundred and fifty, then three hundred. Word spread. The email list grew. We still had no manager, no agent.
Sometimes, if we didn’t have a place to crash, we’d just ask from the stage.
HANDS UP IF YOU CAN LET US SLEEP AT YOUR HOUSE TONIGHT.
We’d thank our hosts with CDs, T-shirts, tour stories, and our endless gratitude.
We made some wonderful friends that way.
One of those friends was a photographer in Philadelphia named Kyle Cassidy, a classic couch-patron who had been enthusiastically letting bands crash in his home for years. We sometimes shared space at Kyle’s with other bands passing through town, trading stories over group breakfasts. That house became a dependable haven after our Philly gigs and, since he loved capturing the band and we trusted him, Kyle also became our default official band photographer. If I knew a band was touring through Philly, I’d send them to Kyle and he’d take them in without question.
I started a computer list of our few dozen dependable couchsurfing hosts, organized by city. Kyle in Philly. Brian’s dad in New Jersey. His aunt in St. Louis. Josh and Alina in New York. Xanna and her girlfriend in Atlanta. Clare and Brian in Montreal. Emily in Brooklyn. My dad in Washington, DC. Kate in Chicago…
DIY is a tricky term.
I’ve been called the “Queen of DIY,” but if you’re really taking the definition of “Do It Yourself” literally, I completely fail. I have no interest in Doing It Myself. I’m much more interested in getting everybody to help me.
I think a better definition might be UWYC: “Use What You Can.” It is, unfortunately, not a very catchy term.
Everybody has access to different tools, people, resources, situations, opportunities. If you’re privileged enough to have family well-off enough to loan you money for your first recording? TAKE IT.
If you have a friend with a shack on the beach who’s offering you a quiet place to write? TAKE IT.
There’s really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And…it’s lonely.
Maybe we can break DIY mentality into two camps, because “collective” work doesn’t actually blow everybody’s dress up.
“Minimal DIY” is the kind of DIY where you literally try
to Do It Yourself. The emphasis is on total self-reliance and individualism.
Don’t have the right kind of microphone? Use a different one.
Don’t have a huge budget for food/can’t afford takeout/have no kitchen? Just buy a box of ramen in bulk and cook it in the coffeemaker you got for $5 at a yard sale.
Can’t afford to hire a full choir of people? Don’t use a choir. Your song doesn’t need it and it’ll sound pompous and pretentious anyway. Or, if you must, record your own voice fifty times, singing slightly differently at different spots in the room.
Car runs out of gas on a long stretch of road? Grab the empty canister out of your trunk and start walking, sucker.
Then there’s “Maximal DIY,” which is more about expansion and asking. The emphasis is on collectivism; you throw the problem out to your circles to see what solutions will arise.
Don’t have the right kind of microphone in your studio? Use Twitter, shouting towards the musicians and studios; some kind person may lend you the right one.
Don’t have a huge budget for studio food? Ask if anyone local feels like helping/cooking/bringing you leftover food from their job at the bakery.
Can’t afford to hire a full choir of people? Send out a blog and have your fans come in and sing with you. They may sound amateur, but it’ll be fun, and people love being on a record.
Car runs out of gas on a long stretch of road? Put your thumb out. Someone will eventually give you a lift.
As you can see, the underlying philosophy is actually the same:
Limitations can expand, rather than shrink, the creative flow.
Minimal DIY doesn’t rely on trust; it relies on ingenuity.
Maximal DIY relies on trust and ingenuity. You have to ask with enough grace and creativity to elicit a response, and you also have to trust the people you’re asking not to ruin your recording session, not to poison your food, not to bludgeon you with a hammer as you sit in their passenger seat.
We hung out and signed merchandise after every show in every town, Pink-Dots-style, and a natural outgrowth of our beginnings in which the audience had blurred with our circle of friends. If we wound up getting kicked out of a venue because we’d hit curfew and we hadn’t finished signing things, we’d parade the remaining fans outside and finish in the street.
We signed our CDs, of course, and shirts and posters, too—usually with a black or silver Sharpie. But we also signed: phone cases, playing cards, sneakers, reading glasses, Bibles, passports (You know this is illegal, right?), purses, faces (please don’t get that tattooed), armpits, puppets, babies (please don’t get that tattooed, either), feet, shot glasses, teakettles, security blankets, breasts, and once, a guy’s penis (it was not erect). And one time, in Santa Barbara, Brian signed a girl’s anus. Everyone was impressed.
I asked him to please throw that particular Sharpie in the trash.
People loved giving us art they’d made. Sometimes the signing line would create art collisions unwittingly, like the time a girl at the front of the line gave me an anatomically correct, life-sized, gorgeously hand-knitted vagina, and a guy at the back of the line gave me a little plastic astronaut toy from the 1980s that nestled perfectly into the vulva. Somebody else in the line had a twist tie and threaded them together more tightly. They live, in harmony, on my kitchen shelf at the Cloud Club and have never been separated since that day.
In the early days, we talked to people for as long as they wanted, about whatever they wanted. Once we started touring internationally, these signings would sometimes last longer than the show itself; we’d sometimes play for two hours and sign for two and a half.
In retrospect, the act of signing was far more significant than I realized in the moment. Especially in the early days, when we were playing in small clubs, I was actually AFRAID of the audience. Not afraid they would hurt me, or throw glass bottles at my head (which DOES happen in some genres of music). I was just afraid of their judgment. We were only just starting to get criticized on the hipster music websites for being too gay, too dramatic, too female, too screamy, too lame, too goth. I would imagine that the strangers out there beyond the footlights were the same entities who were judging us in the snarky corners of the music blogs. I feared the critics. In my head, the critics and the crowd were one and the same.
As I played and looked out into the crowd, I could see clearly that the people in the front rows loved us, since they were mouthing the words to our songs, banging their heads, throwing their fists in the air. But what about the people in the ninth, tenth, and twentieth rows? I couldn’t see them. I imagined them all standing there with their arms crossed, rolling their eyes at our gay mime antics, waiting to be sufficiently impressed.
Signing fixed that, because we got to meet a pretty decent percentage of the audience every night. They weren’t judgmental hipsters. They were just sweet, human, smart, fumbling people like Brian and me, all of whom had kind faces and, usually, their own strange stories to tell. After hundreds of nights of signing, my instinct to fear the audience was worn away, like running water smoothing down a jagged rock.
It was an epiphany: Holy shit. They’re not scary at all. They’re just…a bunch of people.
It just wasn’t possible to feel that anxious anymore: I’d MET them. But I never would’ve known if I hadn’t made the effort to stand at the merch table every night; I might have stayed afraid for years. And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.
Once we had enough money to be choosy, I turned down the option of using a real grand piano. Too much fuss to transport, rent, and tune, too hard to fit onstage, too hard for Brian to see my exact hand movements when we played. But most importantly, turning my head to the side to address the audience felt alienating. I wanted to look straight at them. I wanted to see them.
The typical electric keyboard stand is pretty ugly, though, so along with the tea, honey, hummus, and juice that our contract required from the ever-larger venues we were playing, I asked for a few bunches of flowers every night, so we could tape them to the keyboard stand to hide the ugliness. We often had flowers left over, though, and it seemed like a waste to leave them in the dressing room where they’d just be thrown away. Some divas get flowers thrown at them, but we started a tradition of pitching flowers at the audience when we first took the stage; a love assault of foliage. We started requesting that the flowers have absolutely no thorns, for safety. With some effort, we could usually hit people in the balcony.
People started bringing bouquets to the shows and passing them through the crowd up to the lip of the stage for use between songs, or throwing them at our feet, true diva style, at the start of the show. We would rip them up into manageable chunks and throw them back out to the crowd. The crowd would toss them back at the stage.
This game could last all night.
Later, in the signing line, people would take the flowers from behind their ears and hand them to me as a thank-you gesture. Then I’d recycle the same flower to someone down the line who looked lonely or in need of some extra love.
On a good night, you couldn’t tell who was giving what to whom.
Sharing my life on the Internet has meant that everybody knows the immediate score of my existence. Fans in the signing line will ask, How’s Neil? Did he get to his plane on time? And, How’s your chest infection—have you finished that run of antibiotics? I’m on the road and they’re on home turf. They bring books, herbs, teas, soaps, beers from the bar, organic wines from the region. The edible items are usually shared with the people standing behind them.
The signing line is a cross between a wedding party, a photo booth, and the international arrivals terminal at the airport; a blurry collision of flash intimacies. It’s a reunion with those I haven’t met yet. There are a lot of tears and a lot of high-fiving and a lot of hugging. There’s also a lot of asking, in both directions.
Will you take a picture for
us?
Will you take a picture with us?
Do you need a hug?
Can I have a drink?
Do you want a drink?
Will you hold my drink?
Why are you crying?
It’s not always the fans crying. I’ve been held by many fans on nights I needed a random shoulder on which to collapse.
I’ve observed signing lines at other concerts that are not like this, where it’s all business and security officers stand there making sure nobody touches The Talent. I’ve had to argue with security officers appointed to my signing lines, explaining that, unlike other bands, we don’t WANT security to hurry people along, or shoo them away, making sure they don’t stop to talk. I need people to stop and talk and hug me, or else I feel like an automaton.
Listening fast and caring immediately is a skill in itself. People bring me compact stories: the song that got them through high school, the operation they just had, the recent breakup, the death of a parent. The story about the sick friend who wanted to be at the show but couldn’t make it.
Or the longer, more complicated story about the friend who was supposed to be at the show, but had just committed suicide.
What do you do with news like that? You stop the signing line, you take that person in your arms, you hold them and let them cry for as long as necessary.
Then you get back to work.
If I had a dollar for every time somebody gave me a CD, I’d have a lot of dollars. Instead, I have a lot of CDs. Years after my front-porch encounter with Edward Ka-Spel, I found myself empathizing with the mountains of tapes that he’d been given on tour.
Can I give you my CD? I’m in a band.
The Art of Asking Page 10