As most of my faithful readers know, I used to be in a band. This band was a happy-go-lucky ska/rock extravaganza called Agent 13 (named after the character in Get Smart who was always hidden in places – a mailbox, a sofa, a ship smokestack). One of the things I loved about this band was that we all really liked each other – I don’t think that the five or six core members ever had a stereotypical band quarrel in the six years we were together.
I miss those folks. I don’t see them nearly often enough. (Well, most of them – my percussionist, David Troen-Krasnow, was the drummer, so I see him all the time, darn it all.) So when Eric, our sax player, wrote us a few weeks ago to tell us he’d be in town, well, I was going to crawl over broken glass to make sure I saw him – it had been years (since I saw him, not since I’d crawled over broken glass). It turned out that we couldn’t find an evening when we were all available, but Pete and I had dinner with Eric and had a great time. Eric’s been doing this really, really cool stuff with musical robots which has, regrettably, kept him from picking up his horn for the last several years – which is a shame, since he’s a really talented horn player.
So we had fun. But the most interesting part of the evening was a brief exchange which began with one of my perennial sources of astonishment: that I’m still playing and our bass player isn’t. When the band started, all those years ago, you see, I had a really ambivalent relationship with, well, just about anything involving real commitment. I was terrified of sticking my neck out, cutting off my options. And I joined this band, and they put up with me not being able to make a commitment for, well, a whole year, which says an awful lot for their patience (or their foolishness, I’m not sure which). And our bass player, Scott, was a drill sergeant – always in our faces about working hard, booking, doing the right thing, my heavens, he was relentless. And a great guy, and a really interesting musician, but relentless.
But things change, as they do. I remember when we were auditioning singers, and I felt terrible for Scott having to be the hard-ass all the time, so I took my turn. There was this one woman who was convinced, against all evidence, that she could sing, and she came in to audition, and she sang three or four notes and I stopped the band and said, “I’m sorry, thanks for coming in, but you’re not what we’re looking for.” And Scott told me later that on the way back downstairs, her boyfriend took him aside and thanked him profusely for cutting her off so quickly (apparently, he did not share her delusion about her singing ability).
So I hacked my merry way through the cast of vocalist hopefuls, and we found a singer, and we played for a while, and we broke up, and Scott joined another band which treated him badly, and I went to grad school to hide, and got tired of hiding, and here I am. But Scott – Scott is not here. Scott hasn’t picked up his bass in ten years. We’re not even sure he owns a bass anymore. And this blows my mind. Because he was committed, and I wasn’t, and now I can’t stop, and he has. And I mentioned this to Eric. And Eric said, “You know, I had an odd conversation with Scott about that once. We were talking about this and he said to me, ‘You know, I think I could be just as happy being an IT guy as being a bass player.'”
Apparently, for Scott, music was a choice. In spite of his driven manner. For me, on the other hand, in spite of my early ambivalence, music is not a choice. Call it arrogance, call it vanity, call it whatever you want; I don’t much care. The chances of my putting my guitars in storage and turning my attention to, oh, scrimshaw are simply zero. Because I can’t stop. Because life sounds like a song, and I was born to play it.
Rock on, dudes.