September 08
On being a townie
Musical confessions of a 30-something
by Jay Schwan
For the past eight years I have had the following conversation too many times to count:
Random person: “Nice to meet you. What do you do?”
Me: “I’m a [insert current profession here]. But what I really like to do is play music.”
Random person: “You’re funny. So do you like the Broncos?”
Me: “Uhhh…”
Lately I’ve just left the whole music part out of it and started talking more about work and pretending I actually pay attention things, like which body part is currently making Tiger Woods cry like a four-year-old. So apparently sometime in the past eight years, I stopped giving a shit about making music and started to focus more on my career. I guess that having a family and kids and a mortgage will do that to you, and rightfully so. I ain’t no deadbeat. I take care of my kids!
But for the last couple years now I have been making music a little more steadily, but something has changed. I don’t care so much about making music a career anymore. Music is my passion, but not my job.
I’m a little more prolific now that I don’t give a shit about what I write. You see, before I would sit and stare at a guitar for hours and try to write something. But now, I don’t care who hears it. I don’t care what it sounds like. I don’t want to get famous. If my friends like it, that’s great. But this has led me to realize something that I had been hoping to avoid my entire life, a label with which I was hoping to never have to identify, but one I have recently come to identify with and embrace: I’m a townie.
A townie isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It can mean many different things like a person in a college town who doesn’t go to the school, or something. (I’m a townie in that regard as well.) But I think I’m ascribing a negative slant to the whole “not leaving the town you lived your entire life in” thing. Not only that, I’m a musical townie! Never done anything outside of our wonderful little burg of Colorado Springs. Never went on tour. Never tried to relocate to a city with even a 1% higher chance of being able to parley some meager musical talent into some kind of career.
Guess what? I’m not the only one. Yeah, that’s right. You know those same fifteen people from other local bands you see at every show you’ve been to for the last eight years? Yep, they’re townies too. Guess what that makes you? You guessed it, Townie.
Townies aren’t just musicians, either. There are visual art townies and writer townies and biker townies and the freakin’ list goes on and on. We’re like a 31 Flavors of townies!
So how the hell did we get here? The reasons are many and varied, but I have it narrowed down to a few key factors. Some townies will have experienced a few of these characteristics, while others may only suffer from one.
First, musicians are lazy. Or tired. Or stoned. Or some combination of the three in no particular order. If they treated their craft like a business, then it would be work, right? Who wants to work when most of them play music to get some kind of relief from work? Every band has sat around and thought about how they would write and operate if they actually made money playing music, but that’s all that bands seem to do: talk. Every once in a while when you’re sitting around the table at the Waffle House and just barely sober enough to drive between the lines on the interstate, you might have a good idea. And if you remember it the next morning, maybe you should act on it. There’s a whole lot of smoke but no fucking fire when it comes to ambition. Let’s face it, fellow townies. It’s much easier to go to a bar and get drunk and make fun of the band that is playing than, you know, actually playing.
Second, school: “I got too much homework to play!” OK, this one is pretty valid. The whole rock-star thing is a huge gamble in the career world and it’s good to have a fallback plan. It leads to a steadier paycheck than stuffing yourself in a van with smelly people, eating strange food, and playing for three people in a basement.
Third, love. You’re 17 and you’re positive that you’ve met your soulmate and you’re ready to settle down. Because your crazy 17-year-old life is so hectic. Regardless, I’ve seen many people trade one passion for another and it’s usually a person. Nothing matters now that you’ve got that one special someone in your life. You know how it goes when you get a girl/boyfriend. You forget about all of your friends and hobbies and quit hanging out with them to spend every waking, and some unconscious, moment with them. You’re a lucky son of a bitch, aren’t you? Yeah—until you start starving for the company of your friends again and wanting to make music and your girlfriend is accusing you of sleeping around with fictitious “groupies” rather than going to band practice. Apparently she hasn’t gone to any of your shows and seen the dearth of girls, let alone people in general, at your shows.
All us townies have our reasons for staying put and being lazy. If I wasn’t a townie here, I’d probably be a townie somewhere else. But I think that it’s time we reevaluate our priorities and not get all bent out of shape about not having a scene or no one coming to your shows. The people who get the most upset are the ones who are trying to turn their art into a career. The measure of success is “making it,” which is an arbitrary construct in itself. If a kid is striving to be a professional musician and “get signed,” he’ll be disappointed in anything less. Chances are extremely slim that a discovery is going to happen anywhere near Colorado Springs in any kind of regard. I think it is very encouraging that we have local associations and organizations that take the time to recognize and promote artists within our community and help them attain their goals and realize their dreams, but apparently the local recognition isn’t enough for most people.
So if your aspirations are just to make noise with your friends in the basement and maybe play a show once every four months, then that is a dream you can easily achieve, and Colorado Springs is the place for you to be, little townie! If you just want to hang your paintings in a coffee shop for a couple weeks, then our scene is fan-fucking-tastic. To the people who participate in it, anyway.
As we get older, we naturally tend to reprioritize our lives. Some things just don’t seem as important as they were before. Maybe you finished school and you have a great job. Now you can play shows for fun and not really have to worry about landing a record deal. We settled down and had children and now we can share our hobbies and the things we are passionate about with our families. We can nurture and encourage an entirely new generation of townies! Or hopefully let them learn from our experiences and mistakes in order for them to build on what the Colorado Springs scene provides or potentially grow beyond it.
We have a music scene. We have an art scene. And it is populated by townies; artists and aficionados alike. But if your definition of success is packing out the Black Sheep on a Monday night, you’re going to cry. There is definitely a problem with bands promoting shows, but why promote them when you are guaranteed to get the whole scene to show up to your gig? Right? We’re in this for the wrong reasons, then. If you enjoy making music or art or whatever, do it because you have to, not because you want to get famous. Be honest with yourself and make your art for you. Play shows for free. Give your art to the people you like. Or display it in your own home or something. Don’t get butt-hurt when you play the Rocket Room for the twentieth time and no one shows up. The townies have their own scene and it seems like we’re waiting for something good to happen to us—rather than really appreciating what we already have.
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3 Responses to “Musical Conefssions: September 2008”
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I love the honesty of the Newspeak writers! And I usually disagree with you guys completely. The Colorado Springs scene is “townie” because nobody has yet figured out how to put it out there. However, our locale just hosted the Durango Songwriter’s Exposition where we were able to meet with WB music directors for film and TV placement, Virgin Records A&R reps, BMI publishing reps… HERE in town. A few examples of local bands/musicians that haven’t felt limited to the Springs Scene include: Nocturnal Tomatoes who I believe just signed with a major label, Ashley Raines who has a strong Denver following, My PolyJane project which has developed a presence in the Denver scene as well as received mentions in a national monthly, BodyCaste (working on a deal with a major)… In fact, isn’t the singer for One Republic from here?
One of the most interesting things I have heard recently came from a radio dj in Fort Collins who said that the smaller markets (Colorado Springs and Fort Collins) aren’t held to the same standard as the Denver market. NOBODY EXPECTS us to do anything. We just need to show them they are wrong.
Were you trying to light a fire here?
There’s no doubt we have a lot of talent in this town. In my opinion, what we need is more support for the scene. How many free shows happen and only a handful of people come out? I’ve seen it more than once recently. It would be great to see more people going out of their way to check out a band they’ve never heard of, getting their friends to come out and see the bands they love, and just making an effort in general. Check out Peak Radar or Newspeak (Things to do in CoS), pick an event and check it out!
I would LOVE to see someone from Colorado Springs go on to do bigger and better things. There has recently been an exodus of local artists and musicians to Denver and I wish those people the best. I acknowledge that there is fault with the Springs populace for not supporting local art and entertainment. But still I find it comical when bands get upset that they’re not packing The Black Sheep. Yeah maybe they’ve got a record and maybe they’ve played Denver a couple times, but it’s like they’re expecting magic to happen or something. The music issue of Newspeak covered a lot of this stuff. This piece was my two cents coupled with a hefty dose of narcissism.