On the Drum Kit (for B.P.)

Need is not quite belief — Anne Sexton

I’ve been asked to write about why I believe in my band, or at least, I presume, in what we’re doing. Perhaps I’ve given the subject too much thought; wondered about what it means to be a musician or to have a band; spent too much time thinking about the simple (though rarely easy) act of having, of being in, a band.

The fact is, however, that I approach this topic with the utmost seriousness. We all know people who play music as a hobby. I don’t mean to belittle music as a hobby (in fact it’s probably a great one), but my experience with playing music hasn’t been that way since I was a teenager. For better or worse, I define my life in terms of being a musician.

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A quick chronology: I quit Jawbox in April, 1997, moved to New York, enrolled at Hunter College, and more or less I swore I’d never play again. Except it didn’t work out, and roughly seven months after moving here, I gathered a few friends together and formed The Up On In.

The concept wasn’t complicated: between work and school, I had no time to see my friends, three of whom played guitar or bass, all of whom wanted to be playing more often and with other musicians. We’d all spent some time in bands, maybe toured or recorded, maybe not. But it didn’t matter too much because the band (insofar as it was a band at that time) was essentially an undertaking that assured me time with my pals. It was a nice idea, but I forgot that I didn’t know how to treat my playing — especially with other people — as a hobby. By the time that spring and summer (1998) rolled around, we had lost a member and recorder five songs in D.C. The plan was to release an EP and never play shows.

Except that didn’t work out either. We played our first show on 7 May 1999 (opening, thank God, for Burning Airlines and Roads to Space Travel), recorded the rest of our tunes that summer and have, with the help of Big Top Records, basically become a real band.

It may seem like I’m avoiding the matter of why I believe in The Up On In, but I think the fact that I’m still in the band points to a more important question; that is why do I need to do it?

For the most part, I’ve learned everything I know while in bands. This time I’ve spent away from bands has been essentially fruitless, dull, without aspiration, a waste. Until, of course, I find another band. Once I’m in a new band, old ideas (beats, opinions, beliefs, etc.) seem new again, joining the new stuff in an entirely different context. New personalities, new friends and contacts, new venues, new styles, new sounds — these are the elements of my personal development. Without them, I’d still be 19, a fate I’d not wish on anyone.

So I’m asked why believe in this? Well, what else is there? Playing music has sparked and sustained my interest in all art, though especially in film/video and poems. I can’t paint, but I can wonder about space, figure/ground relations, limits of the frame, and bring these questions to the kit. The difference between one art and the other is material. I’m playing drums, a communicative or demonstrative matter of space, rhythm, tone, and duration. Closer maybe to film/video or poems than painting, sure, but once someone looks into the construction of one kind of art, they should take their criteria (critical, theoretical, and practical) to the mat elsewhere. And being that my entire morality, intellect, emotional outlook, and conscience comes from art, I owe everything to the practice of playing music.

(I should add that I actively engage in hero-worship. Here are some big-times that I’ve met, however briefly, because I play drums: Bill Barbot, Kim Coletta, J. Robbins, Fugazi, Denise Levertov, Kevin McKendree, Amy Pickering, David Grubbs, Peter O’Leary, Galway Kinnell, Peter Moffett, Blake Schwartzenbach, etc.; to say nothing of my friends, some of who are listed above. This not bragging; I mean simply to express my gratitude, as well as the range of experience that musicianship has provided me.)

Obviously, being in The Up On In is not like being in Jawbox (or Laura and Kevin McKendree basement, or Powerline, or wherever else I was before that). The nature of my belief in playing drums has changed over the years, even if my need has not. I ask different things of it, strive for different things (speed, for example, was more important in 1988 than it is now), listen for different sounds. It’s a personal thing, I think. I take satisfaction to be a very complicated endeavor. Like most of us, I imagine, I’ve found it to be increasingly complicated as I get older, if only because I have, as an adult, experienced it once in a while. This means I’ve got to come up with an approach that will unravel those complications, lay the whole matter (in this case, I suppose I mean a song) out piece by piece, and put it back together in a way that I understand well enough to communicate to other people. Which is, I think, the point of anything anyone believes in. Through belief we can find and establish a practice that meets our social, cultural, political, aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual needs.

And for the time being I believe in The Up On In