Artistic Creativity vs. Professional Commitments

"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
- The Raging Id of Durden

Well...maybe so, but I get the feeling ol' Tyler never actually strapped on a guitar, and was never infected by the vicious fangs of the Rock Virus, though he faked it well. In my case, though, it zapped me good and proper, and at the most vulnerably fateful time- when I was defeated, weak, gullible, and desperate. I saw it coming, though, and even enjoyed letting it happen, and now, almost twelve years later, the brutal little bastard has only slightly loosened its grip on my terminally narcissistic soul. But so what? I was asked to offer my so-called "insights" into the psychologically dangerous and physically exhausting practice of "balancing artistic, creative passion with the mundane drudgery of everyday life," so we'd better get to it before I get too unbearably derivative. Come on backstage.

"I simulate love-making by beating a piece of wood with a metal wire on which it vibrates."
-Adam Clayton of U2

So, "The Balance." Anyone ever enslaved by the Creative Impulse has had to come to grips with this merciless reality. Whether it's carving out precious free time to empty your head of the swirling brilliance held back all day while you earn a paycheck, or struggling to stay inspired when your muse fucks off to Barbados with some other pretentious asshole, the problem of balancing obligations with release remains the same. For me, dealing with it involves a nebulous combination of discipline, collaboration, flexibility, and learning from my (and others') mistakes.

Baiting Inspiration
For the last decade, my primary creative outlet has been music, but I'm a word guy by training, with a lousy short-term memory to boot, so I always carry scratch paper around in case the universe decides to align in my favor. Anyone will tell you inspiration can't be forced, but it can be prepared for. As a night owl, it was natural to set aside 10pm to midnight (and often 'til 2 or 3am on weekends) for the sort of open-ended thinking that breeds the best ideas. I've learned to accept that I won't catch lightning every time, or even very often. When I do, though, it's usually a cumulative result of simply collecting and processing many, many stray ideas. Creativity’s such a feast-or-famine thing with me that I've really come to appreciate when it's around, and miss it when it's gone.

"I just can’t picture you doing that."
-An ex-girlfriend dismissing the idea of me playing onstage in a band.

Collaboration is Vital
The best way I've found to break creative blocks is working with a group. Roping in three other talented jokers and getting collectively, empathetically brilliant, definitely beats any individual achievement in my book. By now, I'm so used to bouncing semi-formed ideas off the other guys in the band- who invariably help flesh them out to bigger and better things- that I'd be musically lost without them. Practicing alone, though a necessity, is boring these days, because my band-mates have become my essential musical inspiration. Of course, with a group you run into the problem of other peoples' calendars, but that's the only real downside once everyone checks their egos at the door (itself no small thing) and gets down to business.

Get Flex-Time
Too many late nights spent in either setting, though, and you start to show up late to work, drooling all over the TPS reports and forgetting everything except band stuff. When eight or more hours of your day are sucked away by your job, it tends to make consistent creative output a rare luxury. The rent and bills never stop, though, and guitars, amps, recorders, and other gear is expensive (in this case, credit is good, folks). I've been fortunate enough to work at jobs where my employers were happy to offer flex-time or some other alternative to the 8-5 Zombie Death March, so taking a day off to prep for (or recover from) a gig here and there, or working after-hours to offset a bi-monthly trip into the studio was never a serious problem. It also didn't hurt that many of my colleagues have been enthusiastic and encouraging- almost as much as the Ever-Patient Friends & Family- which is handy when you need to put asses in seats or sell CDs. Even better, my current job (graphic/web design) is a creative position, so my brain is used to deadlines and usually set to receive inspiration from any source.

Blocks are Normal
An unexpected flip side showed up when I once found myself unemployed. The problem then became not only splitting time between my Chosen Expensive Hobby and my hunt for a new job, but also the idea that, with lots of new free time, I should be that much more creative, which proved untrue. As many more important and famous people have noted, when one's passion becomes one's job, it becomes tougher to whip oneself into a workable state of inspiration. Even so, that's only really a problem if you pressure yourself to constantly churn out material. Accepting fallow periods or writer’s block is nowhere near the worst or lowest point you'll encounter.

"You have to be sturdy. Being an artist is not for the faint-hearted and you have to be proud that you are what you are. You have to be a proud bum."
- Patti Smith (during an interview with me, actually, from 10/23/97)

Promotion: Get help!
The hardest part of the whole screaming deal, in my opinion, is the never-ending War To Make People Care. I'm naturally shy, and have never enjoyed applying for jobs or booking shows, though it's easier these days with so many web-based handy how-to's or other sites (which obviously run the gamut from mildly useful to a total waste of time). Groveling continually in front of disinterested nightclub owners, bartenders or promoters, who think you're Just Another Dude In A Shitty Band has always struck me as the most pathetically shameful degradation. I'm probably not the best person to give advice on how to get gigs or self-promote, but I do know that yes, it's who you know, and how much they can stand to be continually harassed, that counts. If you or your friends have got the time and endurance to pester the living hell out of people, then do it. Otherwise, well, rejection's a great inspiration, right?

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
-Hunter S. Thompson (who wasn't really talking about Teh Biz, of course)

Swine and Philistines
Which brings us to: Getting Over Criticism. It's a maturity thing, of course, to be able to tell the difference between appreciative, constructive appraisal, envious projection, and useless bullshit. Filtering it all is a mix of simply not letting it get to you and also realizing that once a creation leaves your head and spews out into the wide world, it will be judged and misinterpreted and mangled far beyond what you thought you'd made in the first place. It was pathetically easy for me to be a rock critic and bitch about music when I wasn't actually creating it, so I had to get over the entire range of criticism (90% of which was variations of "you guys SUCK!") once I put my own stuff on the line. Again, though, it was easier when three other guys backed me up, so we always sank or swam as a group, and no one person ever endured the shit-hammer alone. My point here is simply the same old hoary cliché of Don't Let Other People's Hang-ups Fuck With Your Art. If you like what you've made, then it's Good. If at some point you change your mind, you can always make something new and better; you're the creative one, right?

Indeed. Until you come to the Precipice, anyway. For us, that was the point where we would have to make the Big Push to turn our hobby into a career, turn our lives into shapeless blurs, and our relationships into melted slag. We looked over the cliff and saw that it was Ugly, and chose to retreat. If I recall correctly it was after being offered yet another really lopsided pay-to-play contract at a high-profile LA venue, and I believe my no-nonsense drummer's words were something like "Do you guys really want to put up with this shit again?"

It's Gotta Be Fun
In our callous, bootstrap-worshipping society, it's hard to avoid the fallacy that once you've burned up all your "youthful energy" and semi-innocent ignorance, you've either got to knuckle under and try to make your passion your career, or be content with indulging in expensive hobbies to balance the daily insanity of working for a living. In my case, logistics intervened; everyone in the band either finished school or moved away, so it was a lot tougher to even get together for rehearsals. When we do, though, it's like almost no time had passed at all (a benefit of biweekly practices during our first year together) and the rarity of rehearsals and gigs these days makes them that much more special for us to do, and for our friends to enjoy. See, unlike all those idiots in Fight Club, I knew at 19 I'd never be a world-conquering rock star. That wasn't my idea of creative success.

"People pay to see other people believe in themselves."-Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth

What's "success," then? The fact that the time spent was on good work with brilliant and talented friends: first (fun but amateur) band The Mojo Wire- four self-made demo albums, one compilation, and 23 shows over five years; second (fun and less amateur) band Honey White: 1 E.P. disc, 1 studio album, four self-produced live albums, and 28 shows in five more years. That balances out a lot of life’s more mundane bullshit, which is good enough for me.

Cross-posted: dkos (ku35).

Few And Far Between

A sparse pool of gigs provide two more live albums that catch Honey White presenting their tentative, then fully-formed baroque phase.

Moody studio rock epics usually don't go over well live, at least not without a killer stage presentation and plenty of smoke, mirrors, and playback. Forcing a live stage show to duplicate the intricate vagaries of a band run amok in the studio has often meant career suicide for countless rock bands, famous or otherwise. In Honey White’s case, however, the gaping hole where the idea of "career" was unceremoniously filled by "fun but expensive hobby" continued to let the music speak for itself even as practicality and logistics finally eclipsed the group's gig and rehearsal time. Their third and fourth live discs take up the baton where the first two left off, blotting indie-rock posterity with songs from the extended victory lap of live shows that supported their How Far is the Fall studio album. The tentative muddiness of Saturated Songs and the casual confidence of Deluge and Drought marked a complete progression of creativity from start to finish, informally presenting Honey White’s most adventurous music with ease.

As the band’s sonic vocabulary grew, their setlists shrank, often dramatically so. New material was road-tested immediately in early 2004, and Honey White dropped almost all of the covers and Mojo Wire songs to make room. Time-devouring monsters like "Keep Moving" and "Famous Last Words" anchored many gigs on a wobbly foundation of effects, but older bursts of energy like "Unprofessional" still kept listeners on their toes. The 2005 performances achieved a more ideal dynamic, while still keeping the shows at around the one-hour mark. Sets ebbed and flowed so that more mid-tempo tunes like "Island Fever" and "Mercy Rule" met the audience halfway between the longer, slower songs and harder, faster stuff like "Bottlerocket" and "Nightfall." This sort of pacing became beneficial as Honey White's bookings changed both in size and space, with multiple gigs at theater-sized venues on their home turf in Santa Barbara and club-level appearances farther away in Ventura and Los Angeles.

Saturated Songs documents the beginning of the process, finding Bryn, Brian, Keir and Billy in Honey White Mark II, shaking off dust and working out the kinks of their recently-reassembled musical identity. This was easier to accomplish on familiar stages like Giovanni's and the Wildcat Lounge, but the relatively cramped conditions at those places and the general sonic uncertainty of the band collectively contributed to the overall murky feel of Honey White's third live disc. Fresh tunes like "Let Go" and the jumpy instrumental "Sean Goes To Africa" pumped some new energy around the album, but it's ultimately dominated by Honey White's most massive leviathans: "Sweet Oblivion," "Keep Moving," "Famous Last Words," and an extended run at Neil Young's "Dead Man" theme. The My Band Rocks-era material that rounds out the compilation- "Unprofessional," "Wayfaring Stranger," a muted "Sandman" and Bryn's solo take of "Lightning Rod"- seems to barely hold its own in comparison. Released in June 2004 as half the band moved away from Santa Barbara and they all geared up for a series of demanding recording sessions in San Francisco, Saturated Songs arguably stands as Honey White's weakest self-produced live album.

The central idea that Saturated Songs hinted at- a focused revitalization based on Keir & Billy's fused rhythm section topped off by the twin forces of Brian's guitar and Bryn's voice- was still a good one, so the band refined it while tracking How Far is the Fall in the studio. The fact that eight of that album's final ten songs had already been solidified onstage was a key component of its successful completion; the bulk of the studio material was tracked live, so the basics were already there and the band was free to stretch each song to its own creative limit when overdubbing and mixing. Many bands discover with surprise that recording is a universe away from playing live, but Honey White was able to translate their onstage cohesiveness to the studio and enhance each new song in that setting; if every song began its life as an organic, performance-based entity, it would always be able to work well onstage, no matter what it sounded like on record. The group's frequent initial rehearsals back in 2002 were still paying off, and would continue to do so as they resumed playing live.

Everything fell into place at the gigs captured on Deluge and Drought, Honey White's fourth live album. The 2005-2006 dates themselves were infrequent by this point, since the band was now hampered by the realities of time, space, and the 40-hour work week, but that rarity only drew bigger crowds when showtime finally rolled around. The higher-profile venues and their better acoustics also helped Keir's trusty Roland VS-890 pick up clearer, punchier takes (and fully-formed, assured performances) of not only the tunes underserved by Saturated Songs, but also strong debuts of "Island Fever," "Blacking Out," and "Nightfall." Drastically different remakes of "Lightning Rod" and "One Last Hallelujah" also made the cut. Generally, the guitarists were able to re-create their studio effects on the spot, embellishing everything from Bryn's crunchy tremolo in "Let Go" and E-bow in "Famous Last Words" to Brian's myriad liquid textures on "Blacking Out" and stratospheric solos on "Island Fever" and "Sweet Oblivion." The rhythm boys got to shine too; Keir's minimalist bass oozed with swagger, and a new snare drum of Bill's punctuated everything with gunshot-like power.

As a step up in composition, performance, and recording quality, and also as a balance to the group’s diminishing number of gigs, Deluge and Drought was the first Honey White live album to get wide exposure. In addition to the usual 50-copy limited-edition run received by its three predecessors, it joined Honey White's two studio albums on web-based music stores. The oft-delayed Deluge also dubiously became the first Honey White disc of previously-available material; by the time it was finally released in July 2007, more than a year after the band's last show, rough mixes of many Honey White shows had already shown up on the web.

At that point, though, the band was already deep into a second, prolonged stretch of hiatus-like downtime. This flip side of their achievements in the studio and on stage was induced by the same old logistics, but exacerbated by a glancing encounter with the precipitous "next level" of the music business. Lop-sided, pay-to-play gig contracts, ramped-up promotional requirements, and a galaxy of other stressful decisions unrelated to musical creativity all seemed to be right around the corner. Nobody in the band was too interested in exploring anything like that after enduring the logistical hurdles of 2004-2005. However, if and when Honey White does start up their epic noise machine again, the accomplished arc of music captured on these two live albums demonstrates that they have a ready-made template for how to do it well.

Play these albums: