Rise Above #5: Local Boys Make

You’ve got one or two. Maybe they were friends from high school or college, or you fell in love with them when they played your favorite bar and you, being drunk, thought they sounded like the best band you ever heard. Even when sober you held onto that as fact; ears and eyes finally agreed and you were hooked. The band themselves needed, maybe encouraged, such devotion. It kept their dream alive too. Every local band allows themselves to believe in their friend’s hype: the fact that they are in a band at all proves that they also feel like it was meant to happen.

The local band that still has my heart is That’ll Learn Ya. With a sound that was built off of early REM and folk rock, with fragile abstract lyrics about dreams, alternate histories and childlike wonder, the band was at once everyone’s favorite drunken live act and local poetic muse. The 80s were kind to Rhode Island and Massachusetts, as we were blessed with such bands as Rash of Stabbings, Neutral Nation, Two Guys and Another Guy, Big Dipper, Dumptruck, Zulus, Verbal Assault, Throwing Muses, Plan 9, Mission of Burma/Volcano Suns, and on and on. In that creative environment, it was hard not to feel arrogantly eternal, and That’ll Learn Ya embodied that cocky spirit as much as anyone. Songs like “Color Me Happy,” “The One’s That Fight It,” “Pulling Up The Night” and “4th of July in June” still resonate for people my age and, by virtue of their recent reunion, a new generation of kids.

So you and the band and the loyal clubs create this little myth, one that may grow into something close to the dream, or may fade out as you move on to other things and they move on too, or try and keep it going as long as they can, or get together down the road when the kids and the bills are less of an intrusion. This makes sense especially now, when so many people live inside their own myths. It seems like, aside from sports or tragedy or that blockbuster, there isn’t a lot of shared experience, at least in terms of how we engage with art. You have them: favorite shows, which you can watch entire seasons in one marathon sitting; video or RPG where you literally inhabit a world — and become someone new in order to succeed within it. We’ve been settling in with our little tribes and creating comforting myths to help us get by since we crawled out of the pond.

There are other, sonic worlds, as well, as rich in personal meaning as the one’s that tie you to your local heroes, as deep and all-encompassing as in any video game or drug trance. That’s probably where and why music stated in the first place: to celebrate those myths, and reassure ourselves that they are real.

The aural worlds in which we lose ourselves in personal comfort and inspiration are equal to those that drive the ecstatic in drone or trance ceremonies. Mine might seem odd or obscure, but they are supposed to: they are personal, mine, as yours can only really be yours because only you raise them to ritual and rite. It has become more possible to explore these worlds in greater depth now that we have access to so many bootlegs, demos, rehearsal tapes, that round out that world and its parameters.

I imagine two guitarists on different paths: Reggie Lucas, content to hold one chord all night, every night, all nights, a simple quote that walks a hard straight line in and through the swirl of improvisation, a variation on Derek Bailey’s idea of the guitar as a percussion instrument. From another angle, Pete Cosey, sitting in a chair stone stoic, unleashing solos and progressions from a year 2075 chord book.

Who would Hendrix have been today? A great bluesman? A hip-hop artist? A Jagger looking silly trying to gyrate at 70 to “Purple Haze?” Someone still exploring the possibilities of the guitar? For years all there was to this brief Jim Hendrix Experiment was that short LP from their New Year’s Eve 1969 gig. Recent expanded and remastered CDs & DVDs of those shows allow one to see the full scope of the funk, soul, psych hybrid that Hendrix, Buddy Miles, et al, were exploring. Bootlegs of the jam sessions and rehearsal tapes deepen the story. I hear an artist stepping out of his comfort zone, bold and fragile at once, daring to embrace music for which he was always dissed for not playing, but now doing it on his own terms. Since he died shortly after we have no idea where this would have lead; now it exists forever in a raw possibility of new myth.

You are either a die-hard Who fan, someone that thinks of their songs as TV show intros, or you like them but can’t listen to them because their songs are played so often on the radio as to be meaningless (we can debate whether a song ultimately has any meaning if even the most passionate pleas for raw human understanding sooner or later become Audi or raisin jingles, but let’s not do that here). But for those interested in investing the time, The Who can be re-envisioned as an entirely different animal, as they “really” were, by listening to some of their early 70s bootlegs. Unless we saw them live or took Live at Leeds as gospel, it was hard to buy the old “but they are really so much better live” than on their too-often ponderous, tinny recordings, especially if our available evidence was a VHS of their tepid 1982 “final show,” or the indifferent document of that tour, Who’s Last.

Tommy as well has not been served well by over-play, or by a rancid film adaptation or limp “Who Orchestra” live tours. To hear The Who, and Tommy, at their peak, was to hear much more than that. As suggested by their scenes in Woodstock, The Who used Tommy as not only the centerpiece of their then-current show, but as a lab for working out much of what they would expand on later in their careers. The Who’s live shows from 1969-71 were hypnotic, brutal and poetic; the power of their jams and improvisation put the Dead to shame. They also wring out the pleading, despairing, damaged hope of Tommy, also for the most part lost in the muddy acoustics of the studio version.

These bootlegs were the grail for me. Back in the LP, pre-MTV days, I was sent along on the quest to find these records, falling in awed lust just from pictures of the tour in magazines, chapters on the Big Pink sessions in Dylan bios, etc. All seemed to suggest music from another planet. Members of The Band recalled Dylan coming down from his room every day with sheets of songs to record and jam on, and they could never tell if he had written them or if they were transcriptions from memory of songs that were hundreds of years old. It is that eternal feel to those songs, always with Dylan as the ghost in the back of the photograph that may or may not be there, that makes these songs so powerful. (the 10 CD boot of the Basement Tapes is the one to track down).

All that is a lot to put on a bunch of local heroes who plugged in to have fun and along the way maybe aspire to much more. But your favorite local band, favorite sonic worlds, and Kingston, RI’s own That’ll Learn Ya, they are part of a very old process: to be a part of something bigger than oneself, and to celebrate the relief of belonging, in song and story, to pass them on to prove that when we were here, while we were here, we really raved on.