Long Winters Live DVD a Sexy Tease

Dorsia Films just released a DVD chronicling a night at the Showbox with Seattle's Long Winters, fronted by Reverb columnist John Roderick, who's currently on hiatus from his blogging chores as he slaves away in the studio. For what it is — a no-frills portrait of a fantastic band treating a hometown crowd to a leave-it-all-on-the-floor, tour-capping show — it's a very worthwhile watch/listen. But for what it could have been — and probably will eventually be — it leaves me wanting more.

The best live rockumentaries combine three essential elements: (1) great cinematic chronicling of an onstage performance, (2) a sense of place, which includes crowd reactions and shots of the venue at large, and (3) clever, intimate behind-the-scenes footage featuring the band. Live at the Showbox absolutely nails element #1. Roderick is one of the most dynamic live showmen in all of rock — and we're not just talking Seattle here — and the emotional interplay between he and his superb bandmates (which include Death Cab's Ben Gibbard sitting in on drums during "Car Parts") makes for compelling viewing (although the action appears to have been cut in such a way so as to expel some of Roderick's hallmark banter, which, if true, is a bummer). However, element #2 is entirely lacking; crowd shots are limited to shots of the stage from the crowd, not of the crowd. And while you get scant sense of the room the room they're playing in, the Showbox is never captured panoramically. The net effect is they could be playing anywhere, and I think it's fair to expect more from any film along these lines.

As for the third element, it's there, but only in the disc's special features, where a 10-minute preview of Dorsia's forthcoming documentary on the band, Through With Love, can be found. Here we get glimpses of Roderick mercilessly showering his colleagues with shit in the studio, as well as an eye into his oft-frantic creative process and his brotherly relationship with original Winter Sean Nelson. My sense is that the footage from Live at the Showbox will be recycled liberally in this more full-throated documentary — that the current offering is, in effect, a tasty tease at the masterwork to come. If that turns out to be the case, then I'll be saluting at full mast.

Topics: Doc Watch, First Listen, John Roderick: Reverb Residency, and Music Video

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John Roderick's in the Studio, Column on Hiatus

As our columnist tends to his day job, his column will remain on hiatus. We're as eager to read his prose as any of you, and we promise it'll return just as soon as the suits are satisfied.

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Where's John?

That's a very good question. You may be unaware, but when John Roderick's not foraging for mushrooms along the forgotten shores of I-5, he's drafting the soundtrack to the next Nissan Pathfinder commercial. We assume he's at work on the latter. But he will return. Soon.

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No Roderick This Week

Our columnist is in the studio and away from his computer. He sends his best. Roderick will be back again next week. Now's a good time to catch up on his past columns, if you haven't already committed them to memory.

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What Dad Won't Tell You About Keeping a Beard

Watch a slideshow featuring the beards of William Taft, George Lucas, and the author, among others.

In 1986, when I first attempted to grow a beard, the general consensus was that beards were for murderers and maniacs. Almost no one in mainstream America wore a beard during the eighties, and even in Alaska a beard was a serious statement that the wearer ate cold beans from a can and slept with his dogs. The only public figure of any note who wore a beard at that time was Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who also wore a bow-tie, rode a mule, and carried a blunderbuss.

I always felt that clean-shaven adult men were suspicious-looking—either too vain or too conformist to let their face do what nature intended—so I strove to grow a beard from the first sign of a fuzzy wisp under my nose. In every country from Greece to Pakistan adult men wear flourishing moustaches as soon as they are able and until they die, just as they are expected to wear pants, and many of the world’s religions consider the beard an obligation for the observant men. Unfortunately this association with fundamentalism has discredited the beard over the years, so that clean-shaven faces have come to represent modernity and beards, by extension, to signify archaic and traditional ways. In the sixties, the hippies wore beards to announce their rejection of modern life (and their embrace of nutritional yeast and zucchini bread) just as in the eighties American men rejected the hippies by pampering their cheeks like babies’ asses. The nineties featured a brief explosion of goatees, so that in 1994 it seemed like a majority of American men were auditioning for a job as a sitcom bongo player, but the mass-insanity passed and the goatee returned to its rightful place as the beard of choice for doormen in Irish bars.

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John Roderick v. Adam Duritz

Sure, they sound alike at times, but one's a high-class whore and the other'll cost you ten-bucks-a-throw, writes SW contributor Ben Westhoff in Crawdaddy. You can probably figure out whose services Westhoff prefers, but the piece is still well worth a read.

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Sex, Rock n' Roll, and Reality

"My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly the 10,000 nights I spent alone."
-Leonard Cohen

It is almost universally assumed that rock musicians avail themselves of copious, practically on-demand casual sex with their fans. The images of rock stars lounging backstage after a show literally covered in a blanket of squirming young girls, or running for their lives from hungry teens willing to perform any deed no matter how depraved are so pervasive they practically define the job. It’s a case of collective wishful thinking, shared by the fans, their detractors, and the musicians themselves, that casual sex is a crucial and inextricable fringe benefit of being a musician. My married friends accost me with salacious and knowing winks, our female fans eye each other at the merch table like hungry cats around a wounded bird, girlfriends past and present peremptorily accuse me of everything short of sex-slavery and will not be assuaged, and interviewers leer and blatantly solicit for details— all while the unglamorous truth flops around like a beached carp. Whenever I’ve attempted to disavow this myth of constant sex-having, which I'm forced to do whenever I'm introduced as a "rock star" or whenever I so much as shake hands with a girl, I’m roundly ignored and even scorned. I can’t count the times I’ve stood in a group of guys and patiently denied ever deflowering a single teenaged groupie or making it with a Satan-worshipping sex-cult, only to be dismissed as either blatantly lying or shouted down by rousing disbelief and horror. The myth and legend of rock debauchery is too powerful, too precious, for even my closest friends to not suspect that somewhere, after the show and behind some velvet curtain, I must be shagging teeny-boppers three at a time.

Like all fantasies and myths, this one is so powerful because it’s based in fact. People DO go crazy for their favorite bands, and that craziness often gets expressed in sexual form. Teenage fans in particular often don’t have the maturity to separate lust from their other feelings—I know I didn’t. Hello, Jane Wiedlin— but even well into adulthood people will go slightly bananas when confronted with the physical presence of the person who sings their favorite tunes. Likewise, musicians are often quite receptive to the idea of receiving adoration in sexual form. It's very confusing to be treated like such a special person for an hour a night, and doubly so to be stared at unblinkingly by your excited fans after the show. An attractive person willing to steal you away and lavish you with kisses is a welcome respite from the routine, especially since your bandmates have long ago stopped treating you like a special person. Still, even with both parties striving to make it happen it’s fairly difficult for touring rock musicians to hook up with their fans, and the vast majority of interactions never get anywhere close to sex.

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SW Video: Long Winters at Showbox at The Market

Video by Jason Reid for SeattleWeekly.com

The Long Winters, featuring Reverb blogger John Roderick, played The Showbox on Saturday, July 5.

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Deadlines are Looming

John Roderick is the lead singer and songwriter for Seattle-based band The Long Winters. His Reverb column runs every Monday.

The next few weeks are going to be a stressful time for me. After a period of many months where all I’ve done is restfully contemplate my navel and dig holes in my garden, my band is now preparing to play a spate of shows—including the Showbox, July 5th with The Cops and BOAT—and then sequester itself in a recording studio to make a new record. These are things I love doing, of course, but they’re also a tremendous amount of hard work and I’m starting to feel overwhelmed and unprepared. Why did I think it was a good idea to book several shows during the same few weeks that I set aside to record? Preparing for the one activity is very different from preparing for the other, and they can’t help but be in conflict. We need to rehearse our catalogue enough that our upcoming shows have the tight feel that we get after weeks on tour. We should be working on our new songs too, except writing new material requires that we spread out on the floor, literally and figuratively, monkeying with gizmos and trying out new things. It’s surprisingly difficult to do both.

The same goes for writing. I’ve always wanted to believe that since prose and lyrics seem to come from two very different places in the brain it should be possible to work at one kind of writing until you are tired and then switch to the other. Unfortunately, although the styles of composition are very different they draw energy from the same well. After I write my weekly column I’m out of things to say for a while, and likewise if I’ve been working on lyrics. For the past several years I’ve been working on a travelogue of my adventures in Europe, but I’m never able to devote the months I need to finishing it because the cycle of record-making doesn’t leave enough time. After a long string of tours in 2004 I budgeted some time away from the band to sit and write diligently in my book, and the result was a three-year gap between albums, which frustrated our fans and our label to no end. For me to keep the music coming I have to be careful what else I take on, because in spite of believing that I can do everything all the time, it’s clear that I can’t.

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Seattle Uber Alles

John Roderick is the lead singer and songwriter for Seattle-based band The Long Winters. His Reverb column runs every Monday.

I took the train down to Portland over the weekend to play a variety show called Live Wire, which is broadcast on the Oregon Public Radio. The show is like A Prairie Home Companion if you replaced the laconic Midwestern drollery with a socks-and-sandals Oregon sense of absurdity. It was unpretentious and fun and it really set me thinking about Seattle’s character and how a few small changes, however unlikely, could make this city a much more livable and enjoyable place. Before I start, let me just say that no one hates reading “What Seattle can learn from Portland” lectures more than me. Portland, despite its charm, has one thousand percent more mimes, jugglers, and crusty potters than any city outside of Germany, and this fact permanently disqualifies Portland from teaching any civics lessons or from standing as an example of responsible growth. Until they fumigate their city of all its jugglers it will only be possible to appreciate their example by piecemeal.

Still, it is an undeniably nice, small town, and all the more impressive for having formerly and in recent memory been a totally scary left-coast wreck. It was only a few years ago that you practically had to wade through junkie prostitutes just to get your chainmail fitted at the Renaissance smithery, and the only interesting thing about the city was the curious abundance of punk rock/hippy chicks who dressed like a cross between Minnie Pearl and Tank Girl that you could find nowhere else in the world. Except for Germany. Fast forward to now and it feels like an EPCOT center futureland, where people are home-brewing biodiesel from bat guano and kiwi fruit, plucking banjos made from old PC circuit boards, and eating nuclear waste and shitting out diamonds. The fifty years of benign neglect that once threatened to destroy the city under a carpet of moss now looks like a brilliant master plan to deliver an intact nineteenth-century city to a twenty-first-century population of preservationists, recyclers and fixer-uppers.

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Publicity, promotion, integrity, and selling out to the man.

One of the most prevalent misconceptions about music, and the music business, is that the truly talented musicians don’t need to, or shouldn’t have to, promote or publicize themselves. Publicity is naively thought of as the natural and direct byproduct of a musician’s quality: the better the music is, the more publicity it should generate. Most people don't want to think of themselves as force-fed their culture, they want to think that they like good things and that the things they like are good. If Miley Cyrus is the most popular teen pop sensation, then Miley Cyrus must make the most sensational teen pop. Likewise, if Lil’ Jeezy’s cousin has the most downloaded ringtone of the week, it must be the most bangingest ringtone available, at least from one of Lil’ Jeezy’s cousins. Stands to reason. Capitalism, Social-Darwinism, and American Norman Rockwellism all lead us to believe that the cream rises to the top without any outside help. Unfortunately, we know this is not true. As good as Lou Bega's Mambo Number Five surely is, I find it hard to accept that it is finer than any Leonard Cohen song, although it certainly charted higher. Leave aside the obvious truth that just because the majority of people like something doesn’t mean it’s any good; the music business is not a pure system. An army of publicists and agents uses kickbacks, graft, handjobs, cell-phone radiation, blackmail, and lethal doses of boring emails to ensure that their anointed artists are virtually ubiquitous. A circular logic ensues: people assume that prevalence equals popularity, and that popularity equals quality, so they embrace whatever’s prevalent, ultimately making it popular. This reasoning also explains mock-Craftsman townhouses, pre-stained blue jeans, and the continued casting of Julia Roberts in movies.

Indie rock culture was born out of a desire to circumvent this mainstream music juggernaut. The cultural elite of bored suburban snobs took it as an obvious truth that popular culture was a bloated corpse and that it had perversely inverted its founding logic: the cream no longer rose to the top, it was buried and neglected under mountains of spoiled curds like the Vinnie VIncent Invasion. Mainstream culture was too lost and corrupt to recognize the greatness of the small rock bands, but that was OK. The college-educated fans of alternative rock didn’t need to have their tastes dictated to them by publicists, they could discern quality music with their own senses and from the suggestions of their trusted friends. Thus the indie-rock community adopted a sleeker and more elitist version of the mainstream capitalist logic: great music by definition CANNOT rise to the top of the culture, because most people are too stupid or brainwashed to appreciate it, but it WILL be obvious to those “in the know”. Buffalo Tom or the Minutemen don’t need standard publicists because everyone capable of enjoying them already knows about them, and those that don’t are excluded, not by design, but by their own pathetic tin ears.

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Stop, Collaborate and Listen

John Roderick is the singer/songwriter for Seattle band The Long Winters. His column appears every Monday on Reverb.

It’s not a simple thing to collaborate, let me tell you. Songwriting, unlike painting or novel-writing (or meditating) lends itself easily to team effort because there are two distinct halves to a pop song — music and lyrics—but that doesn’t make it easy or fun to work with someone else on a pop song. The Brill Building songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team at Motown, and the classic rock archetypes of Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards have ingrained in people’s imaginations the image of songwriters huddled around a piano or guitar hammering out a tune in the spirit of good-natured one-upmanship. One person is absentmindedly tinkering on the piano while the other person is twiddling with a pencil; suddenly the lyricist hears a melody and inspiration strikes: “That’s it! Play that last part again!” He sings a line, the piano player inserts a minor seventh, and they quickly and effortlessly compose a masterpiece, laughing uproariously. Then someone does a tap routine with a coat rack, and an angel gets its wings.

When I first started writing songs I pictured myself as half of this kind of partnership, even when I was writing songs alone. Would my other half be Steven Tyler to my Joe Perry? Or would I be Plant to someone’s Page? I even dreamt of being Mike Nichols to someone’s Elaine May, eschewing music altogether, so dear was the dream of having a partner. I figured my other half would come along eventually, and I kept a coat rack handy.

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Defining Competition and Success in the Music Business

There is, of course, a lot of competition between bands. It’s an obvious thing to say—like saying there are a lot of Skoal Bandits at a Kenny Chesney show. But the competition between bands seldom looks like the clichéd Blur vs. Oasis, or Brian Jonestown Massacre vs. the Dandy Warhols pissing matches, where louche twits with shag haircuts deliver unintelligible insults like, “’Ere, them’s a bit all porgy, innit?” No, the competition I’m referring to, the kind I feel, is altogether more quiet, and mostly friendly. When you’ve been playing music for a few years it comes to seem like the only people with whom you relate are other people in bands. Musicians become your whole social network, they’re your peers and your close friends, but despite what you have in common you’re not really having a shared experience. You play your shows and I play mine, your bandmates drink cheap gin and cry listening to Bright Eyes, my bandmates can’t stop to tie their shoes without setting up a wireless network, and talk about their most closely guarded secrets using Rush lyrics. You end up in a situation where the only people who can even begin to appreciate what your life looks like are people you only see twice a year, backstage at some festival between their set and yours, and they don’t actually have anything in common with you at all.

Two bands are almost never in a position where they’re competing for the exact same audience or gig, and it’s very rare that two bands are at the same level for long, so the things you’re vying for are more intangible. Success is very hard to measure in music. Everyone can see the difference between a sold-out show and a half-empty one, but quite often the band with the sold-out show is broken up within the year and all working at Circuit City, whereas the band with a half-full show ends up making twelve albums and touring for twenty years. You’re competing with other bands for “success”, which everyone measures differently. Once a band starts selling records those sales are taken as a rough measurement of that band’s success, but the streets of Silverlake and Echo Park are littered with the remains of bands that sold two or three HUNDRED THOUSAND records but no one’s ever heard of them, and they never made a dime. And they sucked. Likewise there are bands that reliably sell fifteen thousand records every other year and are, at least in music circles, household names. Which version of success do you prefer?

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Exposing the Poker Skills of the Sasquatch! Class of 2008

A few years ago I was invited to join a small, friendly poker game that was just starting up among a group of Seattle music people. I knew most of the players already, or knew them through friends, and although we were keeping it friendly we were playing for large enough sums that there was an unmistakable intensity to the game. I remember the first time I went “all in” risking $200 of my own money on a stupid bluff, the sweat was pouring down my face. I lost that $200, (to Chad Q who books the Showbox, lucky bastard), but we’ve been playing for a couple of years now and I’ve won a few too.

Checking out the line-up for this year’s Sasquatch Music Festival, I was not surprised to find quite a few of my poker buddies are playing on one stage or another over the weekend, and even more will be gobbling up the catering backstage. I figure that the way a person gambles offers an insight into their craft, so I offer you this program guide to the festival with my top picks from among the inveterate gamblers of the Seattle music scene:

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There's No Such Thing As a Free Lunch

Jonathan Coulton built his entire career on the Internet. The rest of us are supposed to follow.

A friend and I were riding our Vespas over in West Seattle a couple of weeks ago when we rounded a corner and came face to face with a full-grown coyote standing in the street. His body-language and his tremendous ears gave him away from a distance: not a dog. Low-slung, grey and slinky, his tail bushy as a squirrel’s, he moved like a thief. By the time we pulled our Vespas to a stop he’d scooted up into the brush, but he peered back at us for awhile before dissolving into the shadows. Despite his wild manner he seemed perfectly unflustered on the manicured hillsides of Fauntleroy. My friend and I were jumping around with excitement, but a neighbor in his driveway gestured unperturbed (Mr. Cool West Seattle) to a sign on a nearby telephone pole, which read, “A family of coyotes is eating cats, so BEWARE!”

I have to say, cat-lover that I am, that I am even more in love with the cat-eating coyotes of West Seattle! I haven’t rooted for an animal like this since that bear swam over from Vashon Island last year and freaked out Federal Way. I get the feeling that there may be coyotes all over West Seattle, but until they start eating Volvos no one is going to raise a stink. My one complaint about the wildlife around here is that it always seems to make itself scarce whenever I have out-of-town guests visiting from faraway places. I make a big production to my far-flung friends about how the bald eagles are going to eat their Pomeranians, and how the sea lions break into unlocked cars, and how the raccoons drink Night Train and have learned to make phone calls, but whenever I have a friend visiting from, say, Spain, the in-town animal life seems to take a union break. Two days before my most recent Spanish guest arrived I had a possum fighting a great Horned Owl across my front lawn, but for the three days of her visit, the best I could muster was a trip to watch the smelt get pummeled by the current at the Ballard Locks. “Their bodies are getting acclimated to the salt water, see?” I said. “Yawn,” she yawned.

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