…and so our journey begins. We’re jamming in our new apartment. We just moved in. We haven’t even made our couch, fashioned from discarded boxes and Styrofoam packaging, yet. No. We’re just getting settled in. And what better way to do that than jamming at moderately loud levels? I say moderately, it’s subjective.
Babs says it sounds like we’re fighting. Maybe. We’re more negotiating. We’re improvising, and in order to do that you have to agree—or disagree—on a few fundamental things. If you end up disagreeing more than agreeing, sure, you could call that fighting. But we’re drifting in and out of agreement. It’s not total confrontation.
I’m not sure when it occurred to me, how it developed, or where it came from, but when I get together with other musicians, I like to improvise. I don’t like to agree on a song to play, and then play it. I’d rather come up with something spontaneously, have you do the same thing, and then see what they sound like together. Who knows, we might even take into account what the other is playing, and adapt in real time what we’re hearing, creating an endless cycle of curiosity. And so here we are, a guitar and a bass, driving each other into deeper and deeper levels of listening, of responding to each other, making music.
And then the power goes out.
At first, it’s unclear what’s happening. We’re in the living room with the windows open. It’s getting dark, but there’s still some light coming in. We can see the windows of other units in the courtyard, they all have power. Maybe both of our amplifiers stopped working at the same time? Could we have rocked so hard that we broke our amps? Is this the destiny we were always meant to discover? Freed from the shackles of dormitory life, cut loose on society. Still incubating in college but finding ourselves, our art, our looks. Getting in touch with our gifts, the only true gifts that we were given, the things that no one can take away from us, the things that… no. The light switch doesn’t work either. It’s the power.
Where the hell is the power located? Do they call it “the power?” The box, where all of the switches are, like a junction box, or whatever it’s called. The fuse box. That’s it. Where is it? The only other key we have is for the laundry room, so we head down. At this point, still, we must have rocked hard enough to blow a fuse. But we had been playing for at least ten to twenty minutes before that. Why now? We open the door and a cold air greets our faces, we walk in and begin to look around for the fuse box. Our shoes slide against sand and dirt on the cement floor, scraping like brushes on a snare. It’s over on the right, already opened, and there’s a note taped on the panel. Great. This probably happens a lot. So it seems we’ll be down here often to recover from one blown fuse or another over the course of our stay.
I head over to get a closer look. It’s actually not a note at all. It’s a letter. To us! It reads:
“You’re having Band Practice, on a work night, after 10:00. You’re doing it with the windows wide open. In a courtyard building, where your noise can be heard by everyone who lives in the same complex. AND, to top it off, you’re not even any good.
So… let’s get one thing straight. Rehearsal is over.
The fact is, even if you guys were actually talented and it weren’t the time of night where people might be heading to bed, (Saturday afternoon, for example) it is still mighty fucking rude to subject everyone else in the whole complex to your noise. You’re renting (or, more likely, you’re parents are paying for) an apartment, not a band rehearsal space.
Obviously, we know where you live. Consider this a friendly warning. Next time, we’ll shut the power off at random intervals too.
Welcome to life after high-school and the dorms. You have neighbors who are ‘grown ups.’ If you want to jam and have keggars, go do it somewhere else—specifically somewhere else where the rent isn’t over a grand per month. We don’t pay that kind of money to hear lame Green Day cover bands learn the guitar.
Next time, the power goes out, and then it goes out all month during the day, the middle of the night, (We’ll try to make it an interesting game for you.) Plus, consider that we know where you live… (Fill in your own blank.)
It’s a fucking shame that they don’t teach you manners at that over-priced college. (I know… I know… you’re just ‘keeping it real.’ The fact is, you’re real fucking morons to think that SOMEBODY wouldn’t have something to say about loud electric guitars in a complex where all the apartments are practically right on top of each other. Christ… your parents must cry themselves to sleep over their retarded children.)
Have a nice night.”
The letter speaks for itself. But there’s so many questions. So much disdain, from several different angles. So much hate, really. We are fucking morons! Why did we think we could jam with the windows open as loudly as we did?! But… why are our neighbors like this!? Are they all like this? For the record, we did not play anything even remotely close to Green Day. With the power back on, we shut the windows, turn down the volume and play a few more notes, but the night is over. The jam is over. The dream… would just have to continue in a different room, at a lower volume, and most likely on the weekends.
Looking back at this letter, I try to distance myself, find a happy place where I can reflect on our actions that day. And just when I think I’ve got it, I don’t. I’m angry. They won. We never found out who they were. We never got to patch things up. We never got to show them that we were apologetic for what we’d done. We never got the chance to prove that our music was more than just Green Day covers, or that we were actually good musicians, or at the least, that our art came from an honest place. It was just so exciting to be in a new apartment, to be young and relatively carefree. They had our number.
And they were harsh. Too harsh. You could feel their enjoyment with every sentence as it unfolded in your mind. It’s an uncomfortable letter to read, actually. It’s silly but it’s serious, and it goes too far. But there I go again.
Thanks for reading! I write, record, and publish my own music, you can find it all here!