When Mark and I were talking about my prospective participation in So So Modern's US tour, however many months ago, I was pretty adamant about my having some actual, practical responsibilities for the band, especially with regard to live performance issues, but the fact of the matter is that the band doesn't have that many shows scheduled for the time I'm with them, and that they've successfully toured in the past without need for a roadie or a guitar tech. Truth be told I've been pretty self-conscious and wary of the idea that I might simply be a tag-along male groupie. Built into this concern is this assumption that there's a hierarchy of tour-related personnel wherein itinerant fans/groupies are kind of bottom-of-the-ladder and also a little pathetic and lame. I don't mean to say I'm not a fan of the band, but I am really not so invested in their music such that my participation on the tour is sustained by the awe of being among them. But to a certain degree, I think there has to be something like that going on in my head. Sometimes I'll be having a conversation with the guys about instruments or recording or songwriting, i.e., the things that essentially define them as band, and I wonder if I come off sounding ingratiating and sycophantic, like I'm trying too hard to insinuate myself into their milieu, or trying to play up the fantasy that I'm actually part of the band. What's more is that I hardly get to talk to people with as much musical experience as them, and the temptation to ask them sophomoric questions about tedious musical issues is always there. I think as a result of all this I've kind of intentionally avoided trying to satisfy my curiosity, and except for the rare post-performance back-patting, I basically don't talk to the band about their own music at all--for all the reasons above it generally feels kind of distasteful.

So far my practical responsibilities have included driving the band around in my car and helping them set up the gear they've borrowed from me, both of which are only really relevant for the stint in Los Angeles. I've also helped them run the merch table, which I kind of feel is groupie-ish but in reality is probably one aspect of live performance where it's extremely useful to have an extra guy hanging around, to watch stuff and answer questions for passers-by; the disadvantage of this has been that I haven't actually had a chance yet to watch the band perform as a bonafide member of the audience. It'd be good to get a little more familiar with their drum and keyboard setup so I could be more useful during soundchecks, and I have to admit I've got this ambulance-chaser idea in which either Mark or Grayson breaks a string live and so I have to run on stage and perform a 60-second string-change and tune-up (and let's for a minute ignore certain damning contingencies like A) I don't know where they keep their extra strings, B) nobody's got an extra tuner that I could use offstage, and I can't just tune using one of their stompbox tuners while they're performing, and C) one cannot realistically change a guitar string in 60 seconds). All of this wanting to be useful comes less from any sort of restlessness during shows than it does from the simple fear of not feeling or appearing to be useful.

Literally hours before the second (and final) show in LA, we picked up a couple hundred copies of So So Modern's newest release, the seven-track Friendly Fires EP, which is by far their longest record yet and which so far has only been heard by the band and a couple of very generous audience members who attended the Key Club show. If I'm not mistaken, home country fans back in NZ will have to wait until the band gets back, or maybe just until somebody leaks it onto the Internet. I might do everyone a favor and do that myself.

While I took the previous photo, Mark was free-drawing this image of me, which if things keep up as they have been will be the only visual record of me on this tour:

Just before coming to the US, Dan had picked up a classic Gameboy off of TradeMe, which I guess is the NZ equivalent of a Craigslist or eBay. FYI old-school handheld nostalgia is an unbelievable tool for attracting the conversation of strangers male and female, high and low, urbane and parochial. The only requirement is that they be roughly of our generation; let's say anyone aged 21-35 applies. We had a (relatively) decent flow of people stopping by the merch table like hours before So So Modern even got near the stage, and all that thanks to the Gameboy.

Actually I tend to get the impression that the band's arrival in the US was a little underplanned and possibly premature with respect to the release of Friendly Fires. The shows in LA put them in odd venues with odd co-performing bands, mostly disposable and self-dramatic (and, IMO, far less good) Modern Rock bands trying to make it big on the Hollywood circuit. By their own testimony, the guys in So So Modern were happy to get whatever they could get, since after all it was their first time abroad and so the shows had some abstract significance aside from promoting the band's music.

That being said, there'd been some tangible weirdness in playing with mediocre Sunset Strip bands. So So Modern tend to represent themselves as an unequivocally positive musical unit, and if you read their MySpace profile or website, you'll probably pick up a calculated and self-conscious avoidance of overtly self-promotional musical description, for which one might be thankful--bands are generally completely fucking awful at the business of evocative prose. Instead, you get stuff like this:

Hello! Nice to meet you. We are are a four-person collective interested creating a more fun and meaningful future through performance and music. By performance we mean the reciprocal acts of seeing and being seen, and by music we mean the ability to show solidarity around creative aural pleasure. Remember the campfire? Hope you do, cos thats what music means to us. A platform for sharing ideas, stories and gathering. But also a stage for challenges, dialog and what not. Much Love SoSoModern

This is cryptic and playful and I think more than a little savvy and knowing; the rhetorical technique at work here is to A) employ the democratic appeal of music's inclusiveness and catholic breadth, as opposed to making any exclusive claims to individual talent or having discovered some uniquely mind-blowing rock sound that you've never heard before, and B) rely on the fact that inquisitive fans are somehow already aware of the band's sound, either directly or indirectly, since there's nothing said that informs the reader about their music itself--after all, you can effectively demonstrate solidarity through creative aural pleasure regardless of style, whether it be synth-punk, death metal, showtunes, or whatnot.

Anyway, when you talk to the guys in the band, especially Mark and Aidan I think, you will get the sense that they really believe what they say about their mission as a band. But insofar as that's true, I don't necessarily find it to be comprehensively true. For all the high metaphysical talk of music as a unifier, there's a distinct aspect of musical snobbery in their private conversations, and I think they're capable of making negative generalizations of whole genres and eras of music, which (even though I do that myself all the time) strikes me as kind of dogmatic. There's also an overt moralistic tone that the band tends to take towards music, viz., some bands' intentions and purposes are somehow more valid than others, and also a tendency to attribute certain intentions to superficial attributes like musical style; i.e., if your music has the technical attributes of corporate radio rock you're probably going to be accused of having the mercenary motives and artistic vapidity of a corporate radio rock band. I don't say this like it should be surprising or seen as blatant hypocrisy per se, but there's an inconsistency built in there--I don't know if you can talk about music as a "campfire" and then make fun of bands you're playing with (FYI, the photo above is of Grayson and Dan mocking the guitar player of an admittedly bad sissyrock band playing on stage at that very moment). I don't want to overstate my case here: the guys in the band are extremely cool and sincere people, but I have been among less well-spoken and less ambitious musicians who seem more accepting of musical endeavors regardless of motive or style.

But really this conversation is about as old as avant-garde art is itself. Mark opposes such terms "avant-garde" and "art rock" when applied to the band because he's openly (and commendably) opposed to art for art's sake, but I think the term's at least a little bit appropriate when it comes to describing the band's aversion to music as a commercial activity and music that is reptitive and tired and unoriginal. Anyway, if there's a philosophical tension here, it might be result of a kind of post-post-modern growing pains that, if I can go out on a limb here, are being felt by our generation at large--regardless of much lit crit you've read, the 20th-century pomo suspicion towards profit-driven music pretty much suffuses every thought we've got regarding rock n' roll, and now I think there's probably a bit of an awareness that this very suspicion has become an institution and created an exclusivity and elitism of another kind, and hence an intentional repairing back to the campfire. I don't think anyone's got it figured out, but I think Mark and the guys are doing their best.

So So Modern played the final slot at the Key Club. This would be a good thing for a weekend show, but it was a weeknight residency show, meaning the headliner plays second to last, and also that the crowd thins out considerably right after that. After the show we hung around backstage and in the loading lot to chat with some friends, and got a brief but pretty flattering review from the venue's rather jaded-seeming stage manager (if I recall correctly: "Good show. You guys were a pleasant surprise, after all that shit.") On the way home, the band had a surprisingly honest session of debriefing and self-criticism. They actually called each other out by name and said what they thought one guy or another might have done wrong. Lemme emphasize exactly how rare and hard it is to do that: during my own band experiences the best I could do in terms of singling people out for criticism was to tell them their amp was too loud; if there was anything seriously wrong (that is, from a musical standpoint), people losing pitch or rhythm or whatever, I could only use impersonal or first-person plural pronouns, e.g., "Things just don't seem to be working," or "We are kinda losing time at this point, I'm not sure what it is", all of this prefaced by heavy self-effacement such as "I dunno, are you guys hearing this too, maybe it's me that's fucking up", etc. In situations like that, the overlapping fears of conflict and hurting someone's feelings and sounding like an asshole are pretty overwhelming, even (or maybe especially) if you're good friends with the persons you're trying to criticize.

Anyway, after about ten minutes of nit-picking re: the show, the van was mostly quiet--I think only Dan and I were speaking, just talking about America. I couldn't tell if everyone was feeling uncomfortable, or if it was just because they were tired.