Page 187 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 181

read the essays in order (Evans’ is the eleventh essay in the book) then don’t be
surprised if the preceding essays seem strangely out of touch by comparison.
This is frightening stuff, bold, loud, prophetic and strong—rock & roll as prose.
Along with Evans’ essay, the other contribution to Present Tense that most
desperately needs to be assigned as required reading for all rock & roll critics,
fans, and performers, is Jeff Calder’s ‘Living by Night in The Land of
Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band’. You know that
you’re in for some powerful stuff when you begin Calder’s essay by
encountering Rule 1: ‘under no circumstances should anyone take seriously
anything anybody at a record company ever says.’ Calder’s essay proceeds along
this line of thought, as he interweaves biting insights on the power politics of the
biz while illustrating each of his points with poignant examples of personal
experiences with his band, the Swimming Pool Qs.
The real power of Calder’s autobiographical essay is that he explains (in
wonderfully sarcastic passages) the seemingly endless hoops through which
bands must repeatedly jump if they want to ‘make it’ to that holy grail level I
discussed earlier (via Jarrett’s essay) as ‘ratification’. The crucial part of this
first-hand lesson in the untold nightmare world of rock bands, however, is that
Calder reveals the inner workings of the ‘industry’ for what they are: the clueless
bumblings of record company morons whose jobs are determined solely by sales
charts, whose egos are larger than the artists they are supposed to represent, and
to whom ‘displays of humanity are a sign of weakness’ and ‘being nice is a
liability’. The point is that the culture industry, like all other major capitalist
industries, is not a tightly knit band of efficient conspirators, but rather, an
anarchic labyrinth of chance, inter-departmental warfare, and endless patriarchal
posturing, with the one constant factor being the assumption that musicians are
expendable. Indeed, as Calder describes it, ‘nothing makes sense at the record
company and the artist is always to blame.’ And yet, knowing all of this full well,
musicians continue to make music, bands continue to play live, and listeners
continue to find pieces that answer their needs—and that, for Calder and the rest
of us out there making the music every night, is the inexpressible magic that
‘means everything’.