Built to Spill made me want to restart music from the garage up.
I’d been in an extended phase of intoxication with layering. I grew up with Phil Spector’s orchestral Wall of Sound pop on the hometown radio station in Kingsport (Oldies 104.9, W-T-F-M!), later moving on to psychedelic-era masterpieces like Pet Sounds, Smile, Sergeant Pepper’s, Abbey Road and acknowledging them as gospel.
Then I spent my teen and college years on layered psychedelic indie stuff like OK Computer, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and by that time I had come to value music as art rather than entertainment, but as an artistic medium necessarily complex, like a 3-D box with walls of layered canvas paintings, filled inside with the universe’s mysteries, spiritual enlightenment and any other ethereal matter I could muster in my imagination. Throughout the 2000’s, indie bands incorporated more and more elements: extra members, classical, novel or esoteric instruments, electronic components, laser lights, glitter.
But sometimes, you just want your music to sound like what you’d scream into your pillow or hurl against the wall in a fit. You want it to feel like you feel when you’re pissed, or lonely, alone in your room. You don’t want it to try to sound like everything at once, just that little feeling right there. You want to play the music of a poor, pissed teenager with no preconceptions. You want to plug in and zone out and make noise. The Brian Wilson “In My Room” effect, later discussed by Rivers Cuomo in “In the Garage.” Not caring, doing it for you. Feeling what you’re doing as a release. Wrapping yourself in the embrace of your own sounds.
The garage bands of my early musical years in high school knew the importance of musical venting as we banged out very specific situational emotional moods, loudly, on cheap starter instruments we didn’t really know how to play. In those days, it was punk, hardcore, metal that was doing that for me, but even those influences were often still trying to direct my thoughts or emotions towards some kind of righteous anger towards a politic or a cause.
As I made strides in local bands I collected increasingly better gear and my band mates and I tirelessly watched music docs and read books and manuals and YouTube videos about recording principles and tried to mimic the process of Glyn Johns and other great producers. We worked in some studios and asked them a lot of questions as accrued the gear necessary to record ourselves. We built up to the ability to play each other’s, and other auxiliary instruments. We started to use all this knowledge to make some of the more beautiful stuff we’d made to date, slowly, patiently, painstakingly.
I am damn proud of this musical growth and the tapestries we’ve woven. But a certain unfulfilled musical I.D. keeps pulling me towards indie, towards shoe-gaze, towards simplicity, towards cheap instruments and lo-fi avante garde who-cares-apathetically joyful noise-making. It says: Just plug in. Make some noise. Play some indie garage rock.
Then, late to the party over the last decade, I started discovering more about ’90s indie. Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du/Bob Mould, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Built to Spill and others like them (Pixies, of course, Daniel Johnson, etc.) who just don’t care about production quality, their outfits, the lights, props or any part they couldn’t play themselves with a few friends in a garage, and they play on stage with the same nonchalant, open simplicity. Or chill apathy, or frenetic rage. What psychedelic rock missed or left off–it was an honest attempt at finding truth that got a little out of control and began convincing itself and listeners that truth had to be found through a drug, Eastern religion, symphony of esoteric instruments or complex post-production process–punk, grunge and indie rock attempted to rectify by stripping everything back down to the noise and emotion.
I was smitten with Built to Spill when I saw them at the Bijou Theatre last week. They’ve been around a while, they have a name nationally, and they had a full theater of fans waiting who you could tell knew all their stuff.
But they walked out to silence. Slowly tuned, adjusted straps, murmured to each other, checked amps and pedals, and then they launched into the music. Not more than a handful of words were said between songs. Nothing special happened with the lights. They didn’t have an artistic canvas backdrop with the band, album or tour logo on it as has become popular lately. They just looked like people I could have stumbled across playing at the Pilot Light.
At 40-something, Doug Martsch is gray-bearded and balding. He wears a plain tee shirt, plain loose jeans and sneakers. He is a killer guitar player but in that way of that guy you know who is a good guitarist, not in the Jimmy Page, I-have-guitar-theory-books-and-videos-licensed-and-unlicensed way. He has his amp facing him and his pedals on top to manipulate with his hands, mid-song, when he gets the notion. He can do atonal fuzz and he can do a blistering solo, but it seems to be about expressing himself rather than impressing the crowd. He has a pleasing Neil Young-style voice and can hit some strong, clear notes when he wants, or he can stand back and let his voice bury itself with the instruments.
The reason perhaps that Martsch continues to change the lineup around him in Built to Spill is to preserve that honest dynamic of a group of guys jamming the songs. Members over the years fight over the direction, vision, image of a band, bring in conflicting influences and get tempted to, like my band mates and I have, grow increasingly complex and layered and polished together.
By deciding he wants to stay who he is, who he probably was as a garage rock teenager, Doug Martsch can use Built to Spill as a time machine, as a crucible, as a soul mirror—in a freeing way, he can make the music anything he wants it to be. It’s freeing.
For a Brian Wilson type, that could mean constructing a vast sonic symphony, slowly and painfully, out of what you hear the angels in your head singing. Or if you’re Doug Martsch, or me lately, you may feel like embracing the giddy apathetic nonchalance or cathartic envelopment of plugging in an old guitar into a big amp, and loudly playing your song in the way you feel it right then, whether you’re in the bedroom by yourself, the garage with your band mates, or on stage in the Bijou in front of 700 people.
The great thing about music is it’s whatever speaks to you. You make it however pleases you and you consume whatever convicts your soul or compels you to sing along or wiggle your tail or whatever effect you were hoping for from it. I am more and more thankful for music and the variety of ways to experience it, because there’s simply no right or wrong way to do it, it’s just pure freedom.
And some people may disagree with me, and they are free and encouraged to do so because it just proves me right!
