And we work the same way I have been working since I was a kid, when I had to learn the chords to “Amarillo By Morning” for my first cover band.(We played Van Halen and other stuff, too. But we also played “Amarillo By Morning,” because we lived in Texas and knew that the girls needed something to dance to. I didn't play the Van Halen stuff, because I played the keyboards. So I was stuck only playing the tunes like “Amarillo By Morning.” If it sounds like this bothered me, then you should get used to it, because lots of stuff like this bothers me, even today.) We get together in someone's house, and we shout out the tempos and chord changes and arrangement until everyone's got the basic idea, and then we run through it until the song stands up a bit on its shaky legs, and then we take a break for people to smoke cigarettes, and then we go back to it. And we do that as many nights a week as it takes until it's presentable. I know, I know: a lot of people have hobbies, and a lot of people treat their hobbies like work. But this is different, because for most of these guys it's not some private compulsion. It's a public work that has to be shown to people, and has to stand up to the quality of work done by anyone else, and must also move those people who see it, move them in some direction or other. Guys in bands volunteer to care about things. It's always moved me.
In Kosovo there's a lot of things I love, but one thing I hate. It's when an artist refers to himself or herself as a professional. Most artists there use this word in a very specific way. It doesn't have to do with consideration of other people's time or talent, or even core artistic integrity. It has to do with a very high evaluation of their own self worth. It means “I only work for money, because money represents proper acknowledgement of my abilities.” It means “I have the respect of certain other people who are widely regarded as professionals.” It means “Screw you, I am a professional.” I've had a lot of people there tell me they were professional. It never meant that their art was beautiful. It always meant something else about money and hierarchy. It turned me off every time.
A lot of people in Kosovo put a very high premium on professionalism. Bands wouldn't play without really good-sized payments, indicating that they were professionals. Criticism of my own work was always framed in terms of my own professionalism, or lack thereof. Criticism of their work was met with declarations of professionalism. I came to hate the word. I felt they didn't know what it meant, or they gave it too much value at the expense of the work itself. People got paid for their work, every time, but it didn't mean that the work was good or even the least bit important at all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about everyone. Plenty of people worked hard for the love of it: Hosenfefer would be a case in point. But in Kosovo and elsewhere in the region, they usually demanded respect and money for their work regardless of its genuine value, and they demanded to be compensated like any other profession, and, worst of all, they demanded to be called professional as if that meant “good art.” Maybe it was a by-product of communism, or the higher standard of living expectations ingrained in Yugoslavian culture. But it didn't have anything to do with the way I grew up, playing for nothing and never expecting the pay to get better, writing songs for audiences who forgot them later, working in kitchens and on loading docks, doing whatever we needed to for food and gas so we could still figure out how to make music or theater for ourselves, our friends, and those few people that cared about it for the few hours we were putting it on stage. It had nothing to do with amateurism or professionalism. I'm not romanticizing it. It just seemed to me then that, considering all my heroes, rock and roll and otherwise, this is just the way it usually got done, and so that's how we did it too.
I think about this while we rehearse, after working hours, in the living rooms of our houses. This is what we've been doing for most of February, rehearsing the songs for Apocalypse Town. The people in the band make money walking dogs and teaching. Some of them work at copy stores, or work with computers, or work with machinery. None of them expect art to ever really reward them financially. They wouldn't mind, but they don't expect it. They just like art, and they've made art that's been talked about across the country, and they're really good.
Back then, when I was a kid, I never would have thought I would still like playing in a band at this age. But it doesn't feel stale, or old, or silly, or useless, or the least bit unimportant. This is just what those musicians have been doing for decades now, always jumping in, piecing it together, figuring it out, forgetting about the time, paying out of pocket, staying late, trying to get to the center of the thing, and feeling like we're learning it new every time. Just like amateurs.
- t
p.s. I love you, Ex-Yugo rock. Kosovo native Viktorija scored her first major hit in 1988 with “Barakuda.”
p.p.s. I love you too, Houston. The Vietnamese community gave their own names to the streets that intersect the Vietnamese part of mid-town, but the Vietnamese names had to either 1) mean the same thing as their English counterpart, or 2) at least share a phonetic similarity. This is how "Travis" came to be "Tu Do," which means "Freedom."*
* Thanks to Marks Hinton's "Historic Houston Streets" for this little tidbit.
