(Damian Kulash of the band OK Go has been guest blogging at Coolfer while the band finishes up its tour. If you'd like to send Damian a question or comment, you can email him at his temporary guest blogger email address, damian@coolfer.com.)
I always do this. I get on a plane with a fully charged battery, duly caffeinated and all geared up to get some work done. There are t-shirt designs to finish, or backed up emails to answer, or a song idea to get sketched out in a synthesis program. I turn down the complementary headphones, settle in, drink a bloody mary mix or a ginger ale, and then I am sabotaged. They put on the in-flight movie and it’s over. I sit, like a zombie, and watch the entire thing, without sound. It’s ridiculous; I can’t pry myself away -- TVs completely shut me down. I can’t even eat at restaurants that show sports games because I’ll ignore whoever I’m eating with, no matter how boring the sport is. So this post represents a huge triumph of determination for me. Every word I write here is a victory over the silent Billy Bob Thorton and his Bad News Bears.
The last post got me thinking about the message of a band -- what a band means, what place it carves out in the world. Obviously, the public image of a band is generated by hundreds or thousands of impressions. It’s a picture composed not only by songs and the band’s press photos, but also by countless interviews, appearances, rumors, snapshots, and stories. No one could find, much less digest, all of the material spun off by a band (my mom is nonetheless making a noble attempt), but the public generally comes to a rough consensus about a band.
Sometimes the message is pre-formulated and planned out. This can seem concise and intense, or just contrived. From the Beatles to the Hives, there’s a long history of great bands who carefully, even anally, crafted a tightly-knit aesthetic message that we hungrily lap up. On the other hand, we can all think of an equally robust list of bands whose transparent attempts to generate an image seem fraudulent or facile.
Other bands seem to whip up a message effortlessly, or even accidentally. Could anyone claim that Elliott Smith seemed manufactured? Or that Fugazi’s politics were a prefab imaging device? Here again, though, it’s easy to generate a long list of musicians whose I-just-rolled-out-of-bed-this-way schtick is boring or pathetic.
With regard to my own band, I’m not really sure which camp we fall in. It’s no secret that we make an effort. We have a distinct look, we plot our course fairly carefully, and we don’t try to hide the fact that we are deliberate. By the same token, though, we are uncommonly accessible to our fans, generally straightforward in interviews, and pretty candid and earnest overall.
Sometimes I question the wisdom of our approach. Of course, we have to stay our course: it’s who we are, and we’re too established to suddenly be transform into something else anyhow. But for all of the effort we expend on blogs and articles written for magazines, on intelligently speaking our minds, on aggressively making ourselves available to fans at our shows, it’s hard to tell how much is really gained.
By way of example: The Vines. We were friends with The Vines before they were signed in America. They’re great guys. We spent a couple months in adjacent recording studios and we hung out all the time. Craig was terrified of my dog, and my dog made it worse by shitting in the middle of their control room after they left one night. We toured with them for their first tour of America (their first tour anywhere, in fact), and I remember thinking that the poor guy was completely screwing everything up. Every interviewer I talked to had been abused or offended by him, and I watched him, helpless and inebriated, work his way around the country, pissing off his fans, his band, and his crew alike. I was sure he’d trashed any chance they had at success.
A couple months later, there was a full page in Rolling Stone celebrating what a total fuckup Craig had become. In the same issue we got a tiny congratulatory blurb about something forgettable. By the end of the year, they’d sold around four times as many records as we did.
It doesn’t really pay to be the nice guy, but we are who we are, and we’re loving it. I suspect there will always be a more caricatured character ahead of us on the charts, and the relative safety of our smart-guy thing will probably keep us from igniting a sudden international phenomenon. But we hope that our approach will last, at least; we’d rather be cruising at this altitude for 20 years than rocket up and plummet immediately. And as we head home, today, I couldn’t be happier. The last nine weeks of shows have been spectacular; I’m proud of our record and the world seems to be liking it, too; after living at dangerously close quarters with these guys for years now, we’re still best friends; and I spend my life doing things I care about. What more could you ask for?
By the way, Billy Bob and crew are celebrating wildly. They must have won the big game.
Thanks for reading. I may stop by and write something here in the future, but for now I’m going to take some time off for Thanksgiving and try to write some new music. If you want to read more things I’ve written, there should be a brand new page of my ranting up on our website, www.okgo.net.
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