Singing to Strangers: The Anonymity of the Modern Rock Star

I remember the moment I announced to my parents that I wasn’t going to college but would instead move to Hollywood and form a heavy metal band. I wasn’t often subject to their condescension but I immediately felt hapless and incompetent as they took turns explaining the stupidity of the choice. This was just exactly the conversation I’d hoped to provoke. I knew well enough, even at 16, what a terrifying gamble it would be to forgo a lucrative undergraduate career in the executive farm leagues, instead choosing to form a persona and trying to create music dense enough to shapeshift into a genuine, monetizable commodity. It wasn’t a choice I’d made because it was smart. Their unwitting condescension had given me the foil I wanted to face down, I’d wanted to find the nobility in the stupid, to fish out the heroic couplet form the 3AM garble, pinning it into time as something people could gratefully look back on from a distance.

But that was the 90’s. Making a career out of music was possible then, the apex of the half-century phenomenon of the pop artist. When a slight variation on the arrangement of G, C, and D Major chords could be enlivened with a certain unschooled inflection that passed for feeling, and thus merit a trade for $10. If money and adulation could be won with emotional aphorism and first year music theory than surely sex wasn’t far behind. Thus materializes Elvis, The Rolling Stones, and a jabbering rabble of anxiously dancing boys with a powerful new trick of seduction. Dance like a chicken and pout your lips, they will come. Not only will they come, they’ll pay you for it. Emotional validation and sexual opportunism thus made being a rock star the de facto career choice for everybody who ever was or will be.

The decimation of this false market has been one of the sadder consequences of the internet’s fast growth. It turns out the wicked art of 5 note blues with an overanxious backbeat was easier and cheaper to make than had been thought. Now it’s all but impossible to make anything grander than a craftsman living reappointing the old progressions in new arrangements and sending your work out to an audience that is suddenly much closer. You can count the plays on your MySpace page, deposit the pennies from iTunes and Amazon, and click on the smilingly alien faces stacked like blocks on your Facebook page, matching them with the sweaty upturned eyes that show up for your show in Baltimore on a Tuesday night. No one will ever be famous again.

“I started playing guitar when I was 12,” Sara Kermanshahi told me. “I started a couple bands in high school. That’s where I met Cedar. We went to the same school in central district Seattle. Pot was big, we smoked cigarettes outside all day, we’d sit outside and play guitar. It was cool–I liked it.”

Kermanshahi is Natureboy, a lonesome band built around her odd-timed guitar arpeggios and the gradual flow of ambient layers of Cedar Apffel and Rory O’Connor. Her first record is one of the prettiest things I’ve heard, a combination of shapeless drone, swell, modernist counterpoint, and Kermanshahi’s voice, both heavy and reluctant, rising to rough, smoky highs that evaporate into shapeless after-thoughts. She avoids the formula of verse-bridge-chorus, her songs never have more than two themes, which slowly embellish themselves in heavily reverbed guitars, keyboards, and doubled vocals.

“I went to this really old man at this place called Guitarville,” she told me. “He said he would teach me anything I wanted, just bring in some songs. I brought in Hole’s ‘Doll Parts,’ Nirvana’s ‘Dumb’–really simple stuff. He was like, ‘Okay.’ It was funny, it was so simple but I didn’t want to learn anything else.”

Kermanshahi fell in love with Apffel in high school after some time of playing music together. “I was automatically in love with him when I was 15, but nothing happened,” she said.

“It was something really important and special going on when I saw him. He was just fascinating, very intriguing. He had the kind of personality that would spark intrigue in people.”

Apffel went away to live in Hawaii, but he returned to Seattle in Kermanshahi’s last year of high school. “When he came back we were friends and we would play music and it just kind of developed into a relationship,” she said. “And then we were together for six years, while we were in the band [House on a Hill—Natureboy’s precursor] and living together.”

The mix of love, career, and music didn’t last. Apffel and Kermanshahi eventually broke up even while House on a Hill stayed together. Then Kermanshahi met someone else, a man who was moving to New York shortly. “I was like, ‘That’s very funny, I was planning on moving there too. I really want to,’” she told me. “That was another thing that drew me here.”

Kermanshahi moved to New York alone, no explicit hope of a relationship, and no immediate future for the band she was leaving behind in Seattle. “I did a lot of restaurant work when I came here. I worked at the Grand Hotel as a cocktail lounge server. It was good money and that’s where I was coming from,” she said.

She persisted in her attraction to the man she’d, in part, moved for. “I kept having to push my love out there and see what happened. Eventually it caught on. I feel like that happens to me a lot. It’s not like, ‘I want her, let’s do it.’ I have to grow on you a little bit.”

“He was very depressed,” Kermanshahi continues, not wanting to elaborate too much. Their relationship wouldn’t last, but it had a big effect on her, one that reverberates throughout the Natureboy record.

“He played amazing guitar, really loved Bonnie Prince Billy, and Nick Cave and all this druggy kind of stuff,” she said. “It actually really influenced a lot of the songs I was writing at the time. Just being in love with him and hearing the music he really liked–it all came about to what inspired Natureboy, so I really appreciate that.”

After a year, Apffel moved to New York and the two began playing together again. Eventually, they agreed House on a Hill wasn’t working and decided to pursue Natureboy, a quieter and more stripped down project, asking O’Connor to join them after he saw them play in Brooklyn.

“Somehow we’ve become creative partners–I don’t know, we have a really tempestuous relationship,” she said. “Seeing the worst sides of each other, in the most ugly way, I think it’s totally put me off any romantic intrigue.

“I view him as a brother, you know? I can’t view him in an attractive way now, I just don’t. People don’t believe that. It’s weird. Really, I’m not attracted to him.”

And the other man, the moody lover whose footprints sound in the quiet spaces between notes: “He’s long gone now, I don’t know where he is.”

John Davis’s music is, in pop terms, the diametric opposite of Kermanshahi’s, but the sense of disappearing scenery never feels that far away. “The D.C. scene I grew up with is pretty much gone,” Davis told me over the phone.

“In the early ‘90’s when I first started going to shows there were almost no clubs. You had the 930 Club but there was no Black Cat and there were no other clubs like that. I’d always just gone to shows at churches or halls, American Legion hall-type places or just weird spaces.”

Davis played drums in Q and Not U, Dischord Record’s most vibrant band in the early 2000’s, a kind of pan-punk trio that condensed a variety of snotty rebel music into an agitated jumble. They only recorded three records, but each one sounds fantastically different, spanning everything from pissy political punk rock, falsetto hymns, new wave funk, and staccato noise rock. “Trust me, we’ve seen it, we’ve seen it,” they sang on “Air Conditions,“ half-taunt and half-concession.

The band broke up after touring for 2003’s Power, and Davis eventually connected with New York singer Laura Burhenn through mutual friends. Together they created Georgie James a 70’s-style power pop band with Davis switching to guitar and Burhenn playing keyboards. The two would trade off lead singing duties.

“It was probably lighter than what I would do on my own, just like it was heavier than what she would do on her own, so that’s where we sort of wound up in the middle on that,” Davis told me.

Though not exactly superstars, Q and Not U had earned a loyal following and had toured around the world, from South Africa to Ohio. Georgie James got a record deal on Saddle Creek and a bigger emphasis was placed on selling the band as an image, trying to capture the ringing chords and earnest ennui with a grainy visual style. Davis and Burhenn appeared quixotically in PR photos staring out from a background of quilts and bohemian knick knacks like fraternal twins who’d emerged from a candlelit poetry reading in Vermont, bringing a moody ballast to the helium-filled jangles.

“Laura always loved taking photos,” Davis said. “Literally every other month it would be, ‘Let’s take some more photos.’ I’d be like ‘Oh god, we just took photos.’ Eventually I got used to it, so really I’m totally at ease now.”

“It was something I’d never done before. I don’t really know if it helped, now that I think about it. But it certainly made people think we were bigger than we were. We didn’t sell that many records but people thought we were more popular than we were because they would see us in every magazine and we were just really well covered.”

Despite good reviews and winning coverage on NPR and MTV, Gerogie James never reached escape velocity. The extra promotional focus from Saddle Creek, including a long touring schedule in advance of their first record, Places, left Burhenn and Davis exhausted and not sure what to do next. Georgie James broke up in 2008 and Davis quickly moved to his most recent band Title Tracks.

Davis writes all of the songs and tours with a band of D.C. musicians. “I think I would keep [Title Tracks] as a solo project,” Davis told me. “It’s where I’m at right now. I like writing songs this way. I think I’ll keep it like this, writing and recording everything myself and then playing live shows with whoever’s in the band. I don’t envision that changing.”

Title Tracks is a harder-edged power pop record, as tightly formed and melodic as Georgie James, but absent Burhenn’s voice the result sounds more aggressive—songs feel like they have a dirtier gain. At its best, the album sounds naked, a single distorted guitar playing beneath Davis’s falsetto-prone voice. The clattering of drums and distorted major chords then suddenly drop away into a spare verse of palm-muted 3/4 riffing or a skuzzy dance hall swing. Davis’s voice has a surprising range and he sings a new note against each chord change with the ease of a 60’s bop crooner.

And for all of that, you’ve probably never heard of Davis or any of the bands he’s played in. Like Kermanshahi, music is more of a calling than a career–the public asterisk on an otherwise private life.

“You have to be pretty flexible–it may not be traditional where you play music all the time,” Davis sad. “There will certainly be people who do that, but it will be rare. I think you have to balance it out with some sort of other kind of work or finding other ways to make music work for you—I don’t know, like jingle writing or something.“

“I do think it’s possible that people will be able to carve out a living and not give up playing music because you have three years and then you burnt out and people lost interest.”

Kermanshahi aspired to one day being able to cast aside office jobs and support herself entirely through music . “All I really want is to tour, make records, and not have a day job. I’m not even thinking about a level of success that’s so huge–it’s kind of ridiculous in a way.”

“I just know this is all I want to do with my life. If I’m good and people think I’m good-they like me–I’m just kind of like, ‘Okay, let’s make this happen.’ There are just a lot of financial problems in the way. We’ll see what happens.”

A century ago, music was more of a social activity. It was an eventide recreation, a drunken sing-a-long in a saloon, or a local talent performing standards for people who’d never get to see the famous maestros in person. In the second half of the 20^th Century consumable music spurred on an unquenchable marketplace, centered on a revolving series of icons who produced records not just as music but as memorabilia from an encounter with an untouchable dimension of mingled sex, optimism, and pantomimed blues. Elvis, Dylan, the Stones, Bowie, Madonna, the Clash, Duran Duran, the Backstreet Boys, Kanye West, and Miley Cyrus all danced around the maypole fantasy of another season, another summer of bounty, sex, mating, and life-building.

In early 2008, I saw Georgie James play an acoustic show in a basement bar in San Francisco with a woman I would, a year later, move to New York for. I asked her to be my girlfriend that night, even though she was moving away in a month. When I got to New York a year later and we’d begun the blind and stupid process of falling apart I went to see Title Tracks play in Williamsburg. I’d emailed her a link to some of their songs and then texted her while I was waiting in a nearby bar for the doors to open. “I’m not sure what I think of them,” was her cryptic response. I remember watching them play that night, loud, quick, and pained, the air shaking with happy noise against the slicing syllables of Davis’s voice. “Every little bit hurts, I don’t want it to, I don’t want it to, but it does.”

A few months later my friend Leigh linked me to Natureboy. It was good company for my immolated ego, abandoned by the one person I’d wanted to build for and with. “You keep riding on a broken train,” she’d sing in my headphones in the vertigo of 4PM sunlight. “What use is it? I’ve got all of my love retraced back up to you, to your face. I went ahead and stayed behind.”

Before the music industry had shrunk to the size of a billion crumbs blown across the exurbs, I still thought I could climb the maypole, and be the champion of other people’s feelings, sending them sweet nothings from a world of weightless personas. Instead of nobility in stupidity, I wanted to shelter my still unexamined stupidity in the safe shadow of a thing that was built to be shared. Explaining the details of my imaginary musical career, I must have sounded articulate and insane—someone detailing a career as a kissing booth attendant. At a dollar a kiss all I’d have needed was 500 kisses a week, 100 a day. That wouldn’t take more than a few hours, and then I’d have the rest of the afternoons and evenings to apply myself to puppet theater or string theory.

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that I gave up on this fantasy without much of a fight. As the moment of paying for my own way came closer I grew scared, I was a faithless lover, unsure if a life lived for music would be enough for me, wouldn’t leave me wanting for something later on, something left behind or too far away to see. The phantom future scared me into sitting on my hands. Not everyone is so easily cowed, even as the rewards for staying faithful dry into desperate waste. You can’t pay rent in MySpace friends or blog posts admiring your beautiful arrangements.

This is very likely what has saved music from its garish recent past. The only ones left making it are the ones who’ll do it for love, and so share it with whoever will listen. Every act of love is the same, a moment of giving when you know to expect nothing back, to tour for gas and hotel money, to spend thousands on studio time and see it repaid in $7 increments. This is rock and roll. These are my rock stars. People who still have to work in offices most days, and who come home at night to make songs for a group of needful strangers hoping for something to sing along to.

*Images via Dan Berkman (by permission) and Shervin Lainez (MySpace)