Part 1:
The Nowhere Band itself: Derailleur
1. Play more than one fucking show a year. Yeah, we had excuses:
People moving, people getting married, time spent recording and mixing. But none of those apply any longer and there’s no point in doing this if people aren’t going to hear it. Well, there’s still a point, but shows are fun and we should play them.
2. Play somewhere outstate. We’re probably all too busy to throw our crap in a van and go for any sort of tour, but just one date in Duluth would feel sweet or even Morris, Minnesota. I spent four years in Morris, and am painfully aware of how little there is to do in Morris. If we were to drive out there to play, it’d be a win-win – we’d get to road-trip to a show and Morris townsfolk would have something to do other than trying to roll eight-foot snowballs.
3. Do a show as the Derailleur Rock Orchestra. This is an idea I’ve been hot on for a long time – take some fantastic album of someone else’s and approach it the way classical musicians approach a symphony. Consider ourselves to be taking, say, “Achtung Baby” as a unified work to be reinterpreted (INXS’ “Kick” always appealed to me as an album to reinterpret, but that damned INXS reality show pretty much sticks a fork in that possibility). So we learn all the songs on the album, fuck them up (the idea here is drastic rearrangements, not tribute-band covers) and do a show or two where that’s all we play. I get excited every time I think about this, but our hectic one-show-a-year schedule hasn’t allowed it yet.
4. Spend more time getting together with guitar-playing friends to just whale on acoustic guitars and drink beer, with no intention of having band practice. Having a well-rehearsed band is a good thing and I really look forward to practice every week, but I miss sitting around with a room full of guitars and a tape recorder, with a steady stream of people showing up and leaving and just attacking all kinds of songs people sort of think they might know.
5. Record the rest of the songs we’ve worked up since finishing the last recording stint. The new ones are even weirder and we might as well ride this wave of weirdness as far as it’ll take us.
6. Get better guitar work out of the short guy who writes the column. A long shot, but it’ll be great if it happens.
Part 2:
Nowhere Band, the Column
1. Be funnier. And more insightful. And simultaneously more detailed and universal – all to give you the experience of rocking while you sit on the bus or in the cafe and scan the column.
2. Do detailed profiles of all of the certified lunatics I’ve run into while playing shows: Hustler Pete, Hardcore Dave, Snax, the Self-Important Nationwide Touring Guy, the guy who said my first band sounded like pissing into the wind, the hooker who pulled up her skirt and flashed my friend Grant while we were onstage at Big V’s and so on.
3. Find a better way to express in words just how otherworldly it feels to be onstage when a show is going really, really well. Here’s an attempt: It’s not that time stops, you’re just not as aware of its passing as you usually are. Or, rather, you’re aware of the passing, but it happens really slow, like when you hit one of the pill icons in Grand Theft Auto. Guitar lines that normally take all of your concentration, just roll off of your fingers and your expanded consciousness has plenty of time to appreciate the enormous sound coming from the amps and drums behind you and the monitors in front of you. You hit some big notes at the start of a bridge, or a big chorus perfectly in synch with the guys playing bass and drums and you feel like part of an unstoppable, perfectly-tuned organic machine.
You might’ve been pissed at one of the guys before the show because of some minor, petty thing, but this isolated, extended moment feels so right, you forget about it completely. Of course, then your fucking guitar cable will short out, or you’ll knock a beer onto your amp or break a string or something pedestrian to break the spell. But that’s ok because it’ll come back.
4. Strike a deal with local guitar shops wherein I say nice things about them in exchange for free gear.
5. Spend more time at Willie’s American Guitars, which features the upper Midwest’s finest selection of high-end guitars and amps!
6. Get some fanmail. Or hate mail. Or even some informational fliers for gun-repair school. Come on, people, validate me!
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