In his last column, computer science professor, amateur musician in the rock band SO3, and wildfire evacuee Serge Belongie finds himself stuck in traffic as fires spread throughout San Diego county. Alone in his car, confronted with the prospect of losing his home, he begins to contemplate the role of music in his life and the genius of his band’s guitarist, Mike Artamonov.
As the hours passed, the traffic moved little, but eventually the good news emerged through the radio that both Mike’s and my neighborhoods had been spared by the fires. We were permitted to return home, and within days, the skies cleared and the city was back on its feet.
Heroic relief efforts on the part of everyone from professional firefighters to neighborhood volunteers saved hundreds of houses and cared for refugees in community centers across the county. Our gig at 710 Beach Club — recast as a benefit show — proceeded as scheduled, drew a great crowd, and in the process raised a respectable donation for the San Diego American Red Cross.
By the close of this heady week of close calls and a mild case of disaster opportunism, something was not sitting right with me. As classes resumed at UCSD and the full complement of meetings reappeared on my weekly planner, I was feeling like a big dork over my `freeway conversion’. Who was I kidding? Fine, Mike’s got the whole second- coming-of-Hendrix thing, but with work back in full swing, I felt myself easing back into my comfortable pattern of teaching and advising, and it was hard to deny the temptation to let band practice slide after a busy work day. I had hit my stride in my day job, and everything seemed terrifically stable under my control — what possessed me to want to take on the improbable task of trying to make it in a rock band?
And one other thing was nagging me. Despite having played nearly 20 gigs by this point, our audiences had consistently been filled with friends and friends-of-friends who were predisposed to like us.
Surely a great deal of negative criticism was not finding its way back to us, and much of the effusive feedback we’d received was nothing more than friends expressing their surprise that we weren’t horrible.
In this respect it’s not unlike the commentary on your cooking from guests at a dinner party. Around the table, it’s nothing but `wow, the sauce is delicious,’ and `the pasta is perfectly cooked,’ but after the guests enter the safety of their cars for the ride home, the truth comes out: `wow, the sauce tasted like dishwater,’ or `I wanted to shoot myself.’
So after all this time, the question remained: were we any good? It’s a question — often uttered with a pompous edge — that I’d heard quite a bit in academia. Lots of people in this world are talented and filled with promise, but can they deliver? And at any sign of overt self-promotion, this edginess can give way to outright derision. A certain Ivy League university I’ll not name has a habit of sending out a greeting card or sorts to faculty at other universities to announce new hires and promotions, including a photo and a short puff piece. Upon tossing one of these cards into the recycling bin, I recall thinking aloud: do something to get yourself noticed, and then I’ll notice you. Yet here I was, a member of a rock band, writing self-promoting emails, MySpace postings, for God’s sake, and Facebook invites for our latest shows or recordings seemingly every week. The recipients surely were entitled to wonder when we’re going to get some airplay, already, if we’re so great. With all this cynicism, I was already feeling the impending sweet release of this ridiculous dream, the return of my then-extinct free time, and the camaraderie of new friends bound by a shared abandonment of crackpot ambitions.
Fortunately, not all of us in SO3 were so busy wringing our hands in self doubt. Mike was spending his energy honing his craft for hours on end, and Hugh had begun advanced lessons with a well known drummer around town. And I had to admit that band practice was actually a damn good time, and when a song was rocking hard, all self-doubt evaporated. The high was unmistakeable, not in small part due to my newly discovered impulse to hump the furniture when playing back a recorded jam that has `hit’ written all over it. The fact was, we enjoyed the hell out of playing, and we were pragmatic enough to know that you can’t please everyone. And it did not hurt our cause that shortly after our gig during fire week, we were invited to perform in New York City at a big benefit show for the San Diego Fireman’s Relief Association. The wheels were turning to get a major label act to headline the show, and rumor had it there’d be some big shot industry types lurking in the crowd.
Thus did I leave the darkness I had entered in the wake of the wildfires. There was no time to waste feeling self conscious; we had a gig coming up in NYC, and I had MySpace postings to write!
Catch up on the first part of Serge’s story in his column here.
