Thursday, 21 March 2002 | In a band

Tonight I'm going to go see the Moldy Peaches play. Of course the show is in Chapel Hill (rather than in Raleigh), which means thirty minutes of driving on wet interstate and not getting home until it's officially tomorrow (one? two?). Then again, they're opening for a band I hate, a local band at that, an arrangement I can't quite make sense of. So maybe I'll creep out between sets and have the parking lot to myself before finding my way back to the highway underneath dark and rain.

I wonder what it's like, being in a cohesive unit like a band that travels together and stops in scattered towns, learning more about the backs of seedy venues than the tourist attractions. Getting used to a new dressing room, a new stage, a new crowd every couple of nights, surviving on foreign restaurants and road maps. I imagine that after a while, the nuances become routine, and towns, venues, and faces all blur and overlap. That would be my favorite part, though: seeing new out-of-the-way places I have no other reason to visit, and feeling like I'm on a constant adventure.

A few friends of mine have started a band and are looking for a female guitarist. I wish I could do it, but, even when I was at the height of my guitar playing, I wasn't yet good enough to improvise with others or play in front of a crowd. I never really got over that learning crest, the one that coasts downward once your fingers have become limber like rubber bands and you can look up while you play instead of staring down at the strings and watching your hands strike unnatural poses. I really need to pick it up again, not so that I can be in a band, but because it's such a nice thing to sit in a near-empty room by yourself and listen to the notes that you produce echo all around you.

In eighth grade, I had my first relationship with a guitar (not including the times my older cousin Dennis would strum and sing "I'm Not Lisa" to me at family get-togethers). It began with a crush on my brother's bass-playing college roommate, who taught me U2's New Years Day and explained chord progressions, distortion, pickups, and how to listen for the elusive deep sounds in the music I liked. I thought it was really cool, being able to reproduce parts of songs played on the radio; it was nothing at all like playing Good King Wenceslas on the flute in the school band. That year I got a sleek maroon bass guitar and a modest amplifier, and I began working my way through instructional manuals. Mostly, though, I relied on friends to teach me successions of notes that formed recognizable songs, because that was much more satisfying.

It wasn't long before some of my friends and I decided to start an all-girl group. Sally was the singer, since she could sing, I was the bass player, since I had a bass guitar, EJ was the lead guitar player, since her brother Ben played guitar, and Stephanie was the drummer, well, because that was the instrument that was left. It didn't seem to matter that Stephanie was completely tone deaf and that she had no sense of rhythm. We seemed to be more interested in writing lyrics, designing album covers, and coming up with names for the band anyway, than we were in actually making music. I recall that we really wanted to put the acronym of our names (L-E-S-S) to good use. We never played a note, though, so those cover designs and not-so-clever band names eventually dissipated.

I ended up playing my bass guitar on stage once. In eighth grade, in a group of boys, rather, at the school talent show. We played Wipe-Out and Bad to the Bone (not my choices), and I stared down at my fingers rather than face the generous noise made by my peers in the audience.