{"id":22165,"date":"2014-12-11T12:56:37","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T17:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=22165"},"modified":"2014-12-11T12:58:24","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T17:58:24","slug":"proto-macho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/proto-macho\/","title":{"rendered":"Proto-Macho"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TNCwhnUIguw\" width=\"420\" height=\"236\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>My close, personal friend <strong>Townsman Andyr<\/strong> and I were talking yesterday about what makes a satisfying show for our band, from our perspective (the hell with the audience!). Beside decent sound on stage, an engaged audience (oh, you know we love you!), a sectioned-off band room and moderately\u00a0clean bathroom, and no more than a reasonable amount of mistakes, we agreed on the following under-acknowledged elements of a satisfying show\u2014for our band, not every artist:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Songs are performed faster than they are on record<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s a minimum of time between songs<\/li>\n<li>Any song breaking the 3-minute mark is justified\u00a0by a\u00a0solo<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;re breaking a serious sweat<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This led to comparisons between our approach to playing live and the visionary football strategies of Philadelphia Eagles coach <strong>Chip Kelly<\/strong>. We both like to work fast, get the plays in at the line of scrimmage, etc. Unlike Kelly, we&#8217;ve yet to develop visionary approaches to health and nutrition, what we will call &#8220;rock science&#8221; when we get around to developing these things. We&#8217;re not bothered by bills requiring us to play short sets. We&#8217;re not about &#8220;time of possession.&#8221; We can get in more &#8220;plays,&#8221; or songs, than most bands can in a 4o-minute set, with the soundman breathing down our backs. When we&#8217;re running on all cylinders, we could put our 40-minute set against one of <strong>Bruce Springsteen<\/strong>&#8216;s 4-hour sets and give Him and His band a run for its money. Yeah, Andyr and I were talking some serious shit!<\/p>\n<p>Then we talked about a certain segment of the local music scene that will never be turned onto what we do, not necessarily because they don&#8217;t like our music or us (either or both of which could surely be the case), but because we&#8217;re&#8230;&#8221;too macho&#8221; is not quite the right term for what we are, because if you know us we&#8217;re really not macho. That&#8217;s where the discussion took a turn into levels of shit so deep you may want to put on a protective suit before wading any further.<\/p>\n<p><!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Right,&#8221; I said, as we realized how ridiculous &#8220;macho&#8221; sounded applied to us. We were talking to each other via the hands-free Bluetooth technology in our cars, as we made our drives home from work. Andyr was probably using his free hand to scratch his head, as I was doing, to find <em>le mot juste<\/em>. &#8220;We&#8217;re <em>boys<\/em>!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Maybe you could say we&#8217;re as macho as a teenage boy is capable of being.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Proto-Macho!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That seemed to fit what we were getting at. We&#8217;ll never be macho, but we&#8217;re driven by the same abundance of hormones that drove us into forming a band in the first place, when we were 16 and incapable of playing any instruments. Maybe that&#8217;s part of the punk rock spirit. Whatever, it&#8217;s fun and it&#8217;s worth holding onto and working. When I saw X a couple of months ago, the first time I&#8217;d seen them since the release of <em>Under the Big Black Sun<\/em>, they still played from that spot within themselves. They still played fast and sweaty. They played what my bandmates and I refer to as Forearm Rock. Everyone was clearly older and probably not capable of generating as wicked a\u00a0hormonal storm as they once were, but shit, it was X. When I watched this Clash video this afternoon,\u00a0a song I was listening to in my car as I pulled into work this morning this morning and sat in the car until it finished, I was immediately transported back to my teenage years, when I first learned, to paraphrase <strong>Led Zeppelin<\/strong>, to know what it means to be a, not quite, man, but you know, as close to a man as I could imagine ever being. <em>Proto-Macho<\/em>. Your Rock Town Hall Glossary entry for the day.<\/p>\n<nav class=\"page-links\"><strong>Pages:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/proto-macho\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">1<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/proto-macho\/2\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">2<\/span><\/a><\/nav>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My close, personal friend Townsman Andyr and I were talking yesterday about what makes a satisfying show for our band, from our perspective (the hell with the audience!). Beside decent sound on stage, an engaged audience (oh, you know we love you!), a sectioned-off band room and moderately\u00a0clean bathroom, and no more than a reasonable <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/proto-macho\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22165"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}