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“Greetings, comrades! You’re listening to Big Jim’s Power Pop Hour, right here on 88.9 FM, WHIT, campus radio for Happy Valley State. Go Fighting Pheasants! WHIT…none of the hits all of the time…”
Two men sit snugly together inside a minuscule booth. High-dollar microphones pointed at their faces. They’re both hunched over in office chairs, tucked up next to one of those curved gray Scandinavian-looking desks. A couple of laptop computers, a small mixing board, a patch bay and compressors, buttons and gauges of all sorts. Both men are wearing headphones. Both men are rocking tinted John Lennon granny glasses. Both with thinning shaggy mop-top haircuts and muttonchop sideburns. But the older fellow, the afternoon disc jockey, sports a prodigious belly of the beer-drinking sort, and his exhalations fill the booth with a bacon double cheeseburger and tater-tot aroma. He’s suddenly busy twiddling knobs. Pointing and clicking. Biting down on his lower lip like a fat kid at recess playing with building blocks.
The one being interviewed, who has yet to speak, is road-gaunt and wears a mystical air about him, a saintly shroud of olden times. Medium height, tanned. A Bulgarian face. A Chechen rebel’s. Pegleg black jeans and a vintage seventies leisure shirt. A downtown stoic, he imagines himself. A back-alley, city-streets seer. A man of the highest import and calling. In the mirror every single morning of his life, he beholds a poet, a priest, a troubadour, a divinely tortured and heaven-troubled soul. Christ-haunted. A lightning rod for grand ideas and cultural tastes. A true legend in his own mind. Every conversation made, from that pimply kid behind the convenience store counter to the Melody Maker music reviewer at a corner London pub and, especially to this plump and bumbling small town disc jockey, every single conversation made is something worthy of capture by VH1 Behind the Music.
“Folks,” the DJ says, “I’m thrilled to be sitting here with the frontman, the songwriting genius, hell, the brain trust, the crime boss, the generalissimo of one of my favorite all-time college rock bands, the band that just will not ride off into the sunset! The band that just will not die! Comrades, I give you Stuart Sutcliffe of Noble Rages. Welcome, Stuart…”
“Thank you, Jim. Happy to be here.”
“So, Noble Rages is headlining tonight at The Kibosh…doors at seven…hopefully we can get a big old Happy Valley crowd out to cheer you on…I know I’ll be there!”
“Sure. That’d be great, Jim.”
“Wow. So many questions, Stuart, and so little time, you know.”
“Aah, well…”
“The elephant in the room, I guess, is…um…seeing that you are the last original member of the band out on the road…um…yeah…how long do you plan on continuing this thing?”
“Aah, haha! Yes…well…”
“No disrespect, Stuart! Please…us superfans out here would prefer it go on forever and ever. Believe me! Just something I have to ask, you know.”
“Of course…of course. Well, you see–”
Stuart then proceeds to expertly and methodically lay out his case. Perry Mason-style. Atticus Finch-style. His Vanderbilt University double major in Early Childhood Education and Romantic Poesy Reductionism seems, in this very moment, to have almost paid off. Oh, the years, the decades, he laments, spent Suffering For His Art! Who in his right mind would throw all of that away at this point in life? Just get a job? Bah. Earn some money? Acquire some sort of health insurance? Nay, states the man out of time. The Peter Pan of underachieving indie rock. I can’t be someone I’m not, he says. I have to stay true to myself. Life Is Not A Dress Rehearsal. It’s Not The Destination, It’s The Journey. Like he’s reading shit off of movie posters, Stuart is. The DJ smiles and nods. His pleasantly plump British Invasion babyface. Hmm, he throws in every so often. Why yes, of course you should, he hisses. Stuart deftly avoids any storyline implicating himself in the mishaps, the mismanagement, the mistakes made of any kind. There’s the crooked manager storyline. The underfunded and idiotically run record label storyline. The inept radio promoter nobody would pick up the phone for. The misguided P.R. campaign. The shitty college town clubs and aloof big city record stores. Those record store morons not even putting up the misguided P.R. material they were supplied with from the idiotic record label. The uncool posters, the unhip cardboard displays. Those record store morons not placing the compact discs on those little preview window shelves. And don’t even get Stuart started on the wrong music writers. The wrong music rags. Those dismissive glossies. The artistic intent missed. The style of the records filtered through the misguided P.R. campaign’s wrong version of what the music was supposed to be. The wrong classification. The wrong genre or subgenre. And of course, of course! The wrong drummer. The wrong bassist. The wrong producer. The wrong mastering engineer. The wrong album cover. Looking like something designed for Yanni, or for Zamfir, master of the pan flute. Or simply the wrong time. The wrong place. The wrong alignment of the planets. Mercury in retrograde. Et cetera…
“But Noble Rages is just you now, Stuart, on stage, with a laptop? Just you and some prerecorded backing tracks…right?”
“Um…that’s right, Jim.”
“What? Did you run off every single musician in Austin already?”
“Ouch, Jim.”
“Just kidding! But seriously, brilliant, I say. A karaoke version of yourself! Or even, like, a modern take on Timbuk 3. You remember them? On stage with their boom box playing backing track beats and all.”
“Sure. Haven’t thought of that yet, but yeah…OK.”
“How ballsy! Just to keep going on and on. Little to no industry support…ever, really. A select and aging fanbase. Guitar-based music becomes more and more irrelevant. The last rasping, gasping gurgles of a dinosaur art form sinking, sinking into the tar pit that is our modern pop culture. So gutsy of you, Sir Stuart, to just keep ploughing ahead! On and on! Hell for leather, doing your own thing, straight into the musical abyss!”
“Uh…wow…”
“Like that Edgar Allen Poe concept album you made. Or especially…that online song-a-day solo project of yours based on the mating calls of North American birds!”
“Yes.”
“You just don’t give a hot damn, do you?”
“What?”
“Not a single thought as to marketability, commerce, or even the very notion of entertainment itself! How noble your Noble Rage is! Righteousness. Pure Distilled Art.”
“OK…”
“Did your bandmates enjoy reading up on Poe? Or learning and recording bird songs?”
“Hold on, Jim…”
“And speaking of bandmates, what about those classic, and still-living, bandmembers of yours? Back in the day…the other fellows…where are they now? Well, we know what happened to Dan, rest in peace, and Bill has been in the computer news of late…to say the least! So I guess the question is…where’s Grady now? Popping antidepressants and anti-inflammatories in his office cubicle? Hustling at whatever shoe store at the shopping mall that’s still open? Selling sneakers to teenagers? Do teenagers still even go to malls? Are there any malls left to go to, Stuart?”
“Jim, I’m not here to talk about old bandmates. And certainly not the state of the bleak American economic and cultural landscape. No wait…maybe I should talk about that…haha. Instead of the old bandmates, I mean…haha…”
“For me, a huge fan as you know…in more ways than one…the classic Noble Rages lineup is as follows: Dan Dillard on drums! That tech wizard Bill Bledsoe on bass, and for sure! For sure! Your secret weapon…that invisible man himself, Grady Garnier on lead guitar! I mean, come on…those are the guys on your backing tracks, right?”
“That sounds about right to me as well…but Jim, let me speak a bit to my old friend and compadre Dan Dillard. The beating heart and the soaring soul of the band.”
“Wow. Really? Dan?”
“Of course. Without Dillard driving us like the maniac he was all those years, we would’ve been just any other mopey indie band slogging through its sets. Dan was the metronome, as erratic as his playing and timing could be. And sure, I wrote and arranged all the songs, and still do, but Dan was, in spirit, a huge part of the songs’ vibes and intent. And even more importantly, Jim, he was just a great big ball of light. I fed off his energy daily. His intense aura. His pure Zen-like nature behind the kit was only a sliver of his life’s work.”
“Uh…you’re talking about the fellow who left you in the middle of a tour, badmouthed you to some indie blogs, and then overdosed in his childhood home?”
“A truly beautiful soul. An Artist. I think of him and speak to him in my own way daily.”
“The same man who walked offstage during the middle of your London debut?”
“Let bygones be bygones, as they say…”
“Said that you were, and I quote, ‘Mussolini reincarnated as a mediocre songwriter.’”
“Water under the bridge.”
“You speak to this man daily? In your own way?”
“Well, Jim. His spirit…”
“Alrighty then…back to my question a moment ago. Your current set uses the original backing tracks, right? You didn’t rerecord all their parts yourself, did you?”
“Uh…of course not.”
“This isn’t one of Bill’s A.I.-produced rock simulation recordings, is it?”
“Hell no.”
“That program he created is truly frightening, don’t you agree? Just type in some basic keyword parameters – musical genre, recording time period, et cetera, and voila! Instant album.”
“No comment.”
“Do you ever ponder, ever really consider that Bill might never have actually been a musician? An honest to god bassist out humping it day in and day out for the sheer sake and pleasure of just making music? Playing shows. Recording. Did you ever feel, at some point, that he was a bit of a fraud? A fellow traveler, sure, doing his due diligence…but ultimately someone who actually shouldn’t have been there? Or even someone with some ulterior motive? Like some tech bro from the future sent to live among and study musicians, Rockstar Americanus, if you will, in their native habitats in the same way that Jane Goodall did with her chimps in Kenya?”
“Again. Wow. No, I never thought Bill was from the future sent to study us rock and roll chimpanzees. Seriously, Jim, did you eat some mushrooms before this interview?”
“Oh, I’m just microdosing a teensy bit of something. Don’t tell Happy Valley State.”
“Uh, Jim…you just did.”
“Oh…nobody listens to this program around here. But on the topic of sidemen, you did have a lot of replacements filling in the gaps over the years, coming and going and whatnot. Even up to shows promoting last year’s album. Am I correct?”
“Is this a college radio station interview? Or am I on trial for something?”
“Ha ha! Nicely done, Stu. I can call you Stu, right? Lots and lots of different sidemen since that classic lineup, right?”
“Isn’t it ‘side-person’ now? I mean, I had Lucy Lee on bass for several years there…”
“Sorry. Quite right.”
“Look. OK. Here’s the deal. All of these musicians were taking time and money and energy out of their own lives. Their own lives! Just to spend it with me and my artistry. To spend it on me, rather. My vision. That’s incredibly flattering, and I appreciate every single one of them, even if they think that I do not. I appreciate even the really shitty ones, you know…”
“Well, some of them got to travel and see the world, right?”
“That classic lineup you mentioned, yeah, they got to do that. But really, Jim, all of them followed me to hell and back. Well, they all came back from hell…and I stayed on.”
Jim the DJ pauses a beat. Then another. He stares down at his notes. Dead air is going out on the Happy Valley State low low-frequency radio waves.
“So you’re saying, Stuart, that you are actually in hell right now.”
“Sure.”
“Right here in this booth. Hell?”
“Well, metaphorically speaking, Jim. I don’t believe in a fairy tale hell. In fact, I think that even the most devout Christians, here in the modern age, do not believe in a fire and brimstone hell. Most people are just going through the motions every day, acting in the theater of their church or mosque or synagogue, or in the theater of their office places or schools. And especially, in the tragicomedy that is their marriage or partnership.”
“What about a rock band?”
“Of course, Jim.”
“But back to the main question, Stu. You are in hell?”
“Uh…is this Crossfire, or is it Big Jim’s Power Pop Hour?”
“Ha ha! So–”
“Seriously, Jim, I’m here to promote the new al–“
“So. Hell, you said. You’re still in hell, Stu. Go on…”
“What I meant, Jim, is that my own lot in life, my own artistic torment, is a hell in and of itself. Not ‘other people’ like Sartre. Not any kind of physical pain or suffering. I’m certainly not belittling folks who go through all of that. And you, sitting there, you are not a personal demon of mine. You are not tormenting me. I mean, it’s just an interview, right? However, when someone has a true calling, such as I do, a higher purpose if you will, then–”
“Alright, folks, that’s all the time we have for today! Stuart Sutcliffe, the indie rock genius himself, it’s been a real pleasure, sir. Everybody, go check out his new Noble Rages box set retrospective Ignorant Bliss: Hits and Misses, out now on Windfall Records, and streaming everywhere.”
“Yes. Thanks Jim…but…”
“Stay tuned for Old Joe’s Polka Show, up next on 88.9 FM, WHIT. This is Big Jim of Big Jim’s Power Pop Hour signing off…keep fighting that rock and roll fight, comrades!”
