Perhaps as a response to my essay about Tommy on Sunday, readers have brought to my attention a new group that they predict will be the next super monster group of rock. As they put it, this group will be huge, epic, historic, and mammoth.
This group is in its formative period, and is changing names on a daily (perhaps hourly) basis. I can certainly appreciate the challenges that any group has on choosing a good name, given the current emphasis and expectation that group names be short, easily remembered, and contain a sexual innuendo, a euphemism, and a snide reference calculated to annoy fans of other generations and/or types of music. This is why “The Rolling Stones” will never be as great as “The Beatles”, and why both bands were trumped by “The Faces”, “The Who”, “Kiss”, and the exquisitely named “Yes”. The additional requirement–that the name not already be in use–is the real killer, however, because after decades of mining the vernacular, all the good ones are taken. This leads to disastrous names composed from the names of the artists, which in turn leads to desperate measures such as artists changing names to avoid conflict, making up names to sound cooler, stealing names from songs, or even more drastic steps.
When their name has remained the same for more than a week, I’ll be happy to share it, but in the meanwhile all I can tell you is that the group desires to have a very short name, because a short name appeals to their core and over-arching goal, which is to be the “greenest” band in the world, and a short name will help to achieve that goal by reducing the amount of ink on their posters, dye on their t-shirts, light bulbs on their marquees, and time required to google them.
I spoke Tuesday with several members of the band during breaks from a rehearsal that took place in an unheated and poorly-lit Boston-area studio, where they are rehearsing for their premiere performance, which is tentatively scheduled for the late Spring, when it is warm enough to play outside or in the subway without, as they put it, “freezing their asses off.” They asked me to keep their identities anonymous, at least until they choose appropriately memorable and copyrightable stage names, and so instead of their given names, I will use names based on their favorite cookies.
While Snickerdoodles and Necco worked out some of the details with Double-stuffed Oreo, Congo Bar explained to me some of the implications of the group. She explained that they only play acoustic instruments, made from long-lasting, non-toxic and renewable materials that can be constructed using low-carbon offset techniques. Thumb-print, the lead guitarist, for example, plays a guitar made from wood and bamboo, with a fretboard made of puka shells (no, neither one of us knows what they are either) and strung with catgut strings, created from the intestines of contented pigs that have died a natural death after a long life consuming a diet composed only of garbage. Some of the other members of the group play only virtual instruments, or conserve energy by simply appearing on stage, looking good and providing emotional and spiritual support for the members who, in the service of their art, do suffer the guilt of consuming natural resources; despite her best efforts, Ginger Snap, for example, has been unable to find a saxophone that is not constructed from metal, and nobody has any idea where to find a microphone that doesn’t require wires, batteries, or both.
The group does not perform live concerts, due to their concern about the resources required to transport themselves and their audience to and fro and amplify their instruments, the noxious chemicals required to clean up after a typical rock event, and the toxic, non-biodegradable karma exuded by ticket scalpers.
They do not release recordings of their music on CDs or LPs, but instead only release their music for digital download, and encode their music using lossy and some would say crappy MP3 parameters designed to favor conservation of bits rather than fidelity. They do not use any sort of DRM, but instead make it easy to share and download their music from any source, which means that it is not necessary to permanently allocate storage for their music.
Their music is engineered to sound good at low volume; the group estimates that the environmental impact of listening to their entire catalog will be less than that of listening to the full-length single of “Highway to Hell” played at appropriate, window-rippling loudness. In fact, they believe that if they make their songs simple and quiet enough, then their fans can easily commit them entirely to memory and reproduce them at will, without any electronics at all but simply through a combination of clapping, humming, and facial expressions.
I later spoke with Peanut Butter, the manager, light technician, roadie, backup-vocalist, and chief hype officer for the band, about sex and drugs, the other two pillars that hold the rock-and-roll world erect. Peanut Butter explained that these subjects were the focus of much ongoing discussion, and he was not sure that consensus had yet been reached, and therefore was very careful to qualify his remarks as reflecting his own views, and not necessarily the view of his bandmates. As far as drugs and other mind-altering substances are concerned, the group restricts itself to chemicals that can be produced through natural or semi-natural processes. Alcohol is permitted, as are mushrooms and mescaline. Marijuana is permitted, but the band only permits themselves to get baked via baked goods, such as cookies or brownies–smoking is strictly forbidden, because of the obvious impact of the smoke on the environment. Heroin is off the list, at least until fair-trade heroin is available, and not even this bunch is stupid enough to try meth.
The subject of sexual mores is clearly one that the band has not resolved, and opinions are still somewhat divided on key issues. Peanut Butter believes that sex is simply ecologically indefensible and has chosen to remain celibate, while Snickerdoodles, who is gay, believes that only homosexual sex is environmentally friendly, because there is no possibility of offspring. Necco and Thumb-print, who are straight, have stated for the record that although they are uninterested in personally participating in gay sex, they would have no objection if Ginger Snap and Congo Bar, the two female members of the group, happened to turn out to be bisexual, especially if they are permitted to watch.
Necco, who is perhaps the most out-spoken of the group, did speak strongly on the subject of groupies: “Although in some sense groupies are a renewable resource, they’re really an enormous, unsustainable burden on the environment. It takes anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five years for a groupie to reach maturity, and even then only one in ten or maybe one in a hundred groupies make the cut, and then typically only for a short time. It’s an enormous, senseless waste! Much worse than eating beef or wearing leather. We completely reject the culture of disposable groupies.”
Peanut Butter, claiming to speak for the rest of the group, wanted to make sure that my readers know that Necco “can sound like a real douche-bag sometimes, although he has a heart of responsibly-mined gold.”
