1993 Quotes and Updates

Plagiarism in music is what they call the folk process.

-- Arlo Guthrie said this during a concert at the Flood Zone

It was a great show, and my first. The audience sat in rows of chairs.

After 75 days, no one remembers.

-- Japanese saying

This is what I advise everyone who thinks their personal problem is the end of their world. Just about everything blows over.

Reasons not to be in a band: One is likely to acquire a slight ringing in one’s ears. One hears about money a great deal but rarely sees any. There are fans who can be a problem, or there are no fans, an even bigger problem.

-- Thomas Beller in The New Yorker

My design for the Journal was heavily influenced by The New Yorker, a magazine I love to subscribe to when I have money. All those shows when I stood in front of the amps because that was the best place to take a picture, I'm paying for it now. I can't seem to filter out background noise anymore, so I don't hear the TV if the dishwasher or air conditioner is running. I can't hear people talking to me in restaurants.

The one time I feel confident and comfortable is when I’m playing a show. I’ve made this little world for myself and that’s the one place where I can really be strong. I’m in control and I can say things that I don’t regret because it’s all been planned out. Nobody can interrupt me because I have the stage. It’s a way to communicate with people without really having to talk to them. Just because I’m lonely and I want to communicate doesn’t necessarily mean I like people.

-- Juliana Hatfield

Remember her? Probably not. This works for writing, too. I can communicate without having to actually be with people. I have never liked talking on the phone. I feel like a hostage. When I first starting doing the paper, a lot of men called me and would talk for hours. I was like a sounding board for a couple of dozen guys, married, single, usually older than younger. It’d start out being about music, then it would be about life in general. Maybe it was because I was home during the day and many of these guys were, too, playing househusband while their wife worked and doing music at night and weekends. I heard a lot of stories about the local groupies and bad girls. After my boyfriend moved in and I started working during the day, the calls stopped.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income, half the possibilities of life are shut off. You hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.

-- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915

Songwriters write their best songs before they become rich and famous. It’s hard to relate to your audience when you’re no longer living their lifestyle. I think Maugham is wrong. My husband wrote a half-dozen songs when he was in his 20s and he hasn't written anything since. What does he have to feel passionately about these days? Maybe this song: "I'll Take the Garbage Out When I'm Ready (Back Off Woman)"

There can’t be any thought process when you’re playing if you want to get close to music.

-- Charlie Haden

What makes the difference between a great musician and a mediocre one is what’s played between the notes: the feeling you give the silences as well as the sounds.

-- John Densmore, The Doors

You are the worst audience in the world. You very rarely look at me, you never applaud, and you don’t look like you’re having any fun whatsoever.

-- an acoustic performer about me

This guy, who was sort of a friend because I met him before I started writing about music, was confused. I wasn’t at his show to encourage him or be a fan girl. I was there to write about his show, and the room he was playing. I wasn’t there to have fun. I was working.

The Bottom was better when it was just dilapidated old buildings and everybody was afraid to go there.

-- an anonymous musician quoted in a 1993 Times-Dispatch article.

The most threatening places are the white, middle-class places where a lot of athletes go. That’s where the fights are. They seem to be the most volatile of people – the highest level of testosterone and the lowest level of intellect.

-- John Fralin of the Swingaderos on bar brawling, 1993

I remember around this time, a family took their mom out for her birthday to a show at Scarlett’s, which was on the first floor of what is now once again Main Street Station. They were asked to leave for being rowdy. There was a shoot-out with security on the front steps and people died, including the mom!