This American Life; When You Talk About Music...; Part 2

My brother had found his way back to music, but this time he was Tom Jones. I feel authentic. I feel real. This is real. So what, uh, where are you at in your in your process here? I like to put the leather pants on because it just feels good. But I forgot one thing. I got to put something in my pouch. The ladies love this. Roll it up. So it's just about that thick and then you fold it over, OK, huh. And what you got there is a real peach. So now you're going to stuff this down the front of your leather. Absolutely. And this is this is for the authenticity sake. Next thing I do is I put a couple of belts with lots of lots

of metal on them because I just feel good. It also keeps my pants up. OK, now I have to get the makeup on. OK, can I follow you? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't have the ruffled shirts. They all at the cleaners and I don't have time to pick up another so it's the best I can do it. Kind of got that look a bit. See that's what I have under but over as I'll show you later, I have a nice sequined tats that I put over all of this and I kind of take a couple of things off because I get really hot, you know what I mean? OK, got to have rings and bangles and bongos. I got the big cross because he always had the big cross. So. So now what I have to do first is tie up my own hair. Oh. I forgot also to put the mascara on the chest here.

When he was done my brother was transformed. Not exactly Tom Jones but close enough and ready to go three minutes late. Ain't no problem when Tom Jones is in the house. My brother and I go to a gig outside Boston where some companies holding its employee appreciation party, you she out there, there. It's in a function room next to a hotel restaurant, Bumbershoot, Rockingham, or something like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. She was just fed up with you. You ready to go the night before this? My brother told me he performed at a Chinese restaurant and after his finale the whole place, all the guests and the waiters, even the stagehands, they all stood up, gave him a standing ovation. He said it was like being in a movie.

Oh. A few months after I interviewed him, my brother got laid off from his computer job. My parents told me they were pretty worried about. Now he's playing the stock market, trying to parlay his retirement money into a nest egg, Karriem, for a while until he makes it big, as Tom Jones of. While my brother performed, I circulated through the room talking to people. This guy is just like very good. Very good. Pretty close. I thought he was very close. If I didn't meet him in the hallway and know otherwise, I would I would have questioned why is this really the time? I didn't tell anyone that Alex Jones was my brother. I just asked them what they thought of it. I just got a great voice, a really great voice, which is good. How do you get them anyway? I can.

I'm sure that you get this part. I would I'd like to have it, but I wanted to hear that he was making them happy. I wanted him to succeed. I wanted to help him get the work I wanted to hear. I mean, they loved. Dan, get him in a story about his brother was produced by Jay Allison with consulting producer Christina GoF. It comes from Jay's ongoing series, Life Stories, which is

produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Coming up, other strategies to keep music in your life if traditional music careers don't fly. In a minute when our program continues. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose a theme, bring you

a wide variety of stories, documentaries, radio, monologues, reportage, found tapes and found documents, which is what I have right here in front of me. Our theme today, stories about people who you could say this about. When you talk about music, your face becomes beautiful. That's right. And of course, not everyone agrees about this beauty. Some people do not find it touching or inspiring to see people who love music. In fact, some people feel that it is a crisis of global proportions. And the document I hold in my hand is an advertisement, a call to arms, really from Motorbootie, a zine, a pretty great 'zine. And it's an advertisement for the first annual conference in World Band Population on stopping the crisis of World Band Overpopulation.

Specifically, says this ad, according to recent studies, by the year 2001, there will be more people in bands in the global economy can ever hope to support. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the current number of audience members to band members at a ratio of two to one. But present trends threaten to reverse this relationship, disrupting the delicate balance between performers and normal people, sayin that I won't virtually everyone be in a band, but everyone in a band will be involved in several side projects, creating a glut of virtually indistinguishable groups of guitar wielding miscreants who are not performing their so-called music will be endlessly talking about it to anyone unable to flee. And then the ad explains what's going to happen at the conference, which is, by the way, February 7th through 10th in Atlanta, Georgia. Uh, the seminar is dealing with the imminent dangers of band overpopulation, legal strategies for achieving zero band population growth, private

sector initiatives for ending band growth, strategies for ending multiple band membership. Here are some of the things that that they suggest can be done to combat this global crisis. Let's see, three strikes and you're out. Rules creating stiff criminal penalties for artists who release more than three full length albums per career waiting periods for instrument purchasers to allow for mandatory background checks for prior infractions at a cooling off period to discourage thoughtless and impulsive band formation. Stiff fines for bands that imitate other bands, civil infractions for air bands, an all out ban on cover bands. They also suggest, let's say, boycotting labels that refused to stop signing additional bands, as well as cracking down on pointless local indie labels, so-called indie labels, finally supporting random band testing by employers, especially in high risk businesses like coffee shops, coffee shops, cafes, bars

and record stores. Well, given the crisis of global and population explosion, perhaps the only honorable course for all of us is to forget about performing and just put that energy into being members of the audience. And what we present next on the program is Act three is a case example of how to do exactly that and. This is the Fastback, a pop punk band from Seattle that's been around for years, actually, and the story you're about to hear is not about being in a semi obscure but well-respected band. It's about being a fan of a semi obscure but well respected

band. Sarovar is a writer and a music columnist for the San Francisco Weekly, and she tells the story. Sometimes opening your mail can be a little like listening to the radio. You're not paying attention, just absent mindedly flipping through the letters and bills and then wham, some little surprise comes out of nowhere and changes your day. I got this package inside with a letter thanking me for mentioning the Fastback in a book review I had written. Not from one of the aspects themselves, mind you, just some guy in Chicago. His name was Scott Lee, and he'd enclose this Xerox booklet about the band flipping through it. I stopped cold at something called the Fastback Drummer's Pie Chart. Since they formed in 1979, the first specs have gone through about a dozen drummers, and this pie chart identifies the drummers by name listing the percentage of songs which each one has contributed to.

But at the bottom of the page, small print warned note, Rusty and Nate shares may not be totally accurate. Their percentages may be approximately point six eight percent off. And I don't think a decimal point had ever struck me as endearing before. The drastic exactitude of point six eight percent sort of captured my heart and I had to meet this person. Basically, it has your standard discography and and there's just like some facts here that I dug out 139 total songs, eight hours. Twenty five minutes, 43 seconds worth of songs. So he showed me other stats, like total recorded versions of songs, total number of seconds of songs, which is thirty thousand three hundred forty three. In case you're wondering, shortest song, shortest instrumental song, shortest song with vocals, the longest song and the longest song without a drum solo.

That's only because I was stunned. I mean, I thought I liked the band called Out of the Chair. And normally as a music lover and as a woman, I rail against the mostly male record collector geek habit of reducing rock and roll to baseball card collecting. They flatten out this complex, thrilling thing down to manageable lists of names and titles and dates. But Scott Lee's Beck's tribute has a devotional fervor of a medieval illuminated manuscript. The list of facts and figures is so relentless and exact and painstaking that it takes on this liturgical glow as if the suspects were a religion and Scott Lietz profit. But some of the new additions to this, as I ramble here, are listed out the songs through A through Z and did the percentages of songs, starting with each letter and the letter. That one was I. There were 19 fastback songs that started with I,

representing about 14 percent of the songs with every album. They seem to have a song that starts within like in America in the summer, in the winter in the observatory. I soon found out that the band has befriended Scott Lee and that they've sort of informally appointed him. Their de facto archivist. Singer Kim Wernicke corresponds with Scott via email, sometimes like four times a day. Guitarist and songwriter Kurt Block graciously calls him a good person to have on our team, though when he first saw Scott Lee's packett, he had some understandable worries. I was like, boy, this is the first thing. The first thing that would come to my mind is this is this guy really scary? Is he the kind of person I would, you know, run away from if he was ever in the same room? Just the kind of person that I would stop answering my telephone if he called. And, um, no, it's not not

not to not to make you think that we don't think Scott Lee is actually really crazy of a person, but he's not he's not the annoying kind of crazy person that that you read about and you think he appreciates his own over the top. And if anything, the aspects are a little protective of Scott Lee. When I was talking to Kurt, I jokingly called Scott his stalker, but he set me straight. No, he's not a stalker. He's a super fan. Oh, super fan. Yeah, I thought that would be, uh, that has negative connotations. Yeah. That's something we don't need. Super fan. Is this fine, like the super fan, the members of the Fastback all have day jobs, so on any given day it's possible that Scott is devoting more energy to being a fan than the fast specs devote to being in the band. When I interviewed Kim, the gaping differences between being a band member and being a super fan were never clearer.

OK, so I have a pop quiz for you. OK, how many total songs before before the new album New Mansions in Sound have the fast recorded? What is it now? How many total songs have the suspects? Fortunately, I don't have something in front of me that could answer that. Really? OK, I have to say it is one hundred and twenty seven. And I was wondering also if you knew the median song length for the. Well let's start with an easier one. What do you think is the average length of a Fastback song. She doesn't know, but according to Scott, it's two minutes, 51 seconds. When I visit Scott Lee's house on Chicago's north side, his roommate lets me in. Scott's playing his guitar along with a new Fastback album. His room is decorated with Fastback posters, and Scott himself wears a

Fastback T-shirt. He shows me this incredibly complex chart. He's working on a sort of family tree to the Seattle music scene, a town, by the way, which he has only visited once. The producers of this American life would like me to say here that when Scott talks about the fast bags, he becomes beautiful because that would go along with the first piece in the show today. But I would never say something so corny. When do you think he kind of made the switch between just being a listener and being as Curt Black called you today, superfan? I think the transition really happened when I was in law school and I had made this tape of one of my favorite Fastback songs. And I was I was walking across a very icy cold midway

in Buffalo. And despite how cold it was, when I listen to this music, it really just pumped all this life into me. It was it was really a life affirming experience. As corny is that might sound, but I don't know. I was just really happy at that point. And it was like it was just a light on me that shone and I hadn't seen it before. And now everything seemed seemed better. I mean, when you showed this this info packet to people, what what is usually their reaction, what they wonder? I think the first question I always hear is, do you have a lot of spare time? In fact, got spare time is limited. He holds down a full time job at a Chicago advertising agency and he writes his own songs. And truthfully, he flirts with the idea of not staying a fan. He's moving to Seattle partly to be closer to the fast because he's actually in their circle of friends now.

And he's tried a couple of times to start his own band. Once he was invited on stage with Kurt to play along with the song. It was exciting, but he's left handed and he didn't have a left handed guitar for him. So it was sort of a disaster, not the moment a superfan dreams of. So on this show, what happens if someone tells a little story and the then we play a song so you get to pick which Fastback song gets to play at the end of your story? At the end of my story, I'd probably say save room for me then because I've definitely saved room for the Fastback, so save one for me. Sarah Palin, a music columnist for the San Francisco Weekly and author of the book Radio

on a Listener's Diary, which will be published by St. Martin's Press in October. We asked for a life in music, Sam Frank, who is 72, and he spent his life playing and teaching the accordion, and the thing you have to know about him is he hates accordion music, most of it, anyway, the son of the accordion. We don't associate ourselves with too much is the like this? I think it's like I

haven't done that for years. That is hard for me to even play a regular style with the way. Well, the other way it swings the other it swings with the with the one finger. And I get a just sound like this watch. Sam Franco hates that accordion umpa beat, he doesn't like the normal Lawrence Welk chord progressions in his music. He changes them into jazz chord progressions. And when normal accordion players use lots of chords all over the place, he prefers to

play single notes in his head when he plays Sam. Here's Coleman Hawkins and other jazz greats. He invented this style. And if you check the Chicago Yellow Pages, which has accordion, Sam is the only listing. All this hour we've heard from people who want to make their living full time from the music. We dream and strive for that. Sam, standardless life, playing gigs, working, never getting famous, though. You know what to save me? That I had the knack for teaching you to stand. That was my ace in the hole would be the teaching part. If I didn't have that, I would be, I would be out of the music business completely. He's watch players who weren't any better than him get a lot of attention, get notoriety, get more gigs. And in the end, he decided he doesn't care, that life doesn't suit him. You can you can, you know, pay mortgages and buy a house.

I'm playing because you played one you played one night and said, how would you like to go look for a job every week? And that's what it amounted to. I never did have the kind of energy most of the people who Sam started playing with back when I was a kid did not stay with music back when Sam began. Accordion was huge, huge. Every band in Chicago had an accordionist doing their keyboards because pianos in those days were so impractical, you know, can't carry them around. The one that you find at the hall is always out of tune. But that era did not last when Elvis hit in the late 50s. Rock and roll followed. Accordion business died. Nobody hired him. Nobody wanted to take lessons. And lots of guys who sang, played and taught with quit the music business. Samit always play guitar too, and he was actually one of the few people in his crowd

who made the jump from the swing era to the rock era. These days he jokes that every brick of his house was paid for by rock and roll. A big poster of electric guitarist Randi Rhodes is the biggest thing in his music room. He taught lessons for years in the guitar, but Sam still views the guitar as an inferior instrument. He can lecture you for a long time on how it's not in the symphony orchestra. Basically, in his view, America's forty year love affair with the guitar is a concerted effort to slap back at the accordion because, you know, everybody's mother and father play the accordion and they said, we're not going to play it. You know, we're going to play something different in there. It was. Just came out as a rebel cause I think it only has five notes to six strings to the same. So it brings it down to five notes.

You know, you have to hit it with a pick. You've got to use two hands to make one note. Does that make sense? Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to use two hands to make one note? I met Sam through one of his students, Kathryn Boyd, who totally understand, has known him for years and says that whatever goes on in Sam's life, he's always happy when he's talking about music. And the most surprising thing Sam told me when we talk was that it took him a long time before he was completely at peace with the way he plays. He started playing accordion when he was 10. He's 72 now. He played accordions back in the old neighborhood and Taylor Street as a kid. Found his way to the jazz sound that he loves by high school, played in USO shows during World War Two in gigged for the next half century. But he says he never felt good about his playing until he was in his 50s.

Up until that point, a sound that he heard in his head wasn't what was coming out of the instrument in his 50s. He said he just stopped worrying about what people would say about his playing. He just played. The only thing I can I'd like to say this is that I never enjoyed playing as much as I do today. All my in all my days, I never enjoy playing as much as I did. Now, now. So why is that. Yeah. Ask me why. Yeah. Why is that. Because today I know what I can do. I know my limitations and I know my abilities. Like if I can't do it I say who cares. You know, I can do something else. When I was younger, I knew my limitations. Of course we all know our limitations and that bothers you. But today it doesn't bother me. Today in his music room, surrounded by his instruments with one of his favorite students,

Katherine, egging him on, doing our interview, Sam couldn't seem happier, really. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Peter Clowney and Alix Spiegel. Contributing Paul Clough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. Special thanks today to KALW in San Francisco for quitting Sarah Vowell. To John Connors for musical advice, to Bill O'Reilly, to Bridget Murphy and Millie's Orchid Show to Katharine Boyd and the folks at Experimental Sound Studios who made the

pretty recordings of Sam Franco. If you would like a copy of this program, it's only ten dollars. US WBCSD three one two eight three two three three eight zero. Funding for this American life has been provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Elizabeth Cheney Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the members of WBCSD Chicago. ABC Management Oversight by Tony Malatya. I'm Ira Glass. When you talk about music, your face becomes beautiful. Yes, it does. And we'll be back in your face next week with more stories of this American life.