kristin hersh

The guitar that love built will be in my hands in a few days. It’s the end of the week as we know it and everything’s different now.

Last month, I did a mini-tour of the southwest with Robert Fisher from the Willard Grant Conspiracy, a normal tour: club dates, club promoters, club crowds. Fine, fine and fine again, nothing out of the ordinary, really. The only problem was that I was playing these old Shady Circle songs; songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers. In clubs, hey come off as art pieces: interesting old paintings, but nothing a twenty-first century individual would ever think to crawl into.

Billy and I flew around the country, thinking, talking, then scooped up the kids and shoved ‘em back into the truck, still thinking and talking, Shady Circle songs in our ears. We gazed off into the distance, wondering what the New Old World’ll be like, when songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers can be played in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers.

Crackpot Theory meets Wild Hare: Billy books Shady Circle house shows with fan promoters on the drive back to California. Kids, dogs, snakes, guitars, amps, groceries, suitcases and schoolbooks tumbling out of the truck and into the loving embrace of smart people, backyards, laughter and potluck freakin’ dinners! Allow me to repeat: everything’s different now.

Here’s why:

1. All real songs are written in houses (and garages and motels and the back seats of cars) for friends, family and interested onlookers. This is music to crawl into. Music played just for commerce is, in my snooty opinion, not real music. If we have to go back in musical time to before there was a music industry in order to learn this lesson, then that’s what we should do, ’cause it’s an important one.
2. Normal people like music. Not just people who look like the rock bands they listen to; all kinds of people are moved by sound. They don’t need big corporations to tell them what music they like and they also don’t need to jeopardize tomorrow’s work day to drink expensive-cheap beer in the middle of the night in a rock club if that isn’t their thing. They still like music.
3. People are giving. When they aren’t being taken advantage of, they know it. They deserve respect and when they get it, they share: ideas, jokes, opinions, money, food, stories, music and beer.

At Michelle’s house concert, like all the house concerts, I laughed and talked through my set and everyone else in the room laughed and talked with me. We were together in the room, not separated by a wall of performer vs. audience. Afterwards, I watched in envy as bandmates scheduled rehearsals with each other. It seemed like everyone there was in a band with everyone else who was there.

I told them I’d give anything to be able to play with one of my bands on a Tuesday night in a basement (or anywhere, for that matter). “Why can’t you play with your bands?” Michelle’s drummer asked.

“Well…because…of the music business,” I answered, well aware of how stupid that sounds.

I bought into the conventional music business a long time ago. Shame on me. Michelle’s world is the New Old World (bring it on!). Someday soon, there will be such a thing as a musician who does not suck and does not starve. Imagine: local bands again. Playing in one’s own city for friends, family and interested onlookers. No more begging, for tours, radio, publicity, T.V. and movie placement, etc. No more rich rock stars, just passing the hat and working hard to support your music habit. There is no shame in that, but there should be shame associated with playing lousy music just to make money and get famous. That’s failure.

I had given up on ever seeing the guitar I asked Collings to build for me almost 3 years ago, before money got really tight.  Collings builds their beautiful guitars to my specifications. Bill Collings watched me play and chose the wood, while I chose the bodyshape.  It was gonna be perfect. My old Collings C-10, the reason I ever had a solo acoustic career, was beaten to shit, barely playable any longer; I really needed a new guitar. But I simply couldn’t take food out of the kids’ mouths to buy a guitar, even if it was built for me.

The people at Collings sympathized and apologized for having to replace the “KH” headstock with a generic one in order to sell it to someone else. Billy was heartbroken, having spent the last few Christmases and birthdays struggling to find a way to surprise me with the guitar, but ultimately giving up.

Friday morning, out of desperation, we decided to share our frustration with this community. We were overwhelmed by the response we got. Billy received (and answered!) almost 600 emails from people wanting to help me buy the guitar. Hundreds of contributions came into “The Hat”, my online tip-jar, mostly small ones between one and five dollars, sometimes ridiculously generous ones. “The Hat” runneth over. By Friday afternoon, we had enough to buy the guitar. We laughed and cried, awe-struck, and begged people to stop contributing.

When the guys at Collings heard what happened, they shared our shock and glee, blown away that any musician could have such a loving following. “They’re buying it for you?” Today, they’re happily boxing up and shipping off my beautiful New Old Guitar.

You people continue to amaze me.

A special “Thank you” to the first Shady Circle house concert promoters: Echo (Brooklyn, NY), Tine (Franklin, MA), Michele (Buffalo, NY) and Tom (Lee’s Summit, MO)

Me, playing “Deep Wilson”, fireside, in Tom’s Backyard.

Leon, Guanajuato is a city of bright colors and happy children. We spent three inspiring days there with some right-minded people who believe in making art with a lowercase “a”. Simply put: beauty for people. The FIAC festival is one that celebrates many different mediums and invites the whole city to attend.

Placed in the hands of three young men who laughed often, spoke freely of “magic” and sang at the top of their lungs, we let Mexico wash over us. Food, people, land, architecture, language..all of it astonishingly beautiful.

With 50Foot Rob on drums and my oldest son, Doony playing bass, we created a patchwork set list of Throwing Muses and solo songs as well as some 50FootWave and Appalachian folk songs, of all things. It sounded interesting: atmospheric tremolo guitar sections erupting into pounding instrumentals. It’d be a cool band except that it isn’t a band. We needed a name.

Since we make up band names all the time, we set some parameters: a band name suggestion must be something you’ve actually seen and it must be something you’ve seen in Mexico. We narrowed the ever-lengthening list down to these contenders:

“Iron Cobra” (a foot pedal)

“Wax Jesus” (a wax Jesus)

“Hover Jesus” (I don’t know how they did this)

“Commando” (Rob swears he saw one)

“Canary Room” (Billy asked for a canary to be put in our room, but they smiled and said no)

We never officially settled on a name, though Wax Jesus sort of stuck. It could be a working title, I don’t know; but speaking of working, my little baby Doony busted his little baby ass and rocked everyone’s world. After the show, he signed his first autographs and posed for pictures with entire families. Then he hosted an almost all-night tequila party in his hotel room (I’m so proud!).

We hated leaving Mexico. There’s something they have figured out there that one rarely sees elsewhere and it’s hard to put your finger on. Humanity maybe?

We left Los Angeles in an earthquake, flew through electrical storms and into a hurricane to end up in a particular kind of paradise; one in which people of all ages participate in a shared aesthetic experience. Children danced while we played, rads pumped their fists, parents and grandparents clapped and cheered. It was humbling.

This may never happen again, but during the set, I looked at my smiling drummer and beautiful son and felt honored to have done this in my life.

Only a couple of generations ago, we the people sang the songs and told the stories and generated our culture from the bottom up. But now, more and more of our culture is spoon-fed to us top-down by corporations, TV networks and ad agencies. We must reclaim our culture. Start telling our own stories again. Singing our own songs. Producing our own meaning. Creating our own cool. — Adbusters

• • • • •

“So what would happen to god if all the televangelists disappeared?” we asked ourselves in the cereal aisle at Trader Joe’s, music and commerce having mixed us up pretty bad in the last year. Surely, people’ll start looking for a better passport to the spirit world than what the bloated corporate corpse** offered. Just about anything’d be better than continuing to throw money at cartoon characters.

Billy picked up a box of raisin bran and read the ingredients.

“Or else we’re all so messed up by the business of selling music that we don’t know what to look for anymore. ”

I picked up my own box of cereal to read, then put it back.

“But music just is.”

Billy tossed the raisin bran into the cart and started walking slowly down the aisle. “Most people don’t think that. Most people think music is the recording industry, just like they think religion is god.” We paused in produce to let the misters spritz us (it was a hot day). “You never belonged in the recording industry anyway; you’re a musician.” He held up a loaf of bread. “Do we need bread?”

“I’ll bake some.”

“No you won’t.”

“Then we need bread,” I said. “But good music matters.”

He thought. “To a select few, maybe. Lots of people don’t know the difference.” We lingered in frozen foods (hot day). “But it doesn’t matter who hears the music,” he said. “If it’s played at all, we win.”

• • • • •

** warner brothers rejected this video when my band, throwing muses, delivered it. they said i didn’t look pretty enough.

…it allows for ideas and collaborations like this:

A time-lapse of a painting by Carmen Benske, set to my song “Torque”.