Nowhere Band News

So, Dan’s a pretty good drummer, but he’s got other skills. He just sets them aside out of concern for the happiness of his friends.  What a guy!

This one isn’t ripped straight from real life like the whole Great Big Schmooze deal was, but there’s sort of a historical precedent.  Back in my first band, Red Hay, our drummer was a sextuple- or septuple musical threat who pretty much limited himself to drums.  I doubt that he ever had any conversations where he flat-out said he was holding back to spare our feelings (although he’s a hell of a nice guy, so I wouldn’t put it past him), but I was still always conscious that he could probably step forward and go all Gary Louris on us at any moment if he got the itch.

So, then, it’s Hiatus Time.  I’m off to California for a week, with production starting back up when I get back.  That puts the next strip up at, what, some time in June?  Let’s say June 9th as a probably-hard deadline.  Although you never know, it might be worth watching this space to see if things run more quickly for some reason.

…aaaand now we see Aaron reap the wages of cock-blocking his bandmate. Poetic justice? Just the way things go? All in the game, yo? It’s not for me to say.

OK, I guess it is for me to say, since I wrote the damned thing. And here’s what I’ve got: like several other Nowhere strips, this whole Great Big Schmooze business is at least partly rooted in something that happened to me (in this case, about 10 years ago), back in the days of my band Red Hay. I was the Aaron figure in that little piece of Kabuki (here’s a hint: whenever a strip’s based on a real-life event, all you need to do to identify which character’s taking my role is to look for the one who’s being the biggest chump or asshole; that seems to be the way I write the reality-based scripts). I really was thrilled to have actually picked up a girl (so I thought) by playing guitar, and I really did sort of elbow my way past one of my boys to get there, and the whole thing ended more or less the way 26d does, except without a righteous drawing of the Hindenburg (actually, the night of the initial pickup also included a crazy little side adventure wherein my friend Chad and I spent a hair-raising half hour with a completely insane dude who wanted to be called “Hustler Pete.” I’m still on the fence about whether The Tale of Hustler Pete will ever be transmuted to comic form).

So, May is a crazy month for me. My wife’s birthday, our anniversary (5 years!), a week’s vacation at the end of the month, and some family visits. Which is to say, sorry the schedule’s been a little choppy, and there’s still some chop to come. One more strip will come out next week, and then there’ll be like a 2-week lull while I travel and recharge and all that. Full service will resume in early June.

And part 3 of the most action-packed night the Awesome Boys have ever experienced is up. How thick is the tension in that car?  Thiiiiiiiiiick.

Part 4 will conclude the mini-storyline, although there will of course be reverberations for a while afterwards.  And Part 4 will be a little late, even more late than this one was.  May’s just that kind of month for me.  Sorry.

Also: I didn’t mean it this way, but Aaron’s expression in panel 4 reminds me a lot of Ray Smuckles when he’s being remorseful.

Aaaaand so here we go on our multi-week story.  The boys are on the prowl, for shows or anything else that catches their fancy.  God help us all.

Quick word about the background/setting:  I’ve seen a bunch of shows at the Triple Rock, and pervading all-gray is pretty much exactly how I always perceive it.   It’s like a concrete bunker where people go to rock.

26b scripts out a little longer than usual, so I’m pretty sure it’ll run a little later than the usual week.  Hope not, but I’m kind of expecting it to.  We’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and this week’s suggested soundtrack, the Burrito Bros’ version of “To Love Somebody,” is just about the perfect song.

There’s always another band out there with a better work ethic, more musical knowledge, better equipment, and more of a willing to be a pain in the ass about things. You hate ‘em and fear ‘em, but they’re still out there, and all you can do is seethe when you see them get attention, and cheer when they get their comeuppance.

To be honest, I don’t feel like this is the most successful Nowhere Band strip;  I wish I could have figured out a better way to keep the top two panels from being so busy. I was juggling the need to keep things brief (I didn’t think this was a joke that could really support a long strip) and the desire to do the parallel-vertical layout.  Oh, well.  Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

The next strip will be something sort of new around here:  a multi-week story!  Big time!

There’s a new instrument in the Awesome Boys’ rock arsenal! I didn’t have much of a point with this one other than to look at the way unbelievably junky instruments will find their way into bands; Derailleur does have an electric organ that doesn’t work so well, but it’s more functional than the ‘Boys’s organ, and it was free. But it’s not just organs… a friend of mine used to have a bass that was rescued from the trash pile outside of a high school bandroom. Realistically, it should have stayed there. Guitars, also, just accumulate– our practice space features at least two more or less unplayable guitars which just sit around, for atmosphere I guess. If I thought I could get away with it, my workspace here at the house would be just as full of junked instruments. It’s just what happens.

On a technical note, I changed the way I colored this comic in PhotoShop. I’ve been having problems with anti-aliasing eating away the black linework and leaving them looking all feathery and weak. The new process didn’t totally solve the trouble, but I think it mitigated it a little. If you’ve got an opinion either way (or some PS tips), I’d love to hear it in comments here.

Honestly, it’s the most commonly-asked question asked of people in bands. And how do you answer it, really?  Even if you didn’t run into the dancing-about-architecture problem that leads people into lame attempts to answer by naming similar bands (by the way, my one regret about this strip is that nobody says that the ‘Boys sound “like Exile on Main Street-era Stones,”  which is a claim I’ve heard from about 90% of guitar-based bands that have ever existed), you get real trouble from the fact that  each person usually has a wildly different take on the band’s sound, with no hope of objectivity. It’s a mess.

If I didn’t drop the Exiled Stones quote, it’s because I wanted Aaron to instead use a more local universal landmark.  While it used to be worse (I swear to god every single person I talked to in a keyboardless low-level Minneapolis band in the 90s thought they  sounded like the Replacements), the ‘Mats still cast a mighty long shadow up here, and the self-comparison rate must still be over 50%.

Dan is sort of paraphrasing my pat description of Derailleur’s sound, by the way; and Aaron’s first bit about the honey is based on an old line of Grant’s about how you can’t taste our sweet honey without getting stung.  I’m not even entirely sure what he was talking about, but it’s a good line.

Continuing a (sort of disturbing) trend of ahead-of-schedule comics, I present Nowhere #22, which lays out Josh’s take on how the music scene actually functions.

As always, while this isn’t directly autobiographical (my shitty post-college job wasn’t a temp job, and I answered phones rather than stuffing envelopes), this is a pretty accurate summation of both my job-selection thought process and how I thought the music scene worked. I really didn’t think I’d be working more than 6 months before I was either writing for a living or making money off of Red Hay’s record contract. And I really did sort of have a “plan” worked out where if the right things happened, I could replace John Stirratt as Wilco’s bass player. This was, of course, before Stiratt’s strange Rasputin-like tendency to stay in Jeff Tweedy’s good graces while Wilco’s other roster slots rotated like the Timberwolves in garbage time.

So, all else being equal, I guess Josh would have a better shot at infiltrating Low than I would’ve infiltrating Wilco.

If you’re in the mood for a new comic, we’ve got one for you:  Nowhere #21, contrasting how Josh and Dan feel about sharing the other half of their lives with their respective coworkers.

As for me, I’ve been in both places.  When I was younger, I tended towards the Dan position– clearly, anyone who worked in the offices I worked in just wasn’t cool enough to be coming to any of my shows.  These days, I skew pretty strongly towards Josh; the more people who follow Derailleur, the better (it helps, I guess, that I’ve been working in progressively cooler places as time’s gone on). That’s tempered slightly by the whole Midwestern “oh my god, I can’t try to bring attention to myself!” urge, which is pretty strong in me.  But that’s a pretty ridiculous urge, best stomped on.

We’re back! This week, a quick look at all the places Jon’s amp has been before it wound up in his possession.

This is something that’s always fascinated me– amps especially seem to linger for decades, and I always wonder what all of the backstory is with my used stuff. I bought a couple of my guitars new, but most of the guitars and all of my current amp fleet were around for quite a while before they came to me, and god only know how they got there.

The backstory for Jon’s Twin is, of course, mostly fictional, but one bit– the “‘doped and cherried’ as part of the Rainbow Music amp rental fleet, where it was used by Angus Young” is at least a real bit of sales palaver attached to my friend Grant’s Twin.