

College shows are weird. Sometimes I Love them, often I hate them – they’re an essential part of our calendar simply because colleges have budgets and college students are a prime demographic for our music – but they are weird. Many schools we play I simply feel such an intense experience gap that I have real trouble bridging it. I feel self-conscious and archaic at best.
There are some schools however, that really seem like home to me. For a while California University of Pennsylvania had that feel – though I think that had more to do with one or two individuals and the fact that we’d made friends with some of the staff (i.e. people more our own age!) and that we didn’t stick exclusively with the school peeps there (hard to do in such a small town, but we managed it by first encountering California through Jozarts). One of the colleges that we played up in New York made us feel like we really belonged there, at least as performers – there are far too many schools where we show up and it feels like the school has hired some token acoustic act to round out a culturally balanced arts calendar and that the students themselves are rather non-plussed.
Whatever – I’m gearing up to say that I really do LOVE playing at University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. I have no idea what it is – and I’m pretty sure it has less to do with the overall school and more to do with us just finding “our people” within the school. There’s a lesson in that. We need to write about 4 more geek-referential tunes and really advertise ourselves that way… though it’s not the true focus of our music, if we can get a couple of gamers and sci-fi geeks together, we’ll entertain’em. It’s our speed, our humour, our specific angst – “our people” indeed. It’s just a matter of drawing them out. They’re not usually the ones coming out to the college coffeehouses – we’ve just got to figure out a way to draw them out…
Last night it was fun to hang out with kids that were into the things that had evolved on a straight line from the things I’ve Loved. They know the Muppets, they wear their retro Transformers t-shirts, the video games they play have evolved out of the ones I’ve Loved and still Love) and surprisingly their musical tastes are old-school enough that when we throw down with a Nirvana cover they’re really, really, really into it.
I’d Love to see the study on that – music that every high school kid of a certain “type” encounters at the age of 13 – 15 that really SPEAKS to them seems to be: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Doors (from the 60s), who would it be from the 70s? Violent Femmes from the 80s… and now Nirvana from the 90s – it means we all have a common musical vocabulary – and it also means that ilyAIMY probably ought to pick up a Femmes cover again.
Yeah – it occurred to me that I was literally twice the age of most of our audience last night, but they know the words and they sign along – and they were FUN to hang out with later. I didn’t feel too strange falling asleep on a dorm room floor to the sound of late-night laundry surrounded by anime and move posters…
But there IS something strange about waking up here. It’s like a flash back to the Commons [dorms at MICA]. Laundry’s still going, one of the neighbours apparently partied too hard and is throwing up somewhere on the edge of earshot, no-one else is awake (Terry Pratchetism about the river Ankh skulking in its bed like a student at 11am) and the bags under my eyes remind me that all of this is 20 years ago for me. These kids were 4 years old when Kurt Cobain died. I was in college…
Erf. Enough out of me this morning. The “Frankenstorm” continues to bear down on home and we’ll continue our way West. Tonight’s Findlay, OH and I’m lamenting my lack of an internet connection. Might experiment with streaming from my phone just to see if it works. I’m sure the sound quality will be heinous – but I’m always curious!