Fear

You hear a lot of fear flying around, mostly in advertising and often in religious institutions. I almost wrote "fear flying around these days", but this tactic is nothing new. Since we started roasting those first chestnuts on an open fire in the forest, we as humans have used the potentiality of negative results to deter, or motivate, others to do the way we'd like. Try it with a toddler, it works. With most, anyway. In fact, you can tell a lot about the basic nature of that toddler through this interaction. Tell him or her the stove is hot and hurts, and watch if they obey the fear in their mind or not.

This kind of fear is good. I have all my limbs and basic facial features intact because my parents did a good job of instilling in me a healthy fear of hot stoves or busy intersections. Religion and modern media take what they would also label "healthy" fear to new heights.

Take Exodus 20:18 from the Bible for example:

"When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, 'Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die."


That's pretty heavy, man. But check out that nice convenient veil the Bible puts between God and men. The men are too busy shaking in their boots to question who they should be listening too.

Take the media. Not to mention any names here; Glenn Beck you stupid-fucking-idiot soul-succubus, but the media will use terms like "Nazi", "terror", or "blood-shed", over and over until poor Grandma who doesn't realize the 24-hour news cycle will rot your brain thinks the world is only full of danger and gosh darnit', she better get her nightly news to know where the bad guys are! For the record, my grandmas are way cooler than that.

Here's a headline from CNN.com this morning:

"One Business Growing in Haiti -- Coffins"

Are you kidding me? Instead of mentioning that cholera deaths in Haiti are rising, CNN conjures up an image of a bustling coffin and grave industry, bursting at the seams 'cause there just so many of them Haitians dying all the time, they're piling up down there!

Send me a comment about Fox News, Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh and you'll find out how a blog explodes. I don't know technically how, yet, but it can't be fun. But notice I loped those liberals at CNN in the group too, nobody is above it, because fear tactics simply work too well. So then it goes without mention that everybody out there has to wade through the B.S. and find their news and information from a scientific and an unbiased (as possible) media outlet.

But there's another kind of fear, conditioned by the constant barrage of the above factors, which plays out in our minds all day. Since we've just shown that we live in a culture of fear, it follows that our personal worlds might be filled with the same kind of thinking.

When I stumble up the stairs in the morning, looking for breakfast, and choose between an apple and a pair of Twinkies I make a couple hundred or thousand minute, sub-conscious choices. One that I let surface to my groggy morning ego (something very hard to control in the morning) is that apple's help prevent lung cancer. My grandfather died of lung cancer, boy am I afraid of and fear cancer, and therefore should eat an apple.

Again this is good fear playing out and ultimately helps me make a healthy choice. The trouble comes when we try and apply this direct logic to our big life choices, choices significantly larger than apples v. Twinkies. When thinking about leaving your job right before a promotion to start a business, does fear play in? You bet. Fear about losing financial security, your mortgage, a failing entrepreneurial business...

The truth is that there is no truthful, objective way to account for what will happen in the future, and in reality, only you can work hard to augment the potential outcome. In other words, if I'm thinking of leaving the Corporation Corp. to start a company that designs beer-bottle-cap-cabinets then fear might highly dissuade me from doing so. But this fear is unfounded. It shouldn't deter you and given that this is our ONE life, our one chance, a secure pension plan won't ease regrets about unfulfilled life dreams.

Fear plays into music in two ways. First, when playing live improvisational music... you must forget it exists! Fear has no place in life or music. The micro-second you begin to second guess yourself because of fear about whether what you're about to play will sound "good" or not, ruins the note before it even leaves your fingers or lips.

Second, when pursuing a career in music, you have to be fearless. It's the only way. Fearing an outcome is tantamount to failure. A close relative of mine, very close, who I love, recently told me I need to "rethink my situation" or something to the effect that playing music full time isn't a real job. It makes my mind want to explode. Makes me mental. Drives me bananas down bat-shit crazy-street backwards!

WHEN DID WE MOVE FROM A WORLD WHERE MUSIC WAS AN INTEGRAL PART OF SOCIETY TO PASSABLE DIGITAL NUMBERS, ITEMS AS USABLE AND DISPOSABLE AS HANDBAGS???

We are in love with artists one minute, unable to stay interested because they only release a limited amount of pre-fab music and then Justin Beiber's voice changes, Britney goes to jail for nose candy and teenagers are apt (or forced for lack of options) to fall in love with their parent's music. Why don't they have their own music, music they can grow old along WITH?

The answer is as complex as explaining away any post-recession industry, but fear played into it, big time. Major labels feared investment in new talent, feared new technologies like Napster and now we have a system where those without fear, the heavy hitters starting technology companies, control the money game. Take Twitter, Pandora, Spotify or Grooveshark. These are the new DJ's of the current century, controlling the game.

So until I plan my technology start-up (we did get in pretty balls-deep with Mountain Side Mardi Gras ) I have to maintain that mindset of an artist which has guided and shielded us since troubadours traveled around France in the 13th century. We do what we do not for the money, but for love, which is the opposite of fear. We don't fear the outcomes of existing in an industry long forsaken for it's profitability. Playing music in the name of love is not some hipster, hippy, or beatnik expression but a protection from the fear in the world. Silence is ignorance, leading to fear and even hate in the worst case. But music, those first few notes you hear at a concert, penetrate that emptiness with light and love and substance. Fear has no room.

Maybe I have with music the same relationship some people feel they have with God, a protectionist sense of love, like that with a father, which can obliterate fear.

I sat next to a very, very wise man on a flight to New York a couple weeks ago. He's a leading cancer researcher at CSU and a Hindu-born Christian. If a preacher tries to preach to me, I will not listen, just like no one wants to hear a car mechanic go on about transmissions in their spare time. But if a scientist wants to take a crack at explaining, logically, to me his way of seeing religion in the world, I'm all ears.

He had one phrase which he kept repeating throughout his vast descriptions of religion (Eastern and Western) and how it relates to everyday life: "Live a simple and sincere life, and you will be like a humble lion."

As someone who is surrounded by lots of public attention as part of what they do for a living, that advice is immeasurably valuable. A lion fears nothing in the jungle.


*A few days after I started this post, WikiLeaks.org caused fear to ripple through the world's powerful and elite, posting their personal comments about adversaries and allies alike as if they were Facebook comments about your best friend's boyfriend. You didn't want him to find out you think he's a sleaze-ball and now damage control is the name of the game. Although Julian Assange is most likely a meglo-maniac, harmful to US interest, the story is just so novel, so massive in scope, the media has embraced his image and mission.

Tour Time and Time Warner

This week, the Frogs are headed to Texas. Things have stabilized in the FGF camp since moving into a new house and getting robbed several months back. The Denver police found one item (the largest and most expensive) and Steve and I were more than happy to sit at the cop-shop, haggard and anxious for hours, in order to tow our PA back to it's rightful pad. We have an awesome new roommate moving in, Calvin, who works in finance and can probably provide some perspective to us about what life in the corporate world might be like. The first time he came over we bonded over his "existential breakdown" in NYC, where I had just returned from a wild trip, running back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan, recording two full songs and playing two shows. Producer Will (Will E. Beats) and Engineer Klem should be sending me some tracks this week and I will post the new tunes as soon as they are in my eager paws, or Frog toes to be more specific.

On that note, the amount of Frog memorabilia we've obtained over time, a relatively short time, is astounding. From where I sit at my computer in our living room I can see:

- A giant stuffed Frog from one of our youngest fans, a kick-ass little girl name Willa

- Posters from over a dozen shows, We've only begun to put them up. our buddy Kevin in the mountains has stacks and stacks in the archive.

- A wall-sized, sewn blanket of our South Park-style caricatures, replete with our Frogs Gone Fishin' logo. If Trey and Matt came in the door we might have a lawsuit on our hands.*

Any number of amphibian-related books, holiday-cards, painted Mexican leaping Frogs and hygiene accouterments like candles or soap decorate our house, bathrooms, Suburban (Leslie) and RV (Bertha). I am a Frog. It's not a question if I want to present myself that way. People refer to the group as "The Frogs", individuals as "a Frog", and make checks out to us as simply "Frogs".

These are physical indications of the world that your band becomes. It is much more than a physical world, however. Your world as a musician is defined by concentric circles around which are your band and it's family. Family goes way beyond the conventional definition at this point. And just like you love your real family, as it's the only one you've got, you love your fan base and business associates, even the annoying step-brothers or creepy uncles in the bunch. From the moment you wake up to when you go to sleep, you take stock of this family, figure out how to make it work together for a greater experience than any fan or band could achieve by themselves. Most often this happens in the form of live concerts and your job as musician is to make fans feel like you are watching them, as much as they are watching you.

It's so cliche to discuss, but that reciprocality between band and fan is the ONLY thing keeping you as musician from disintegrating into some sort of repetitive, guitar-playing robot. And when fans come to multiple shows in a row, your art becomes more comprehensive because you have the arch of time to work with, days in between shows, as a new factor to manipulate. Active fans will guess rabidly about which songs will be played in what order, which songs will open and close the next show. Some bands have whole archives, dedicated to information about those very statistics.

That is the source from which your world as a band should emanate, the catalogue of songs you maintain to play at the moment that is just right for band energy and audience atmosphere. In fact, that is where you can draw the line between real musical artists, and corporately created pop-stars. Real artists operate on a catalogue built-up over time, pop-stars are ushered into the public domain on a cascade of dollars, not musical aptitude or hard work. It's also pretty cliche for artists like me to bitch about said pop-stars but none of it is relevant anymore, anyway. Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift sell a fraction of the CD's Britney or N'Sync did, the model has gone out the window.

What we are left with are hard working bands (we're now on hour seven of the 15-hours to Texas, in the middle of Kansas, as I finish this post) and independent-minded labels who might get their cash from the big boys, but certainly make their own decisions, sometimes for the worse. One of the more famous examples of this twisted carnival-industry came when alt-rock band Wilco was released by their label, only to be picked up by another owned by the same parent company, Time Warner. Not only had Time Warner financed Wilco's record, they had to essentially buy it back from themselves when the band was let go due to poor management.

Many years ago... OK maybe 6 or so, when I was (hopefully) less wise to the ways of this world, I thought being signed to a major label would be the best, the balls, the brass ring and not knowing what that would mean (large-scale debt to a corporation) I was probably disappointed when my amateurish emails to Sony or Disney Records or who knows where weren't returned promising studio time and world tour. Now, after seeing what happens to bands who are signed to contracts they can't fulfill, oftentimes because a major won't market them correctly, I realize that there's nothing better in the world than being able to call my producer Brad, or lawyer Eric with a problem and have an advocate on the other line, rather than some money hungry scum-bag whose utterly disinterested in music or art.

After returning from TX, Frogs will spend some quality family time for Thanksgiving at home and tour around Colorado during the winter. NYE will take place in Telluride for two nights straight of celebration with the FGF band. Everyone who attends will receive a live CD of the show. Also, check out a pair of new music videos, produced by L.A.-based filmmaker Travis Milloy:

"Never or Now" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYB1thJbVHA

"Herb" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8y0clvIako&feature=related

Enjoy!

*Trey Parker and Matt Stone must have some ballsy lawyers. The creators of South Park are also from Colorado... must be something in the water.