The Jason Molina transcription continued today. I’m about 90% done, currently it stands at seventeen pages without any narration or description to fill the spaces between long passages. There was one really nice little answer he gave that I’ll share, but that’s it for today. The magician can’t show his trick, the poker player can’t show his hand, the cat…the cradle… silver spoon…all that bullshit.
The Depeche Mode song “Useless†is playing.
EL: Do you think that you are proud to consider yourself a Chicagoan?
JM: Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ve never pretended that I grew up here because I moved around a lot growing up, but from the time that I made the leap to become a full-time professional musician—See, I’ve always felt that that’s one of the most important things that younger bands don’t understand. They’ll ask me a lot of times, “What do you do?” Or, “what’s your day job?” And it’s like—I had no money. I got no money from my family, I had no money from any other mystery source, I just worked crappy jobs like everybody I knew and, at one point, without any money, I had to say, “Ok, I can go on tour for six weeks or I can work and try and get two weeks off here and there.†I just took the leap to just go on tour. And that meant for me—and means for a lot of musicians I know—quite a long time of sheer uncertainty and being absolutely broke. And it’s really hard to find yourself thirty-years old living again like a college student, because, you made the choice years ago to be a full-time touring musician. And in the eyes of some people you are utterly successful. And I think that they equate—sometimes—positive critical acknowledgement with financial gain. And I haven’t seen that. Really. Some of my favorite bands that are still around here in Chicago understand that going on tour is a labor of love, and it’s also a labor of losing money. Touring is expensive and dirty and hard. And money comes in so sporadically—especially when you’re on an independent label. My relationship with Secretly Canadian is a fifty/fifty deal and no money comes in if there’s no record out. I’d say that—I would like to see a lot more younger bands take that leap as early as possible, because you’re not going to fail if you’re still writing music. I mean, if you’re setting out to make a certain amount of money, you’ll never even start the ignition, you know? We’ve toured through gas crises. We toured in England during the huge gas crisis where they had striking truckers set all the refineries on fire, and gas was, like, twenty dollars a gallon. It went up to the point where you basically had to bribe people at a gas station to get any gas. Of course, we didn’t set out to do that, but we did it, and we survived, and we came home, and everybody was still here and our lives were still in tact.
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I’m going to give myself a haircut, run down to work for a few hours, and then I’m going into the city for the night. Sorry this entry was neither profound nor insightful. I’m sorry I wasn’t creative today. Tomorrow I’ll get back to banging speed and ranting about “da man,” or “da system” or how bad movies are, these days…
last night.
Zoya: are we still playing the ‘guess which craigslist ad is evan’s’ game? cause i think i just won
Evan: go on…
Zoya: “Hi, I’m 25 looking for someone younger or around my age to hang out with. My last 3 girlfriends were all virgins and I love the idea of teaching.”
Evan: is there a ‘cringing embarassingly’ emoticon?
