Just Don't Worry
It’s definitely not covered really anywhere, but the early ’90s college music scene was super neo-hippie, so much so that there was a term: “neo-hippie frat rat.”
I’m not sure there was anywhere in the world more full of neo-hippie frat-ratism than Austin.
People were super into the Dead, and Allman Brothers, and Blues Traveler, and other little bands, smaller bands, like Allgood, the Grapes. Austin’s own hippie jam band, Soulhat, was in there too, although I didn’t really get why.
I liked them better than all the others, and I just couldn’t dive fully into Dead culture. There was a disconnect somewhere.
I remember sitting around thinking, man, I could really get into the Allman Brothers deep, but the whole scene was like—I just couldn’t do it.
And I was convinced it was me.
Like, why couldn’t I make that leap? Try harder, JD!!
But all these scenes and all these bands and everything just kind of go to a mean.
They all end up in the same place. A mono kind of thing. Like there’s a defined list of things the scene will accept. There’s also a very defined set of “no’s.” There’s one way to do things. There’s for sure a few ways NOT to do things. And these rules just appear. Very mammalian almost.
And then it breaks and something changes and a new band comes along, everybody’s done with it all and it becomes some kind of subculture.
That’s all to say that—and this is a stretch but stay with me—I really have moved so far away from Ableton. And I have a bunch of friends, international friends, who are still into it, and I love that they’re into it and still rocking with it.
And I’m sorry that I’m not. That I can’t go over to Europe and hang out with Sebastian Mueller and do jams and workshops.
But I found out it wasn’t for me. At least not for now.
I’ve got a new songwriting semester coming up with my group on Wednesday, and I did a little test run this morning, and my thing is just lights out for me right now.
Everything feels really great. I wrote something yesterday I love. That’ll probably be the first song.
And I feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be.
And I’ve also got a rehearsal this week, going through vocals for the Grateful Dead band.
And it’s just really funny that that’s my main live thing now.
Because I never would have thought that I’d be in a Grateful Dead band, especially given how I tried so hard to get into them, and I couldn’t.
But I’ve now come to them musically, and I love it, and I get it, and I know how to play it. And programming the drums on MPC to rehearse with, hilariously.
And I know how to play bass Phil stuff, but we’re more rootsy than that, so I can bring my own thing to it.
Turns out, I really didn’t have to worry at all.