9/19-20: Lyon, Straussburg

In Lyon we arrived at what looked like an unlikely spot for the show – a giant office building. In years past, the squatters in Lyon had come to an arrangement with the city that they could have this building as a social center until it was demolished, at which point they’d get a new building. We wandered the halls looking at show posters for ten minutes before we finally found the people setting up the show. In spite of an incredibly well arranged show supporting the post-punk band Animals & Men, my guitar was suffering from the shifting climates and I played worse than any other show on tour.

Noam and Gilles drove us to Straussburg and then bid us a sad farewell. Here too we discovered that the punks in Straussburg had been given a huge building by the city with which to do as they may. The venue, Molodoi, had been contracted rent free as an underground music venue and infoshop 18 years ago and they were anticipating another 18 year contract on the horizon. I was on the bill with two crust metal bands and two math rock bands, all of whom were great.

Almost everywhere we’ve been in Europe we’ve visited long running sustainable independent music venues. Squats, legalized squats, collectively run venues that are decades old, etc… Compared to the United States, Europe has us well beat out on spaces for underground music. The few American examples are nationally famous in the punk world – Gilman St., ABC No Rio – but in Washington DC for example we’re lucky to have a venue for two years. Just before I left for tour two show spaces and two houses closed or stopped doing shows. In spite of it all, American underground music is still going strong and it’s interesting to see the evidence of it over here. Everywhere we’ve been we’ve met people excited about American music, playing American songs, wearing American band tee shirts. It makes you wonder how American music could be so widely appreciated when we live in a culture that doesn’t in any way nurture spaces for independant music to thrive?

The obvious and surely most accurate answer is that American cultural imperialism has created a USA-centrism that permeates even the smaller crevices of subcultures internationally. But part of it, it could be argued as devil’s advocate or maybe out of a deep seeded patriotic defensiveness, is that maybe American music benefits from its isolation in the same way that some of the best songs were products of depression. Maybe the artist in exile has a greater sense of urgency and it’s in that urgency that the creative impulse grows. Take the birth of jazz and the blues as examples of what kind of brilliant creativity can come out of impoverished conditions… living in the one world superpower is probably the bigger puzzle piece, though the second line of argument does make for a small consolation to the fact that Americans are so utterly lacking in resources to foster underground music compared to our counterparts abroad.

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