Recommended Reading

Ditch the Flames! So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other Tales from a Drummer’s Life.

By Jacob Slichter

New York: Broadway Books. 286 pp. $21.95

Funny system, the music business. You think you understand the rules, and then they change right before your eyes. Take, for example, the first video filmed by the group Semisonic, which accompanied the song “Down In Flames.” The band hired a former associate, Doug Gayeton, to direct. He had shot a video for Matthew Sweet’s song “Time Capsule” in which the singer was tied to the ground and sang as cockroaches crawled over him. MTV rejected it as “too gross.” So Gayeton takes his idea for the Semisonic film, which involves a lot of fire effects, but clears it first with the channel so as to avoid the Sweet shenanigans. Completes the project, sends it to the group’s label, MCA, who gets it to MTV. What’s the verdict? “We can’t show a video with all this fire!” Sometimes you just can’t win.

Jacob Slichter was the drummer for Semisonic When he joined the band, he had made less than a dozen public appearances in course of his life as a professional musician. Cloaked in his “mantle of failure,” he was surprised and elated when a Harvard classmate, Dan Wilson, invited him, along with John Munson, to form a band. Dan and John had experienced a successful run as part of the group Trip Shakespeare, but recently been dropped by their label, A&M. The trio hoped to find a space in the rock landscape following the demise of Nirvana that depended less on rage and raw energy and more on melody and smart lyrics. They �put together a four-song demo that Slichter describes as “up-tempo melodic songs with smart lyrics rendered by the wry optimism of Dan’s tenor, the sour skronk of his guitar, and a fat bass and drum groove below.”

Unlike most applicants to the star making machinery, Semisonic landed a deal with MCA, now Universal, and ended up releasing three CDs. Two songs, “Closing Time” and “Secret Smile,” were hits; the former was even nominated for a Grammy. Nonetheless, their fame is fleeting. In a universe of niche marketing, Semisonic never adopt an easily assigned category in the public consciousness. Their label therefore treats them with all the erratic attention of prospective dance partners at a high school prom. “Negativity and doubt within MCA combined with the familiar difficulties at radio - ‘It ‘s too soft for alternative, and pop won’t add it until it this on another format’” - such is Semisonic’s inevitable fate on the merry-go-round of success..

This story could be the basis of sour grapes and grousing, but instead, Slichter transforms bile into belly laughs and complaints into career advice. So You Wanna Be Rock & Roll Star is his account of this swift and sweet journey to the top of the charts and one of the more entertaining and instructive books by a professional musicians I’ve read in quite some time. Part of it comes from the fact that the drummer is literate and level-headed. You can credit that to the Harvard degree or his Mid-West-bred mantle of common sense. Either way, the drummer can be star-struck and down-to-earth in the same sentence. Part of his appeal comes down to the fact that Slichter comes across as being as neurotic as the next guy: worried how he’ll look in the video; convinced he comes across as a dork in designer clothes; suspicious of the good intentions of professionally hip record executives. He depicts the anxieties attendant to fame and the fact that success does not necessarily breed happiness or even mental health. Worries over sales figures all too easily remove not only the pleasure in the work to be done but also erode one’s conviction that anyone will hear good work at all.

Although Slichter scrupulously avoids descending into raging against the music machine, So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star identifies with particular clarity the obstacles bands face at the present time. He chronicles the ups and downs of dealing with the complications of getting radio airplay and how sometimes it seems as if program directors believe they sit at the axis of the universe. However, he recognizes that the greater issue remains being stuck with confining categories. Slichter understands that making music that cuts across boundaries is no easy task. Both the labels and the stations seem to assume that the public’s eardrums block up unless what they’re offered fits unreasonably neat and discreet categories. Try breaking out of the box and they build another container around you, nonetheless.

The tagline in Semisonic’s biggest hit “Closing Time” that proved to lodge in many people’s ears was, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Nice turn of phrase, and Slichter ends his engaging volume with a similarly up-beat but adult sense that something else lies around the corner. Wonder what he will write or the band will record next?

Posted Nov 29, 2004

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