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In This Issue

• The Sex Strike: Year Three
• Your Neighbors’ Christmas Lights & Personalities
• Excerpts from “A Jigsaw Christmas Carol”
• Festivalia 2006-2007 (Part Two of a Two-Part Series)
• Things to do with THE FED (besides reading it)
• An Erotic Channukah For The Hot Maccabee In You
• In A Land Of “Wonderful Christmastime,” The Seeds Of Discontent Form In A Chinese Drug
• Columbionics
• Inability to work v. Lateness
• Santa Outsources to China
• They Watch
• The Staff of 23.4

Andres Vedova

Rachel Katz

Jacqueline Beckwith (a non-celebrity), Cameron Bird (vocals for Architecture in Helsinki) and Rachel Katz (another non-celebrity), CMJ ‘06

Rachel Katz

Lovefoxxx, lead vocals for CSS, dancing on stage with the infamous “bush people,” Virgin Fest 2007

Rachel Katz

Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips at a press conference, Bonnaroo 2007

Last issue I gave synopses of my experiences as an attendee of CMJ, Bonnaroo, and VFest. This article, however, deals with conclusions that I have come to by merely spending time with famous people, when I honestly have little right to. For both CMJ and Bonnaroo I was granted Press Access, which meant I could go backstage at my leisure and spend time with the Stars of The Music Scene. Hence:

PART 2: Analysis of the concept of “Celebrity” at CMJ ’06, Bonnaroo ’07, and Virgin Festival ’07.

From the age of ten I have been going to rock concerts and thoroughly enjoying myself. The former years of my musical “seasoning,” if you will, were spent at the HFStival at RFK Stadium in D.C. But because my father feared that I was too young to be thrown around viciously in the mosh pit, I was only allowed to go if I stayed in the stadium seats. Also, he argued, I was too short to see over the crowd. Sadly, the height problem is still mostly true. By the age of fourteen, however, I was in the crowd enjoying the music with the attendees, being pushed and shoved and kicked in the face, and groped—but I loved it.

As I grew older, I took music more seriously, and my concertgoing was no longer restricted to that one time of year where I saw a lot of trashy people drink beer at a football stadium and take it as an excuse to wear super-trampy clothing. Music became an all-encompassing project in social psychology for me. At shows, my father, his girlfriend, and I would get backstage (if you want to know how, it is because me dad is the DOC, or Doctor of Cool, according to his best friend, Mike) and merely hang out. I became fascinated with not only the “scene”—the famous people, the alcohol, the cigarettes, and the groupies—but more so the humanity of said famous people, the alcohol obviously, and the lack of groupies or even Band Aides. I found no Penny Lane, but I did find mothers, wives, children, and always booze.

The main reason why I began to sneak backstage was my ever-burgeoning autograph collection, however the more times I hung out with the “backstage crowd” the more I began to actually enjoy their company. They weren’t the sybarites that I had expected them to be, but much closer to the people in front of the stage. The only difference, I came to realize, was that one group of people had the instruments. Both groups have families and friends that support their endeavors, both enjoy music, both enjoy drinking and socializing. These Rock Stars, with capital Rs and capital Ss, were much kinder and, dare I say, more normal than the lead of one of the school plays in my junior year of high school (she was a complete bitch. Terrible case of egotism). Regina Spektor on stage at Bonnaroo began to lament the heat of Tennessee: “Now all of you say your names on the count of three…One…Two…Three. Great, now I’m going to worry about each individual one of you. That’s just as large as my Russian Judaism is.” And at one point, the people on the inside were just as anonymous as the people on the outside. Even more surprising, sometimes the people on the inside are the people on the outside. To quote Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, “If I wasn’t playing these festivals, I would be there anyway…crowd here is artists and musicians. Everyone here is in their element.” This is the same Wayne Coyne that makes his grand entrance onto the stage via a giant “space bubble” that he rolls in onto the crowd.

But despite all of my attention paid to the atmosphere (for that, read the previous article), for at least two of the festivals I actually had business being backstage rather than my previous clandestine affairs with the VIP areas.

At CMJ, certain shows were difficult to get press access granted. Many venues were not under CMJ authority and there was no overall press access letter given out to each backstage manager. At the Shins show, I couldn’t even get in to the concert at all, because they oversold tickets and underestimated the crowd that the Shins, CSS, the Album Leaf, the Thermals, and three other bands (that I’d never heard of) would attract. But other venues, such as Studio B in Brooklyn and Irving Plaza in the city, were quite indulgent.

At Studio B on the night Mindless Self Indulgence played, we hung out with the manager, James Galus, and the band back in the green room. They had really good chips and dip and free Red Bull for which I was quite grateful. The band didn’t come backstage until after their set and only for twenty minutes, but Jimmy Urine gave me the biggest, sweatiest hug and kissed me smack on the forehead and thanked me for dancing in the crowd. I got him to sign a cocktail napkin for my cousin who lives and breathes by MSI. The “Rock Star” in him was thinking ‘old potatoes’ I’m sure, but still, he smiled and gave me the autograph and then collapsed in one of the couches and had his girlfriend sit in his lap. I was seated on a coffee table not five feet from them, and mused to myself how this man in front of me who was practically kittenish in his reactions to his girlfriend stroking his hair, was the same man who has been purported to ejaculate on his adoring fans during a song called Masturbate. They seemed almost Jekyll and Hyde in their differences. One was rude and vicious, living up to his stage name, whereas the other was rather polite and quite funny. This was one shiningly obvious example of my theory that all Rock Stars have Multiple Personality Disorder. Or rather, that they become someone else to their crowd, so as to not let them down by how utterly normal they are in reality.

People think that rock stars go back stage and do blow off of a stripper’s ass, but from the multiple and different experiences I’ve had, I have never seen one stripper backstage. Nor, even more surprisingly, did I see blow. I suppose that there could have been discreet usage, and I don’t doubt that in certain situations there was, but we are not living in the 70’s where it was entirely acceptable for a musician to do a line off of the hired women. The era of the Rock Star is fading fast…the definition of a Rock Star certainly isn’t what it used to be. Back in the original movement of The Super-Mega-ROCK Star, there were succinct boundaries of what actions, code of dress, and music defined them. However, as the movement of rock expanded, so did said boundaries. No longer does the Rock Star need teased hair and a cigarette dangling precariously from his lower lip. The Rock Stars of the twenty-first century look more and more like that guy who lives on the floor below you, or that kid who works at Starbucks. That girl that cuts your hair. These people have less of a transformation from their former selves to current selves than a baby duck molting.

Though they are often courteous and even downright friendly, I have no delusions that these musicians actually remember who I am; to them I am Press. I am the ever-present gnat in their manes. While they may accept my company courteously, I do not become a friend, because I am actively storing away every single move they make in order to prove a point or write an article. They cannot trust me to be fair or flattering, because God knows once you open up to a member of the press and give juicy tidbits of your personal life, it’ll be a feature on Page 6 or in Us Weekly the very next day.

And yet, these stars have trusted me. Whether it was due to their naiveté about the press or my natural friendliness (or even my seeming, yet misjudged, ineptitude as a reporter) I have hung out with these musicians. They have confided more than the typical, generic stories that are reserved for the public’s ears. And that in itself is something remarkable.