Jam Bands

“You totally would have loved Mr. Sunday,” Jennifer said.   She carefully placed her wine glass down on the coffee table and then went on gushing.  “Relaxed, outside, food trucks, and then that kind of music you like, you know, no words… …dance-ie… …flowing…” Her voice trailed off.  My tongue contracted against the roof of my mouth.  My eyes felt bolted down in their stare.  My body was completely still except for the subtle raise of my eyebrows. 

            “Jam bands?” I said this as if offering my husband some dessert.  A piece of pie, dear? 

            “That’s it!  Yes, all kinds of jammie music.  Seriously, you should have come.”  Jennifer took another sip of her wine.  I smiled, still not moving, dead stare, and said nothing.  Without a conscious thought, I placed my bare feet on the living room rug.  I pushed my weight onto my legs and off of the couch, walked to my bedroom, and shut the door.  I sat at my desk, staring straight ahead for a moment.  I swiveled my desk chair back around to face the inside of my room.  Jam bands?  Why is everyone under the impression that I am an 18-year-old white dude from Long Island that smokes pot in his parent’s basement while watching DVDs of Phil Lesh performing at Terrapin Crossroads with Further?  Did I do something to make you think I have Phish and Grateful Dead tapestries hanging on my walls next my Jimi Hendrix incense?  Did watching my ex-boyfriend at Arlene’s Grocery play “the most significant gig of his life” cause you to believe that I like jam bands?  Was it all the Phish shows I was dragged to by previous boyfriends where the only relief I could get from the drug-drenched-eyes-glazed-over-head-bopping-numbed audience was to visit the ice cream truck, because at least Vermont has good icecream?  Was it seeing Dark Star Orchestra in Philly where I lied and told my boyfriend I felt sick and had to go home so as to avoid standing for 4 hours swaying, listening to ONE LONG OVERDONE SONG?  Or maybe it was the Disco Biscuits show where I spent the majority of the time in the bathroom, watching girls snort things up their noses because I found it far more interesting than the concert?   Must have been the biscuits.  That must be why you think I love jam bands.  

            A jam band in case you have not been graced with hearing one play, is a kind of band that often goes off on long, improvisational musical interludes, no lyrics, no beginning or and worst of all, no end in sight.  The songs of jam bands have names,  and then the rest, is up for well, fucking off.  Fucking off is what entitled pseudo-hippie male (and sometimes desperate female) populations of the northeast and California, refer to as “jamming.”   This kind of music was particularly popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, which coincidentally coincided with the rise in the use of psychedelic drugs.  Only at that time, there was a political message and stance behind the music so though I don’t particularly care for a lot of it, I can understand and respect it.  And at that time, Jerry Garcia sang about liberating oneself, and actually liberated himself with his lifestyle.  Since then, other bands, sometimes made up of the original bands’ members that have not died from drug overdoses, have come into popularity and play to packed open-air venues, to children of wealthy Long Island corporate lawyers, furious in nothing except for their quest to get tickets to the next big Phish show.  Yes, the act of attending a jam band show has become a demonstration of one’s status and education level.  It is a club, an exclusive club that I do not and never wanted to be part of, but found myself in because of the men I dated.

             Now I know what you’re thinking.  I’m a stuck up prissy, never tried a drug in my life, I need to “live more in the moment” and just let go (in that California bullshit accent) and perhaps I would understand.  Well let me tell you I have tried.  Hard.  And a lot.  First of all, the songs have no beginning and no end.  And I know, I know that’s like “part of the philosophy man…the song continues long after you are listening and it’s totally meta…”  …I get it.  I studied British Romantic poetry in college and took more than one class that had a title like “Buddhism and the Concept of I.”  I’m not exactly a geologist with my head in the dirt with no appreciation for the abstract or for philosophical ponderings.   I can certainly riff.  What I can’t do is get behind an art form that is, strangely very much like the boyfriends I dated.  It denotes privilege and segregates those that play instruments from those that do not, and worse  leaves no room for those that merely wish to know “what’s going on” as the song continues into it’s tenth or eleventh minute without any sense of ending.  And worst of all, when I say this to a jam band fanatic, a lover of the musician’s music, I am met with a pretentious sort of surprise.  “Well, you wouldn’t understand.  You don’t play an instrument.”

            You may be wondering if I hate anything more than I hate jam bands?  I do.  I hate that it took me years to spread the curtains to my own thought and voice, to peer out of myself, look someone else in their stoned, reddened eyes, and say, “Ya know what?  This music.  It’s not for me,” and not made to feel less intelligent or less cultured or political, or dare I use a jammer’s word, “open” because of it.