I love the unknown band. I should define that better: I love the good, decent, hardworking, unknown band. The band that is content to avoid the games and all the uphill struggle of musical popularity and actually, dare I write it, stay true to their music. It’s an idea that every band throws around, but it always ends up on the van floor with all the cigarette butts, half-stale cookies and a week’s worth of dirty laundry.
I love the good, unknown band that knows no matter how many nights spent in the safety of a well-lit Wal-Mart parking lot, eating out of dumpsters, that their music is solid, albeit undiscovered. They aren’t dependant on the rest of us to tell them that they’re good at making music.
All us fringe music lovers have our own favorite unknown band and among them, Surrogate is my favorite. Surrogate spent three weeks on Emery’s acoustic tour this summer and to date, their Myspace still has fewer than 1,000 friends. It’s not that they’re unpopular; it’s just that they don’t have to be. Chris, the lead singer is perfectly content to live in his trailer home outside Chico shooting clay pigeons and drinking Newcastle’s with his friends. He knows he’s good at music; he just doesn’t need us to validate him. He’ll surface every few years and record another brilliant album and hopefully tour on it for a few weeks like a modern-day Townes Van Zandt. Chris’s CD comes out next week on a semi-decent label, but it’s so different than what they usually put out that they’ve already forgotten it was their money that paid for production (money that Chris took and used to buy his own recording equipment and then proceeded to record the whole project in his living room).
They’re out there in almost every venue in America, my favorite unknown and yours. They get all the weeknights, all the Monday shows for gas money and maybe a place to stay. The new working-class hero is a musician in an unknown, unsuccessful band. And we love them for it. Someone has to do it. We’re glad it’s not us. We want to sleep in our own beds and drive cars that actually have air conditioning. We’ll know who they are though and we’ll always be there to buy another pity t-shirt.
Chad,
promoter, Solid Ground Cafe
www.myspace.com/sgcafe
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