Realistically, it takes money. And this is the thing that no one really wants to talk about. It seemed like there was a time when we were all down in our drafty Massachusetts bedrooms, with guitars or pianos or drum kits, just trying hard to make music. Trying to write something that reminded us of the music we loved most. And just getting better, inch by slow inch, was reward enough.Then there...
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Posts by Alina Simone
My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #18
My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #17
Two of my childhood friends are famous. Not FAMOUS, but still... famous enough. And while I was living in New York City, and they were becoming famouser and famouser, it became more and more difficult for me to keep trotting out my favorite excuses regarding why I could never even hope to get anywhere in the music world. Let's call them Mr. Funny and Ms. Fancy. One is a comedian and one is a rock
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #15
So I put an ad in the back of the Village Voice where guys with flying V guitars and gnarly hair, who are already wicked pissed off at someone who has destroyed their one chance at stardom, demand things like 'pro-gear', pro-attitude', or 'pro chops' (what's a chop? I still don't know). Obviously my innocent, little ad, citing the influences of delicate and famous-only-in-certain-circles indie...
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #16
My friend Jim (the one who tried to pick me up via my Village Voice ad) hooked us up with his rehearsal space, a cavernous room stuffed with a decades worth of lost cables, broken amps and the forgotten sweatshirts of a thousand dead bands. It hung there, suspended up above 9th avenue, almost across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. We were on the tenth floor -- a teeth grinding ...
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #14
My cool new job sending people to Siberia actually required that I get another job - one that actually paid money. I won't get into the economics of indie-rock right now, that can come later, but here was my situation: Job A paid $25,000 before taxes for 35 hours of work per week from home. Our apartment alone cost around $1700 per month (welcome to the New York City metropolitan area folks!). Job
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #13
We lived above a cuban restaurant, at the corner of 3rd and Willow, a 10 minute walk from the river and that glittering, jewelbox view of Manhattan. I was looking to start a band, but I was also looking for other things, like a paying job. Anyone who has ever looked down the long and windowless tunnel of life-as-Dilbert, spent doing paperwork for a nameless, faceless corporation, knows enough t...
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #12
I only had one real friend in Austin. His name was Christopher, and he was a player. I don't feel nearly as bad spilling the torrid details of his life because he still owes me $500 for bailing him out on rent after a typical week of willful excess and debauchery. My favorite game to play with Christopher went like this: I would think of a string of three unrelated words and ask him to tell me a t
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #11
The whole reason that I am veering off into this total digression about my hobby of photographing my down-and-out neighbors in Hyde Park with a 1950's press camera is because there is an amazing story here. It is not my story. I have no right to tell it. And yet, that's exactly what I'm about to do. It's 2:45 am on the east coast -- I can't sleep and that homemade vodka raspberry lime rickey isn't
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #10
I was the queen of the homeless people. I'd set up my little maxi mouse amp in front of a dead zone on 6th street, what would later become a billiards parlor, and play the three songs I knew on acoustic guitar: No Woman No Cry, Masters of War by Bob Dylan and Troy by Sinead O'Connor. When I got tired of cycling through these three, I'd start singing accapella -- mostly folk and gospel songs by ...
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My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #9
It was the mid nineties and Austin was one of the white hot centers of the dot com boom. The third coast. Off Rt. 290, new roads, dark and eerily smooth, spun out like the milky whorls of a distance galaxy, into what had been miles of scrub and ranch land. Someone's 'little piece of heaven' got sucked under the bulldozers each day. Mini mansions unwound from these roads like dominoes, their ske...
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