Austin City Limits Festival in Aught-Eight. | The Real Guitar Heroes

Austin City Limits Festival this year came in a concentrated dose from Friday evening through Saturday night. For me it was the return of the Drive By Truckers. I used to see them every time they came through town. One year I saw them 8 times in a week. My friends and I committed to the task starting in Dallas and tracked them through Denton, Austin, and back down to San Marcos. It earned us an invite back to the house where they were staying. Wildly drunk, I couldn’t keep up and my girlfriend drove me home. After that I could usually get in a quick conversation with Jason, the band’s youngest member and now that he’s left and I let two albums worth of tours go by I’m back to anonymous fan status. And that’s still a good place to be with the Truckers because you’re in good company. Their latest album Brighter than Creation’s Dark is especially raw and to the point. No pretense with these guys. Looking around at Emos I realized I was surrounded by sweaty men who knew all the words and were frequently singing along with arms around shoulders. DBT’s songwriters speak honestly about suburban living, the pain of war, and what grabbed me is a quick line at the end of the song Self Destructive Zones that I felt struck at the core of what’s happening with kids and music today.

The verse goes:

The hippies rode a wave putting smiles on faces,
that the devil wouldn’t even put a shoe
Caught between a generation dying from its habits,
and another thinking rock and roll was new
Till the pawn shops were packed like a backstage party,
hanging full of pointy ugly cheap guitars
And the young'uns all turned to karaoke,
hanging all their wishes upon disregarded stars

It’s that last bit about karaoke that makes me laugh then shudder. I read karaoke as ‘Guitar Hero’. Kids are using video games to mainline fame directly into their veins. You get to skip practicing, skip writing your own songs, skip the pain, and just crawl in the skin of Slash. Nintendo knows it too. The commercial for Rock Band shows a mob of hip teenagers invading a suburban home as if it were one of rock’s hallowed venues. Mom’s probably heating up pizza pockets in the living room. They flow downstairs into the basement where there’s a full stage, lights, mics, guitars, instruments, and probably a load of laundry running in the back.

I was guilty of a similar fantasy when I was a teenager. Instead of video games, it was pure imagination. I wrote an ongoing story of an alternate future where all my friends had a band. We practiced in the back room at my parent’s house. We performed at the fine arts camp in Michigan I went to. Then I caught up with my age in the story, which was the last year of high school and it occurred to me that if I had spent less time writing and more time practicing with my friends we might actually have a band. It took years to get used to the idea that I could just go out and play my own material in front of people if I wanted to. I never did form a band.

Without digressing too much I think Guitar Hero will be the drug of choice for teenagers who have the dream but don’t see why they should have to pay dues when they can go directly to rock star status within a video game. This is not an apocalyptic problem. What will happen is those same kids will realize that heroin is not nearly as rewarding as living in the real world, including the sacrifices you have to make to live in it. Maybe they will become so pent up from funneling their creativity through a plastic 4 buttoned guitar that the aftermath will be the most moving, inspired rock music we’ve heard in generations.

ACL always proves that good music is still happening, and it’s not all that underground. It’s just not on the radio. You can trust teenagers to root it out, too. They have nothing but time on their hands to plumb the internet and social networking for quality, or at least original manifestations of Great Music.

The Truth Train

Any religious conversation usually winds its way down to the prime mover argument. It will start with the idea of intelligent design, the watch found in the forest, who was the designer? and so on. Then eventually all the way back to the big bang. The universe had a beginning, so what caused it? Who/what caused the big bang? What was there before the big bang? All very important questions. After the scientist shrugs and says “well we’re just not sure”, Christianity clears its throat, proudly steps to the lectern and says “Well let me tell you Who caused the big bang, it was this Fella named God, his only son is Jesus, he died for our sins, it says so in the Bible for which we can provide evidence of its inerrancy. The end.”

The problem is they are passing off an hypothesis for a solution. It’s a tough hypothesis at that because it is un-disprovable. We are damn lucky to be able to look as far back as we can into the birth of our universe, which is something like a second after the big bang. Before that? Well, that’s a tough call. I honestly don’t know how we’d even go about finding out what existed before the big bang or what caused it. In fact, it makes my brain hurt.

Fortunately, Christianity has been more than willing to give us an answer. An answer that we made up thousands of years ago and paraded it as common sense through a combination of good deeds and brute force. But it really doesn’t explain anything, since you’re still left to explain the origin of God. Fortunately again, the Bible eases that anxiety by telling us that God is timeless, there was nothing before God, he exists beyond our physical realm, and other exceptions. I don’t buy it, but a lot of other people do.

So it’s as if it comes down this: Truth is what you get when you stop asking questions. I’m going to call this the Truth Train and it goes like this:

In the beginning the Truth Train left the station with all of humanity on board. It didn’t go very far. It just let everybody off in this old time neighborhood called Nature and Ancestor Worship. It was ok, nothing fancy but it was a place to crash after a long day of hunting mastodon.

Polytheism Town was built just outside of Nature and Ancestor Worship. Lots of marble columns. Hard to navigate.

Then they built this neighborhood called Christ-ville. People shunned it at first but after a few moved in they told their friends. In fact they would get back on the train, go back to the old neighborhoods and either persuade or force those guys to get back on the train and come up to the new place. So they did. And they built more and more houses to fit everyone.

But the Truth Train started servicing areas beyond Christ-ville, including Helio-Centric Town and Evolution City. At first Christ-ville told their citizens those cities beyond were full of trashy, classless types. You don’t want to go there. Then they built a wall and said if you go there, we’re going to kick you out of Christ-ville. I mean it!

Eventually though, Christ-ville annexed Helio-Centric Town and much much later even Evolution City. (There’s still controversy over this. Some parts of Christ-ville don’t recognize Evolution City’s Right to Exist. Very polarizing)

And the Truth Train just keeps rolling. New tracks are being laid all the time. These days most people are getting off somewhere in Christ-ville. Some still live in the original parts, but more and more people live in the suburbs of Evo-Town and just try to ignore the stink-eye they get from the folks in the old part of town.

These people are pretty happy with their lives. They know the train keeps going, but there’s a lot of security in Christ-ville and the schools are ok, so they stay.

Some people stay on the train though.

In fact if you ride it long enough you get to a place that’s not so bad either. You realize there are other nice places to live besides Christ-ville (which you can always go back and visit). It’s a place where you can get along with your neighbor just because you want them to get along with you, without fearing retribution from the Authorities. It’s Reality City, and it’s getting bigger all the time. The developers can’t even tell you where the edge of town is. If you keep going on the train, the edge just gets further and further back, and you see parts of the city you didn’t even know where there. You could spend a lifetime exploring it. If you get yourself into a Fallacy part of town, you can just back out and go down another street. You don’t have to buy a house built on one of those old Assumption foundations.

Me? I’m riding the train to the end of the line.