Dead Channel

Even better than the Twilight Zone, it's

Dead Channel

Alternative Rock

I'm forever indebted to a Terry Gross interview with William H. Macy that I heard on the radio years ago. In it, she grilled him on his acting technique, and he held forth on it with perfect confidence and Mametian precision. He said something to the effect that he didn't like method acting or so many of the other popular acting techniques because they all came too close to relying on inspiration, or the Muse. He said that any 'technique' that relied on inspiration or the Muse wasn't a technique at all, and that when you were inspired or had the Muse, you didn't need a technique. You were on fire then, and nothing could hold you back. But for the other 360 or so days per year, you needed a technique to get you through each scene. To reliably produce results in the absence of inspiration. It's common sense, but he put it very nicely and it applies to any kind of work you're serious about, in my humble opinion.

In a sense, his technique turned each scene into a problem, and it was his job to work toward a given solution. I'm a hyper-analytical kind of guy who likes solving problems, so this way of working through things does wonders for me.

So anyway, I'd identified a problem in one of my stories that I'm working on, and I was trying to work through it today. Imagine if all human civilizations were hijacked by a somewhat oppressive power in about 1943. We're not talking about slave-camps-and-hot-iron-on-the-feet oppression, just a power that attempts to put a collar on all humanity's baser instincts (being loud, sensual, indulgent, etc.). So think of it as a giant Baptist church, but without God. So in other words, like the Baptist church in the South. We'll call it The Power.

Now The Power doesn't really understand humans terribly well. It has great technology, superior to humans', but it doesn't understand how good humans are at running around or going under barriers they are confronted with. So The Power is, like most so-called totalitarian authorities, quite inefficient, leaving people with some wiggle room to play with.

So my 'problem' was: what do you think popular music would look like in America by 1983? Pretty soon, I got so fascinated with the possibilities that I forgot about any kind of solution. So really, the exercise worked.

No Sun Records. No British Invasion. And then no hippies, and no Summer of Love. No mass production or distribution of rock or R&B records. It all stays underground. Records are cut in improvised basement studios or in normal studios, after hours, when nobody's around to see it happen. An array of regional bootleg networks bleed over into each other somewhat, but mostly you're listening to records produced one town over. Except when you can tune in a pirate station across the country run by a music fanatic with some balls and a shortwave set, beaming outlaw, raunchy blues out of the South or the latest crazy jump and swing out of Chicago, and it blows your mind because you've never heard it before, and may never hear it again.

Rock and Roll (though it doesn't exist by that name) stays naughty. Even the 'mainstream' of it is subversive when it's not sexy, angry when it's not animated. It's sweaty men in juke-joints playing for that girl at the edge of the stage. It's the obsessed who only find peace in their music, recording it for the love of the sound. Very little in the way of paychecks, very little in the way of marketing. It's country boys with homemade electric guitars jamming with R&B drummers and horn players, after hours, in the back of the roadhouse.

Rock and roll.

I'm getting drunk on thinking about the ultimate bands that might exist in such an alternative universe.

And whatever it ended up looking like, there would be no such monstrosities as this.