Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 25-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
In 1985, David and I went to a Vancouver record pressing plant to watch the final preparation of our LP. We asked the guy to write “we live on Indian land” around the inner groove of the LP, and the guy asked if I was singing in Indian. Huh? Some weeks later, we loaded 500 LPs into the trunk and backseat of my Toyota Corolla. We sent the record out to a handful of college radio stations in Canada, and soon the first response arrived: two pieces of mail from the University of Alberta in Edmonton on the same day. A radio-station playlist with Mecca Normal at number one and the station’s magazine with a review of the album saying it was the worst record ever made. The guy said I should be killed. Actually, he said Dave should kill me. This polarity has continued through Mecca Normal’s history: Some hate us, others are passionate about what we do. A very interesting vantage point to occupy for 25 years. There is great value to the activity of debate in the margins, where it is important to establish and maintain many voices. We are happy to stimulate this enterprise. It is not a service we set out to provide, but a strange bi-product of making music as social and cultural agitation. In her NPR column Monitor Mix, Carrie Brownstein recently quoted what I wrote about nasty comments on Brooklyn Vegan after an excellent piece about our recent tour. “People participate in media now, and this is what people interject with in this quadrant of culture—it’s rather depressing to think that there have been a lot of quiet people, and now they speak in comment boxes and type things like—’hag’ and ‘douchebag’—and I thought about the sad, low state these guys must be in psychologically, and how men in general, have, as well as being socialized to hide emotions other than anger, have also learned to hide misogyny, allowing it to spew in blog comment boxes, anonymously—it’s some kind of barometer.” Along with the name-callers were the defenders of Mecca Normal and a most interesting comment: “Just because a lot of people agree on something doesn’t mean they’re right.”
