Every week, 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 42-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Yesterday, I contacted Rain City Rock Camp and Bellingham Girls Rock Camp and asked about donating some number of CDs to pass along to their participants. Either they know of us or they don’t. I didn’t write an exposé about “who we are” to sell them on the idea, but as is sometimes the way during the formation of a plan, I started to get ideas. Within an email, I spontaneously suggested that I would make some content about Mecca Normal’s activities specifically for their programs, which would be aimed at much younger folks than the classroom events we presented in colleges around 2010 when these rock-camp kids hadn’t even been born yet.
I got back to the very nice venue where the merch is stored and asked if, without making a buncha work for people there, they could assist with something like this, and believe me, I’ve thought this through. They simply want us to come and take away all our stuff, a pick-up truck’s worth. That’s what they envision, but here’s me saying something like, “Can I get various people to arrange to come by and pick up some amounts of stuff from the 25-plus boxes that your people will open and count out for them?” I envision this happening with all parties crouching in an under-height basement, but I think I’ve invented that part.
I believe Dave has a list of contents because that’s his department, while my department is the band’s only driver, which means I don’t lift boxes or equipment or keep track of what’s where.
So, guess what? The guy at the venue basically said they could assist with this kind of thing. Now I’m excited about formalizing a campaign that intends to illuminate what’s possible with music considering all the ways we approached it. Whether that’s the idea that one never knows what’s going to happen, but starting and persisting are super important because that’s how adventures, opportunities, fun and interesting people will get into your life. That could be enough for a video right there. Or how about the concept of a far-flung coalition of young women at a disadvantage when it came to participating in the music scene created a viable social movement? What does that look like in a nutshell for 12-year-old girls? The idea would be not to get bogged down in too much history, but to present it in ways that will appeal to those who are used to TikTok-length episodes.
“1922” from The Observer (Kill Rock Stars, 2006) (download):
