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.
I’ve made quite a few videos, but not for a while. One of my favourites was screened at PopCon, the annual gathering of rock critics, scholars and other music enthusiasts. Made in 2016, it includes an overview of stuff that went on mostly between the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, which is now all ancient history.
Just taking a look at it at now, noting that in footage of a rather raucous live performance of “Joelle” in Chicago in the mid-’90s [2:08] just after I stop singing about a young woman whose boyfriend is staying with her while her parents are out of town. He expects her to make him breakfast and before you know it, the frying pan flies across the room and hits the wall “with all the energy and the history of a situation … Joelle!!”
Dave takes the guitar down low to create a space where I might “do something” it turns out to be a good place to have a private chat with him about god knows what, but something amusing, evidently. And in so doing, the audience is exposed to vital information about the angry feminist band they’ve heard on the albums—there’s funny stuff, too! Radical!
I may have been somewhat oblivious to the power of nuanced impressions that a man and a woman sharing a stage 50/50 in the ’80s and ’90s held beyond advocating for equality for women. Audiences could see our friendship in action, and maybe that was a transformative element equal to the ideas presented in the lyrics. In fact, maybe just that snippet could be presented with text to make an impression about such things.
Here’s a message I just sent to Judy, who purchased the Mac Jacket painting yesterday.
“In considering donating portions of [Mecca Normal merch] to Girls Rock Camp situations, I began to realize that even the admins there may not have heard of us, let alone the participants. So … as I was sending messages … I started to think about making online content to give context to specific areas of focus that would be aimed at much younger people than our classroom event, which when I think of those times, my first thought is you bringing us to Evergreen (State College) to present our lecture (circa 2011), and of course any time I think of the art we put up along the way, the art shows you facilitated at Northern (all-ages event space and art gallery in Olympia) are the visuals that pop into my head. Thank you for supplying many years of internal reference points that are currently fueling a new idea!”
Another short video could be “Small Things Do Turn Into Bigger Things But Not Usually The Things You Thought They Would, But Once You’re There, What You Thought They’d Turn Into Isn’t All That Important Because What They Are Is Totally Lit, But I Will Check Out The Word Lit Because It Was About 20 Years Ago That A Teacher Told Me This Was A Word That Would Show That I’m Down With The Kids If I Used It Which I Never Have, So It Might Reveal Something Else About Me Now.”
OK, now I’m not only looking for merch distro, I’m also looking for organizations I can approach with my offer of CDs and online content.
“Fallen Skier” from The Observer (Kill Rock Stars, 2006) (download):
