Our Band Could Be Your Life
With all the talk about “indie rock” in the past year, Michael Azerrad’s excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life should be required reading. Over the course of 500+ pages, Azerrad covers the birth of the American indie underground of the 1980s - a time when “indie” meant Do-It-Yourself independence rather than the vaguely hip music genre the term implies today.
The book chronicles the indie careers of 13 bands - including Husker Du, The Replacements, Mission of Burma, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth - with a music geek’s attention for detail. But whether you’re interested in any of these bands, the real impact of the book is the focus on the DIY ethics and attitudes of the time - “Jamming econo” as Mike Watt of the Minutemen describes it. (The book’s title is taken from a Minutemen lyric: the simplified/indie ethos can be applied to anyone’s life, musician or not.) This was a time when bands played gigs in warehouses and basements and slept on office floors as a matter of principle as well as necessity. Highly recommended.