To hell with teams. I want to be in a band.
Friday nights in Skagit Valley in the late nineteen eighties meant an abundance of high school sports events. My alma mater Mount Vernon High School had a phenomenal basketball team that won state my junior and senior year, and included future NBA and MLB pro Mark Hendrickson and the balletic phenom Tim Caviezel. I was privileged to witness their games courtside as a reporter and photographer for the weekly Skagit Argus and took classes taught by the coaches. Imagine hearing a couple thousand people packed into a high school gymnasium collectively gasp in astonishment. That’s what it was like watching the Bulldogs dominate the court.
Across the street from Mount Vernon High School stood a house out of a Tim Burton movie, a miraculously uncondemned, haunted-looking mansion surrounded by overgrown flower beds, the home and practice pad of the band Cranial Decomposition. I admired the hell out of those guys and considered them friends. The classic lineup was Alex DeBlassio, Ray Belisle, twins Bob and Dan Newman, and Aaron Lamont, though later my friend Thom McCafferty took over on bass. Cranial were part of a local music scene that performed at the Hillcrest Park Lodge and the Rexville Grange Hall and occasionally recorded demo tapes that were played on community college radio. At any given time, there were about a dozen alternative rock bands in Skagit Valley in the late eighties playing songs about nuclear war, flag burning, and Mr. Potato Head. Stagnant Water, Systym Victym, Mytzlplck, and my own band that I’d given the cringe-worthy name 2AM played shows with bands from out of town including Seaweed, Some Velvet Sidewalk, The Monomen, Nation of Ulysses, and Scream, which featured a young Dave Grohl on drums.
In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about the difference between teams and bands. Even though I loved teams sports as a spectator, I hated them as a player. The word “team” still provokes negative associations of the numerous times I was yelled at, body shamed, excluded, and pointedly picked last. My grade school soccer team was an unstoppable regional powerhouse on which I was relegated to the position of defender because I was slow and unaggressive. In one match, I made a successful penalty shot after which my teammates made me feel real great by exclaiming that it was a miracle that I had actually scored a goal. In seventh grade, I played center on my school’s basketball team and spent the season getting ridiculed by my own teammates. The following year, a group of boys approached me and said they only needed only one more player in order to fill out a roster. I told them that since they’d spent the previous season teasing me and never passing me the ball, this year no one would get to play basketball.
So when I hear corporate America talk about TEAMS TEAMS TEAMS JOIN OUR TEAM ITS ALL ABOUT THE TEAM THERE’S NO I IN TEAM IT’S A TEAM EFFORT TEAMS! TEAMS! TEAMS! I imagine red faced middle aged men in graduated tint eyewear working out their inferiority complexes by volunteering for youth sports.
One evergreen feature of grade school athletics in the 1980s was getting screamed at by other kids’ parents; many of those Conway Elementary soccer matches were essentially tournaments of intergenerational verbal abuse. It got so bad that during one match, my neighbor John Jefferson, who was refereeing, ejected a particularly vociferous mom and dad from the sidelines. This was shockingly eventful, totally out of the ordinary. Typically we’d just watch the target of parental ire blubber in humiliation and occasionally we’d pile on the abuse ourselves. Yeah, your mom’s right, Kyle. You SUCK. This was all supposed to make us tough.
Once, after a wrestling tournament in which I lost every match (as was typical), I got a ride home with one of the assistant coaches, a dad whose son was a star wrestler. During the ride, this potato farmer with short man’s syndrome harangued me with a litany of all the ways I was failing as an eighth-grade wrestler. My own parents, it should be noted, were wonderfully supportive and encouraging, took community college classes on how to improve their children’s self-esteem, and never once berated me from the sidelines. I remember thinking, as I rode home enduring the harping criticism of a man who was wholly invested in the championship potential of thirteen year old boys, who the fuck does this guy even think he is?
The organizing principles of bands made more sense to me than the hierarchal, zero-sum-game dynamics of teams. In bands, each member had a predefined role based on the instrument they played. You wrote songs through a rigorous process of aesthetic negotiation in which the most necessary skill was the capacity to listen to one another. Bands were competitive with other bands, but could be fans of those other bands, too. Competition didn’t lead to a winner and a loser, but instead created vectors of inspiration that allowed you to grow and change when exposed to other musical ideas. When another band played, you danced. When you played, they danced. All the supposed camaraderie that was being promised in the locker rooms of Skagit Valley I found on sweaty stages where dudes emptied their lungs into microphones.
And it was dudes, mostly. Guitars, amps, and drums were primarily accoutrements to the Y chromosome, although I remember two notable exceptions playing at the Hillcrest Park Lodge. First was a Sub Pop band with the brilliant name Dickless. That show was particularly bracing, with the lead singer ripping a fire extinguisher off the wall then daring the audience to come up and get blasted in the face with it, madly howling, “WHO WANTS A DRINK FROM MY MAGIC POTION?!?!” The other notable all-female band I saw in that venue was Seven Year Bitch. After the bass player busted a string midway through the first song, they proceeded to rock the living shit out of us hicks.
In high school sports, the girls teams were structurally an afterthought. There were some stand-out players for sure, but no level of achievement was possible that would have packed the bleachers for a girls’ basketball game to the same degree as a boys’ game. For starters, in the late ’80s and early ’90s professional women’s basketball simply didn’t exist, so there was zero possibility that a girl could eventually go pro like Mark Hendrickson, who today is one of just 13 athletes who’ve played for both the NBA and MLB. Also, consider cheerleaders. The point of athletics was to encourage and broaden the pathways to masculine self-actualization.
Then something extraordinary happened in the Pacific Northwest — it became the hottest music scene on the planet. A number of the bands we saw playing at Hillcrest Park went on to international prominence and acclaim. Seattle, just sixty miles south of our grange halls and chilly practice pads, emerged as the Mecca of a music revolution led by four bands — Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam, with Mudhoney — ever the proud underachievers — bringing up the rear. Then Olympia, where I started college in the fall of 1991, became the epicenter of the Riot Grrl movement, an exhilarating fusion of three-chord punk rock and third wave feminism. I ate it all up. And when the jocks with short hair started showing up at grunge shows, those of us who felt marginalized by high school athletic culture resented their sudden interest in “our” music.
There is no real reason why an organization of individuals working together for a common goal needs to be called a “team.” I can’t imagine I’m alone in harboring complicated feelings about that word. I imagine that there are others who were more traumatized by adolescent athletics than me grit their teeth whenever they’re bombarded by the team-speak of corporate America, and I bet there are more than a few professional women who consider the term patriarchal and outdated. Somehow we’ve decided that capitalism = sports. We absorb this subtext through our involvement with high school and college athletics, then enter the workforce psychologically prepared for the pecking order of org charts, converting the score keeping mind set of baseball diamonds to the market share mind set of spreadsheets. We claim to value innovation and outside the box thinking, but the improvisatory impulses of music and the idiosyncratic blind alleys of artistic production are largely subsumed by the rigorous execution of strategic plans. I remember a particularly funny moment in a conference room at a tech company around 2008 or so. Every person in the room was male like me, and every other person besides me was wearing the same style of button-up cornflower blue shirt and khaki pants. One of the penis-having wearers of this shirt/pants combo kicked off the meeting by saying, “Oh-kay… So today’s all about, like, brainstorming and creativity. Let’s hear some outside the box ideas.”
Here’s an outside-the-box idea. Stop calling the groups of people who work together on projects at companies “teams.” Start calling them bands, and let them rock.
