You may have picked up on how much music has been a driving force for me in inspiring me to do what I love and find the way I want to do it. I recently got a nice note from Elizabeth Agate regarding this and it is today’s guest post.
I finally got around to reading books like “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” and just about every band singled out had a very similar message of DIY and community (concepts filmmakers really could benefit from). Here’s a few quotes that mirror our current film world:
Conley from Mission of Burma writes, “Distribution was weak at best…there was no way to find out essential marketing information…it was like a new frontier, it was do whatever you can, call whoever you know. Everybody was just figuring it out for themselves. There weren’t too many secrets back then–everybody was just kind of helping everybody out.”
When Mike Watt talks about “jamming econo,” the financial limitations the Minutemen faced forced them to record in a certain way, and to me this is what helped establish their sound, influencing other bands, even if they never reached rockstar levels of fame. “You have to be econo so when the hard times hit, you can weather them.”
