An artist's work is daunting. There is always the love-hate relationship with the impending icon status. Or how about the flip side of success? The eternal plateau of creativity. The short-lived shelf life. The thought of your music playing in grocery stores. There is expectation. There are tabloids. There are cult followers. There are record labels. There is Napster (well, for now). There is the constant threat of Boy Bands stealing your thunder.
Fortunately, not everyone agrees with my potentially melodramatic, slightly pessimistic point of view of the inevitably precarious life of an artist. Take Phil Ayoub (LA '95) for instance. He believes single-mindedly that being a musician is all about working hard. He is so plain and simple about his affirmation that I wonder if he is missing the point of music. He separates the stigmas, the audacities, and even the luxuries that cling to the idea of "the musician" from what he does. Modesty is an understatement for Ayoub. Although in all black, as he jokingly disclaimed, he does not see himself as your prototypical "artist", whatever that may be. He sits, cupping his mug of hot coffee, shoulders slightly dropped and thinks aloud, candidly.
"What do you think of this?" I ask, pointing to an excerpt from an interview with Erykah Badu in the previous day's New York Times. In it she calls herself a "starving artist", "hungry for the stage", and more aggressively claims that if she could not perform she would die. Ayoub, who is calm and perceptive, claims that it was a bit exaggerated - that at least he didn't feel like his music was a life-or-death situation for him.
However, he agreed that performing live is an amazing experience. "It becomes a little bit of an addiction. I'm totally hungry for the stage too. You know, you do something up there and people applaud. They like it. After you do it once, you want to do it again. I remember after my first performance I said to myself - I want to do this tomorrow night, and the night after that and the next night and the next and the next..."
To hear Ayoub slip into a reverie about the experience of playing music is like listening to a baby speak his first words. Ayoub is still green, just starting out with his new band, Riverside Train. It isn't even a year old. The virginal awe he still has for the live performance is endearing. Inherent in his talk is the promise of continued growth, of expanding curiosity and the possibilities of future experimentation. For the most part, the band does a long list of cover songs, ranging from "Real World" by Matchbox 20 to "Legs" by ZZ Top, from "Fire" by Springsteen to "Wild Thing" by Hendrix.
Ayoub remembers his first flirtation with music. A band at Tufts was looking for a lead singer, so he started practicing with them. "We were doing Jimi Hendrix songs, and you really don't have to be that great of a singer to do Hendrix. Well, as it turns out, they didn't use my vocals after all." He smiles, letting the implications of his comment float in the space between us. A normal person would blush, but Ayoub is confident.
Ayoub's sincere modesty impresses me, insofar as it contradicts my belief that an artist has to possess a degree of "arrogance and audacity" to pull art off. He agrees, claiming to admire Oasis for that precise reason. The band's attitude has made headlines and stirred controversy. "I like their cockiness," he offers, his unassuming tact in stark contrast to the cavalier British band.
His attractive humility probably stems from a background of frequent hit-and-misses. At Tufts, Ayoub was an English major. A frequent contributor to the sports section of the Daily, Ayoub felt some promise in journalism. "I wanted to be a sportswriter, but after I graduated from Tufts I worked with the minor league Red Sox and didn't like how they treated the writers."
He opted for a total change in career path when he went to business school at Boston College. " I was an English major because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And the truth is, I went to business school because I still didn't know what I wanted to do." Aside from buying time at high financial costs, Ayoub underwent some training that would later apply to his musical career. "My dad runs his own business. I saw how that worked and I liked it, I wanted to run my own company too. So I went to BC to try to learn that, too."
Being the lead singer of a band is not too far removed from running a small business. In fact, after graduating from BC and realizing soon after working in the banking field that he wanted to work in music, he set out for Boston (from his native Rhode Island) to set up his practicing studio and to line up his band members.
He found two of his members through ads on the Internet, met one of them through a friend, and discovered T at a party. "T is from Japan. He loves American rock 'n' roll, and came to the US to be in a band. To get legal residence he had to find a place to study, so by default ended up at Berklee School of Music. I ran into him at a party, where I didn't know anybody. Everyone was a classically trained musician. There was T, not speaking a word of English. We started to play on our guitars, and one thing led to the next. Pretty soon we had the entire party applauding us." After months of informally playing cover songs and hard practice, the band settled on a name and started writing some original songs.
The name Riverside Train refers to the T on the Green Line that takes the band members to Ayoub's house, where they practice three to four times a week. What at first seemed to me as a rather sparse amount of practice time later turned out to be a great accomplishment for the five male band members. They all hold full-time jobs on top of their burgeoning musical dreams. Now, more than ever, their artistic calling is knocking louder and more consistently. "We make a lot of social and work-related sacrifices for the band, and a lot of us are thinking about leaving our jobs."
It seems like an artist's job is never done. For one, he or she is comparable to the huge Emersonian eyeball, naked and omniscient, soaking up, unbiased, all the visuals of society. An artist is a mouthpiece for greater groups of people. An artist is a conduit for metaphysical creative energy. There is the initial inspiration to find, the well of imagination to finesse, the mechanics and gears of articulation to grease. There is the need to cultivate talent, the desire to out-grasp your reach, to be innovative and ingenuous.
Ayoub does not seem to be shaken by the difficult prospects of his job. Instead he has a moderate outlook avowing, "After BC I realized that I was working at jobs that I couldn't see myself doing for the rest of my life. At school, I did just enough to get by. It was the same at the jobs I worked, just enough. Everything was B+. Music is the only thing I wanted to be better at, better than B+."
After listening to his Riverside Train's EP, I shirk the mentality of grading and try not to criticize this group of neophytes. He labels his music "modern rock 'n' roll" and hails Springsteen and U2 as his musical role models. It is one thing to be inspired by the musical genius of Bruce and Bono, and quite another thing to borrow chords and melodies from songs that even the musically challenged would recognize. Take, for instance, the first song "Like A Cowboy." The song begins and ends with a clone of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." My English professor would shrug this problem off and chant, "Good poets borrow, great poets steal." If this axiom can be held up as somewhat true and innocuous, then Riverside Train is in the clear.
Unfortunately, there is a lot to be said about originality. "Like a Cowboy" sounds too much like Cobain. However, one cannot overlook the fact that the band is still amateur. The priority should be on skill. As they hone and polish with every rehearsal or performance they are improving the tools of their trade. Without that foundation, the kind of creative sparks, or lack thereof, that may or may not be flying, does not matter much.
The last song on the album, entitled "Don't Run Away", is a more personal account of Ayoub's intimate side, one which he shies away from talking about. Though the theme of "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy cries over girl" is overdone, the truth is that no two love stories are the same, and poignancy is an underrated emotion.
This song, about a guy longing after an elusive girl, is hindered by two things: stifled lyrics and, again, a familiar-sounding tune in the opening chords. The refrain confesses, "and I don't know what to say right now." Perhaps this is an honest disclosure of frustrated speechlessness, which is known to happen between estranged lovers. It still comes off as a set of unimaginative and unconvincing lyrics instead of love-struck reserve. Secondly, the song opens with something all too similar to the Rolling Stones' Wild Horses and Angie. The result is, unfortunately, a work of B+ merit. Which is, as every Tufts student knows, not a bad grade.
Riverside Train's EP might be marred by a lack of cleverness, but there are certain aspects that are not overshadowed by the shortcomings. The most salient example is that of the remarkable guitar solo. If you like the Black Crowes, Led Zeppelin, or the Rolling Stones, then you will approve of Riverside Train's guitar style. The song arrangements reserve a special spotlight for the solo guitar jams. This not only redeems the lyrical and vocal drawbacks, but also goes as far as to upstage the other instruments. The drums and other percussion instruments, as well as the bass, sound ordinary in the arrangements, playing secondary roles to the central guitar.
This becomes a surprising feat and worthy of our praise when Ayoub explains that he didn't start playing the guitar until late in his Tufts career. He reminisces, a tinge self-deprecatingly, "It was such a bad move, my first guitar. I must have spent $300 on one that really was worth $70. I had no idea what a good guitar was. I got totally ripped off." Soon after the na??ve purchase, Ayoub began taking private lessons with a man with whom he still keeps in touch. An almost fatherly figure, Ayoub's college guitar teacher still advises him and helps him sort out band problems.
When I curiously probe into the "Behind the Music" aspect of the band dynamics, he smiles and admits that sometimes they argue. Each band member comes from a very different musical background with specific likes and dislikes. Having dissident visions can create some friction, especially with the volatility of all-male adrenaline. He laughs, recalling a night when a rowdy audience member climbed on stage, grabbed a guitar and started taking his clothes off. "We had to stop mid-song and Jim [Vitti] dropped his drumsticks and went to take him off stage. Yeah, we have our testosterone Italian rhythm section back there."
The most obvious element of a good live performance is cohesion and exchange between band members and their instruments. Riverside Train need not worry about the circulation of vibrancy. Though Ayoub admits that they do have their occasional tete-a-tetes, and the rare brush with a fist fight, their compiled efforts amount to a cohesive and unified clout. There is no question about Riverside Train's enthusiasm. Ayoub proudly boasts that every bar at which they've played has asked them to return. Last week they had the honor to play at the Hard Rock Caf?© here in Boston amidst musical memorabilia from eras past. Next Wednesday, Feb. 21, they will be playing at The Rack at Faneuil Hall.
Although Faneuil Hall is no Fleet Center, Ayoub asserts that they're not just "doing this to have a good time. We're all on the same page with this. We're taking it all the way." Riverside Train is not concerned with loftiness. Instead, they are grounded - working hard toward the moment wherein their music might transcend mere pleasant melody and graduate to a higher emotional plane.
When asked if he considers himself an artist, Ayoub's response startles me. "No. I'm a hack." At first glance, the word "hack" reminds me of its fraternal twin, "hackneyed". I would like to think that Ayoub would not want to volunteer himself to the school of clich?©d music. Thinking this, I thank him for such an interesting time. He responds with a contradiction to his previous self-quip, "Yeah, in a couple of years it'll be more interesting." Therein is his prophesy. Maybe one day he'll get a Light on the Hill award.
