The first season of VH-1's competition/ reality series Bands on the Run is history; Flickerstick, that loveable, drunken crew of artists and pussy-hounds, won, by the way — just in case you didn't know.
But you did know, didn't you? Because you saw every episode you could. You tuned in for a laugh, and you stayed. You began to make allowances, such as watching The Sopranos on a rerun night, or actually learning how to set your VCR to tape one channel while you were watching another. You considered the heresy of picture-in-picture. You didn't think it could be done, but your fragile, dangerously overloaded Sunday night TV schedule accepted the weight of another series; with a groan and a list, it held.
And when the tour turned southward, you cleared your calendar, hoping against hope.
I, too, know the amalgam of shame and elation such a guilty pleasure inspires. The mere concept — a Road Rules for the least shitty of those thousands of bands willing to dangle by the lips from any meager industry wang that happened to unfurl from the sky — made me nauseous. It seemed as tacky and easily manipulated as any other "reality" series, and thanks to the onslaught of advance publicity, I was sick of the show long before it actually aired.
I must admit, however, that I was looking forward to the pilot, in a very COPS-fan sort of way. As a musician who has spent considerably more than a couple of weekends on the road, I relished the opportunity to play Ebert from beyond impunity, debasing MTV's obviously fabricated take on independent touring.
So I watched it. Until it was over — the whole thing, not just the pilot. It sucked me in, and not in any detached, ironic, kitschy manner, either. I loved it, for a lot of reasons. Like a lot of standout premiere seasons, there was something endearingly amateurish about Bands on the Run's first salvo. Nobody knew what the hell was going on or what to air, so we got to see a lot of just about everything (except actual performances by the bands, clips of which were kept conspicuously short, and thank God) — almost certainly more than future seasons will reveal. About the only glaring omission was any depiction of drug use, for obvious reasons; barring one short voice-over and shot of a bathroom stall, drugs failed to make an appearance.
Four bands on the road for eight weeks, and no pot? Sure, right, OK. There were surprising amounts of boozing and indiscriminate sex, though, so I let it slide. The selection of bands provided another highlight — they all sucked, by and large, but Central Casting couldn't have assembled a more entertaining, fractious cast of players, short of having members of the Bush family interact with refugees from the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow.
You had your uptight, far-too-serious career competitors (San Diego's Soulcracker), your classic, gut-reacting, borderline-alcoholic rock dudes (Dallas' Flickerstick), and, just for fun, you had four debauched, sexually ambiguous Goth-core chicks (L.A.'s Harlow), each with more balls than Soulcracker as a whole. Following the pilot, NYC's Josh Dodes Band was added. The most talented, stable and focused outfit on the show, they were therefore about as telegenic as a Mormon bean supper; coincidentally enough, they were also the first band to get the ax.
But the show's most enthralling element was its easy sense of familiarity. Of course, that's primarily why reality programming can work so well. You see your best friend in the bitchy club girl, your ideal sensitive man in the dumb guy from Idaho. You relate. And Bands on the Run applies this to a cultural microcosm small enough that it still feels, well, special, dammit. The shit-talking. The empty clubs. The power outages. The boredom, the beer, and the absolute certainty that you guys make these other assholes look silly — all of it rings true, instantly resonant for anyone whose experience with music goes even a couple of inches further than listening to it.
For the last two months or so, I found myself horning in on conversations with strangers after overhearing phrases like "then Rex said," "I'm sure Harlow's gonna get kicked off next week," or "what's up with Sutton's hair," and being welcomed to the discussion.
There's no way to accurately gauge how many Bay area viewers were tuned in when Tampa was named as the next stop on the tour, but a joyful clamor undoubtedly arose from houses, apartments and dive bars all over town. And mere minutes later, when primary Soulcracker whiner Beastie recounts that they "pulled up to this shithole called The Brass Mug," it surely got a lot louder, augmented by the clinking of beer bottles and about a million anecdotes regarding someone's first trip to the Mug.
Talk about relating.
While the winner was announced two weeks later in Fort Lauderdale, we can claim the distinction of being the city where Harlow got the boot — at the Amphitheatre, as a matter of fact. And though I didn't see many familiar faces during the episode (I was completely unaware that they'd come through) the number of people claiming to have attended one or more of the bands' shows swells every time the subject comes up. Which, history tells us, is one of the chief indicators of a phenomenal, revolutionary or life-changing event — one somehow important enough that lots of people will lie about having been there.
Was the first season of Bands on the Run a phenomenal, revolutionary or life-changing event? Of course not. Don't be stupid. It was just another clever TV idea (clever enough to get VH-1 nominated for an Emmy, anyhoo) that ended up doing exactly what the idea people hoped it would: It worked on people like me. With the widespread attention the show garnered, it's unlikely that subsequent seasons will work as well, which is fine. They've already run through here, and we've seen sort-of-famous people standing where we've stood so often, so we've already had about as much fun with Bands on the Run as we're going to.
Besides, the next one won't be the club's secret, you know?
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2001.