In Praise of Dashboard Confessional

A function of fests like last summer’s Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park is to introduce the uninitiated to music they should know, to lead middle aged householders such as myself to the water and invite us to take a deeper drink. The short sets and the often muddied sound are a way to get acquainted, kind of like those round robin, rapid fire dating bees they have at bars nowadays. In this context,there were several bands that I was interested in seeing that weekend that I knew a little about, such as the Arcade Fire, the Killers, and Death Cab for Cutie. But some of the best discoveries are of bands that you had no intention of seeing at all or of which you were totally ignorant. In this context, my most pleasant surprise of the weekend was the set by Dashboard Confessional.
I knew absolutely nothing about Dashboard Confessional ahead of Lollapalooza. By looking at the promo photos, the singer replete in his flat top, black T-shirt, and tattoos, I assumed that it was some kind of rockabilly outfit. Then I read a preview of the fest warning that their fans were bound to be the most annoying of the weekend, shouting the lyrics in unison with the band, and a couple of young dudes I was hanging with ahead of the show started spouting on about avoiding Dashboard “and all of that emo crap” like it was a musical plague. Being the contrarian that I am, that pretty much meant that I had to check them out. Paraphrasing John Kennedy Toole’s paraphrase of Jonathan Swift, you can usually tell that something interesting is happening when all the dunces have aligned against it.
The first thing you need to know about Dashboard Confessional is that just about every bad thing people say about them is true: Chris Carabba writes songs about that corny, self-indulgent intersection of love and regret, and his audience consists primary of pubescent girls, most of whom shout his lyrics with an abandon that probably makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But I really enjoyed their set. Dashboard Confessional is the first band I admit to liking who has used the word “cuddle” in a song.
Music is essentially a non-rational art form; I don’t really need a reason to like a song or a band. But I am going to foist my apologia on you nonetheless, which is based on a cornerstone of my entire world view. When in doubt, I go back to a simple credo: What would Joe Strummer do?
I first heard the Sex Pistols and the Clash when I was 17 back in 1979, and the scales fell off my eyes. And while I can now see that my immediate and total obsession with the music back then was melded with ordinary teen angst, male aggression, and my search for an identity, there is part of that subculture that did and still does fit like a glove, and the most noble aspects of it can be summed up in the life and music of Joe Strummer at the cusp of the 1980’s. I won’t bore you with a detailed history of the Clash or recite the countless stories of how good a guy Joe Strummer was during the later incarnations of his career. What is important is that for those first few years of the Clash, from1977 through 1982 or so, Strummer personified a love of good music: his own, but also a lot of fellow punk acts, a lot of reggae, some American roots music, and the like. He personified the belief that these supposedly peripheral forms of pop music could be a kind of salvation for the rootless, for those of us without a seeming purpose other than to slide as effortlessly as possible into our comfortable, middle class lives.
The philosophy of folks like Joe Strummer, their challenge to the world around us, was melded to their music. Punk was a call to action, much more than painting or film or any of the other creative arts, as movies and the visual arts rarely if ever demanded a dramatic shift in lifestyle or how you looked at the world, but to the contrary served to flavor otherwise dull lives, defraying the moment of crisis and thus allowing their audience to go on, perpetuating the status quo.
Punk gave folks power, and one of the ways it did this was by returning melody to its place of primacy in rock ‘n roll, rejecting the show pony proficiencies that had come to dominate the genre in the 1970’s. To watch a guitarist wank on with some technically proficient solo is to be psychically emasculated; you can’t do anything but nod your head and be impressed. However, listening to a simple melody is a call to action, it nudges you to sing along, and you become a part of the event. On this level, the Monkees are more punk rock than, say, Al Dimeola or even Jimi Hendrix, and personally, given the choice, I would on most days rather listen to the Monkees than Hendrix, even though Jimi was an unprecedented guitar master and counterculture hero while the Monkees were prefab Hollywood make believe.
Whatever their strengths and deficits now that the wave has long ago crashed and punk rock is just more cultural flotsam scattered across the beach, this is a basic understanding that most of the great early punk bands had, that they were there to play their songs rather than to show off chops, that their melodies and the energy they brought with them were a noble raison d’etre. That first wave of punk rock brought a crew of great bands with great songs: the Pistols and the Clash, for sure, but also X Ray Spex, the Buzzcocks, and the Jam, and even some of the 2nd tier acts like Stiff Little Fingers and the Television Personalities.
The Stooges were probably the first band who had perfected the punk sound; in fact, they did it long before it was known as punk. Iggy of course is a musical god, a once in a generation performer who could get away fronting a hambo band and still be great, but it was their songs, “Search and Destroy”, “Raw Power”, “I Just Want to Be Your Dog”, et al, that were their gift to the world, one we do not deserve but that the beneficence of the human imagination has deigned to give us anyway.
This punk ethos is still my bedrock, the foundation on which I have built my cultural home. Everything must pass through this door before it becomes something that I care about. Possibly because he was a little older than most of the other early punks, Joe Strummer understood some of the cultural and political implications of what they were doing, and thus is the one we can hold up and say, “Well, what would Joe Strummer think about this?”
Getting back to Lollapalooza, from the first few chords, I found myself liking Dashboard Confessional. I liked the simple, energetic strumming, and I liked the catchy choruses, pretty standard stuff but still structurally a little off kilter from typical power pop, the choruses often just thrown in there, using rhythm, a more energetic strum to the guitar, rather than melody or rhyme to set them apart from the rest of the song. And I liked the chanting along by all of the young girls, as if an early Beatles concert had been infused with the ethos of the English soccer terraces. All those dissident screams that had been directed at the Fab Four were now given words, a hundred sopranos shouting “as for me I’ll sit alone and listen to the saddest songs and wonder” at full voice, which despite the maudlin tone is much more empowering than the inchoate screams of the 60’s Beatles groupie.
I found the set very punk rock, but in a clean, way, as if the producers of “Dawson’s Creek” decided to put together and market a punk band, the lead singer tattooed but cute, a modern Shaun Cassidy, not threatening to teenage girls nor their moms, a few of whom stood on their blankets near the back of the crowd and sang along with their daughters. I’m sure that this is one of the reasons that some people hate the band, but while decadence is part of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, it is not a prerequisite, and I’ve always had a soft spot for innocence. There is no reason the innocent shouldn’t be able to rock with the rest of us. Besides, innocence doesn’t sell anymore, nor does cute, at least not like it used to. We’ve become a jaded culture, where even teenage girls are sold a cynical, more selfish image, where the hip hop star has long ago replaced the cute power pop singer in terms of star power. So I can root for the cute guy with the tattoos on stage singing about lost love without feeling like I’m supporting a sell out.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the lawn, the Brian Jonestown Massacre were regaling their fans with taunts of Dashboard Confessional, whose songs could apparently be heard across the park. The crowd for BJM was what you’d expect at a rock show, mostly young and male, and not near as big as that for Dashboard. I think it kind of ticked BJM off. To be honest, I didn’t catch much of their set, but what I did observe was mind numbing, watching some hairy dudes wank on guitar ad nauseum, with no great songs, no implied invitation to sing along, or dance, or slam, no call to action to do anything other than to marvel at their supposed virtuosity and rock attitude. It was what punk rock came to kill but unfortunately is now being marketed as some kind of “alternative”, to what I’m not sure. I guess to bands like Dashboard Confessional.
In contrast to the Brian Jones Massacre, most of the folks in the Dashboard Confessional crowd seemed to be having fun. I left wanting more. So I went to the Virgin tent and bought a copy of “The Swiss Army Romance”. There are a lot of good songs on it, to my ears just as good as most of the other acoustic guitar music making the rounds and getting all the critical accolades, Wilco, Son Volt, et al., and the lyrics are no more self pitying than, say, Death Cab for Cutie. I will admit that most of the pleasures of this music are unveiled within the first listen or two, but what the fuck, this is rock ‘n roll we are talking about; when I want something that gives up its secrets reluctantly, a petal at a time, I’ll listen to some Mahler or pick up my dog eared copy of “The Brothers Karamazov”.
The next time Dashboard comes to town, I plan on being there, near the back with all the parents and the chaperones, at a table with a gin and tonic in hand, humming along while the kids sing, “We’re not 21, but the sooner we are the sooner the fun will begin, get up, you fink, you think, our lives are fake ideas and real disasters, it’s cool to take these chances, it’s cool to have these romances, and grow up fast”.