Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 9.0 // Critical Darling, Commercial Flop

When I was seventeen, I went to my first real rock and roll show.

Yes, I like to act as if I've been in the scene forever, but your little Jenna, who is at once a professional fan and pretentious, unforgiving music critic, had at one time completely given up on anything remotely resembling contemporary music.

I listened to nothing but the local oldies station all through middle school. This was back when “oldies radio” meant the '50s and early '60s, and not any year remotely approaching the year of my birth in the early '80s. I didn't have any strong affinity for oldies radio, but a person has to listen to something while doing homework or falling asleep, so that is what I kept the clock radio in my bedroom set to.

At the end of eighth grade I was advised (more or less) that everyone my age listened to 99X, which I believe, at the time, was billed as “Alternative Rock”. Whatever that means. I remember the exact conversation sitting in the computer room in the hallway where you took all your electives, next to this girl whose name I will not publish but do remember. For some reason I perceived her to be cooler than me, and when she heard that I listened to Fox 97 (“Good times, great oldies”) she tried to chastise me, and fully succeeded. So I switched.

What followed that was a few festival type concerts, the kind of all day events with too much sun and overpriced food. I thought that's what live music was. I had never been to a club show, and I think I was completely ignorant of their existence. And while I generally had fun playing in the sun all day and into the night, throwing up rock hands and dodging the feet of wayward crowd surfers, I never felt like I had seen a tremendous amount of music. The performers at these shows were often hundreds of feet away and projected onto large screens at either side of the stage. I often wondered to myself why I was paying so much money to basically sit in the hot sun and watch broadcast television.

I distinctly remember, at 15 years old, lying in the sun, in the middle of the stadium at the International Horse Park, catching a nap during the Fuel set. Granted, Fuel isn't the most amazing band, but I was 15 and this was 1998. I should have been nuts for them. It seemed like everyone else was. Read More »

Busking 8/5/2007 from Jenna Tollerson and Vimeo.

Downtown Athens, Georgia, 3 AM Saturday night (or Sunday morning). August 5th, 2007.

These guys had a sign that read:

WE SING ABOUT WHAT WE SEE.
     -------------------------------------
OUR DRUMMER IS WASTED!!!

A few things:

• I am so totally ready for the universe to stop beating me up. I get it! I've learned my lesson re: biting off more than I can chew/counting my chickens before they hatch/eating my green veggies/various other platitudes that ultimately mean nothing. The point is, I deserve to have something good happen in my life — it's been more than a year since the last Really Exciting Change, and I refuse to believe that at 24 years old things are due to start leveling out.
• I am sure I am not the first young geek to say this, but I really wish I could work for Connected Ventures, or at least hang out with the staff on a regular basis. There are many reasons for this, too many to enumerate here, the least of which is that they spend afternoons after work making dorky music videos that come out eerily well. My new favorite reason? I just discovered that the always lovable Zach Klein is actually a stone fox.
• My friend Becca, upon arriving at my apartment this time last week and putting away some beer to chill: “Your refrigerator might be the saddest thing I have ever seen.”
• To the bad cover band around the corner I'm being forced to listen to through my open window: you have no business covering Nelly. The only thing worse than hearing “Hot in Here” for the 400th time is having to sit through a rhythmless cover version.
  I think they will bust out some 50 Cent anytime now, and then my night will be complete.
• Twilight is this weekend. It won't be as quite as fun without beer and food money in hand, but there should at least be some sights to be seen and some drunk people to make conversation with.
• They are butchering Gavin Degraw now. I am sorry that I can't be more entertaining for you today.

This Christmas, for the first time in many years, I'm not buying presents for anyone. It's a hard candy Christmas—with apologies to Dolly Parton—and the state of my finances makes it impossible. In lieu of material things, which are hardly in the spirit of Christmas anyway (right?), I present for your viewing pleasure, two songs from my 19 year old self, and some reflection on these performances. Why the dissection? We compulsively analyze things. You know we can't stop just for Christmas.

Note: streaming flash video appears below. If if doesn't work, or you prefer Windows Media, or even want to grab the MP3 audio versions, you can find the original, four-year-aged post here.

These are two songs from the 106 West Annual Christmas Show in 2002. I know that if you are much older than me, four years probably doesn't sound like a long time, but to me it feels like a lifetime ago. This was after I had gone to college, but before I had made any close friends there, before I ever had a job, before I ever paid bills, before I cut my hair, before I had gotten over my shyness and learned how to talk to people, before Abie taught me how to dress in a way that wasn't hideous.

River (Joni Mitchell Cover):

While you can't appreciate how loud everything was, especially the applause from the audience, what you can see in this video is how uncomfortable I am on stage, in my own skin. I look at this now and think, “Get your hands out of your pockets! Why the hell did you pick that outfit?” and even “That is completely the wrong bra for you.” Overall, the person in the video feels like someone different, not me, but I can relate to her on one level, about something you can't see in the video.

I hesitate to bring it up even now, because it's long past, but it's important to my appreciation of the performance, and I've never talked about it before. At Christmas in 2002, I was estranged from one of my best friends in the entire world. The worst part was that I felt it was entirely my fault. It was probably the loneliest I have ever been. This feeling permeated every facet of my life for awhile, so while I had no romantic interest in this friend, I still related to River on a deep level (“I’m so hard to handle / you know I’m selfish and I’m sad / I lost the best baby that I ever had”), so much so that every time I sang the song the pain hurt my heart. I often am praised for an extremely emotive performance of River, and that's because I can't sing it, or even watch this performance of it, without being transported back to that time.

We eventually reconciled (with a vengence), so in the end, everything worked out, but sometimes, I still wish that I had handled the situation a different way, so that maybe I wouldn't have lost that time. Even if it means that the performance would have suffered.

Please Come Home For Christmas (Charles Brown Cover):

“A! Everything I sing is in A!”

Here, despite my lack of a compelling stage presence, I've got the audience in the palm of my hand. It's a pretty stiff performance, until the monitor made a strange, very loud sound (at the first “So won't you tell me / you'll never more roam”) and all I could do was open my eyes in shock, smile and laugh it off. However, by the end of the song, I'm freaked out to be on stage again.

The applause at the end of the song was absolutely unreal. The video doesn't at all capture the roar that came at me. One of my biggest regrets to date is that I practically ran off stage instead of taking a moment to bask in the glory.

These days I don't sing as often as I used to. Chances are, however, that I'll be making an appearance at the 106 West (Site | MySpace) Annual Christmas show, next Saturday night, December 16th, at 7:30 PM. The show is free, and should be pretty rockin, if past years are any indication. I would love to see you there.

Seeing the Indian for three weekends in a row; Etta James live in concert; the OK Go treadmill dance; the OK Go Million Ways dance, getting most or all of my news from the show with zefrank; questions and answers on Consumating; watching Goodfellas on a loop; arguing the merits of the new My Chemical Romance record with Neil and CB; driving from point A to point B without my car breaking down (2 out of the last 6 trips. Could be worse).

My dear, dear friends; CB insisting that I go see Beck with him, and that it's his treat; fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; quality time with Zach at the beginning of happy hour; getting plenty of sleep; owning up to the fact that I was horribly unhappy at my old job, and even though I have no money now, I somehow still feel like the luckiest girl in the world

“For those of you who don't know, the man standing in the back is my father, Thom Tollerson”, [pauses as everyone who knows and loves Thom applauds], “and he taught me everything I know, including how to wear a skirt.” - Sarah Tollerson

106 West is open once again, ready to provide musical entertainment to the greater Winder area. Here are some pictures of the opening event last night. Also check out the extremely talented bands who rocked the house for us - Sarah Tollerson & the Big Fantastic, Mike Willis & the Escape Artists, and Leaving Araby.

Many people have asked me how the month of sobriety went, or even stranger, “how the not-drinking is going”, present-tense. It made me realize that I never wrapped it up, never gave it a conclusion in the narrative of my life. Someday, I may have a publicist for this sort of thing, but for now, I'll have to make the announcement myself—and ramble out some thoughts on the whole matter. Read More »

Random guy walks up to me at the Bain Mattox show at Tasty World. I notice he's wearing a hat that I own, but he's otherwise completely unfamiliar to me.

“Hey! Is your sister here?”

“Yeah, she's close to the front.” I point to where my sister is standing with her friend watching the show.

“Where?”

“Right there, in the turquoise.”

“Oh, cool!”

He stands next to me for a couple of minutes, facing the stage. I'm little intoxicated, and I start to blame my drunk memory on not remembering this guy, but I realize that he doesn't even look slightly familiar. I screw up a little courage and turn to him.

“I'm sorry, do I know you from somewhere?”

“No, no, I just recognize you from myspace.”

He was even serious.

***

I'm at my bar enjoying a delicious beverage. My friend is at my left, his coworker is at my right. The coworker is quite rotund, wearing a shirt that says, ‘When you masturbate, God kills a kitten.’, keeps proclaiming loudly to the whole bar that someone should help him lose his virginity tonight, and has had one—count it, one—Smirnoff Ice. He has the social skills of a home-schooled kid except without the helpful element of shyness. He and I are not getting along, although I'm sure that would be a surprise to him. He thinks he can woo me, and attempts to work his game, giving me a smooth line that he's probably been waiting to use on someone for weeks.

He turns to me, unprovoked, and says with utmost sincerity, “You know what? Even though I haven't been drinking, you're still really cute.”

He looks at me expectantly, wondering why I'm not falling into his arms or at least blushing and giggling like a school girl. I don't even blink. After the half an hour or so I had already spent with the coworker, this comment just seemed par for the course.

My friend on my other side hadn't heard any of this due to the volume of the noise in the bar, so I turned and relayed it to him, scoffing. We then laughed together, manically as we are wont to do, and the coworker just sat, bewildered.

“What did I say?”

My sister, the rock star, is in the red and black today. Read it and revel in her awesomeness.

Things have been mostly good, even if there has been almost nothing to write about. Work, school, work, school, the routine only sometimes punctuated with sleep, hanging out in bars, or watching The Sopranos on DVD. I am the busiest I have ever been, with three fifths of my weekdays beginning at 8 in the morning and ending at 8 in the evening. I feel myself aging at a rate much more rapid than just a couple of years ago, burning the candle at both ends, as it were. But rather than shrink back from the challenge I find myself stepping up, charging at the obstacle that can, at times, seem like a brick wall. (Going full speed all the time causes many periods of accidental and unplanned unconsciousness, a factor that sunk me last week, academia-wise.)

Sometimes I wonder if I've taken on too much, gotten in over my head, a thought hastened by the naysayers (I shall not name names) who insist I can't keep up this speed for 3 to 4 more years, who grimace and give me looks and tones that say what the hell have you done? I smile sweetly I say that I'm certain that I can handle it, and privately I regard the whole situation as a trial by fire or a rite of passage, ultimately a pathway to some semblance of self-respect.

I also try to constantly remind myself that I could be working much, much harder with the payoff being much, much less.

In the meantime, I (usually) have weekends as a reprieve from all the madness. This weekend I saw a lot of people and consumed a whole lot of whiskey. Friday night found me drinking with my co-workers, which, besides yielding many free drinks also ended with me walking home with two roses purchased for me (from the “rose lady” that most Athenians are familiar with) by two of the aforementioned co-workers.

Saturday night I went to Sarah's show at DT's. A coworker of Sarah's was sitting with my parents, and just before introducing himself (Chris, a lovely doctoral student who was pleasantly fresh with me throughout the evening) gave up his own seat for me. As we shook hands, leaning in to hear names over the music, he looked at me agape and exclaimed, “You smell—You smell AWESOME.” I grinned and blushed like a schoolgirl. That was possibly the highlight of my interactions that evening, excepting my phone conversation with HGB, which is always a pleasure all it's own.