Real fun

[April 25th, 2007] Any mid-level touring musician will tell you that life on the road isn't as exciting as one would imagine. There's a lot of homesickness, actual sickness, band bickering and unrelenting boredom to be found while traversing the American landscape. There are a variety of ways to combat that last problem; some are healthy, some are lots of drugs. Ashod Simonian (of Earlimart, the Panty Lions and Preston School of Industry) takes Polaroid photos. About seven years' worth of his favorites are archived within the pages of Real Fun: Polaroids From the Independent Music Landscape.

The photos go from the standard tour shots (a cropped shot of M. Ward holding up a guitar in one hand, a beer in the other) to wildlife (an open-mouthed dead raccoon surrounded by pills and empty bottles) and more touching stuff (Grandaddy's Jason Lyte asleep on a porch at sunrise, surrounded by cheap, empty cans of beer). And, despite his medium—my Polaroids always look like shit—Simonian's photos are often striking. The Polaroids' trademark white frames have been removed, leaving large, high-contrast images with a tendency to blur eyes into faces and pull anything red or yellow to the foreground. The result is a sort of ongoing visual emergency: Scott Kannenberg's (Pavement/Preston School of Industry) ketchup bottle is a stick of dynamite; John Darnielle's (The Mountain Goats) face, splashed in sunlight, floats angelically on the page. There is a refined sense of immediacy to these shots that makes you want to get up and go.

Portland musicians are perhaps overrepresented in the book: Simonian shows great affection toward the late Elliott Smith, who is captured while removing lint from the slippers he will provide his drunken guests. "It captures Elliott in a light that many didn't see," Simonian writes. "But precisely as I remember him: warm and hilarious." Other Portland folks who made the book include a bitter-looking Adam Selzer (Norfolk & Western), a dog-petting Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney/Quasi), Chris Funk (Decemberists) with a teddy bear, the Thermals and James Mercer of the Shins.

The book (its dimensions are somewhere between a 45 sleeve and a compact-disc case) features slick, fold-out index pages with thumbnail sketches of each shot, and descriptions of selected Polaroids from the author and featured musicians. The big bonus, though, is the companion CD, with exclusive tracks from Norfolk & Western, Califone, Mt. Eerie and 15 other bands.

What on first glance looks like a series of name-drops is actually something much sweeter. The coffee-table book is Simonian's love letter to the road. And while some photos are made sweeter or more interesting by way of description, many, fittingly, go undescribed. The photos speak for themselves.