There's something cool about living in the same house as a rock and roll band. The air of decadence and general lack of cleanliness that come from having the practice space in the living room make me feel like I'm in some sort of a Rolling Stone advertising spread, and any second now the lighting people are going to show up followed by this month's featured celebrity ("...and here's Johnny Depp in a royal blue evening suit by Versace ($1200), in a basement apartment surrounded by hip rock 'n' roll grime and some beer bottles..."). Or, if that image in the parentheses is a little exaggerated, I at least feel smugly hip being surrounded myself by such grime. Our living room, cluttered as it is with music-making supplies and other types of associated paraphernalia, nicely fits my idea of what true rock and roll decadence should look like.

To be sure, the experience of living with dedicated rock and rollers is not that uncommon, but that doesn't make it any less genuine. Even though many, many people in Madison either have roommates who are in bands or are in bands themselves, I still feel a little bit closer to that intangible realm of coolness that seems to exist only in the pages of pop-culture magazines when I look around my living room at the amps, speakers, miles of tangled-up wire, and tiny shards of broken drum sticks that have taken over the floor. Living like this is an experience for which our culture has spent great energy preparing me; despite the years of grade-school training that taught us to live well, live clean, say no to drugs, and keep our rooms tidy, I suspect that most of us listened more closely to the very nearly opposite messages that were to be found in television, movies, on the playground, and in rock and roll. These opposite messages ordered us to ignore the clutter in our rooms, to go play and forget about waiting in lines, to do whatever drugs we felt like doing; is there any wonder that rock and roll (and I don't mean the music itself here—I mean the whole world of rock and roll, the image of its lifestyle that has been painted in our minds by modern legend and MTV) won out over grade school in shaping us to be who we became? Which one sounds more fun?

This is why the decay and decadence associated with the rock and roll lifestyle do not evoke exclusively negative connotations for your average American. Secretly, or not so secretly, nearly everyone who was born after about 1950 craves to take part in the great orgy of semi-filth and anatomical abuse that is reported to us in the annals of Rolling Stone. The life of a rock and roll musician has become an icon of escape from the world of rules and rigidity, that boring place where you really do need to keep yourself clean and presentable, and where ingesting illegal substances really can have unpleasant consequences. I suspect that most people live at least part of every day vicariously through someone who cares not for such things.

And what better way to be one of the envied few than to be in one's early twenties and start up a rock band? My roommates have organized themselves into something called the Soft Release, and their music (which I know quite intimately by now) can be best described as slow, sad, emotive, and yet somehow still extremely loud keyboard-driven rock. Of course, for them, it may be all about the music, but for me, a non-member of the band, it's all about the experience of having them around all the time. It's about helping them move their instruments (at least one of which, the keyboard, weighs as much as three of us together) from the living room and into a waiting van outside, and it's about hanging around the back entrances of venues, holding open the door. It's about coming home at immoral hours to the smell of cigarettes and spilled beer, and the sight of a disassembled drum set lurking in the corner. By my proximity to the rock and roll world, I am allowed to visit it whenever I wish. I simply open my door and leave my room.

After all, visiting the world of decadence and relaxed rules is all most of us should want to do. Living in it without a break leads to things like heroin overdoses and criminal records. In a way, grade-school teachers had it right; most of the time, you probably should keep your room clean, stay away from (most) drugs, and obey (the majority of) the rules. But no matter how good you are, no matter how moral and clean, the sight of a dimly-lit basement room that is filled to capacity with guitars, amps, low-quality pornography, and returnable cases of beer will always be a little appealing. It's the age-old struggle between lawfulness and lawlessness, between the stern but caring nanny and the carefree, wild and dangerous lost boys. We need both sides; reality is somewhere in between grade-school and the seedy life of abandon. Living as I do in such an apartment, I can only hope that the seedy side does not win out completely before I have a chance to move, and to regain balance.

- Connor Wood

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