I Have Gotten Complaints. I Earned Each One.

When I was 16 (or thereabouts), I passed one of the great halls, one of the many rites of passage for a young grunge bassist.  I put together an unsanctioned rehearsal in my parents garage while they were away, and about one hour into the cacophony of blaring screeches of electric guitars and clattering of drum heads, the police were banging on the door to inform us that we had passed the test, and that the all-mighty gods of rock were ready to admit us into the gates of greatness.  They shut us down.

We were outraged.  We demanded justice. We didn’t understand how anyone could be so callous as to hinder the growing talent of young people.  Everyone was suspect, and in five minutes all three of us became experts on legal matters concerning city ordinances.  Someone was going to pay, and we were going to exploit every loophole we could, for the glory of artists everywhere.

That was the last time we practiced at my parent’s house. 

Yesterday I found a charming incident of noise complaint while researching music of Mexico. I came across two different accounts of Father Cosme Santa Anna, one in which he writes a letter to the archbishop where he complains about the noise of the “mariachis”, dated 1848, and another in 1952, where he denounced the drunkenness, gambling, and disorderly conduct associated with the mariachis across from his church in Rosamorada, Nayarit.  He tried to stop them and took their instruments.  Both these incidents are some of the first historical evidence that the word mariachi was in use before the French invasion of Mexico in 1862.

I am proud of my brothers and sisters south of the border.  Bold move, having band practice across from a church.  Fight the power.  I also love the idea of some priest in Mexico, furiously writing a letter, then sitting by the mailbox waiting for the authorities to arrive and do something about “all this damn noise”.

The other was the anonymous Pravda review (which some have speculated to have been either written or possibly ghost written by Stalin himself, for reasons far too lengthy to go into here) of Shostakovich’s Opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which is reproduced on page 298 of A History of Russian Music. Besides the normal fanfare of late romantic composition complaints that were to bestow Mahler and Berlioz before him concerning percussion, Shostakovich received one of the early highest-level damnations a musician could be honored to hear.  The Prada review claimed that for the author to endow his heroes with passion he had to borrow his nervous, frenetic, and epileptic music from…and here is where it gets nasty… from JAZZ.

Dear god, man.  What have you done?  Invoking the “J-word” on a musician is one of our greatest honors. I’m not surprised that the Russians were responsible for such a feat.

It makes me feel like the hard rockers of the late 20th century had it easy.  Assisted by powerful amplifiers and percussion technology that provided top-of-the-line innovations in acoustics, it’s a wonder that they didn’t receive more noise complaints.  They actually seem kind of lazy, if you think about it.  What a bunch of slackers!

I’m still hunting for the account of the wizened old man, banging on Schubert’s walls, yelling “Stop all that noise!”. It just tickles my heart thinking that quartets were the scourge of the city, and woe to the tenant who was cursed to live next to a cellist. 

Here’s one of those dirty bastards now, playing Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 3