Local bands' tenacity, passion make them gamblers By Jenni Glenn Fine & Performing Arts Editor In a modern music scene dominated by manufactured teen pop icons from the Britney/Backstreet Boys school, the astronomical odds against finding success as a rock band deter many potential talents from pursuing music, particularly when the group's members have more traditional career opportunities. College bands nationwide, and particularly in the Ann Arbor and Detroit area, experience such conflicts. But like countless others, the band Automobile, in spite of each member's non-musical successes, continues a musical collaboration seven years in the making simply because its members cannot imagine a life without music or each other. Guitarist/keyboardist David Baldwin, guitarist Michael Kunc, bass guitarist Ryan Buell, drummer Mark Maynard and singer Jenny Toms have played small venues across the state together for the past three years, focusing on their current home towns Ann Arbor, East Lansing and their original base of Flint. Between the ages of 21 and 23, the band members are all either recent college graduates or students. Close friendship ties hold together the bandmates as they tackle a typical schedule containing four concerts a month in addition to the task of recording Automobile's first album. The bandmates' easy rapport and joking spirit shows through clearly in their debate over how to describe its genre. Like any band, they loathe the prospect of their music being limited to a single characterization. So each member turns helplessly to the next in the traditional attempt to put a name to the band's style. Baldwin finally labels them "avant gardeners with a touch of post modernism ... whatever the hell that means," to a chorus of approving chuckles. This indescribable sound's roots lie in the Flint music scene, where its members began playing in separate groups during their junior high and high school years. University Business senior Buell and MSU finance student Kunc first joined forces playing guitar in a band called Minefield Hopscotch in 1993, which later added art student Maynard, then MSU advertising and film graduate Baldwin to its roster. At the group's first performance, Kunc recalled, "one of our guys totally freaked out." The band only then discovered what, due to lack of practice, had gone unsuspected: The lead singer's chronic stage fright. The performance ended rapidly and the group soon found a new frontman. "We were young and foolish then," Buell said of the group, which finished recording its first album mostly due to the fact that it had already collected deposits from people wanting to buy it. "We're old and foolish now." Fronted by members too young to enter bars, Minefield Hopscotch began playing at Flint Local 432. "It was a hole in the wall, but it had character," Baldwin said of the club, which featured many young area bands. The experience allowed Flint's aspiring musicians to perform in front of an audience as well as to record for the first time in club owner Joel Rash's upstairs studio. In addition, Flint Local 432 introduced Minefield Hopscotch to another local band, Rhino Star, which boasted Toms, now an alumnus of the Unversity's Flint campus, as lead singer. As with so many college bands, the complicated lineage that ensued would see them morph through a series of identities. Both Rhino Star and Minefield Hopscotch recorded a couple of albums before splitting up in 1996. This led to the formation of Wives of Bath, another group combining the talents of Toms, Baldwin and Maynard with other area musicians. After eight months, the band broke up, allowing the three members to connect with Buell and Kunc to form Automobile. Naming the new entity was a struggle, however. In fact, the members claim finding a name is the most difficult part of being in a band. The group began as Snapshot, for lack of a better name. "We didn't know what we were going to call ourselves, and we were hoping it would just fall out of the sky on us," Baldwin said. But "we're all children of the auto industry, and (Automobile) is representative of our music." The name relates directly to many of Toms' lyrics, which frequently focus on the impact of the auto industry on Flint. "What happened to Flint, as far as the city crumbling, really had a big effect on me," she said. This inspired many of Toms' poems, including "Detroit, an Insect Food," which began as an assignment for one of the English major's classes at Flint. She wrote the poem while sitting in the parking lot of a demolished Auto World store. Once set to music written by the other band members, the poem became the song that closes each Automobile show. "It gave (my poetry) a lot more meaning with music behind it," Toms said. Automobile's members write all of their songs together in this way, combining riffs, choruses and other individual ideas into each piece. This improved on the systems of their previous bands. JESSICA JOHNSON/Daily The members of Automobile are willing to scrounge for grocery money from time to time in order to keep pursuing their music. In those ventures, one person typically wrote each song by working alone, Kunc said. The collaborative spirit follows Automobile to its live performances. "It's playing live where we get the chemistry between all of us," Baldwin said. One of the group's favorite shows happened at 1999's Octoberfest in Lansing, where they shared a stage with Marcy Playground. As a result of the performance, Automobile was selected to be on a live compilation of the event produced by Lansing station 92.1 FM, "the Edge." As with most of the band's jobs, Automobile stumbled into the offer to play Octoberfest when its organizer happened to hear them playing while walking by a coffee shop. Other opportunities came from the group's tenacity in calling clubs or from trading jobs with other local bands. Not all the band's concerts go as smoothly as the Octoberfest event, however. During a show a year and a half ago at the U.S.A. Café in East Lansing, the band had to set up their equipment right next to the tables and had their start time pushed back. "They started kicking out our friends during the set," Kunc said, because they were under 21 and it was after 9 p.m. "It was like playing a Steak 'n' Shake with a cover charge," Buell said of the U.S.A. Café job. Once the group's friends were thrown out, very few people interested in the band remained in the audience. In spite of the band's pride in a great set, at the end of the performance they were greeted by a silence in which "you could hear a spoon drop," Buell said. In Ann Arbor, Automobile has performed at the Halfway Inn, East Quad Music Festival and the League Underground. Now that they have penetrated the music scenes of Flint and East Lansing, the bandmates are working more on getting jobs in Ann Arbor. "As far as Ann Arbor goes, we haven't played everywhere we need to play," Buell said. Automobile is holding off on scheduling any performances at the Blind Pig for the time being. Part of the reason lies in the fact that the band would prefer not to put in time on Tuesday night so as to move up to Wednesday night, and so on. "Unless you can get a good foothold at the Blind Pig, you can't get a good show time," Buell said. The band also wants to wait to book larger clubs such as the Blind Pig in order to finish its album. That way the group could leave listeners with a sample of their music. Without an album "you take 10 steps forward, and then by the time you play again you've taken nine steps back because no one remembers you," Kunc said. Automobile started recording its first album a year ago. The bandmates plan for the as-yet-unnamed album to include 10 songs, nine of which are finished. "There are a lot of literary references in all the songs, except for the cranky political ranting ones," Toms said. This recording experience worked out very differently from previous sessions in which the band members have been involved. Typically, new bands pay high rates per hour for time in a recording studio, so the members don't get a chance to do everything they want to do. Instead, the album's producer and engineer Greg VanNewkirk offered Automobile unlimited time in his backyard studio. "We're kind of his pet project," Baldwin said. "It's the best thing that could have happened to us for recording purposes." During that first studio session, the band laid down five tracks, following their habit of time pressure from previous recordings. After listening to them again at VanNewkirk's suggestion, they decided not to use any of them. Now the bandmates work on each song for an extended period of time. "A lot of times in the studio, we listen to the same song over and over and over," Toms said. "We get a really refined sense of our own music." "We're able to make the album at our pace, which makes the music really heartfelt," Baldwin agreed. "We joke about how long it's taking, but I think it's going to be reflected in the maturity of the music." The bandmates hope to finish off the album, their first priority, in the next couple of months. As for the future, the members of Automobile aren't looking much further ahead than their next performance, scheduled for Feb. 1 at East Lansing's Small Planet. After pondering the question of where they next want to go with their music, Automobile's musicians unanimously decided on "Des Moines, Iowa," since they really have no prediction of what will happen. "It's a critical point for the band right now," Buell said. "All of us are staring down the barrels of the work world." Although each musician has other options, Automobile's members all agree that their hearts are in pursuing the band's music to its natural conclusion, whatever that might be. "I wouldn't have changed anything, the years I've been in this band," Kunc said. "Getting huge, that would be fine, I'm sure, but as long as this continues, that would be great. I would give up being a rock star to continue this." Originally on page 3B in the 1-27-2000 issue of the Daily.