Troubadour Mishka Shubaly, a Denver native honing his chops in New York, muses on what inspires his music.
Live Music: Too much is heaped on the shoulders of rock ‘n’ roll. Rock is dead, then it’s going to save the world, then it’s dead again – all in the same afternoon, it seems. At its best, r ‘n’ r won’t save the world, but it will make you feel good about starving and losing money and driving around the country until your favorite T-shirt disintegrates in the dryer of someone whose name you don’t know.
One of the things you learn from being on the road all the time is that rock is not happening where Spin or Rolling Stone tell you it’s happening. L.A. is not rock ‘n’ roll; it’s a clown show. Athens, Ohio, and Valdosta, Ga., are where rock lives: tiny backwaters with $1 beers and honey-eyed blonds, kick-
butt local bands and even the occasional racist redneck for you to fight. The best show I’ve seen in the last couple of years wasn’t Coachella or Lollapalooza; it was watching a 19-year-
old dishwasher dry his hands, take off his apron and walk upstairs to rock the club he worked at with his hardcore band.
Rock is not eyeliner and cocaine, it’s about rolling around on the floor while your friends dump beer on you, screaming your heart out in your kitchen whites. The American music scene is amazing right now, but it’s happening live, not on My-
Space, and not in your iPod.
Richard Pryor: There has been no greater comfort to me while touring alone than the six-CD collection of Richard Pryor’s stand-up. You can erase several days of bad shows, long drives and getting harassed by cops just by listening to Pryor talk about getting arrested for shooting his car. An incredible artist with an endless capacity for both anger and forgiveness.
Books: The last good book I read was “Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls,” by Edward E. Leslie, about marooned sailors and castaways. I just broke up with my girlfriend of five years, and before I started reading this book, well, you know how it is, you walk around the city hoping a rope will snap and a piano or a safe will fall down and crush you. Then you read about some poor fool who has to kill and eat his dog and then weeks later digs up the paws and bones because he still hasn’t been rescued. I got some tacos and a six-pack and felt a lot better.
Comic artists: With hip-hop quickly cannibalizing itself, comics now get my vote as today’s most inventive medium. Masters like Jim Woodring and Art Spiegelman are turning out some of their best work, and there’s a huge crop of underground artists like Jason Shiga and Ivan Brunetti who are putting out diabolically clever and heartbreaking mini-comics. Tim Krieder’s “The Pain” is hilarious, with some of the most searing political cartoons I’ve seen. His sense of humor has sharp teeth.
Shubaly plays Wednesday at the Larimer Lounge (larimerlounge.com) and Thursday at the Hi-Dive (hi-dive.com). He’s finishing a new record, “How To Make a Bad Situation Worse,” so expect to hear songs from it.
