God Star Social Travels from Austin to Knoxville and beyond
by Paige M. Travis
Jason Trout demands a redefinition of "play" as it is used in phrases like "he plays music" and "he plays in a band." Trout doesn't play in the traditional sense of the word. He works. And he loves his job.
Trout's band the God Star Social started out as a solo project, stemming from songs he wrote during the last days of his tenure in Austin, Texas.
"When I moved to Austin from Indiana—where I grew up and went to school—I was heading to L.A.," says Trout, a slight and serious man of 27. "I had come into contact with Austin and fell in love with it." Like many musicians before him, Trout found that Austin allowed the existence of that rare animal known as the professional musician, someone who actually makes a living "playing" in a band. "You could get attention for your music, but it's unlike L.A.; there wasn't this plasticity to it."
He befriended a coworker, a fellow musician named Tony Scalzo who sliced bagels by day and played in a band called Fastball at night. You may know Fastball from their 1998 hit "Way" that saturated the airwaves for an entire summer.
"When I was a kid, I thought if I was able to go to the mall at age 14 to Musicland and buy someone's CD, those guys weren't working somewhere."
Instead of being devastated, Trout was inspired. Scalzo was a success; his advice to his friend and fellow bagel seller was to persevere.
Trout got a shot of his own in a band called Violet Spell, signed to Elektra then let go in the midst of a buyout. Undaunted or just blindly devoted, he worked fulltime as a coffeehouse manager and took weekend tours with his solo material. Until he couldn't take anymore. He broke. Maybe artists' minds are more prone to that panic, freezing, crumbling. Trout refers to the experience as "my mental breakdown."
"I laugh about it now because it's behind me," he says. He dropped everything in Austin and moved to Knoxville to be with his family. Call it a vacation or retreat from the pressures of the outside world—in Knoxville, Trout had no job, no friends. He thought he might return to Austin to put together a band. But he met guitarist and "kindred spirit" Matt Field and discovered the Pilot Light.
"If it wasn't for the Pilot Light, there's no way I could've existed here," he says. "There's no other place that allows you to, not only get up and play experimental music, but experiment right there on stage. They'll pay you, encourage you. It's just a cool fucking place."
Trout and Field found drummer Travis Schappel and bassist Matt Zingg and started playing some of Trout's songs and writing their own. They released a six-song EP called Queer Sultry Summer in 2002, and a full-length disc Decidedly Lo-Fi/Revolution and Static Sky this summer. The band recorded and produced the record in Trout's garage with equipment rented from Austin.
"If you're at the point where [music] is what you breathe, what you do, then do it yourself. It just seems like it's the only way to do it," he says.
"Production was the most important and the hardest thing. I really dove into it, lived it, for those weeks. It's just easier to do it like that, when you don't have those restraints, when you can work at any time." The time at home was also important because the five weeks he worked on the record, sometimes for 18 hours at a time, elapsed just after his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
"I definitely escaped into that album. It became so important to me. And to be able to play that for her before she passed...." Trout says he gained tremendous perspective from living with his mother during the last year of her life. "I've done this for so long, it's become—it is dramatic, but—it's become a part of my survival in so many ways.... I've had hard times, and if music wasn't there for those things, I don't know...."
Trout's music has a life-affirming energy. Lo-Fi captures the God Star Social's live set—the winding, ebb and flow of songs that last for five-plus minutes. Field's and Trout's shared love of Sonic Youth and Television bear out in the fuzzed-out guitars, grunt-murmured vocals, insistent beats with an underlying melody.
"I don't think we're the most palatable or accessible band," Trout says. "Yet if you give us time, you can get a lot out of us. But we're at a time now where people aren't really about giving time to things. I think people are in a fast food life right now. We're not fast food music."
Neither is Sonic Youth. "They are in their 40s now, and—I've seen them twice in the last year—they rock harder than any of the other bands out today. We all should be learning from Sonic Youth."
To rock hard, make few compromises and keep evolving—this might be Trout's credo, if he has one. He sees himself making music and touring—keeping Knoxville as a home base—for the next 15 years or more.
"We could, very well, end up just doing this without really getting any money or appreciation for it. I'll never stop. Regardless."
September 25, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 39
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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