Rock On!

Revisiting my tactile relationship to music in a changing city, part 2.

Last week, Bandcamp Daily published an essay I wrote about listening to -io by Circuit Des Yeux and the troublesome relationship I have with my orchestral past. “Stranger,” especially, smacked me over the head, confronting me with the sound of the contrabass being used for something expressive, oblique, and forward-thinking.

Since hearing this song in October 2021, I’ve openly lamented how I’ve minimized the bass’s position in my life. The classical bass served as my primary tactile relationship to music for 11 years. The Cleveland suburb I grew up in, Lakewood, had an unusually strong music program, bolstered by a proportionally high tax burden on small homes and gifts from an alumnus who’d struck it big as a distributor of oil & gas equipment. It was that tycoon’s initial investment that gave the orchestral program its crown jewel: The Lakewood Project, a high-school rock orchestra featuring electric strings, acoustic strings to support them, and a rhythm section with all the usual components of a rock band.

LP debuted in 2003 with the help of an enterprising music faculty and the “Eddie Van Halen of the violin world,” Mark Wood. Wood, a founding member of Trans-Siberian Orchestra and inventor of the solid-body electric violin, is a wild amalgamation: a Julliard-trained violinist with a Freddie Mercury haircut who’s played with Celine Dion and Billy Joel, Wood is a man of terrifying skill and savvy. The Lakewood Project proved just one brief detour in Wood’s international fame as a rock violinist. Much like TSO, Wood’s music is, well, dramatic:

This vision of an electrified rock-band-slash-youth-orchestra celebrated 20 years of existence this past weekend, and I traveled back to Cleveland to play as an alumnus. I played with the ensemble from 2011-2015, spending the whole time in the back corner as an acoustic bassist. The weekend was fun and low-stakes: I came back, in large part, to reunite with a cellist friend from the c/o 2013, Moira, who still lives in Cleveland but has been incredibly busy with medical school. Picking up bass performance again on hits like The Who’s “Who Are You” and Kansas’ “Carry On My Wayward Son” felt more campy than serious. The alum and the current LP high schoolers delighted an audience of parents, donors, and family members. I caught up with a couple old friends.

The Lakewood Project is loaded with memories for me dating back to (sigh) 2005. My family moved back to Lakewood after a brief stint in exurban Columbus (ew), this time enrolling us in public school after having gotten a glimpse at the disintegrating Catholic schools in my kindergarten year. Lakewood Project performed a set at a festival decommissioning a redundant elementary school. I was in second grade. The high schoolers on stage looked like Disney Channel stars, with immaculate stage presence, colorful outfits, and cheery smiles.

2005 clip of The Lakewood Project performing a Mark Wood original, “Strike the Match,” one of the ensemble’s audience-pleaser hits.

Where some young homosexuals fall in love with musical theater or pop stars, I fell in love with this. And when I got it, I made the most of it. Playing in the ensemble let me connect with friends I still maintain today, like Chelsea, who first showed me Mr. Twin Sister and with whom I saw Beach House in Pittsburgh last year. I played with my style to increase my confidence, I helped arrange music for small ensembles, I tried out for youth orchestras all over and played in several. It became a “thing” for me.”

The youth orchestra industrial complex comes to an end at some point, not without some major stressors. I spent senior year leveraging my bass performance skills for college scholarships. I learned one of the bass standards for a senior recital.

The annual 4th of July show is a bit of an ordeal. This was my last performance with the ensemble, until this past Sunday.

I kept playing with my college orchestra to get some fine arts credits, and I even practiced regularly my first semester. But, without the intense regiment of both the traditional youth orchestra circuit and this weird, exciting ensemble, I didn’t have much motivation. I went to college for a more typical career; playing music felt like a chapter of my life that was meant to end. Even though our music teachers encouraged us to keep playing in some capacity, with Lakewood Project boasting that 80% of alumni continue to play their instruments in some capacity, the realities of daily life and the expense, both in money and space, of the upright bass exacerbated my laziness. I fell away from playing in any capacity and just recently decided I have to restore my tactile relationship with music. I’m taking bass guitar lessons from a neighbor.

Lakewood is a weird place that’s in flux. As a city, it’s undergoing a resurgence of interest from buyers and developers with a renewed interest in dense, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, mixed-income towns. Given the price elevation, I would say that, since my high school graduation especially, Lakewood has undergone gentrification: massive upsets in real estate values, prices, and development interests that have severe implications for low-income residents. Lakewood was always in a privileged place as a suburb outside city limits but with urban amenities. Many who chose to raise families here did so under the guise of distrusting suburbia and looking for something alternative. The city isn’t as homogenous as some of its neighbors, but to call it truly diverse might be a stretch.

At the end of the day, the biggest beneficiaries of Lakewood’s services, and the kids who get extra attention in the school district, tend to be whiter and richer. Some come from families in estates along the Great Lakes that are worth millions. What Lakewood promises a student from Edgewater Drive differed greatly from a student in an overcrowded Bird Town apartment. As Lakewood increasingly becomes a playground for rich, young upstarts who want urban living but don’t want to take a chance on Cleveland Metropolitan School District, it needs to invest in affordable housing, transit, and basic systems home repairs.

By Rocket Mortage’s metrics, houses in my hometown have sold for nearly 10% higher than they did last year. This is on trend with the last 10 or so years; just after the Great Recession, it wasn’t rare to get a quality home for between $110,000 and $150,000.

The Lakewood Project’s allure is relatively unchanged in this climate. If anything, that Lakewood boasts having an ensemble like this among its more traditional extracurriculars plus an urban built environment has made the schools more appealing. As long as the high school has a rock orchestra, it’s alt. It’s not like raising your kids in the cookie-cutter suburbs. It’s a more authentic lifestyle with a more expressive, creative school. Right?

I had more fun in Lakewood Project than I give it credit for. I am more confident now than I was when I started. But I think a lot about the exceptionalism that Lakewood residents express for their hometown and wonder how that attitude contributes to Lakewood’s ongoing gentrification. The actual process of gentrification isn’t just about shifting vibes, shifting prices —— it’s about market forces and government policy coming together to increase real estate values, send poorer, nonwhite residents to outlying areas, and generate a cityscape with amenities geared towards a largely white upper middle class. With its strong-enough public schools and mixed-use corridors that abut large blocks of mostly single-family homes, Lakewood didn’t have to do too much to attract investment from people looking for arbitrage opportunities. The city was already mostly white, but it was poorer and the homes were showing their age. The transformation was quick and it’s ongoing. All that is happening while music is taking a back seat at the elementary level in Lakewood as the district seeks to be competitive in STEM with neighboring districts. Any opportunity to generate more future Amazon and Raytheon employees should be taken :)

As for my tactile relationship with music? I think that reflecting on it, revisiting Lakewood Project, an ensemble I somewhat resented for most of my time in it, and noodling on two different kinds of basses has me pretty excited. While my skills are super rusty now, I think they’re salvageable. The youth orchestra industrial complex, which churns out hyperserious kids who may or may not be cut out for professional musicianship, is behind me. The weird politics of The Lakewood Project, with its conflicts between members, leaders, parents, and more (there are plenty), needn’t affect my desire to play. I can claim a healthy relationship with instrumental performance on my own time; I don’t need to be a part of anyone or any place’s legacy.

I played.