The Privilege of Autonomy

Our band could be your life

Real names'd be proof

— Minutemen, "History Lesson Part II"

Mark,

Milo Aukerman, the lead singer of the Descendents, is a rock star when his biochemistry career gets hard.

Milo Goes to College

He left for UCSD in 1982. The band put his cartoon face on the cover of Milo Goes to College and shipped the album before he was gone. Not a farewell. A placeholder.

Bill Stevenson played drums for Black Flag while Milo was at school. When Black Flag broke, he started ALL — the Descendents minus their singer, plus a different one. Then he built the Blasting Room in Fort Collins and produced records there. Descendents. ALL. Rise Against. Lagwagon. NOFX. Karl Alvarez and Stephen Egerton rotated through the lineup. The merch table never closed.

Milo finished a biochemistry PhD in 1995 and worked at DuPont on plant molecular biology for twenty years. The Descendents reformed when he had time — I Don't Want to Grow Up in 1985, Everything Sucks in 1996, Cool to Be You in 2004, Hypercaffium Spazzinate in 2016, the year DuPont laid him off. He has been back full-time ever since.

Whether they meant to or not, the band held space for him for thirty years. Bill Stevenson didn't wait for him. He built his life around the gaps, not for them. He made space for Milo without bending his life to it.

On Leadership

What the band gave Milo: time. Thirty years of it. Album covered with his face on it. A place to come back to when DuPont didn't want him anymore.

What did the band get back? The same thing. They gave him space; they got the space to make ALL. They gave him the option of leaving; they got the option of him coming back. They gave him an exit ramp; they got a band that could outlast any one chapter. Autonomy was the gift in both directions.

Call it design or accident. They had been a band first. The cushion existed before the autonomy. Whatever Bill Stevenson built around Milo's leaving was built on years of already having been the Descendents.

That is also part of what you mean, I think, by protect yourself. Bill made space for Milo without making it his only space. He had his own life — ALL, Blasting Room, the producing — that ran whether or not Milo was singing. The model isn't martyrdom. It's parallel investment.

You're fair to call out that I'm acting like a manager, not a leader, Mark. Having the space to be that kind of a leader is a privilege.

I'm not even six months into this job yet — I'm scared of the risk. The team has no reason yet to hold space for me, and I have no track record that lets me hold space for them at the cost of breakage the company will read as my failure.

Our Band Could Be Your Life

The Minutemen — D. Boon, Mike Watt, George Hurley — played working-class punk out of San Pedro. Their song "History Lesson Part II" closes with the line Our band could be your life. They meant it literally. Working-class music, working-class people, working-class money.

December 22, 1985. D. Boon was 27. He was asleep in the back of the band's tour van when it went off the road in the Arizona desert and rolled. He was thrown from the vehicle and killed.

The Minutemen could only afford a van. The DIY ethic that made the music real is what put D. Boon in a vehicle without enough between him and the road. Working-class punk had no exit ramp. He paid for his autonomy with his body.

In the Van

I'm scared of being in that van. I know you understand that — it's part of why you're in group sessions the way I'm in project meetings. Being a strong leader is a privilege, the same way eating dinner every night or sleeping under a roof is a privilege.

I have to build that. For my team, and for me. It's genuinely terrifying and hard. It's also not something someone is gonna hand to me.

You're right though that the answer is to give the team the space to become the team. I need to give myself the space to lead too.

For Mark

Mark, you once said "It takes some safety to be able to do something like that. As a contractor I would never have suggested it… We weren't all employees, we weren't on the same playing field."

What did the leaders who held space for you do? When you were new? When you were a contractor? What separated them from the managers?

Our band is scientist rock

But I was E. Bloom and Richard Hell

Joe Strummer, and John Doe

Me and Mike Watt, playing guitar

— Minutemen, "History Lesson Part II"