It has been approximately two months since I left So Many Dynamos and the dream I am currently livin’ is less nomadic. Days I once spent traveling hundreds of miles to exotic locations (hello, Lexington, Kentucky!) are now spent ripping up carpet, scraping paint, and patching up concrete in my unfinished basement. Evenings that transpired in dank bars and weirdo art spaces are now occupied by winding down on the couch with my wife, wrapped in a Snuggie™, watching The Next Iron Chef with a kitty curled in my lap. To most, this would seem bland, but I find the consistency invigorating; my departure has brought me the awareness of how abnormal my former life was. The more time I spend functioning as a normal human with normal problems (not that scrambling to find the promoter at 1am to see if the band can crash in his apartment because both of the local bands cancelled at the last minute and nobody came to the show so now we can’t afford a room at the Motel 6 is an unusual dilemma), the more I understand our culture’s most common clichés. There’s no place like home. Familiarity breeds contempt. You are what you eat.

One such phrase has been particularly appropriate lately: Those who can’t do, teach. By the time I gave my two weeks’ notice, I physically, mentally, and emotionally could not do the band anymore—somehow performing renovations on a four-bedroom house is less exhausting. Now, I teach guitar lessons twice a week at the local music store.

Being a member of a touring band dominates your identity. More people know me as “Ryan from So Many Dynamos” than by my Christian name. I have been saved into multiple cellular phones as “Ryanamos.” Even my odd jobs have been extricably tied to this identity—writing articles about the band, recording other bands that know me through the band, reviewing shows for the local alt weekly paper because I befriended the editor after she wrote a story about the band. Teaching guitar lessons is oddly comforting because it has absolutely nothing to do with So Many Dynamos. Maybe that’s for the best; if some parents saw the on-tour, unshaven, unshowered, sweat-caked version of me, they might take issue with allowing their child to sit in a room with me for 30 unattended minutes.

Education and music have been intertwined in my life since I took my first guitar lesson at the age of 12. But in my early 20s, the combination of a decade of musical knowledge and my increasingly independent priorities went awry. When So Many Dynamos began, I copped the attitude that everything I liked was better and more relevant than everything everyone else likes. And by channeling my pretension into a rock band, I could “teach something” to my under-educated peers. I was too high on van fumes and secondhand smoke to understand how arrogant this was. I was James Murphy in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” before he realizes his fragility.

With live performance comes an uneven balance of power wherein the audience and performer’s roles are clearly defined. Guitar lessons level the playing field. I possess a definite level of authority, but I still must cater to my client. I used to have certain frustrations with relinquishing control, especially since most of my students are between eight to 12 years old, and kids in that demographic can’t get enough AC/DC (and AC/DC is possibly my least favorite band in rock ‘n’ roll history), but I’ve still had to teach “Back in Black” at least 50 times. I blame Guitar Hero, but four years ago, I blamed School of Rock. Eventually, I learned that the process is more important than the subject matter—judge not lest ye be judged. If I only taught songs I liked, I’d be no better than the teachers at private schools that ignore evolution because they don’t believe in it (it is called music “theory” after all, and I’m sure Bach is sort of like Darwin to monks singing Gregorian chant).

So today, I will ride my bike to downtown Edwardsville with my guitar resting securely in the gig bag strapped to my back. I will walk through the back door of the music store and the little bell will ring, like it always does. I will greet my first student and his dad, and they will have no idea that I was in a touring rock band, that I performed in front of 2,500 people in Chicago once or that I performed in front of four people in Salt Lake City three times. None of this will matter, because to them I am not Ryan formerly of So Many Dynamos. I’m Ryan Wasoba, guitar teacher.

We will sit together in a small white room and plug his iPod into a set of speakers. A drumstick will hit a closed pair of hi-hats 16 times before Angus Young hits the opening E chord to “Back in Black.”

Watch: AC/DC, “Back in Black” [at youtube.com]