{summer christmas special}
After some nine hours spent in coach class solidarity with my kenneled dog back home, I finally walked my way back to summer in December. It’s a time and place where the highway air cycles through scents of day-melted chocolate after a cool night, wayward palmtree bark, and a description of salt water from an imagination that’s never seen the sea; where car horns and sunny rain hum with cicada constancy in at least one section of the nearest major metropole; where people, with Christmas one air-conditioned week away, are so starved for northern notions of holiday cheer that they will clog every lane in their entire city just to glimpse a fake plastic evergreen the size of an apartment complex, its ornamental spangles glittering in contrapuntal patterns well past dawn.
That’s how it is in Brazil, at least — the only December summer I’ve ever known. I’ve known it a few times, by now, if not anytime recently. A lot of things, like those above, are well familiar; the hiked prices and shit exchange rate aren’t. When I first came here, too young to appreciate it, I could live like a king on a duke’s diet of coins and paper. Now, I recoil spittingly when I see a newsstand copy of Esquire for what comes out to $35 American, or wince deep when someone spends half a hundred so I can eat crayola sushi and other elementary Japanese. It’s probably worse in Rio. Even up here, you’re wont to part with a few dozen Reais, 100% tax and a urine sample just for a couple sticks of deodorant, or sugar cane.
Aside from avoiding banks and things that necessitate them (swipe your credit around these parts, even in the nicer restaurants and malls, and you’ll wind up card-cloned out of 7 grand like my friend Fuhrer), I’ve been visiting some of the places I’ve been before. I’m not making it up, down, or over to most of the places I’ve been before (Bahia, Paraty, Ilhabela, Ubatuba, Itu, and yeah, Rio), but the ones I’ve made have been a good head trip. Probably my favorite was the cute little apartment in the weird-ugly downtown of Sorocaba city, three stories up and down the hall from a “Body Art Designers Tattoo Piercing” parlor that back then existed only in the distant future. I think back on having whiled away many a hot pre-teen day playing Super Nintendo games on a computer that wasn’t quite archaic yet, one that serendipity loaded with ROMs (and a fancy little interface to trawl through them1), and I think, hey: I had a pretty cool childhood. How many other kid gringos got to cool out during December summer in the coziest nook of beat central, in one of rural Brazil’s biggest urban oases?
(my old view)
On the way over last week, my long legs jammed violently against the most generous recline I’ve ever seen granted an airplane seat, I had barely slept in two weeks and through nearly a hundred pages written about the saddest minutiae. On that plane, I felt like a toaster strudel with an ashtray for filling. I felt like a medium-large froyo cup filled with garbage, microwaving on high. I felt like three down-comforters and an air-conditioner forgotten for the length of a heavy nap. (The last of these three I’d actually experience a few days later, then scribble into a notebook.) I felt like a shower. I couldn’t shower.
I did sleep, though. I’ve never slept like that on a flight before, and probably won’t again.2
Now I’m here, sleeping less a night than I probably managed to on that flight (the reasons for which I’ve been sworn to secrecy by someone who will become a character in my “Story” probably pretty soon3), but feeling better nevertheless. It probably has something to do with the agua de coco. It’s like an energy drink, except it doesn’t taste like battery acid, actually energizes me, and won’t make you (or me) feel like shit. You get it by buying a great big green coconut, chopping off the top eighth of it, and then stabbing something sharp (and then a straw) into its glistening flesh-ceiling. It’ll probably be around $2, and the best use of money you’ll make the entire time you’re here.
…You’re still coming, right?
Jk. I’ll stop wanking now — the bracketed posts I write are always wank. I’m going to get back to the Story in a second; I actually just edited the least previous installment in that just now, and made it not suck anymore, so get on that if you haven’t before. Long story short, the big show me and my wacky band of 2007 have been driving towards for the past few “chapters” is finally about to get down. It’ll happen before 2012, and then maybe the timeline on these things will finally pick up the pace and I’ll be less than a year behind the present before 2013. (I’ve said it before, with different years — but 2012 will be a different year, in a different way.)
See you there.
- Thanks, Sorocaban bootleggers — I still remember your long dead name, 2EZ4US. [↩]
- Not before the First Class Era begins, at least. [↩]
- I really do need a better name for it than “The Story.” Read some entries in it — they’re the ones with quotation marks and capital letters in the title — and let me know what you think it should be. Lob a good one and I’ll let you hear my mythic music. [↩]
“Before the Movie, You Live the Life”
Back at the practices of June ’07, A-Town was helping us keep it unreasonable on the reg. One vital afternoon, while rehearsing the 4-minute musical slur we called “Medley 3,” the core five of us were working the build out of OK Go’s “Get Over It” (as spliced with then-hit “Tipsy” and Nirvana’s “Drain You”). Several moments before the drop into “99 Problems,” I realized Asa – who didn’t have a part in the song ‘til then – was nowhere to be seen. We all kind of looked at each other confusedly in the last two bars before the transition, when at the very moment of our impending collapse, A-Town came springing out of the bathroom, door swinging and mic in hand, landing in the center of the room right on beat and cue: “If you havin’ girl trouble, I feel bad for you, son!” We hit the next section of the medley with grinning confidence, and damn if the kid couldn’t out-cartoon a Korean warehouse when he felt like it.
It was around this time that I began to regret not having blown my life’s savings on hiring a pro camera crew to film every minute of work going into this show – for hijink hilarity like that above, partly, but also all the grossly exaggerated stress and conflict we self-inflicted. Everyone involved had zero perspective in all the best and worst ways: we actually thought that this show, if executed properly, could be a launching pad into a quick and relatively painless ascent to international stardom. My recently abandoned record label had made a name for me in the vibrant pop-rock scene of Nashville (for a time, I was the stuff of barroom legend: the mysterious “Jacob Dorruff,” some strange child prodigy who kept funding local records and infiltrating all the otherwise-inbred message boards with impassioned diatribe), and I figured I could leverage that into some gigs and regional success down there. (And while I knew that the music we were doing then wouldn’t cut it beyond the impressionable teen market, I also knew that this show at Milkboy could give us enough momentum to start really making the material click and the grooves arten up a little.) So we took everything deadly serious, in the kind of hyper-aware/unaware way that makes the bands filmed in DiG! so entertaining, charming, and resoundingly hateable. Even during the darkest moments of those long rehearsal weeks, I knew that if nothing else, we could’ve made for a great documentary.
Many trying moments came, like when KJ and I got a little too obsessed with “live production” and wasted half a day on trying to learn how best to use the bass pedal I had just dropped $200 on,1 and Lupin and Dilan staged a brief mutiny during which they demanded we cover the Go! Team’s “Huddle Formation,” in its entirety, in lieu of a fourth medley.2 Dilan kept saying he’d need a “garbage can drum” to pull off the song’s distinct percussive feel. I briefly considered the irony of not being able to afford a garbage can (sufficiently musical in tone and timbre), then perished it.
Lupin’s infractions were mostly the product of a typical space-kid’s disconnect from grounded reality (relative to everyone else’s in the band’s, this was rather remarkable), but Dilan’s growing recalcitrance was a direct function of his resentment for practicing two to six hours everyday as recently promised. I once had to stop a run through the “Tainted Love”/”SOS” part of our second medley because I noted, rather furiously, that Dilan was texting, and then once more because his guarantee not to fuck up the beat whilst doing so was failing miserably. Another time, amid circumstances I can’t recall, he left Lucy to wither by her lonesome in the practice space for several hours while he went to “do some necessary chores in the house” – the most involving of which was a nap. I bristled at him on both occasions, blue flame for eyes.
One particularly painful-funny day came during that crucial week Lupin had disappeared to the south, and my attempts to get the band to rehearse without him in the mean were proven largely futile. Pete and I crashed in KJ’s basement with him the night prior, having fallen asleep to a platter of either Stars of the LId or early Elliott on the wax-spinner, anticipating the keyboard we had finally ordered Pete to finally arrive the next morning. How we had found and decided on which keyboard to cop was pretty out there, and typical of our approach in those days: I had managed to track down the guitarist of Family Force 5 on Facebook (circumventing his stage name), friended him, and solicited his general advice. He said that with enough practice (and without having heard a lick of our music), we could easily rock out as pro as they did (which, before they went all electro-soft and Auto-Tuned, was pretty pro), and that felt like encouragement enough. He also answered my question re: what little keyboard Crouton (I think it was Crouton) slung for the legendary Ferguson performance: “The Novation Bass Station.” We Googled it, saw that it was listed online for a pretty sober $200, and KJ comped it to his family’s plastic post-haste. The show was looming dangerously close for our keyboardist still to lack a keyboard, and if it was good enough for national TV, it was good enough for a gig at Milkboy.
***
“It’s fucking software” is what I heard that morning as the last of a warm dream died, my skin grossly sweat-welded to folds of basement couch pleather. A CD plopped down on the coffee table in front of me, and, identifying its scowling source hovering above, I leaned over to take a look. It was a paper slipcase, labeled simply: “The Novation Bass Station.”
“It’s fucking software,” KJ repeated. Pete and I could scarcely believe it, scoured the torn packing remnants and even the mailbox from whence they came. No dice: without realizing it, we had just scrapped a couple Benjamins on a library of keyboard sounds for a keyboard we still didn’t have.
That’s when I first got that thought about the documentary.
Sugar-shit soured to pure shitrot when Pete opened up his just-bought, refurbished Macbook to find the screen bleeding dark matter all over itself. He cursed loudly, demanding to know who the fuck had done his new machine wrong in the night. I had just woken up from a deep sleep long uninterrupted, and KJ too denied any foreknowledge or responsibility – and so the tragic turn was attributed to the powers of a strange and spiteful mystery. It put an even damper damper on the day – hell, the whole thing we were in together, whatever it was – for all of us, no doubt Pete especially: he’d scarcely had the laptop for a week, and it was supposed to last him all of college, which hadn’t even started yet. No rest for the weary, no warranty for the refurbed…
KJ had bought two tickets to see Panda Bear that night off the second-hand mercado, and somehow, for whatever reason, turned out unable to pick them up himself. Somehow, for whatever reason (probably related to the other), Pete and I conceded that it made most sense for him and me to drive into town and make the exchange on Kage’s behalf. He hit us with the $80 cash we’d need, and soon the Shitcopter was burning cheap octane down the summer-green freeway.
As we sat waiting in the agreed meeting place – the parking lot of an inner city Whole Foods, funnily enough – the tix pusher told me via cellphone that he was 6’6” and in a bright pink collared: “can’t miss me,” he gloated deeply. Pete and I rolled eyes, but the guy’s aim proved true when he rolled up, unmistakably marked by polar bear girth and rugby-pink machismo. The exchange took less time than it had taken for him to tell me he’d be obvious-looking to someone looking for somebody obvious. Got out the car, cash for weighted envelope, thanks a lot, enjoy the show – and as we reclined back into the wheel, I realized with sad anxiety that there was only one ticket enclosed. Moreover, the oversized bastard had disappeared into Whole Foods, only to emerge five minutes later and suspiciously without a shopping bag or even a freshly dispensed 50¢ yo-yo in hand. He probably figured I would have scooted by then, I figured.
Instead, I was up in his face within a snap, demanding answers. He kept his composure, claimed the deal had always been for one ticket – and though I can’t remember if he relented to give us some cash back or not, I do remember thinking he might have been telling the truth when KJ, re-examining his email correspondence with the guy back in his den, quickly X’ed out the window and cursed the big pink curd for his cunning.
Somehow we found another ticket — but there was a bleak flavor to the day that just couldn’t be spat.
***
Nighttime likewise skimped on mouthwash. I remember picking up Mixtape again, driving around with him and the others while he played cuts off an early Panda Bear record or two. One of them was called “Inside a Great Stadium and Running a Race,” and for a ride used to rock-outs like Year Zero and Pinkerton, all the track’s shits n’ squiggles just weren’t a match.
“This is the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard,” Pete fumed from the passenger seat, in fact. His freshly tarred laptop screen was probably still fouling his mood, but yeah: it was some pretty stupid-sounding shit.
“No no,” Mixtape insisted, barely comprehensible as he demarcated a conceptual transition in the bleeps and bloops around us. “Panda Bear is great. He was just entering The Stadium before – now The Race has begun.” I was trying to keep an open mind for the concert ahead, but it was getting rough.
After dropping off Pete, the three of us sauntered into the ground level Sanctuary at the Church, a space typically reserved for more sit-and-think music than the sweat-thirsty maw below, where we had recently seen Cold War Kids and Sunset Rubdown. Most of the frontmost pews were claimed by the time we arrived, so we staked out some fire-hazardous space on the rug in the aisle to keep close to the stage, as had a few dozen others. I remember the opener being some Asian longhair called Scott Mou, who charmed the silent crowd with an interminable sea of warble and noise.
Nowadays that kind of thing has to be done immaculately to sway me, but back then I wouldn’t have suffered it quietly for Boris, Merzbow, or Thurston himself. Sprawled out on the rug-floor in physical exasperation after what felt like at least an hour, I wailed long, screaming protest into the dark of the sound and the cathedral. They took turns swallowing me whole, my voice too quiet and the muscles in my throat too dimly lit for even the kid closest to notice.
Sometime much-feeling later, the ardent antimusician departed the stage to let Panda do his thing. I had earlier seen a YouTube or two of his live act courtesy Kage, and was disappointed to find what he was doing before me no different: the fellow just stood in front of an effects board, occasionally twisting a knob, wailing kind of like I had against Scott Mou, strumming a chord or two on the guitar every few minutes. I’d seen some guy going by the name Animal Hospital put the live one-man atmospherics game over the top in a Philly basement about a year prior, and Racing in the Stadium again, Panda Bear just couldn’t keep up.
After a while, I felt comfortable folding. I left KJ and Mixtape to stew in the non-happening of it all as I favored some late-night chew in Chinatown, turning around to drive back and pick them up again as soon as I finished staining my last napkin. Sitting alone in the car, I contemplated how I was in a bad mood because of the music. Panda Bear’s, sure – but with four days left before our big show, I had to admit mine was bothering me more.
- For a moment, we actually considered setting up a “DJ mix table” of effects pedals onstage, which Pete or I would man for the entirety of the set – though of course, this was well beyond our means at the time. [↩]
- This met with an instant veto from me and KJ, seeing how non-medley covers offended the sensibilities of the band we wanted to be, and also because “Huddle Formation” is a song so reliant upon its studio tricks that not even the Go! Team, a band whose career depended on them figuring out how to play it live, could figure out how to play it live. [↩]
“Water Honey Flavor”
The rain beat down on Swainia, torrential sky-spit pounding thick upon landmarks state and local. The insect dead in their floating graves mostly found relief too late and little from the chlorine that had done them in slowly, while others fragmented upon droplet impact; the private asphalt strips that cut a motorway arterial through the estate flushed a lusher shade of black; the trampoline where Pete had earlier that week almost-cracked his ribs, before moaning prostrate by its side strumming a body he could plug in but couldn’t play, sweat through its fibrous skin; the lake and trees drank greedily from the dirty cotton balls above, deep drafts swelling nearly to their mud and barken brims.
So I observed through the many open windows of the royal garage annex where we practiced, sharper and more spirited than ever before. Lupin wasn’t there – he had not yet departed to the warmer climes of Florida, but even in the final week he could practice with us before the show he had missed crucial shed time for things like haircuts and moonbounces – but the spirit behind his enthusiastic maxim (“we need to be tight as shit”) was in one way or another on all our minds. Just the three of us: me the bass, Dilan drums,1 KJ on chords power and barre. The rhythm section. And as the crisp gales circulated from window to window, they replenished us like they did the other green world outside. Playing garage (annex) rock reheats of “SexyBack” and “Sweet Escape” could scarcely feel fresher.
It reminds me, now, of a thing I had written a couple years earlier. It was about one of the few perfect moments I enjoyed in tenth grade, a moment during which my boatmate and I, in a two-man shell, rowed our way down the vapors of a freshly rained river. Other boats among our team fleeted in and out of vision, the mechanical hum of our coach’s instructions melting into the ambient fog around us. Ben’s back before me, I turned around to glimpse over my shoulder the Girard Avenue Bridge, a monolithic skyscraper with a railroad for a roof, as its stone arches peaked through low-floating clouds like an ink mountain on ancient Chinese silk. At a time when I had little enthusiasm for rowing, those enchanted few minutes helped me realize why I ever bothered to do it in the first place.
Like rowing, music needed a vital reminder every now and then. And like rowing, music entailed discipline2 and commitment, tough decisions like pushing a close friend out of the mix for the better of the band or boat, and a willingness to work endlessly for a brief and immensely high-pressure blast of glory or shame (so close to one another in elemental quality that you often can’t tell them apart until it’s over). Lupin’s Floridian holiday, just days away now, would certainly raise the stakes for the possibly-gigantic debut show we were to play in less than two weeks, and its nearing deadline helped raise the intensity of that dialectic compound of total loss/victory. Focused, detail-oriented practices like this one seemed essential to the success of the show – looming ever closer – but even if we were starting to sound pretty good, the amount of work left to do felt daunting.
For starters, we needed a rapper. Lupin was mortified by the prospect of reciting rhymes in front of a potentially large crowd, then excited, and finally mortified or excited depending on the rhyme in question3 – in any event, somebody would have to fill in some blanks. And we needed a female voice to replace the long-hanging void left by Marie’s half-reluctant departure: we knew that she wouldn’t do, but had no idea who would. And by God, we needed Pete to learn his keyboard parts – and Pete, even more pressingly, needed a keyboard to learn them on.4
Thankfully, Lupin would now add to his resume of Dancefloor Diplomacy contributions5 an invaluable connection. He’d sung with a girl named Lucy at a local music camp the summer previous, and per his recommendation, somehow or another she came whisking silently through Dilan’s garage one fine spring morning.
Her bright, gold-flecked skin gave her a radiance from beneath the redder crown of hair that flowed down her back like some regal veil. The effect, combined with the sharp architecture of her face and a height that’d be unusual for a girl of any age, made her seem older-souled than most kids her year. Without noticing it, this quiet maturity reminded me of myself at her age, whatever it was – which I would learn later that day, to my disbelief, was a mere 14.
What had nothing to do with me at any age, though, was her voice. Lupin told her to sing, and so she sang a song she knew and liked (something by the Format), and it was so good that the depth of its good passed me undetected. Hers was a beautiful voice, as rich and ready for jazz standards as it was for a reading of Rihanna, and its arrival into our world was so sudden and simple that I could only yet comprehend it as good enough to recruit on the spot. I’m sure someone explained to her the vague heights of our ambition and raison d’etre as a band, but if it was me I’ve long forgotten the conversation. In my memory, Lucy simply appeared, sang, and stayed.
Enter Luce.
Her voice was even better than Lupin’s Beach Boys pipes, but the best part was that it went with his like honey into tea. The way they blended reminded me of one of my favorite bands, Calamine, whose Dan and Julie worked better together than happy marriage.6 With next to no effort, our sound had been enriched tremendously.
***
If it was Lucy in the morning, then hopefully we could find a rapper by mid-afternoon. Assembled semi-circle on couch and floor, the lot of us racked our cellphones for inspiration. But before we could even get to our “address books” deep within the clunky depths of our pre-smart SIM cards, an offer came from an unlikely corner.
“I’ll do it.” Pete, from the couch.
“Really?” Skepticism on the floor. Pete can rap?
“Yeah, why not,” he said, shrugging slightly in the leather but slouching neither less nor more. “It’s not like I’m doing anything else in this band.”
True enough. Still no keyboard.
Someone passed him the lyrics sheet to “99 Problems” courtesy of a messy Sing365 print-out7 and cued up a YouTube8 instrumental to match.
Pete, rapping the second verse, which was not even a part of our set: “Cause I’m young and I’m black FUCK I can’t do it,” lyric sheets scattering on “FUCK” with a defeated whip of the wrist. For Pete’s budding career as a rhymesayer, it was a bold and valiant death.
“You’re not gonna believe this, J,” said KJ, next to Pete on the couch and back to his cellphone. “But Asa raps.”
Asa. The blond-haired, hazel-eyed poster child for the suburb-American ideal. Met KJ in childhood when he was rambling through their neighborhood, Nerf football in hand and asking the fellow young’un if he wanted to play (did, but I’m not sure if either of them have – together or separate – since). Went to the Mainline’s slightly weirder, kinda artsier private school for kids who probably wouldn’t quite fit in at the other ones, but probably didn’t quite fit in because he didn’t do art, never hair-dyed his introversion into extroverted purple or pink, couldn’t play the guitar well enough to ever answer “hey man wanna jam after school” to the affirmative. He’d come over to KJ’s house one recent night, though, and handled KJ’s (otherwise unused) drumkit well enough, ‘til he broke the snare with grinning mid-teen gusto (as it happened often, KJ told me). And now KJ was telling me that on one such night, Asa and KJ and little KJ brother Ian attempted to improvise some demos (Bisy Backsons was the band name), broke most of their gear along the way, and concluded with a scratchy little thing featuring just Ian on the kickdrum, KJ on the harmonica (Dylan crush), and Asa freestyling some “poesy to the Mainline” – not unconvincingly for a white, prepubescent 8th grader, KJ said. I believed it enough to get him over and give it a shot.
Enter Asa.
As it would happen, his beginnings in the group were somewhat less auspicious than those of our new, amber-tressed chanteuse. I can’t even remember exactly how it went, to be honest. We probably plugged in, ran through a number or two with him relieving Lupin of the raps, had a “hey, not bad” moment, and left it at that.
What I do remember came later, when we were back to our rugged semi-circle and airing out me and KJ’s latest ideas on the acoustic guitars. Something in particular must have sounded great in a way no one expected, because soon everyone was exclaiming their praises. Asa, caught up in the spirit of the moment, bolted right up off his chair, seesawing back and forth on rubber heel, shouting a barefaced lie:
“I’m from New Yawk! I’m from New Yawk!”
The hatred with which the room received this gesture was sitcomesque: to a man, everyone roared at Asa to cut it the fuck out. Even Lucy, who’d never met him before and scarcely had been in the band for 90 minutes, was vocal in her disapproval. It wasn’t until some 12 hours later, reflecting on the day from the couch in KJ’s back room – a frequent sleep haunt of mine in those days – that I realized how amazing Asa had been in that moment. The only person in the room he knew was KJ (I had met him maybe twice before, and only briefly), and yet he didn’t hold back a damn thing. It was downright unreasonable; I loved him for it.
***
In truth, it had not been Asa shamelessly a-shimmy at Dilan’s that day, but rather his alter ego. I was soon to find Asa had at least three personalities: the first, Asa himself, being the all-American suburbanite of means modest and manners mild; the Asa KJ met years ago over a game of Nerf. Then there was A-Town, the schizoid, racially recombinant rap bastard who lived off of pure thrill, freestyle verse logic, and the physics of whatever big budget music video he had most recently seen. This, of course, was the one from “New Yawk” – a descendent of Flava Flav, and an illegitimate forefather of Major Lazer’s trademark hypeman. And then there was another one, long unidentified and nameless, who was Asa when trying to act like A-Town. People tended to like Asa, love A-Town unconditionally, and resent this third fellow – we’ll call him Fake-Town – in equal measure. All three were our rapper, at various intervals – which one he’d be with us when his turn on the mic at Milkboy was to come, none of us knew.
One of my all-time favorite A-Town memories – one that would have steeled my faith in him for our performance had it happened before the show – would actually transpire a couple years later, on a night when KJ, me, Lucy, and Asa all went out for a rare dinner together. Asa was in his mood au naturel as we ate barely-mediocre cheesesteaks at Minella’s (the 24/7 diner in Wayne, and the only place on the Mainline to eat past 11pm), no hint of anything extraordinary in his demeanor. Lucy hitched a ride back with him, while I went with KJ. When the two of us returned to KJ’s driveway, we were shocked to discover Lucy standing there alone in the dark – especially since Asa had left after us.
When we asked Luce what was up, she said Asa had lost control on the drive back, doubling the speed limit whilst sitting ass-out the driver side window, steering with his kneecaps. (How he would manage to keep the car accelerating under such circumstances, we could not be sure.) KJ and I were plenty familiar with A-Town by this point, but even then had to doubt he was capable of something so far beyond us – but sure enough, not long after the words had left Lucy’s lips, A-Town came screaming back ’round the bend WELL out of his window and coming off an incredible surge – how the fuck could his foot still be reaching the gas pedal? or the brake? – as he burnt rubber to a halt some ten yards ahead of us. He turned around, shouted some hoodrat shit like a shaman possessed by the spirit of a million hack rapper adlibs, then slipped back into the cockpit and somehow whipped his baby-blue Honda Civic onto an adjacent street at Ferrari speeds, jack-knifing back in reverse with comparable momentum a moment later, the three of us wounded with laughter. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen another human-being do.
- The practice space was his, you will recall; Swainia was what he and his family called their giant property. [↩]
- Tellingly enough, Sun Ra was so obsessed with discipline that he named several albums and compositions after it. No doubt it was essential to his music, as it often required dozens of tack-sharp musicians to play. [↩]
- What’s less embarrassing about rapping a MIMS verse than a Jay-Z one, I don’t know. Perhaps the same reason why a band would find covering the Monkees preferable to the Beatles… [↩]
- Hilariously, Dilan had a fairly generic but nevertheless 88-key Yamaha in the practice room: Pete could have easily gotten a start using that one, but we’d be damned if we allowed even our rehearsals to be fouled by its cheap, plastic tones. We must have thought that if it wasn’t good enough for the show (the rationales on these matters tended to be implicit, unspoken), then fuck it for practice, too. And so our keyboardist continued to show up simply to disembowel tambourines and jump up and down to the beat, a concern about how “we really should get a keyboard soon” voiced occasionally. [↩]
- As has been previously noted, the young lad’s beyond-his-years guitar and singing skills had already proven a gamechanger. [↩]
- Musically only, sadly, and for just six recorded songs. Get the EP. [↩]
- Which, incredibly, had included the song’s fan commentary in the document. Our favorite went as followed: “I am from a white suburban neighborhood and the pigs are just as big a dicks. However, if you have some cash and you CAN fight the case then you shut the fuck up when talking to the pigs and call your lawyer (#1 in my speed dial) otherwise, if you are too poor to have a lawyer available, you are fucked because the pigs will do whatever the fuck they feel like to you like search you shit or haul you in for a talk. 2.25 million in jail in the US – 1 out of every 8 black men between ages 25 and 29 – yea, I say fuck the police and fuck your dickhead dad for spending 25 years harassing people in jail for victimless crimes. Dan kilo dot com” [↩]
- YouTube! in 2007! [↩]
“Dried”
Feeling as though we’d discovered some kind of calling, KJ and I simply had to get the rest of the band on our wavelength. It was obvious, within a couple days, that nobody read the novellaic Facebook message I had written in the inspired afterglow of that April night at the local liberal arts campus, and that nobody would. Fashioning a backup plan, we invited the freshest face in our lot, Lupin, to KJ’s suburban headquarters for an update on the size and scope of our ambition.
The uniforms, the loosely-defined “live Girl Talk” concept, the worldwide audience waiting for us: it all made sense to Lupin, and we could proudly tell it struck a chord as he shifted excitably in the folds of the Backroom beanbag, realizing that “we need to get fucking tight, though.” Even if it was clear to all three of us that the acoustic “Sexyback” we had jammed just minutes prior wouldn’t cut it, we probably had no clue that something like that was in fact not a shred of a percent of what we’d need in order to accomplish our goals. But we did know something like this would take a lot of work; we did know we’d need a team capable of getting fucking tight.
Lupin wasn’t quite the serious artiste he seemed at first brush, though. Inklings of doubt came early, one of the most memorable being a Saturday morning practice at Dilan’s after he had spent the night hosting Lupin. The two had invited over a couple of girls, Bonnie and Laura, the former of whom was prolific Dilan’s main squeeze at the time, the latter being a potential hookup for Lupin. The night ended for them sans girls and sprawled out on Dilan’s endless leather couch, where we were surprised to find them together the next morning, disheveled and unconscious ten minutes past our 11am start time.
Lupin awoke demanding a shower, which Dilan — foregoing one himself — granted him in the practice room bath next door. Once Lupin had shuffled out of earshot, Dilan took to telling KJ, Pete and me all about the night prior, during which Lupin evidently made several timid (and rather odd) non-advances in Laura’s general direction before quitting the plot entirely. From there, our stifled hero resigned himself to the solitude of the practice room, where he let loose on Dilan’s drumkit. After prattle-shouting awkwardly over the rhythmic din for a bit, the girls split, and the two boys, reunited, ended the night where we had found them come morning.
“Yo,” Dilan observed, some 40 minutes later. “Is he even showering yet?”
Silently, our ears tuned into the distant thrum of what we collectively hoped was a shower nearing conclusion. Of course, five minutes later the distinct sound of water coursing between open drains flooded the room, as did the distinct sensation of facial nerves meeting open palms.
Another long stretch of time elapsed before the shower stopped, during which Dilan probably shared more details of the night prior. What he couldn’t tell us, though, was something none of us knew: Lupin was in love with Bonnie. So in love, in fact, that part of the reason he was excited to meet us was to distract himself; he had been crushing on her for months prior, and two of his then-closest friends had gotten with her shortly after he confided in them his feelings for her. That’s why Lupin seemed so sullen at the TV on the Radio concert where we met him — the boy Green, who introduced us, was one of those two turncoats — and that’s why Lupin threw himself into our band with such enthusiasm. Shortly thereafter, though, like a plot twist in a lazily scripted teen flick, our drummer Dilan met Bonnie and wound up bedding her, virginity and all. It was certainly enough to explain why Lupin had been so tempestuous the night before.
What couldn’t be explained, however, is why Lupin had disappeared for well over two hours to take a shower in the adjoining room. We were deep into the afternoon by this point, hungry and not yet begun the practice we were planning on having finished soon, so when we still hadn’t seen him half an hour after he turned off the shower, I lost my nerve. Storming through the practice room, past the rock debris strewn floorwise, I reached the door and flung it open to reveal a fully clothed teenage boy, smiling blandly at himself in the mirror.
“Lupin,” I exasperated. “What are you doing?”
Blue eyes unblinking, he turned on his heel, photo-ready smile intact, and chirped simply: “Waitin’ for my hair to dry!”
Marie, then still in the band, was not coming that day, and though we were in those heady months of both Myspace emo-narcissism and the dawn of Facebook tagging, there was nary a camera (or photographer) in sight. He just wanted to make sure his hair air-dried right (which, as it was about my length, I knew would take at least an hour) before showing himself to even just a few guys in the band — who, of course, were waiting on him to practice in the next room.
During times like these, I tried to remind myself that these were the kind of inconveniences I’d earned myself in recruiting a preternaturally talented 15-year-old to my band. Pete and I both knew we were nothing like Lupin was when we were three years younger, and the middle children Kage and Dilan were only a year or so removed and just as dumbfounded — but pretty much everyone’s immature at that age. It just reflects in different ways.1
Still, I wasn’t always the most understanding guy, and Lupin — though I was certain he lacked a mean bone in his body — gave me plenty of challenges. About a week later, we had a full-band practice that went well enough, though Lupin’s inability to get Marie to properly harmonize with him foreshadowed trouble. We finished at around 8pm, and Dilan, eager as ever to go veg or find some pretty face for company, rose quickly from behind his toms and cymbals. Marie had her car, and KJ, Pete and I had mine, but Lupin seemed to have neglected to tell his parents when to pick him up, stationed as they were in some faraway burb none of us had ever heard of before.
“Oh well, I guess I’ll just chill here for a while,” he said, returning his phone to his pocket, his father having not picked up. Dilan looked confused and muttered a “What?” to that effect. Perhaps he feared a reprise of the strange mood-kill Lupin had executed the last time he was over and Dilan had girls in mind.
I remember laughing on the way out, quietly wondering what they’d get into this time. About an hour or so later, still on the road home after having deposited KJ at his Radnor digs, I found out – the screen of my old cellular brick illumined, bearing Lupin’s name.
“Jakob!” he shouted, as bright and cheery as he was likely to get in those days. “Me and Dilan have such a legit idea.”
Cautious curiosity. “Yeah man? What’s that?”
We’d been talking about expanding, beyond the walls of Facebook and into the streets, our promotional efforts for the upcoming show at Milkboy. Lupin’s pitch was to flier the Mainline exhaustively, something we’d been planning to do for some time – I was with him so far.
“And on the flier,” he said, priming me for the big reveal, “beneath the words ‘DANCEFLOOR DIPLOMACY,’ there’ll be a picture of your face, of Dilan’s face, of my face, and of KJ’s face – Pete’s too, if there’s room2 — and we’ll all be looking sick.3 And underneath us, it’ll say, If you want to get with us, put your name and number here. And there’ll be a bunch of lines for people to write themselves in.”
The idea took a moment to coagulate inside my head, then burst with an aneurysmic pop capable of erecting a marble memorial for some couple hundred braincells. If Lupin was kidding, he had me fooled: there was not a hint of irony in his voice, nothing to counterweight the dense absurdity of trying to schedule carnal appointments with girls via the conduit of a nonexistent band. I went with my instinct.
“No. Absolutely not,” I decreed. “First of all, that would never work: if I saw a flier like that, the most I would do is flip open my phone, and jot down the number of the funniest person I could find.4) The least I’d do is make a mental note to hate that band forever. Stop it — I don’t wanna have to look for another singer, man.” Pulling out the big guns.
Fortified by his new ally Dilan, Lupin managed to protest – but I was steadfast, and, though not without bitterness, this particular problem was soon quashed. Still more were in gestation, however: I would later learn, after getting to know a few people in Lupin’s social circle of the time, that he had begun to annoy them all by bragging ceaselessly about his band (worrying me that people would come to hate us before even hearing a note), and that he had more or less co-opted the unusual spin on contemporary slang that KJ and I had developed in just a couple months of knowing each other (oblivious to the fact, as KJ and I helplessly observed, that his fanatical adherence to the lexicon led to inadvertent parody). In any case, it was funny to soon hear that all of his friends were then wondering why the hell Lupin suddenly kept saying words like “sick” and “legit” every other sentence.
Something else they noticed was Lupin’s sudden boost in confidence – something we detected after just a couple of practices, and something over which KJ and I exulted. We doted like proud parents when he followed our advice to extend a “fuck you” to various jerks and jokers who we heard, via anecdote, had treated him disrespectfully (Green in particular), and we grinned doubly when we could see how happy and liberated he seemed as a consequence. We didn’t know about the anxiety he must have had over Bonnie and Dilan’s recent collaborations, but in any event, the doldrums that shadowed his every step when we had met him seemed to have fallen from his sides. It felt like we were changing his life for the better, and we became not unconsciously aware of the potential to, in some way or another, provide people joy through the means of our unreasonable take on life and music.
Lupin’s increase in confidence refracted back towards those musical ambitions of ours, however, often threatening the entire operation. Another wild notion of his that remains memorable was the day that we allowed him to come to practice a couple hours later due to a party and, no doubt in an attempt to impress the girls he met there, he later called back asking if we could instead move the practice to said party, trading drums and electricity in Dilan’s garage for acoustic guitars and comfortable seating in his hostess’ Moonbounce.
Worst of all, though, was that announcement of his during the early days of June, now less than a month away from our live debut and with precious little rehearsal to our name. Lupin’s family had finished planning their yearly trip to the beach, which this year fell in June – literally the entire week before the show. KJ, Pete and I were mortified; Dilan and Dylan, simply curious as to how we would be able to learn the material now. Lupin’s itinerary severely compromised our plan to kick rehearsal into high gear during the first two weeks of summer, arranging and learning the lion’s share of the set just in time for the show – and we, the brain trust of the band, simply couldn’t accept it.
Desperately, we reminded Lupin that we had him confirm his commitment to this gig date long ago, and that we simply would not be ready if he – the lead voice and guitar of our act – were to spend that crucial last week lazing about the shriveled shores of America’s warmest AARP compost heap. We implored him to implore his parents for a rescheduling, but he accepted their plans as implacable without even posing to them a single question. Delusional with anxiety now, we even tried to convince him to convince his parents to let him stay with us that week while they went down the shore with their daughter and whoever else, appealing to Lupin’s simple desires with promises of parties, rock shows, lavish meals, and some seriously committed wingman assistance in the dating department5 — it’d be like camp! — but Lupin proved implacable himself. He liked Florida, and wanted to go. There was no alternative.
Worse yet, this miserable revelation came shortly after we had decided to minimize the role of Dylan6 in the band.7 He was a great sport about it, happy to use his newfound free time to take up a residency at the Jersey shore, content with our promise to invite him back for a day or two closer to the show for rehearsals of our version of “What Is Love?” (as it was based around his prettily plucked interpretation of its chords and melody). But it presented the sobering realization that we, as a band, lacked a keyboard (which Pete was to play, as soon as we could find one), a female vocalist (since the Marie incident), a rapper – Lupin, feeling uncomfortable with mimicking the likes of Ludacris and MIMS, reminded us that we needed one – and soon, for a time, Lupin himself. We also barely had rehearsed just one and a half pieces – “medleys,” we called them – and didn’t know what we were going to arrange for the rest of the set. What we did have was a looming show date, now just a few weeks away, and a Facebook event, which was promising a mindblowing performance to the 150+ people having already Confirmed their plans to attend (hundreds more had penciled themselves in as Maybes). In order to push through, I’d have to disconnect from the realm of reason entirely.
- One thing I had in common with Lupin, for instance, was a rather misguided faith in my ‘exceptional’ maturity. [↩]
- A slight not on Pete’s face, to be sure, but rather his involvement in the band. [↩]
- Meaning “hot without fever.” [↩]
- I wasn’t above a little pranskterism then, and maybe I’m still not: the idea of, say, my high school security guard getting a call from some dumb teenager re: “Dancefloor makeout sessions” would be one too funny to resist. That is, if Dancefloor Diplomacy weren’t my own band. (I did not yet possess my high school security guard’s phone number then, but would come to have it a couple cellphones, summers, and one high school graduation later. We’ll get there. [↩]
- Though if those are “simple desires,” then I guess we’re all simple folk in the end. [↩]
- Our original lead guitarist, not to be confused with our homophonic but alternately spelled drummer. [↩]
- Though he was a great fit at first, Dylan wound up a victim of circumstance when Lupin entered the picture. Dylan was the superior ax man, but Lupin could play all of our material with perfect fluency, and his more “indie rock” sensibility fit our sound better than Dylan’s folk and funk inflections. Also, it was much harder to get three guitars in sync than two, and the additional amp’s biggest contribution to our rehearsals was its intermittent blasts of feedback hell-noise. [↩]
{always soon}
New pieces of the Story are finished and will be up soon. In the meantime, for Diplomatic reasons a name that has appeared on this page numerously in the past (and future) has been changed. Which is not to say, necessarily, that it’s a pseudonym now, or that it wasn’t before; just skim the old posts to get the names back into your mind for the next one, if you please.
Don’t move, back in a few.
“The Vision” / “The Curse”
For a place often packed to the jambs with shabby blazers and testosterone, the air felt strangely thin. Strewn backpacks lining the walls like the padding of an anechoic chamber, the pitter-patter of my soles melted into silence mere moment-fractions after they sounded. The same could be said for those of the vague stranger walking opposite me, a head shorter and with one crowned by locks even longer than mine (bushy and grunge-blond, at that). But there was enough of us in common, one could tell – from our little, pointed deviations from the local dress code, to our spines’ curving acquiescence to gravity – that we were likelier to have more in common with each other than with anyone in the cussing throngs that usually filled these halls. He knew it, too, considering he was willing to bet I’d welcome his invitation.
“Hey Jacob, come this way,” he mumbled. “I wanna show you something.”
Following him into a nearby science lab, I neither corrected him about my name nor asked him his. Instead, as we arrived at a record player, and the small gaggle of self-styled weirdos circling its awkward place on the lectern, I asked him what kind of records they played.
“Punk,” I think he said, removing the wax from its paper slip. It might’ve been “funk,” but the music soon proved him wrong either way. The band was called Dressy Bessy, and their brief time on the platter made for the first and last time I’d ever hear them. Still, I was impressed: I never knew there was even a few “counterculture” kids at my high school,1 and I had yet to really check out any vinyl before that day. I made a mental note to maybe look into it sometime soon, and when he put some Elliott Smith on next – “A Fond Farewell” – I did the same for him. Then I went back on my way, probably to the boathouse for another afternoon of sprints and blisters.
Max was the kid’s name, and he was not long for Haverford. A few months later he would be expelled for an after-school infraction that involved thoughtless trashcan arson, and I never saw him again. I remember stoking Green – one of the other vinyl weirdos, and then a fellow rower – for the inside scoop, and finding out there was another kid who was with Max at the time and likewise got the boot.
I didn’t know it then, but KJ was the missing link between both stories: that Dressy Bessy record belonged to him, and he happened to have been Max’s unlucky company when he decided to spend the last of his matches on some gymnasium garbage. KJ was able to appeal to the school administration on the basis of having merely been a naïve and confused witness to the destruction, and was allowed to return after a semester – thereby fating his friendship with me a year later. In the early stages of that friendship, KJ told me all about his spring away from Haverford, spent at some teenage oasis where girls frolicked, textbooks existed only as an abstract (and largely unspoken) concept, and teachers were frequently interrupted by students for makeshift, ensemble renditions of Kelis’ then-hit “Milkshake.” According to KJ, this extended vacation in the academic netherworld was just another “Kagefest” – an annual tradition during which he would liberate himself from all schoolwork and otherwise reasonable obligation, as the spirit moved him, to fuck around for a while.
Tonight, amidst a kindling forest of lit cigarettes, I found myself playing witness to another such Kagefest. It was Saturday night, and we were spending it in a small crowd within a large basement beneath the nice liberal arts college just down the street from our high school – a place from which KJ had been away without leave for nearly two weeks now, showing little concern for the thin ice he must’ve been on after the Great Trash Fires of ‘06. Instead, he’d been spending his days and emotions at the local hospital, visiting his sick grandmother – and scurrying down the road to the magazine and CD racks at Borders, in hopes of soaking up what little worldly culture the Mainline could provide him. As for the nights, he’d been spending those going to events like these, oftentimes with me as the company and set of wheels.
This particular event was one of the harder ones to categorize. We stood steeping in the exhaled drags of the assembled under-eighteens – KJ to my left, puffing on his trademark Djarum Black – while a rail thin miniature of a man stood white-rapping onstage. The comparably skeletal beats emanated from an ailing boombox with a sound like an amplified dumptruck, and the lyrics – few of which were his – mostly revolved around cocaine, group sex, and other fine adult fancies well beyond his barely pubescent reach. My amusement with his grifted rhymes2 proved no match for the grief of my shallow lungs, however, which were fast approaching the brim with recycled smoke.
“And then you go out and buy her some flowers, and a box of chocolates,” the cachectic emcee spoke with his nose. “Not because it’s Valentine’s Day, not because it’s her birthday, but because it’s today, people. Just ‘cause it’s today.” Having made our brief appearance, KJ stamped out his nicotine clove while I laughed away a cough, making our ascent up the stairs and beyond the pipeline canopy.
As the smoke-reek from the dormitory bowels faded from my pores into the crisp April dusk, my mental lens refocused itself on fresh surroundings. It was a beautiful evening, young life teeming in thickets at every turn, nourished by the light at the end of the semester and summer’s fertile pollen on the wind. As for KJ, well – I had been spending a lot of time with KJ lately, hadn’t I? After all, it’d been only a month since we had met in his backyard, a few weeks since that first night we hit the town and found a corpse in it, and less than 24 hours since some cracked mother (neither his nor mine) forcibly extracted him from my car to drive him home. For such a young friendship, ours seemed to have seen well beyond its share of interesting experiences.
Tonight would prove to be another in the series, but for what we would find in ourselves instead of strange circumstance. We wandered our way around campus from party to party, looking for something to grip us, but our idle talk about the band and what we wanted to do with it soon began to develop plenty traction of its own. It didn’t take long for us to drift far from the constellation of kegs and cups and into our own expanding microcosm, scrutinizing the smallest details of our sudden epiphany, committing them to fervent memory.
First came the realization that Dancefloor had fallen far from the place I had first dreamt it up, and the place it still occupied in the deeper recesses of my mind. I was inspired to start playing music by listening to Girl Talk’s Night Ripper and faintly imagining some kind of live, orchestral rendering of those impossibly layered, laptop-sampled party sounds. Instead, we had devolved into some kind of stupid medley cover band, planning to start our show with a loungey take on “Moneymaker” that would build momentum into “Sexyback” a la acoustic flamenco – worst of all, whilst wearing a ragtag patchwork of whatever idiot clothing we could find.
…wait a minute. this is NOT cool.
Indeed, both the sound and image of what we were doing had gone awry. KJ likened our current look to one of those shit-stupid frat party bands that gets paid in beer to play Sublime and Dave Matthews songs, whereas the sound of what we were doing was abstract to the point of flaccidity. To wit, in having hung out over the past month KJ and I had come to share a developing aesthetic that valued sharp rock sound and attitude (think Spoon), and a sense of style that went far beyond the nice sale items our mothers brought us home from the mall every now and then. Dancefloor looked like ska and sounded like jazz, at least to our jejune understandings of the two3 – and that horrified us.
To remedy, KJ suggested bringing ourselves into focus around a new uniform: white shirt, black tie, black pants. It was more or less what he’d worn to school every day since long before I knew him, and it struck me as the prime solution to our problems. After all, a cleaner image meant a cleaner sound: as I wrote to the other members of the band after that night, “There is beauty in simplicity, and our only goals are to rock while retaining pop/rap’s dancey grooves and lateral hipshake.”
And that was it, in our minds. If we could achieve a perfect rock/pop/rap amalgam in our sound, a sharp and sexy uniformality in our image, and an effortless perfection in the simultaneous execution of the two, the masses would come on their own. I wrote in that same missive to the band that we needed “AT LEAST” 100 people to show up to our first show, but that I wanted “double that.” We’d have to do whatever it would take to get the people out there, to be able to surpass their high expectations, to give them not only a show but an event. KJ and I wanted to smash our instruments to pieces at the set’s conclusion, just to be unreasonable (who the hell goes all Townshend-Cobain on ‘em in a coffeehouse, anyway?), and we wanted pieces of a facecake with the smug mugs of the entire band printed on it for sale at the back of the room, just to be assholes. What could be funnier?
With that night, the night of our Vision, I suddenly realized why I had been endeared to KJ so quickly. In him, I found a reflection of myself, albeit the more ridiculous, daring, cocky bastard side of myself that was harder for me to see on my own, without a mirror. What kind of reflection he found in me, I wasn’t then sure, but there was something to it that both of us found fascinating, and worth returning to again and again. In a way, he helped me find my strength and a sense of identity in a time when my sudden trouble breathing while rowing had stripped me of both. And though we agreed that our limited means at the time would have to make for some kind of compromise, it was that night that cemented in my mind the idea of “live Girl Talk.” Whatever that meant, I knew, we would damn sure figure out.
***
I would be remiss, however, if I continued to underplay Pete’s place in my life back then. Despite having been estranged by my move to a different school at the end of junior high, we had wound up becoming best friends for the better part of senior year, braving the winter months in my new used car to drum up whatever weekend interest we could muster.4 Even when KJ entered the picture (and the car), Pete and I remained the weathered veterans and elder brothers, teaching much to the young’un about late-teen life and rocking out as he observed from the spacious backseat. I don’t think we really considered the newcomer an equal until the one sunny afternoon he leaned inbetween the two front seats, proffered an iPod cued up to a song called “Stand Up (Let’s Get Murdered),” and introduced us to the rapper P.O.S.
Pete and I shared a skeptical glance as KJ returned to his seat, but the ensuing rush of horns/guitars/bravado took mere seconds to set us straight. In the span of a few big choruses and one convenient traffic jam, I lost myself and a pair of cheap sunglasses in the music (I came back, at least), while Pete gave his trademark tambourine a fierce beating with the inside of my car door.5 KJ had proven himself wise beyond his years.
From then on, the great times in that car didn’t stop. It was (and is) a fine ‘96 Volvo, in a lot of ways, but perhaps out of self-consciousness borne of attending a school where most kids got fancy cars with their learner’s permits, I had dubbed my whip “the Shitcopter” – both an acknowledgment of its streetwise ghettoness, and a metaphysically skyward transcendence thereof.6 It was nice and comfortable enough for people to enjoy – even covet – its warm, fuzzy interior, but not so fancy as to discourage a little bit of rowdy fun. In some ways, its allure was not unlike that of a really fine lo-fi album.
Indeed, its purposes – and appeal – were largely musical. With Pete too afraid of himself to drive,7 and KJ’s mobility still limited by his age, the Shitcopter was the means of transportation, our silver-grey ferry to and fro the rock show of the evening. And whenever the ‘Copter was in motion, so were the jams and so were we.
One of the car’s finer days came just towards the very end of spring. Fresh off practice at Dilan’s, the three of us embraced summer’s first impact with open windows and a liberal stereo-dose of the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s ’60s psych/folk revivalism. Pete, tambourine in hand as ever, began to shake and tap along, while I added in on the chiming triangle I had recently hung from my rearview, when traffic and timing allowed. KJ kicked one foot up against the back of my seat, reclaimed his acoustic guitar, and began casually strumming along.
Just like that, the ‘Copter had transformed into a faux hippie caravan, the warm sounds and good vibes spilling into the street. And incredibly, people seemed genuinely appreciative of the gesture: onlookers young and old would smile widely, bob their heads along, and flash us hand-symbols of rocker solidarity as we passed. When we parked and disembarked briefly at the music store to stock up on picks or somesuch, a trio of beautiful girls across the street actually hopped excitedly out of their car and pointed in our direction like we were…well, something to point at.8 It was about as sweet as an afternoon on the Mainline could be.
But our night was just beginning, and we were on to bigger and better things. As we made our way downtown for another basement rock spectacle (in a church most young locals have at least heard of, by now), we ratcheted up the intensity with choice selections from favorites of the day like Apollo Up! and Family Force 5 (the latter of whom had claimed our hearts with a recent bit of latenight TV ridiculousness).9 Entering city limits, however, I noticed some concerning number of missed calls from the mom back on planet earth – knowing me back then, I’d probably forgotten to tell her my night’s plans – and deemed it wise to pull over for a brief interlude of damage control. I had no idea that by the end of the phonecall, my car’s ignition would no longer be in its rightful place, but rather dangling uselessly from KJ’s trembling hand.
Kage had apparently wanted something from the trunk while I idled on the phone – space for his guitar, maybe – and, with characteristic impatience, cared neither to wait nor figure out how to properly remove the key from the wheel. And so he yanked, yanked harder, and tore the whole damn apparatus clean out. Perhaps it was the Shitcopter’s way of telling us we’d been taking things a little too rough, lately…
Either way, engine still revving — and all four windows wide open — we found ourselves trapped in a seedy-shite neighborhood, our debilitated cripple-car miles from the church’s subterranean maw. But instead of consulting my wallet’s AAA card, I wound up simply jamming the ‘Copter’s severed appendage back into its socket till it stuck in place and, miraculously but without making any promises, revived the vehicle to rumbling life.
We wound up making it to the show just fine — unreason wins again — but it was the ride back that proved meaningful.10 A crucial recent discovery of ours was a little slider on my car stereo – right next to Bass and Treble – called the “Fader,” which served one purpose: moving the sound between the car’s front and back speakers. When panned hard to the rhythm of the music – especially the danceable kind – it sounded incredible, and had an effect akin to DJing. The way back home that night made for our best set yet.
“This is this new band called Justice,” KJ said halfway through the drive, putting on the French duo’s debut EP – still the only thing they had out at the time – before proceeding to flip the beats from the front to the back of the whip with a natural’s touch. Funnily enough, I remember thinking I’d never hear of them again (my mind would change when I heard “D.A.N.C.E.” a month later, and used it in an abortive high school graduation video), though their harshly pixilated electro sound made a perfect match for the Fader.
By the time we turned onto Lancaster Ave – the main line of the Mainline – we were on to Year Zero, Nine Inch Nail’s new album and a pretty uniquely violent exploration of industrial glitch rhythms. Tracks like “Vessel”11 and “Meet Your Master” were Fader classics, and the three of us were lost in total reverie while KJ leaned forward from the backseat to handle mixing duties. Things reached a fever pitch in the midst of The Greatest Fader Track of All Time, “The Warning” — me taking advantage of the abandoned road to spend perhaps undue12 attention to the beat, Pete gone somewhere behind his pulsing mop. Given the deafening volume, it wasn’t until the track fizzled to its conclusion that we began to notice that the cinematic swirl of blue and red lights illuminating us were not per God’s favorable direction from above, but rather the screaming police car right behind us.
Fuck. How long had that been happening? I quickly pulled into the parking lot to my immediate right – which belonged, conveniently enough, to the local police force – and watched as the patrolman pulled his buggy up alongside the ‘Copter. The euphoria from just a moment ago was now replaced with a deep and sobering dread, as I took belated stock of our thoroughly unlawful conduct. Firstly, we of course must’ve been speeding to have drawn his attention. Then, when he began to pursue, he probably noticed KJ, his thick curl brambles extended far out beyond the back seat and into the front of the car, safety belt clearly and quite illegally unbuckled. What’s more is that we didn’t even realize he had been trying to pull us over for, well – having been in the midst of a musical sojourn to some different plane of reality at the time, it was hard for me to know how long. We must have looked every bit like the ludicrous young dolts we were, and my limited experience with cops up to that point had taught me that in the big game hunting of traffic violations, teenage guys were their favorite targets. As the patrolman approached, I could tell my wallet, insurance, and life were about to suffer in ways beyond what they could yet comprehend.
“Do you know why I stopped you, young man?” the officer asked, hovering above my open window while Kage and Pete sat silent in the backdrop. I think he was fairly young himself, maybe somewhere in his thirties, but as his frame blocked my view of the only lamppost in the lot (to speak nothing of the adrenalized terror clouding my eyes), I had little grasp of what he actually looked like. Palm outstretched and leaning against my hood like a cat pawing some hapless rodent catch, he didn’t mention anything about license or registration – bastard was probably just savoring the moment – though he was conversational aplenty. After we’d completed our little small-talk tango (tense for me, leisurely for him), he announced finally that we had been going close to 60 in a 35, and maybe mentioned a couple secondary offenses along the way. I did my best to parry the inevitable blow, apologizing quickly and explaining, with penitent grin, that we had “gotten a little carried away with the music.”
“Yeah, I noticed your big-haired friend there in the back, kind of leaning forward to DJ the stereo, or something,” he replied. My disbelief was eclipsed only by a sense of precisely how fucked I was about to be.
But both of those feelings were about to be eclipsed themselves by something even greater, like some fantastically rare alignment of distant cosmos the beauty of which only a few souls will ever know. As the weight in his palm pressing against the roof of my car began to shift, I could feel some subtle detail in the air shift with it.
“Okay then, guys. Just…”
He shoved off from the hood of the car, now standing erect with each arm at either side. With his movement came a hint of light from the sole giant lamp hanging beyond him, peeking around the brim of his hat like a sliver of divine insight.
“Just keep rocking out.”
And with that, he left us, fading into the brilliant rush of electric light that now overwhelmed my vision unobscured. Confusion, laughter, understanding, joy…for a moment it seemed insane, stranger than all but the shittiest fiction; but then, collectively, it all made perfect sense, something magnificent dawning on us there in the empty lot. We smiled together, reveling for a moment in our shared enlightenment, before driving onward into the night. The stereo enjoyed a break for the rest of the ride, music having provided us that rare kind of moment even music itself can’t properly soundtrack.
***
I was absurdly lucky that night, without a doubt – but it felt like something more than that. A police officer had just seen a trio of teenage boys delighting in gleeful disregard for the law, pulled us over to exact swift and cruel justice, and then saw something in us that changed his mind – turning punishment into encouragement, hatred into respect, shit into pure cacao.
Or if it wasn’t alchemy, then perhaps it was something fated from the start – some kind of message delivered to us from above, conveyed through the unlikeliest of vessels. Of that, I couldn’t be sure. But whatever that cop meant when he said those words, I knew, we would damn sure do it.
- Even if Mainline definitions of “counterculture” largely meant Urban Outfitters and Zach Braff, at the time. [↩]
- He mostly stole from the Party Andersons, who were a fake rap group formed for one epic gangsta rap song by the comedy trio The Lonely Island. This is the same threesome that went on to join SNL and mastermind viral memes like “Lazy Sunday” and “Like A Boss.” They’re inescapable nowadays, but back then, familiarity with the group meant you must have been pretty hip. [↩]
- Nowadays I would criticize us for having looked ska without the horns to back it up, and having “sounded like jazz” without any of the chops…or having actually sounded like jazz at all, for that matter (well – maybe cocktail). Back then, we simply thought both those genres sucked unequivocally and should be avoided in even the most superficial of senses. [↩]
- Highlights included an absolutely incredible Ken Andrews show, too many meaningful chats in hellhole diners and cheesesteak joints to count, and an absolutely batshit night at a suburban mansion where the mother would regularly get high with the kids, make out with the kids, and ultimately be arrested with the kids. [↩]
- Pete would always have a love-hate relationship with his tambourines, inevitably ending in slaughter. [↩]
- It was just a passing joke made one day to Marie, actually, but she loved it so much that the name stuck. My friends from that time still call it that. [↩]
- ”The idea of me being in control of a huge, moving metal box…is fuckin’ horrific.” [↩]
- When later retelling this story to a future girlfriend, I briefly reconsidered my memory of this particular moment when she insisted they must have simply been laughing at us. I wound up instead concluding that my girlfriend was a jealous bitch. [↩]
- Their first album actually had some stupid party rock greatness on it – inversely boosted by their bizarre insistence that they were, sincerely, a Christian Rock band. [↩]
- Sunset Rubdown provided a perfectly fine set of music unfamiliar to me, but the only thing I remember clearly from it was mainman Krug’s between-songs assertion that “tomorrow doesn’t start at midnight, but whenever the sun rises” – a statement I had made to KJ earlier that day, more or less verbatim. [↩]
- It was great fun to pan the song’s huge synth-chord to the back of the car, and to play ping-pong with Trent Reznor’s stuttered chorus: “OH! my! GOD! …canitgoanyfaster???” [↩]
- /safe. [↩]
“Cake and ‘Cakes”
Lupin, for his part, meant no harm. He was in fact completely oblivious to what he had done until reading the conclusion to the previous episode of Soymilk Revolution himself,1 and even then one could say he didn’t do a damn thing at all. In truth, the only way Lupin ruptured my friendship with Marie was by having a nice voice.
It’s true. Sometimes we use people we know as little more than a literary device, a means of progressing a story — all people are authors, if not literally writing ones.2 And sometimes we use people we don’t know in much the same way, as I did just a week or so ago when I used one pop band as a mere way to set up my review of another pop band’s new album.3 Not long before that, for the means of progressing my Story, I used Lupin as a way of bridging the last piece into this one. A chapter that ends with a touch of suspense is what makes the reader abstain from his bookmark and turn the page, and a trick as simple as that is enough to convince some readers that what they’re reading is legitimately engaging (qualifying it as “good,” to most of those same some readers). It wasn’t really fair to Lupin, because my words were misleading,4 and the next chapter was not yet conceived, let alone written, let aloneliest ready to be read. It is now, and “Lupin” is the first word of this chapter just as it was the last word of the last, making for one of the easiest transitions I’ve made in recent months (having lately tried my hand at smoothing over a few). So now you know that Lupin was in fact not to blame — and his voice only really was depending on how you decided to hear it.
Marie had a decent voice herself, but it wasn’t quite so nice as Lupin’s, and they didn’t sound quite so right when they shared their voices in melodic motion. I, for my part, would have never imagined them singing together at all when I first met Lupin that fateful night at the Trocadero Theater, but it turns out it wouldn’t take long for me to be surprised.
Even now I’m surprised by how quickly I must have been surprised, back then. It goes without saying that different people will always remember things differently — unless you’re the short pompous asshole who first said that history is but a set of agreed-upon lies (or one of the pomp-ass aspirants who paraphrase him) — but one man’s recollection, diluted by the years, is almost always inferior to a document written just hours after the happening in question.5 And though my memory’s not the worst of all those present at the time, there’s only one person with access to such an ongoing history of this time-window in my life.
Wait for it–
Lupin was just the kind of kid to write in his journal every damn night about the damn day done, and though he isn’t that kind of kid anymore,6 he’s become the kind of guy who can look back on that time in his life and be able to say, “Oh yes, I remember that perfectly — that’d be in the White notebook.” Which is exactly what Lupin said to me when I asked him a question not long ago, and exactly what surprised me when he shared some of those notebook contents with me: KJ and I asked him to audition for our band a scant four nights after we met him at the Troc.
“Then I went online to get French homework, and ended up talking to KJ and Jacob [sic] for a long time about music, and I’m gonna audition for this band Dancefloor Diplomacy on Friday.” [White Journal, 4/24/07]
…
My life must have dripped molasses back then, for it felt like KJ and I had deliberated on whom next to audition for weeks.7 There had been the blond choir brah Ryan, who blew off his first audition and simply blew, in an anti-rock kind of fashion, at the second. And I still had in mind a jacked college kid from the local Ivy, for I knew that in one fell motion the chap could yowl a tune and do a backflip (whilst looking model-handsome in a white beater and plain jeans, no less) — but what the hell were we gonna do with a pro like him? Ask him to sing “El Scorcho?”
So by the end of a four-day eternity, we gave up and decided to ask Lupin. It wasn’t that we didn’t like him — he just seemed a little too quiet and sad to be what a bunch of party jam jokers like us needed from our mainman mic controller. Besides, on that night at the Troc KJ and I could each tell where he had bought every single item of his clothing, and for whatever reason that made the thought of him being in our band ring ridiculous. Who’d wanna see a party band fronted by some sad kid wearing an Urban Outfitters tee?
No matter. We asked the boy Green to hook us up with Lupin’s AIM credentials, and soon we were chatting with the emo candidate himself. He seemed like the kind of genuine dude his deeply blue eyes and (correctly) presumed passion for the Bright Eyes canon suggested he would be, and he was unabashedly excited by the prospect of being in a band — even one of our strange and ostensibly unoriginal kind. KJ asked him what he sounded like, and Lupin said he’d most had his voice compared to that of Thom “Radiohead” Yorke, which KJ found unlikely and we both found unfortunate. Who’d wanna see a party band fronted by some sad kid wearing an Urban Outfitters tee and sneering like a cat trapped in a sauna of existential angst?
Still, for all his enthusiasm and for all our non-existent alternatives, we agreed to audition him at the dawn of the weekend. In the long shadow cast by the Bowflex in Dilan’s work-out practice space, the young Lupin jammed with us on the requisite Pinkerton before treating us to lone takes on Bright Eyes’ “Lime Tree” and, of course, RadioYorke’s lovely “Karma Police.” KJ and I weren’t all too keen on the new Bright Eyes album that had provided Lupin with his tune of choice,8 but he sang it damn prettily and audibly knew his way around the guitar maybe almost as well as Dylan did — albeit with less a taste for the funk which KJ and I had unfairly prejudiced, and more for the kind of indie rock music that made our young souls sprout spiritual erections. As KJ had predicted, Lupin in fact sounded little like Yorke, and for our purposes this worked out well — he had a good, clean, dependable voice for a boy his age. Without a reason to hesitate and like KJ before him, he was thus asked to the next one.
The sun’s daily arc drew itself long and slow then, to be sure, but perhaps because of that it seemed like so much could happen between rise and set. Proving himself to be as unreasonable as any man, Dilan somehow managed to book us to play at the biggest and best of all local coffeeshops, Milkboy, for the date of June 28. Not only were we to play, but also we were to headline, with Dilan’s punk band Generic Youth opening,9 and Dilan’s punk band’s friends’ pop punk band Laidout playing between them and us. It was a pretty large venue, and the resident coffeebastards expected us to draw at least 100 paying customers (at $8 a pop) if we wanted any hope of not shriveling up and blowing out the door in a whisk of embarrassment. So that made us a band with nothing but a name and a few ridiculous pictures, hardly any actual material to speak of — certainly nothing recorded, or recordable — and a need to get at least 100 people to pay 8 dollars and 1 Thursday night (a summer night, no less) to see us. And that, of course, meant that we’d have to put on a proportionately worthwhile performance, to prevent the venue from becoming a roomful of riotous hatred and refundthirsty violence.
An avalanche of activity followed, and looking back on it our strategy seemed to be to hype the show up and get as many people into it as humanly possible — once that happened, I must have guessed the impetus to practice our asses off would follow naturally. So while musical progress did continue to slowly seep out of us, primary concerns seemed to be more superficial: on May 2, Lupin told us about the two cuties he managed to convince to get to work our merchtable (after all, what kind of band doesn’t have something to sell?); on May 12 we did a homespun photoshoot which I later managed to Photoshop into working promotional quality (the fliers of which are around somewhere, just not on my harddrive — I did recently hear about a girl who, long post-high school, still has a stolen one on her wall); on May 17 I made a Facebook event that still exists and promised incredible things for a band that had maybe a couple minutes of rehearsed material at the time; on May 19 Lupin shat a fearful, anxious brick into his White journal about just how many people had RSVP’ed as “Attending” and just how nervous these numbers made him; and on May 27 we had a full-band practice (well…as full as the band was, at the time), which Free Gilbis! bassist Drew filmed into a videotape that I would quickly edit into a brief promotional clip.
[video redacted for the time being.]
The video was slyly fashioned to make it seem like we had a lot of stuff rehearsed, but it’s actually just a disordered pastiche of rough-‘round-the-edge moments from what we called “Medley 1” (a.k.a. The First Medley), and then a few snippets of the first time we jammed on a cover of Haddaway’s cheese-as-fuck classic, “What Is Love?” It was based around a classical guitar-picking arrangement of the chord progression that Dylan10 had come up with and played at a school assembly around the time I decided to ask him to join the band.
So.
The June gig was scheduled before Lupin was even in the band, but in a way it wasn’t until he showed up that it all seemed remotely real or feasible. Lupin, as was the case at the beginning of this chapter (in 2010), had no idea he had effected such change — all he did was show up when asked (incredibly late more often than not). But he brought a talent that made the rest cohere — Dilan and Dylan were both great, but great drumming and great guitaring alone are seldom enough to feed our young (or veterans) — which is evident in that he provides pretty much all the memorable moments in the clip above, from his improvised solo over Gwen Stefani’s “Sweet Escape” to the pretty little nothings he guitar-whispered into Haddaway’s cold, lonely ears.
***
By this point, my life was in nigh-total flux. I had been ousted from my boat and my team (of which I had been captain) around the time that Lupin joined the band by force of the inexplicable and inhaler-irresolvable respiratory failures within me, and on the day this practice was taped my former boatmates and best friends were racing the river without me, long past the hope that I could ever rejoin them. It was an immense pain to feel what was once such a large part of my identity wither and keel like a pair of scorched lungs, something beyond what I could comprehend or force myself to face at that point, and I don’t doubt that’s why I delved as deep into the band as I did. I had gone from something I had rehearsed and gotten damn good at over the course of years, to being forced to replace that with a pursuit of something completely novel and unknown to me. It was depressing but catharsis, confusing and exhilarating — and the enthusiasm of the skilled musicians who came to serve my budding (yet still mostly shapeless) vision, mixed with the surreality of being forced to fit it all together in just another month, inspired in me something of an obsession. I threw myself at it with abandon.
Yet the change in me felt most pronounced not on May 27, this day of practice some thirty before the show itself, but on the day before — my birthday. Amidst the deep-spring warmth of the sun I returned to KJ’s backroom, the place where we had met, to find he had bought me a “blackout” cake — a reference to some slanguistic inside joke-talk of ours at the time, though neither of us ever blacked out — and a plastic camera that was all the hipster rage at the time. It seemed impossible to me, just how close I had gotten to this kid, two years younger than me but more mature and interesting and loyal than any other friend I ever had. We had known each other but two months and I was already closer to him than anyone else I’d met in all my four years of high school.
Marie got me some sweets as well, except the cupcakes she gave me were ones she had baked, iced and sprinkled herself. It couldn’t have occurred to me at the time, but in this way my nineteenth birthday became the point at which my best friend of the past and the best friend of my future crossed, intersecting at a vector of celebratory confections. The two desserts were equally delicious, and their respective qualities had nothing to do with the friendship revolution that was about to occur. If it had really come down to cake and ‘cakes, Marie would have won some decisive extra points for having made hers for me — but not long from this point she would be instant messaging KJ, telling him that she hates him, claiming that he stole my friendship from her, or else razed hers to make room for his own.
This, of course, was untrue. There was no reason I couldn’t have stayed close to both of them, no reason to have to lock one out to embrace the other. The turning point was something else entirely, and turned pointedly one night when Marie and I discussed her place in the band. She’d been our femme singer for the past couple months, but had blown off a great many practices for a few not-so-great reasons (saying she’d be over to Dilan’s in 30 minutes, then spontaneously combusting into a nap — caring not to alert anyone before or after — was one memorable instance), and with the show being less than a month away I wanted to resolve her commitment issues like a guy trying to make a ho a housewife.11 And as it turned out, she did not hesitate to tell me she had no interest in the band rehearsing or being any good: we had a show to worry about, true, but in her words she was just happy to be able to tell people she was in a fun band — and she only ever really showed up to practice because we were all attractive guys, anyway, and hanging out with five or six attractive guys through a conceit of music was a nice hobby to have. That this was not only the case, but also one she felt no shame in casually fessing to, struck me as somewhat astounding — especially considering she was a merely passable vocalist and lacked the grand surplus of talent that could have maybe made it hard to let her go. Given the circumstances, it seemed hopeless to resolve — no less so than my body’s submission to the igneous rocks of asthma suddenly lodged inside my chest.
I had no replacement in mind, but after what must have been a couple days of inner strife over the awkward friend vs. bandmate dynamic, I decided that I simply had to risk it. I’d like to imagine that I tried to find Marie on AIM or even lobbed her a couple missed calls before resorting to the Facebook inbox, but in the end I did it through a letter made of kilobytes and apologies. We may have been a dumb and aimless party band when Marie had joined, but with the introduction of Lupin and a concert date burnt into the calendar as imminent reality, we were now a dumb and aimless party band aspiring to greatness. Even a smallgirlsworth of give-a-damnless deadweight could be enough to fuck the whole thing to rubbish. In any event, my efforts at diplomacy were not well received, and I didn’t hear again from her in a long time.
It was a dumb reason to make a casualty of a friendship, but circumstance had made it hard to avoid, and as I drew closer to KJ by the bond of the band I don’t think I even allowed myself too much time to think about it then. Marie wasn’t my friend anymore, but I can’t remember if I ever paused to wonder who had really made the decision — the music or me.
- The last chapter, really — this is a pretend book, not pretend TV. [↩]
- Literally literally writing ones. [↩]
- Links to all “recent” “professional” writings will be posted here soon, but in the meantime there’s always this here. [↩]
- I began this literary blogthing inspired primarily by one of my idols, who at one point admitted there’s a ~30% chance that any given word of his prose is simply untrue. These words, taken as a whole, were ostensibly meant to serve as an ongoing (online) account of his life at the time, but the prose was good enough to justify the lies, and I suppose it was those very lies that allowed his prose to be so damn engaging (and actually good) in the first place. I now follow in his footsteps, but challenge myself to make my Story as interesting as his without ever lying. In one of his more self-reflexive pieces, he quoted a writing professor of his to say: “In order to tell a story, you first need a story to tell, and after that, you need a goal to accomplish with that story” — the goal being the point at which my idol decided he had to lie, and at which I’ve decided that I must be as truthful as possible. But here and now you’re learning that I’m not at all against the idea of turning up the distortion a little bit every now and then, if only to make the clear resolution sound that much sweeter. [↩]
- Retelling this Story as it happens (for it is 2010, and it is still happening — don’t worry, shit starts getting real good real soon!) would be much easier than what I’m doing now, struggling to recall just what the fuck happened in 0h-seven. The gap may soon be shortened considerably, however, as plans to jolt the heartrate of my recollections from “blue whale on benzos” to “regular person high on life” have been laid and are projected to begin one month from now, so long as I don’t keep falling into these swollen footnodes. Easy to get lost down here. [↩]
- The significance of which true disciples of the ‘Milk will learn some unreasonable number of chapters from now. [↩]
- Life’s tendency to accelerate with age is becoming a bit of a theme in my writings here. High school’s sunset seems to have also been the last rays of childhood’s endless glow of slow-simmer days, for me. [↩]
- I really dig half of it, now. [↩]
- Funny anecdote here. One day we came to practice and heard from Dilan that his father got an email from a clothing company also named Generic Youth, who demanded that the teen punks change their collective title. So one quick band meeting later and Dilan logged into Myspace to officially rename the group Fuck Generic Youth. This evidently failed to appease Generic Youth the clothesmiths, and Dilan’s father got another email, and so they settled on their third and certainly worst name, Free Gilbis! (exclamation theirs). Looking back on promo materials for the show, they in fact performed as Free Gilbis!, but I’m not sure I could’ve told this story had I just referred to them as such from the start. [↩]
- That’s the guitarist, not Dilan the drummer, for those keeping whores at home. [↩]
- Motherfucker must’ve forgot about Dre. [↩]
“Better Than Aliens”
“I know you’re not really a huge fan of them, but I’m sorry,” she said from behind the wheel. “Tonight’s a Radiohead night.”
She was right — especially at the time. But that night it made little difference to me. I could see where she was coming from, and even back then I had a hard time complaining when “My Iron Lung” was on the stereo. I cracked the passenger side window to let in some warm summer dusk, and put my free hands to use around the pliant neck of my imagined guitar. It was the only instrument I really knew my way around, but I looked smooth and polished as an MTV closeup as I synced my diving hair and fluid arms to the chords. Twisting the volume knob between us, she turned down my daydream when we rolled up to the drive-thru window, so she could ask the giant talking menu for some quick and easy ulcer food. The menu and its attendants stocked us up accordingly, and we soon returned to the suburban bends and alleys beyond the nearby treeline.
There we found our empty home, filled with other people’s furniture, possessions, and tailless dog. It was really only empty — and ours — thanks to the temporary absence of those other people, who usually owned the place in effect, and always on paper. These folks had entrusted the house and its resident dog to Marie, who was being paid some generous fee for keeping a lonesome and responsible watch over things. Except she had bent the rules in inviting me along at the last minute, to keep her company for a bit of the long and boring night ahead.
Boring in theory, at least. In practice it was the kind of summer evening that seemed lit from within, somehow free of the dark unease that nights are often wont to bring. That’s what I had accredited with the vaguely surreal vibe of our twilight drive, but it hung around even as we escaped the falling night between those four unfamiliar walls. As the lights flickered on to greet us, it felt sort of like walking out of a coma and into a married life — one filled with toasters and cutlery and other gifts from a wedding I couldn’t remember, couches and kitchen tables from a trip to Sears long forgotten.
This, of course, would make Marie my wife, and as we had only ever been friends I had to doubt that those housewarming lights evoked the same kind of feeling in her. The strange thought quickly passed as my attention turned to Petey, the dog who not only lacked a tail but a fourth leg, and compensated for both by being a goddamn friendly and lovable little thing.1 We fed him with attention and pork-oiled fries inbetween bites from the spoils we nabbed at the drive-thru, then slid our way into the basement, where a superior television set would entertain the DVD we had brought along.
The film was typical of high school era Marie, a dry documentary about a couple of strange and crusty old sisters who lived in a doddery squat of a house someplace Welsh or British — which, one way or another, had garnered them hipster cult status. I liked it well enough, and once it had passed we must have talked it over a bit as we sat on the carpeted basement floor. At one point or another I perused the bookshelves of audio documents the real Man of the Household had collected — live bootlegs of bands like Tool or Dave Matthews Band or some other mainstream-cum-subculture group that’s inspired folks to dedicate entire corners of homes to their archives. It was interesting for a time, and then it was not.
Sometime around the time it was not, Marie disappeared from the room and I turned my attention to the cheap magic of the chair she had been sitting in. It was magic because it had no legs, only the hard plastic seat and backing, but in sitting in it on the floor one could feel rather comfortably suspended in animation. The magic was cheap because it did not defy but rather relied on forces of nature (gravity, the size ratio of the average human body) in order to work, and looked like garish crap in the meantime. Absent-mindedly, I decided to do an experiment and place my head upon it, as though it were a pillow. This wasn’t comfortable, but it worked. A few moments later Marie returned, and decided to try an experiment of her own, sitting back down in her chair without first asking me to remove my head from its corner.
This also worked, but was much more comfortable. Somehow she had managed to sidle herself in with one smooth motion, and now my head was in her lap, my hair cushioned by her dress on one side and being gently sieved by her little hands on the other. Like so many other future self-absorbed male writers, I managed to remain eluded by the dead obvious intentions behind this feminine gesture, almost forcibly on my part. A ton of great things fell into my lap during high school, and I let most of them slip for all the strangest non-reasons.2
But now that things had fallen into her lap, she seemed to know what to do. Looking back on it, her taste in guys had probably earned her some decent experience with ones in the comically oblivious department, and she guided me through my quiet hesitance with grace. Soon enough we traded that tacky half-chair for the floor, our limbs entwined and our eyes set to the Spielberg sci-fi unfolding onscreen. That I felt comfortable enough to lean over her shoulder and interrupt her lips in the middle of some witty quip about aliens was a testament to her skill.
Our brief time together remains unique in my mind for how perfectly innocent it felt. No clothes were removed, and all we did was kiss. But there was something very loving and intimate to it, as if we had slipped into an alternate universe for a brief spell. By the time we looked at a clock it was almost daybreak, and I remember sitting on the couch in the first floor living room, the sun beginning to coat the TV screen in its reflected glare as she lay on my lap, bundled up and smiling peacefully in a shallow slumber.
“Wait a minute,” she said, behind the wheel again, watching the train pull away for the city without me. “I think there’s another station close to here that’s got one coming soon.” It must have taken some time to rouse ourselves from the empty home, get in the car and go driving, but it felt fast as snapping the spine of a dream.
“No worries,” I assured her, opening my door. “I don’t mind a wait.”
She insisted, and removed her foot from the brake with finality. Not to be outdone, I swung my legs out the open door and dropped my feet to the moving ground, the rubber sole of my Nike Dunks screaming dramatically against the asphalt.3 She acquiesced, shouted that I was crazy, and with a smile requited my farewell. My obsession with being as polite as possible in those days must have left a lot of confused girls in my wake.
***
I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen next at the time, but as it turned out this moment was never quite reprised between us — and for a long time, we never spoke a single word of it. But for just as long, the look in each other’s eyes that night sweetly lingered over our every minute together. Our friendship felt more complex and meaningful to me, and when we hung out I could sense that same feeling in her — as if there was some intimate knowledge between us that most great friends seldom got to share. The fact that we have now each written pieces about it means something, though I can’t be quite sure exactly what — I’ve never read hers.
But in those months that followed, my best friend Marie and I had never been closer. We discovered the funniest white hip-hop duo alive on a trip to Amish country, and we pored over Dig!, which for a damn long time was probably her and my favorite documentary. We made haphazard attempts at starting a t-shirt company and a radio show, and took tons of goofy pictures on her computer that, when uploaded to Facebook, would invariably make it seem like I was either dating her or gay. I hardly even gave a shit, such was our friendship.
Of course, after she joined my band to lend us her voice at high school’s end, things wound up getting more complicated. Just a couple months later, we wouldn’t even be on speaking terms anymore, and she blamed KJ — her “replacement” — for the death of our friendship. Which I knew because she had said as much to KJ herself.
But she was wrong about that. It wasn’t KJ who was responsible for my fallout with Marie, but none other than that sad, bright-eyed boy Lupin.
- You’ve gotta dig how dogs all have their own little personalities, unlike those frigid felines. There’s a reason why “catty” means bitchy and “doggy” is a term of endearment! [↩]
- Of course, these non-reasons are actually real and pretty good ones, having to do with complicated things like the poorly timed rupture of my parents’ marriage, and the ensuing years of strictly all-boys education that followed. Which is a level of personal detail not even my friends would care to read on the Internet. [↩]
- They made a ridiculous sound, considering we can’t have been moving all too fast. [↩]
{a post-proem interlude}
You’re forgiven, if you forgot about how this webpage is meant to be telling a specific Story — or if you forgot about the thing altogether. The last three entries have been transitional bits and pieces, the most recent of which is more than two months old. That entry, for its part, was meant to be a “proem on rock,” a brief preamble before getting back into the no-nonsense business of hard, objective bloglifejournalism. I never followed through, instead seeking refuge from the cold in my cozy dorm room and the Virgin Islands, in which places I wrote a small book’s worth of analysis of and criticism on everything from Kafka to hip-hop, middle English poetry to contemporary music and law.1 Now I’m back, and instead of continuing the Story, I’m here weaving yet another strand of connective tissue. This is akin to placing an “Interlude” after an “Intro” on your record, a dim move that even a glue-sniffing, wife-betraying asswipe like Usher wouldn’t make, and yet here I am, insulting Usher like he’s the damn fool.2
Who’s the fool? Well, there can be more than one, and right now I’m owning up to my place at the table. I want to write the Story, to revel in the fond memories and exorcised demons, to get it out of my system already, and yet I’ve done a historically awful job of keeping up. A New Year’s Resolution probably can’t make my track record any better, but a guy can try — although things only seem to be ramping up, with ever-increasing band duties, a growing freelance writing palette (yes!), a new stride in my academics,3 and more than I care to even think about right now. But 2009 was a quantum leap from 2008, The Worst Year of My Life, and if I can keep vaultin’ in oh-Ten, it’s gonna be a damn fine year as well. I’m amped.
What were we talking about? Oh right, nothing: and New Year’s, kind of. It was a decent Eve, though couldn’t help but pale in comparison to some recent ones.4 I spent some of the afternoon on a freeway while reading Hunter S. Thompson and listening to Usher’s Confessions, which attentive readers of Soymilk Revolution and careful listeners of music will by now know is a bad album — one of the most syrupy logs of shitschmaltz I’ve ever forced myself to ingest — and I spent some of the evening walking around NYC’s snow-dampened streets, wet like a descending mountaineer’s defrosting nostrils. Relentless wind chills pierced my woolen exterior with ease, making me yearn for the shabby, clotted veins of the city’s arterial subway system, the relative warmth of still air and collective body heat. My modest desires were appeased several times over the course of the evening, affording my friends and I not only warmth but also the occasional platform jazz solo, improvised music for an improvised crowd. During this time I was writing furiously in my notebook and thinking about how Hunter S. Thompson’s hilarious brand of Gonzo journalism is perhaps the earliest form of “citizen journalism,” especially as seen in his On the Campaign Trail ‘72 book, really especially as regards Edmund Muskie and the drug Ibogaine. Hm.
Musical collaborator/good friend Zach and I spent some time with friends in a friend’s apartment that night, discussing the difference between the Bolt Bus and the Chinatown bus. Zach paraphrased what I had said on a Chinatown bus earlier that day, unaccredited, in noting that the Bolt Bus is simply the Chinatown bus for white xenophobes who don’t like hearing a small Asian woman scream about how the next departing bus is on its way to “D.C., Washington,” or “Delphia, Philly.” I continued my pilfered thought by pointing out how the various Chinatown bus companies are actually often owned by rival gangs, a sort of Triads vs. whoever-the-fuck-else deal that appears at least sufficiently sane on the surface but is actually heavily steeped in a competition so fierce that the businessmen and women involved are liable to kill each other for your tattered $10 bill. However, I had to admit that the most dangerous things I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of Chinatown bussing is a fat urban couple who filled a blast radius of twenty seat aisles with a stench that smelled like fried chicken via fiery, vengeful asshole, and a hook-up between two friends of mine that I wouldn’t have imagined ever hooking up, at least not on a bus. So perhaps those Chinatown buses aren’t all that dangerous, after all — though those two things happened on the same bus ride, to tell you the truth. If nothing else, that’s a little fucked up.
A lot of other things happened that New Year’s in New York. For the occasion I became an insatiable vortex, into which-whom disappeared two hot dogs, a papaya smoothie, three slices of mysterious and delicious defrost pizza, three courses at a decent Chinese restaurant, cheap boxed wine, a 600-calorie bomb in the form of a Crumbs carrot cake cupcake, a fair amount of Jack Daniels, a bullshit “les petits” bottle of Evian and two novelty-sized slices of fresh pizza, in that order. I also spent the two hours before, the moment during, and the half hour after the turn of the decade watching a jam band play, of all things.
It was a southern rock/gospel-influenced jam band, so I guess that was interesting. I’ve never been much for jam bands — it speaks more to the side of music I could give a shit less about (intense virtuosity) and less to the side I couldn’t love more (direct, moving songwriting) — let alone when it costs me $50 to witness, but the strange bastards onstage had their moments. The crowd was also intriguing: I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a more varied crowd of people at a show before, the vast majority of whom seemed to be genuinely enjoying the hell out of the proceedings. People of all creeds and races, heights, person-genres, et al: a rotund little midget who was swigging ale and grooving to the band almost entirely out of his field of vision; grey-haired folks who were not there because of younger relatives; the kind of scenesters you’d more commonly see owning the dancefloor at a fashionable club somewhere; and a very, very cute young woman in my immediate vicinity who was dancing her heart out and has left a small impression on my mind that will probably recall itself every time I am faced by the prospect of a jam band again for at least the next few years of my life. Which will be damn infrequent, lord willing.
For the most part, I tried to focus on the music but couldn’t keep those kinds of thoughts out of my head. And the music itself inspired more than enough thoughts on its own, thoughts like:
“Jam” music presents the rock band as pornographic, orgiastic release. Each musician is given a moment in the sun to play with his or her self, and after a few vamps and runs of auto-stimulation, the whole lecherous lot unites and gets off together in a great big communal climax. To their credit, they can come many times without going limp — though from certain perspectives, it would look as if they weren’t ever too virile to begin with. Whatever.
Listening to a jam band play is like reading a paper by a pretty smart kid who nevertheless refers to his thesaurus at least twice per sentence. It’s easy to dig on the pyrotechnical vocabulary and the florid prettiness of the individual elements, but the sum is far less impressive than any of its given parts — or even the potential of what each “author” (literary or musical) could be doing with what he or she’s got going on. This is why so many fans of this kind of music can listen to one of, say, Guided By Voices or Weezer’s best records, scratch their heads, and spit about how it “doesn’t do anything new.” It misses the point entirely, not just of the music in question but as far as I care music in general — though perhaps I just never inhaled enough Cali ‘dro to get the point of jam music, and nobody’s got anybody to blame for that except me. Different strokes for different bloats.
Blokes, I meant. Folks. Willis Jackson? Speaking of differing tastes, mine have been changing a lot recently as far as music goes. I still love most of the shit I’ve been loving for the past few years, but in general I feel like I’ve been experiencing something of a “genre awakening.” I like reggae now. I love dub, and in the past few weeks I think I’ve been starting to appreciate hip-hop on the face of its universally acknowledged merits and not just the occasional overlaps it has with my more entrenched musical tastes/leanings. My Last.Fm, if you can find it, is pretty ridiculous…If it tells you anything, my two favorite releases of last year are by rap-punk bastard child P.O.S. and mainstream star/gender- and genre-bending pop thing Lady GaGa. I’m either broadening my horizons or losing them entirely.
What the fuck is this interlude supposed to accomplish, anyway? And what kind of aesthetic dolt/delinquent make his interludes as long as his real tracks? (Or, in my case, posts — the last ‘real’ one being “Nights It Came Together,” about half a dang year old now.) Well, this has gotten me into the swing of writing about myself again, which is something I suppose. More to come soon? Maybe. In the meantime, I’m still writing for one of the top 20 most popular newspapers in the country, and am now just beginning to write for one of the top 5 coolest music websites in the world. I’ll show you some clips soon! And no, I’m not going to share the new Spoon album with you! haha lol
Holy hell, this Outkast album is good. What’s crazy is that I’ve always felt Big Boi is the lesser half of the group, but man, Speakerboxx is so on point. It’s an old album, dated 2003, and I guess that’s pretty old by today’s hyperactive sociocultural torrent-standards. I just experienced what my dad calls my first “geezer moment” the other day, when I was hanging in the Order Room of my friend KJ’s house, where his little 14-year-old squash prodigy, future electronic drummer brother Ian was cruising the net hard. It was a Saturday night, roundabouts 11pm, and the little dude was video-chatting with the scores of friends he had online at that very moment. He hopped into one chat with a group of young teen girls in the neighborhood, took some unflattering screencaps of them mid-sentence amidst some stifled fits of laughter, then X’ed out and blew down the information superhighway to yet another girlcluster somewhere else on the Mainline.
“Do you still like Andrew?” he asked one of the young’uns. She blushed, tossed her hair and admitted that her thing for him had faltered ever since he lost his eyebrows in some unfortunate prank that involved sleeping bags and duct tape. “Let’s get him in here,” Ian replied, and soon Andrew was flown into the chat, flustered and indeed eyebrowless as a newborn baby. Ian put his computer on mute, snapped a few more screencaps, quickly assembled an awkward collage of Andrew and the girls and a few Google Image’d hearts in Photoshop, uploaded it to Facebook much to the assembled company’s chagrin, then exited the digital carousal with a mischievous laugh.
Back in my day, online conversation was limited to text, and although some of us Skype and videochat nowadays, it’s not the same kind of social function that the young teens and tweens of today seem to have made out of it. It was the first time I, or KJ, ever felt like we were a part of “the older generation,” and it was a fascinating and frightful little sensation. I’m old enough to get into bars legally, and I guess that’s pretty damn old…Life speeds up, time gets thinner, and I need more of it than ever. Let’s see if there’s any magic left to be found in this strange new world.5
2010 is still green and fresh, but some pretty unreasonable things have happened already. For one thing, I’ve taken a $100 swig of a $1700 bottle of cognac, and breathed a fire so damn potent and strong it had women two and a half times my age hitting on me the only way those kind of women at my age can do — horrifyingly.6 It was some damn good cognac, though, and the moment made not a damn lick of sense, which has me thinking that 2010 might just be the Year of Unreason, or at least the least reasonable year of my life thus far. Could this be the start of the Decade of Unreason? Don’t touch that dial unless you’re trying to rip it off.
don’t pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang.
- Some of that “small book” is among the best stuff I’ve ever written about anything. I’ll show you sometime, especially if you ask! [↩]
- I recently listened to his Confessions album, and the vitriol’s still fresh. What a maddeningly crap record. [↩]
- 6 classes and 6 A’s later, all I can say is: take time off from college if you’re considering it. A rebirth, in more ways than one. [↩]
- 2005 was spent in all-white threads, atop a skyscraper with tons of family, a live band filling the 75-degree air some 25 stories above the Rio de Janeiro coast. 2007 was spent watching the goddamn Jonas Brothers lip-sync a mediocre pop song on “live” TV, but that was at least book-ended by some great sex. And 2008 ended with a party surrounded by colleagues and friends with whom I had recently become very close and appreciative of, which was heartwarming in its own way. 2006 was weird, now that I remember it, but also involved a girl that made me pretty happy at the time, and at the end of the year that’s all one could really want. [↩]
- I’ve got it, don’t sweat. [↩]
- These women are what I now call “grinchy.” Talk to me in the streets or on the lines to find out more about this phenomenal new slang. [↩]
{the complete fragment, the incomplete whole}
Unfinished fragments, regretted wholes — I can’t count the number of times I’ve written something in this little box, only to have it wind up in the Saved Drafts graveyard, or perhaps the mausoleum of private entries next door. Sometimes I think too much and write a whole lot more; sometimes I write a little bit of nothing, and even that feels like excess. I don’t take forever to put something on this page because I spend a lot of time writing it, I take forever to not put that something on this page because I spend too much time writing it. Franz Kafka, sometime before he died (that is, before he ever had the chance to become famous), wrote in his journal that the only effective way to write is through “a complete opening out of the body and the soul,” uninterrupted and unhealthy and usually happening while the writer ought to be asleep. And while nothing I have written in my blog could ever compare to what he might have written in his,1 I feel as though the only way I ever find the give-a-damn to finish a piece outside the influence of deadlines and paychecks is to do it all in one sitting. Sometimes you need to feel like you have to write something in order to see it through.
I don’t feel like I have to write anything right now. Tellingly, the above paragraph is stolen from an entry I began writing about a month ago, only to shove its incomplete body down a long tube where it will remain untouched for approximately the next year and a half. Which is quite a shame, because it was a pretty good and timely piece; it had to do with the strange and harrowing confluence of events that centered around a single weekend in September, wherein 1) the remains of a young woman named Annie was found in one of the graduate buildings of the university where I study, 2) one of the people I’ve been closest to in this life was struck suddenly by an unlit car that sent her broken limbs flying through fifteen feet of dark, rainy sky, and 3) I developed an appreciation for dub music that briefly possessed me. This confluence meant a terrible lot of things to me, far beyond the pale of any reasonable coincidence, and something I really felt like putting to paper. I think you’ll like it, once it’s finally resurrected and finished — if you stick around that long, of course.
A year and a half is a long time, for anyone not dead. Every year and a half of my life, since the age of 15,2 has felt like an individual little life, although each one of them gets a little smaller as a unit every time. By the end of each time I feel like my context, as a human-being, has changed very thoroughly, most often in ways I failed to anticipate — the context changes, and those changes make their mark on me, but what really lies at my center has remained roughly unchanged. Somebody I once met and spent a lot of time with for a while told me, one Year And A Half later, something to that effect. His insight stung momentarily though he meant no offense by it, and reassured me that this was in fact a very good thing; I thought about it for a couple minutes and saw it his way, and so it was. Which is all a very long-winded way of me saying that I guess I actually don’t know where I will be in another Year And A Half, or whether or not I will then be finishing a journal entry I left incomplete here a month ago. So my previous paragraph may have ended with a lie; I apologize for that rather than delete it, because I like the way I arrived at this apology, as people sometimes do. But I hate lying almost as much as I hate being lied to, even when I’m writing and I know that a few smart, carefully placed lies can make good literature become great literature.
This is all bullshit, and it’s not what I came here to write. I just thought that this would be a good time to present to you
A BRIEF PROEM ON ROCK
Which is a bit of a misnomer because the music I make is not definitively “rock,” although rock it indeed does.3 My music does more than it is, when it comes to rock, while also containing many rock ingredients and flavors. And I’m bringing it up because I want to clarify something: in my last real entry (which means I haven’t really updated in 4 months; fuck), I briefly promoted a show I was organizing wherein my band was headlining. To avoid temporal confusion, I now stress that this is not the same show I will begin talking about in the next couple installments of The Story that lies at the heart of this website. To clarify, that show happened in the summer of 2007; the one I promoted here in the summer of 2009 happened in the summer of 2009, as planned.4 I could say more, but in the interest of keeping this proem brief (as advertised), I’ll stop here.
Sometimes it can’t hurt to explain things a little.
Speaking of that same last real entry, in it I mentioned that I would be writing for a very large publication soon. That did indeed happen, and here is some evidence. There was also a second concert review that, because of a deadline misunderstanding, I had to write in two hours, and I guess it’s pretty decent considering that. More little bits and pieces like these should be surfacing soon, both in this same publication and elsewhere. I wish my current schedule permitted me to branch out and do a little more, but I also enjoy sleeping nowadays.
That’s really all I have to say, and in the interest of having something new on this website again, I’m going to go ahead and hit the “Publish” button very soon. Which I feel bad about, because this really wasn’t very interesting. But I promise to come back and write something Real very soon, and in the meantime, I want to bring attention to the fact that last.fm is my favorite Internet technodoodad service right now, so if you have one go ahead and use it to verb-friend me. And if you don’t have one, you can at least check out what I’ve been hearing lately…Other than the very odd, bleating harmonies that appear to be happening between two (possibly Middle Eastern) men somewhere not far outside my window. I think this is getting “Published” now so that I can plug my laptop back into my speakers and choose to hear something else.
More soon!
(plan d getting money.)