Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1397
Getting way too emotional at a Ride show and listening to an old album by a band called Space Needle.
Well hello. Morning. What is it? Wednesday? Okay. I can deal with a Wednesday. I got lots of sleep. Jane was great this morning. Dressed as an elf. We got there early. Fifth car in line. All very smooth. Can’t complain.
Looks like people liked the “gift guide,” that is nice. Thank you for your kind words.
Re-listening to Tamar Berk, Good Times for a Change, which is fine, decent rock pop anthems, kinda 90’s, actually. Does not fit my emotions at this exact second but there is a lot to like about it. I know nothing about Tamar Berk, except I am still, god forgive me, using Spotify and it has that stupid-ass sidebar where they show you video and photos and shit about the band, I don’t know why but I can’t stand this stupid little sidebar. Mostly becsause a) it will not stay shut no matter how many times I click on the close button and b) it got rid of the friends view, which was, arguably, the best thing about Spotify, though they have pretty much been degrading it from the beginning. Anyway the “video” accompanying this album is some selfie video that she took in her apartment, and I admire the lo-fi nature of that I guess.
Finished listentening to all our new vinyl and are back on the project of clearing out the “To Investigate” playlist. I like to go into the new year with a cleared out playlist. All the 2024 songs placed and filed appropriately and a blank slate. I have 53 hours of music to get through. I’ve listened to it all once, so this is just a matter of starring the best tracks and adding them to playlists. Re-listens.
Ride show on Tuesday was great. And intense. Jussi came down for the show, she is a big fan. I mean, I am theoretically a big fan as well. I would put Nowhere as my absolute favorite album of 1992, I cannot convey how much I loved that record. But there’s something about Ride that drives home aging and it really hurts because — and this may come as a shock to you — I do not like growing older, it is unpleasant. Anyway, because she is a big fan Jussi wanted to stand up front, ideally right against the stage. And what am I going to do? Not spend several hours with one of my best friends that I don’t get to see that often? Plus! Nick came to the show, surprised Jussi by coming down from Wilmington, so it would have been two of my best friends I abandoned to go stand in the back where I am comfortable.
So, even though I do not generally like to stand up front at shows, I put on my big boy pants and did it and, reader, it was so intense. I forgot how crazy the whole thing is! This has gotta be one of the weirdest human rituals out there!
First we had the opener, LA band called Rocket, two shredding dudes on guitar, just a monster of a lady drummer who was the most bad-ass lady drummer Ive ever seen since the Goddess of Thunder herself, L7 drummer Dee Plakas. Patty Schemel-level brilliance here. Just amazing. And then a super-hot mod girl on vocals and bass, probably half my age. The band played a mix of the good parts of the Pumpkins, My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Orange if you remember them, but ‘o Dinosaur. Solid. There was a 60-second moment they sounded like the legendary Boston drone-rock band Bright and it was so, so great.
But I am sitting there like two feet from this super-hot woman half my age in a miniskirt, and I feel like such a letch. I mean, I am ignoring it, but then right next to me is this dude my age, greying, and he’s just fucking filming the whole thing, constant photos, and I can see his screen and it is not great. So many people up front filming and taking pictures constantly. Taking pictures of mic stands, of pedal boards. I can’t deal.
I took no photos of this experience but here is a photo from their instagram that will give you a bit of an idea:
Rocket | finally home 37 days later 🤓 thank u to anyone who came to see us play on this tour ❤️ | Instagram
1,311 likes, 20 comments - rockettheband on May 22, 2024: "finally home 37 days later 🤓 thank u to anyone who came to see us play on this tour ❤️".
(I did take a couple photos of Ride, one burst, five photos. That is enough! You don’t need your camera out the whole time!)
And I feel so exposed up front at a show I do not like it one bit. I have been on the stage, it’s a myth they’re not looking at you, that they can’t see you. Most of the time they’re not looking at you, often they can’t see you, but they can, they can, and they do. I want to be invisible at shows, I want to be lost in the music. It is very hard to do that when I think the band is staring at me.
Anyway, one guitarist had a 6×12” cab plugged into an actual Peavy PA it was so weird. Giant amps, the kind of amps you use when you are still rock idealists. Dual Gibson guitars. You don’t see dual Gibsons that often. The singer had leg warmers, The drummer had one of her pant legs ripped off to better drum my god she was so awesome.
The chief effect on me was to make me profoundly regret ever quitting a band my god why did I quit my band? Did I do that? Did the band break up around me? Did I screw it up? I probably screwed it up? And we were a great band, and it is entirely understandable that I thought “oh well, we had a good run, I’ll never be in another band that good may as well give up,” no that’s not fair, I did join other bands and I was right, they weren’t as good.
Man I miss being in a band that was so dumb to stop being in bands.
Which is, of course, just missing your youth in another form, I suppose.
Oh hey coincidentally my desktop this morning is a sketch I made of Curve playing at Avalon in Boston in 1992. It’s a great sketch. Curve really pioneered the whole lights-in-the-face thing. Another band I stood too close to with a distractingly hot lead singer, only back then it was age appropriate, shit, I think Toni Holliday is older than me.
Anyway, that was bad enough, but then Ride. Oh god. Oh god. It was fine for the first few songs, new songs from the (really pretty good) three “modern era” Ride albums. But then they played “Dreams Burn Down” and the whole thing grew insanely uncomfortable for me. This song used to mean so much to me, every word, I mean you could almost say that it encompasses a good chunk of my personal life philosophy.
We fill the days and nights
We fill the gaps in our empty little lives
But we know we are doomed the moment we walk out the room
Waiting, hoping for a sign
That what's forbidden can be mine
I just want what I can't have
'Til my dreams burn down and choke me every time
It’s dark, man, but it’s also… I dunno, I find it clarifying, and a tad uplifting.
But anyway, I am now 52, I was a wee baby when this song moved and shaped me, and I have aged and grown somewhat jaded and Mark is 55 now and has also aged. But the song still grabs me, made me feel all sorts of nostalgia for past times in my life I don’t think about too often. I was in a pretty receptive state already since I had made the emotional mistake of listening to my new vinyl copy of Space Needle’s Voyager earlier that day and memories came flooding back to me of 1995, a year I don’t think about much.
And now I am standing in the front row of a show, three feet from an aging rocker singing a song from 30 years ago and I am shedding a tear and he is right there in front of me and it is all super awkward, maaan.
Oh and there was this… gonna say 65-70 year-old woman next to us up front and she just fucking loved Ride. And, weirdly, she loved the new shit more. She sang perfect harmonies to every new song. But not the old ones? Kind of… I mean, good for you, Ride, picking up new fans who like your new work that is the sign of an active, real band and not a nostalgia act. They totally qualify. I am so happy for them.
I never shoulda quit being in a band.
Anyway, I made it through “Twisterella” and “Cool Your Boots” and a lot of new songs but eventually cracked and headed to the back before the wall of oldies with “Vapor Trail” and “Seagull” and thank god, I couldn’t have handled it.
The back of the club, my people just great. Sound is better — Mark uses amp modeling now so the mix between his and Andy’s amps is all weird up front, the vocals were too low for each band since everyone uses in-ear monitoring now. Sound is so much better in the back. There was an autistic guy in a Boris shirt, holding a Boris concert poster for some reason, was just amazing. He was loving the show so much, just losing it with excitement. Middle-aged woman dancing like her life depended on it. So fun. Saw and talked to the girl from Rocket, she is just a normal human being, very nice. There was a dude in a Cyberaktif shirt and I really should have talked to him. Did talk to a girl in a Souvlaki shirt, we agree it is the best Slowdive album. There were people walking out of the club putting their face masks on as they leave — literally saw three different people do this and I have so many questions.
Listening to Space Needle, going to Ride yesterday, I realized: I miss my old friends so much. I miss the ones that I have lost, the ones that I lost before Facebook came round and everyone is in touch. I miss them constantly, achingly. I miss the ones I am still in touch with. I think about them constantly. It’s a feeling that, at least at scale, is more or less over in humanity: we don’t lose touch with people in the same way anymore. But some of these people — I can’t find them on Facebook, I haven’t heard from them in 20, 30 years. No way to reach out, no way to research. It haunts you. Or it haunts me. I actually have no idea if any other human is like this.
And then there are the ones that are on Facebook, or that you’re somehow connected to, but when you reach out it’s just… crickets, or nothing. I mean, that is obviously fine, it’s their choice. And what are you going to say anyway? “Hi, I miss you, I think of you often, we had a great if imperfect friendship. We never did each other wrong, or at least not that wrong? Hopefully? And weren’t those a few super intense years? We were inseparable. And now we are not. And I guess that’s fine. And I guess I just wanted to… acknowledge that and tell you, in case you ever doubted it, that I thought it was real too.” But what is that? What even is that? is it selfish? Is it something humans need to do more of? Less of? No fucking clue.
But we have the friends we have and we should do it more often. I did it to a friend yesterday. And it was true! She is the best. I am glad we’re still friends after all these years.
(notice you do it “to” someone though. It feels so presumptuous, doesn't it?)
Because the opposite of being friends all these years is… not? And what’s the point of that.
Here is a picture of Jane dressed as an elf with a drawing of a digital clock. I got my 2024 photo filing done yesterday so all my Jane photos are gonna have to be new from here on out. We can do it.
Comitting a slight breach of ettiquette putting such a pure shoegaze hit like “Dreams Burn Down” on a normcore Justa Mix, but it is topical so I have cleared out a little room on today’s playlist for it. Sorry, Julia-Sophie, you’re just gonna have to wait a bit. We also have old Saint Etienne not new which is weird. New old band discovery Wussy, great new song from Laura Jane Grace and a solid new one from Elias from Iceage. Oh yeah lotta oldies on this one actually. And Mike Posner, Mike, you are a beautiful soul, don’t change. Ships are safe in the harbor, but that ain’t what ships are made for.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.