old band, new band

I bought tickets to see Slaughter Beach, Dog in the waning days of the pandemic and it was cancelled just days before, but this was back when I only casually understood how bright the embers of a band can burn. We went to see Isaiah Rashad instead and the show was pretty good, and at midnight on my drive home Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers came out, so I parked the car in a dirt lot on a hill and listened to three quarters of the album and wondered what it would’ve been to be around when good kid, m.A.A.d. City came out.

I suppose this is a way of saying that records come out when they come out and they are rarely kind enough to coincide with the right time of your life. This is the idea I was scratching at when I wrote about three-album-runs and timing and lightning, but I want to come at it from a different direction.

Hanif Abdurraqib wrote the single best essay I have ever read, called “Fall Out Boy Forever,” on I band I admire but don’t listen to all that much. Although I admit, after reading Hanif’s piece, that things might have been different if the timing was different.

In one of piece’s more minor movements, Abdurraqib traces where Fall Out Boy came from:

“Some of the faces are familiar enough from the Chicago hardcore scene: there is Pete Wentz, Chicago scene celebrity, who most recently screamed in Arma Angelus and thrashed around in Racetraitor. And Joe Trohman, the scrawny guitarist from Subsist. The drummer is Mike Pareskuwicz, from Subsist.”

The essay is not about where a band came from, but about what happened in the tidal pool when their old bands receded. It’s about a great many other things, and I urge you to read it in full. It will break your heart.

The point is that people form bands and sometimes these bands are beloved but the unfortunate thing about bands is they break up.

The point is that when bands break up, their collective brilliance scatters into sun-reflected shards and comes to rest somewhere else in the scene. Sometimes what comes after a band is better than the band itself, and sometimes it isn’t.

Dave Grohl made Foo Fighters after Nirvana and we know that story. Jason Isbell was with the Drive By Truckers for a little while before the 400 Unit. Brian Eno came from Roxy Music and produced for the Talking Heads. The bands we love are almost always a product of the bands we love.

Slaughter Beach, Dog is Jake Ewald’s solo project, just steps away from the beloved Modern Baseball. I love MoBo to bits, but I wasn’t around for their tenure. Instead, I tell the story of their fabled Michael Jordan House and scream “Bullshit, you fucking miss me” when the song demands I do and sit with the ache of missing something you love.

I never properly had MoBo, but I have Slaughter Beach, Dog, and I was about to see them when the pandemic intervened, as it did. In solace, I have come to love Slaughter Beach, Dog’s live recordings. Here’s Jake at Couchtown:

Now, I don’t know what Couchtown is, or was, but it seems that Jake Ewald does, or did:

“Thank you so much for being here. Thank you to, um, whatever this house is called. I’ve played so many shows here that every time I play here it’s a different name… Couchtown! Thank you to Couchtown and everyone who lives here for having us. It used to be Whole Foods. It used to be something else – Cosmos, yeah. Lotsa names, the house of many names”

My dad used to wear a CBGB shirt and I asked him a couple dozen times what OMFUG stands for and I even got it wrong at trivia one night, but the whole thing left me with a lasting impression of The Venue as a cultural monument.

There’s cachet in saying you saw a certain band at a certain venue. I think, mostly, it is about bearing witness to a moment in time. For a short window, the lifespan of a venue overlapped with the lifespan of a band, and we reaped the benefits. What a gorgeous trick of fate.

I am not a music historian, and I do not pretend to understand the lineage in a way that might do it justice, but I once flipped through a photo book that documented 100 days of punk at The Roxy – all 100 days of The Roxy. There used to be a bar in Calgary called Broken City and there used to be a bar in Vancouver called Richard’s and there used to be a house in Philadelphia called the Michael Jordan House and they were legion. The bands that played there once might not be together anymore but they’re probably in new bands and playing in new venues.

It’s no small secret that The Weakerthans are the best band in the world. I saw them, once, but I was seven and slept through some of the show. I missed the best years of the world’s greatest band.

Before he spoke my favourite poetry, John K. Samson was in a Winnipeg hardcore band called Propaghandi. I don’t much listen to them, but they make great music. In a different time and different place, I would’ve had a Propaghandi t-shirt. Instead, I have my Weakerthans shirts.

The lineage I’m trying to trace is that John K. Samson was in a punk band once but he left and made his best music with a newer, softer band. Jake Ewald was in a punk band once but they broke up and he is now making his best music with a newer, softer band.

I missed Propaghandi and I missed the Weakerthans and I missed Modern Baseball but I arrived just at the right time for Slaughter Beach, Dog, so as we wavered in the hangover of a tired pandemic my friend Lucas and I bought tickets to see Slaughter Beach, Dog. Just two years before, someone’s basement became Couchtown and Slaughter Beach, Dog played there. Even though I’ve never seen Jake play, I have these tapes of live performance and that’s enough to reassure me that he’s out there, somewhere, in some small venue, playing his best songs.

It becomes easy to mourn the bands that used to be, but don’t let that get in the way of finding a new band to love. You see, the magic that gathers in the muggy air of a certain venue when a certain band is playing in a certain year is the not the property of the band or the venue or the year. It’s the music itself; this ineffable, intangible wonder. It’s the reason you bought a ticket and dragged your tired self through a new set of doors to collapse into the arms of a crowd and sing your favourite lyrics.

I have also spent an inordinate amount of time with this documentary:

Things like these – live recordings, ticket stubs, band shirts – are a way of carrying a collective memory with us. They are a testimony to the venues and the music and the people that lent us a place to rest our tired feet. They are a profound elegy for notes that will always hang in the air above a crowd that will never forget.

I believe in a world where there is always music playing somewhere. I believe that some things, like music, like love, like grief, are too vast to remain in the same place for too long. I believe they will escape and find new ways of making themselves known. I believe there is beauty in new things and there is beauty in leaving them behind.

May the bands you love break up and find new songs to hold their same old words. May your favourite venues someday shutter their doors and send you reeling across town on a new bus line to some new ramshackle stage. May you never forget where you come from, what you left behind.

There is a moment, near the end of We’re The Weakerthans, that never fails to make me cry:

“It seems to me that when bands break up I always kinda think well what are you, in junior high? Like what, why would you bother? I mean, I think that there’s no real point in that. We’re always gonna get together and play music, I think. Unless one of us stabs another of us, which could happen.”

The Weakerthans have been “cryogenically frozen” since 2015. Slaughter Beach, Dog has not returned to Calgary. Elsewhere, bands are splintering into a half-dozen solo projects. Venues are closing and re-opening. In the spaces before, between, and after, people are playing music. There will always be music.