It’s been a week since I left the apartment for any reason other than a grocery run. OK, maybe I also hit up the liquor store a few times. For the first time in many years I have been experiencing actual cigarette cravings (I quit seven years ago), but I have not yet caved!
This week’s entry will be brief. I’ve been struggling off and on with the impetus to write. It comes and goes, and right now I’m forcing myself to do it. I find it darkly funny that the year I finally decide to start a proper music blog is the year career concert-goers such as myself get the rug ripped out from under us. It’s a dark cloud over my mood that’s tough to shake, and when I’m not working remote, the nesting urge takes over: I am compelled to cook, clean, and sleep. Ernie is like a pig in shit: his two favorite people are around constantly to shower him with affection and snacks. Emphasis on the snacks.
Oh, to be a peacefully napping cat in the midst of chaos.
There has been a smattering of joy and laughter and genuinely inspiring camaraderie despite the doldrums. Ironically, I feel more actively engaged and connected with my friends and loved ones than I have in a long time. There are constant phone calls, Discord chats, and spontaneous, drunken Google hangouts. The global scale of the crisis has thrust us all in the same boat: Alone, Together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_BNf_Dd4TM
I have been having the same conversation with almost everyone. This was supposed to be our year. Every band we ever loved seemed to be putting a tour together. The high of the anticipation makes the loss all the more brutal, and I’m not optimistic. Barring a miracle, live music isn’t returning to (an adjusted) normal until a vaccine is in circulation; prolonged suppression measures will be necessary to keep our communities safe and our healthcare system from being catastrophically overwhelmed.
Frankly, it’s the easiest decision in the world. Sacrifice all semblance of normalcy and public life to make sure people like my parents have access to care, god forbid they fall ill? It’s a no-brainer. Worrying about my relatives who are older and sicker than I am keeps me up at night. I’d be lying to you if I told you I haven’t been fielding semi-regular panic attacks. There’s nothing I want more right now than be able to drive up to Connecticut and throw my arms around my mom and dad; words cannot even begin to express the scope of that desire. I have a deepened appreciation for the preciousness of the little things, now that they’re on indefinite hold. But if staying put in my apartment for up to a year and a half is the price I have to pay, so be it.
The light at the end of the tunnel? Man, just imagine the party when it’s all over. Unfathomable. A dream come true. And that day will come, sooner or later. I was DMing a mutual on Instagram earlier this week: no one will ever stand around at a gig with their arms crossed ever again. It will be heaven on earth.
It occurred to me while I was texting my parents on a deserted Metro North train the other day: I lived through 9/11, and this is way weirder, “weirdness” being the only metric by which I was able to appraise that kind of event as a 12-year-old. On September 12, 2001, I went to St. Catherine’s Park on 68th Street with the neighborhood kids – my school had closed for the day – and bummed around on skateboards, threw handballs against concrete, and drew on the sidewalks with chalk. It smelled like burning, and if you looked up you could see the plumes creeping into the sky, but the next day I was… back in class!
New York made a very stubborn commitment to keeping on with life as scheduled, to finding hope and healing in the simple act of perseverance, and so we got up and went to work, went to school, went out to eat and drink and socialize. The gears kept on turning. We all knew this had shifted the axis of “normal,” that life would change significantly in the years to come, but there was the sense that it could be, well, sensed. Which is I think how people got through it, both the horror of the day itself and the sequence of equally horrific global dominoes the country shoved over in its wake.
This is the second historic disaster of my lifetime, I guess, and the gears have ground to a halt. The scope of the impending changes feels unknowable, almost in an eldritch way. Weirdness for a 31-year-old yuppie, as it turns out, is trudging up the track steps to a jarringly empty Grand Central in the middle of rush hour, with the gray morning light streaming through the windows. The sight is filed away now, somewhere adjacent to the memory of billowing smoke, viewed from a park on the Upper East Side.
This week I commuted into Manhattan on vacant trains, walking around on mostly vacant streets, and the looks on people’s faces – if they were not obscured by masks – were hardly resolute, not defiantly purposeful or even acutely afraid, but marked by a sort of glazed-over confusion.
I’m a little dazed myself. Friday morning was when the “gig bloodbath,” as my buddy Brendan so astutely termed it, commenced at last. My inbox is now a graveyard of canceled tour notifications and venue closures, each subject heading a temporary epitaph for any given band or concert hall. I was prepared for it, but I wasn’t ready for it. I’ve discovered these are two different things.
Greg Dulli UK/Euro, canceled; USA leg in May is theoretically a go, but I’m not making any bets. White Reaper is off the March docket, as was every show I had planned for this past weekend once Cuomo capped public gatherings at 250 insubordinate assholes per bar/club/restaurant. (Guys, go the fuck home! If I’m not out there, you know it’s bad.)
The Thursday night prior, my friend Grace and I had scrambled to Mercury Lounge, desperate for a final evening of relative normalcy. The late show had been called off already, and Michael C. Hall’s band, Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, was our last shot at a proper rock show before social distancing brought the curtains down on most of New York’s concert halls.
It was a weird, poignant night. We greeted our fellow audience members with elbow-bumps and “jazz hands” (Grace’s idea) instead of the usual handshakes and bear hugs. There were a few people from my neck of the woods, oddly enough, and one fan had even flown down from Minneapolis. Thank god, the band they were here to see was still playing, and I felt an overwhelming relief by proxy.
“This is the last show ever,” Michael C. Hall declared, face smeared with glitter, about halfway through the set. We all laughed grimly.
I didn’t care much for the music, to be honest, but I was glad to have gone. I was grateful just to hear an electrical signal pumped through an amplifier. I got pretty drunk on Brooklyn Lager, which I drank fearlessly from a grimy can (as always). I spent much of my time observing the crowd itself, the way they moved and sang along, how their eyes followed the band, the faces half in darkness, half aglow in magenta light.
All gigs are different, and all gigs are the same. The observable consistencies, both in physical space and behavioral ritual, provide an inexplicable, existential comfort. I have traveled the country and marveled with delight at the universality of dusty stages and sticky floors, the wafting smell of beer mingling with the ozone scent of lighting rigs. Of all the memories burned into my brain, these are the ones I treasure, with unparalleled sentimentality. I imagine I will be revisiting them frequently in the weeks and possibly months to come.
I can bitch about the clubs I hate and exalt the ones I love, but they serve the same purpose. We fill a room for the same reasons. We are here for catharsis and community and the incomparable joy that live music provides. Normalcy can spin out right off its axis, but we will come back here, when it is safe. And we will celebrate. Fucking count on it.
Friday afternoon, as I puttered away over a stack of files, “Champagne Supernova” shuffled up on one of my Spotify playlists. It’s a karaoke favorite of mine, and a case study on the virtues of nonsense lyrics. Nobody knows what the fuck Noel Gallagher is talking about, but youknow what he’s talking about, and man if that bullshit gibberish doesn’t hit like scripture.
Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball. Where were you while we were getting high?
I felt tears stinging my eyes all of a sudden, dawning comprehension of a new layer of meaning. This was ridiculous enough that I almost laughed, but instead I chose to embrace the moment. I put my paperwork aside and listened.
That night, facing down a weekend of quarantine, I finally plunked my butt on the carpet and set to shuffling the backlog of setlists into my binder. They tend to flap around on my desk for a bit until I can rustle up the will to organize. These had been laying around since the beginning of the year: Fastball, Cheap Trick, Sloan, The Smithereens.
Dutifully, I smoothed and snipped, peeled and folded over gaff tape until all were safely stowed in their plastic sleeves.
I gave the record book a quick once-over, enough to prompt a smile but not lingering around to invite despair. And then I closed it, and returned it to its permanent perch at my bedside table.
Soulwax have finally rescheduled their 2020 U.S. tour dates, which were postponed from winter to early fall due to production issues. Originally, I had been scheduled to hit both the Philadelphia and New York dates this past weekend, and was heartbroken when the announcement was made that their monumental stage set up would simply not be ready in time. I have submitted my PTO request for New York and Philly, Round Two, and if denied I may very well fly to Chicago or take an Amtrak to Boston for the new dates which fall on weekends. The last time I saw Soulwax was November 2, 2011, at the pre-renovation Webster Hall, and it was a night I’ll never forget. Tiga and Auto Body opened, and I got hammered with a South African couple who generously bought me overpriced Jack and Cokes all night. I was so drenched in sweat by the end of it I almost forgot my coat at the coat check – it didn’t even occur to me that I’d ever needed or brought one. I woke up half-deaf for my retail shift in the morning and it felt like a javelin had been lobbed between my eyes. Worth it.
This blog is about rock music, with a few notable exceptions. Soulwax, my gateway drug to electronic music, is the pivotal one. Perhaps it is unfair to classify them as “electronic” musicians at all: Soulwax began as an alternative rock band out of Ghent, Belgium, the brainchild of brothers David and Stephen Dewaele. The electronic gesturing began with the 2004 album Any Minute Now, and doubled down with Nite Versions in 2005, which was simply Any Minute Now remixed by the band and bookended with a few new compositions.
I became aware of Soulwax in 2008, during the tour supporting the release of Part of the Weekend Never Dies, both a documentary on the band’s mercilessly exacting tour circuit and selected live performances of Nite Versions in full. I was intrigued by this progression in itself: there was the rock band, then the rock band which became an electronic reinvention of itself, and at last it was those remixed versions of the songs which were brought to concert halls, embedded once more within all the signifiers of rock band.
It is the Live at Leeds of dance recordings, and my adoration was instant and all-consuming. Hearing PotWND for the first time was one of those clouds-parting, brain-reorganizing experiences where I felt the earth move under my feet and my neurons in the process of re-wiring themselves. I bought every album and listened to whole damn discography, start to finish, from alt-rock ancestry to electronic evolutionary endpoint. I considered spray-painting “SOULWAX IS GOD” on the walls of the Purchase College campus. I thought about tattooing it on my forehead. Soulwax smudged at the boundaries between rock and dance, bringing live drummers and bassists on tour, playing vintage analog synths with all the physical enthusiasm, sweat, and theatrics of a guitarist wringing solos off a fretboard. Audiences got dangerously into it: drugged out, fucked up, losing clothing, jumping up and down in a single coordinated mass and occasionally getting wheeled out on stretchers.
In other words, Soulwax is rock ‘n’ roll, brought back to its bacchanalian teenage fundamentals. You may observe below:
I would recommend watching the documentary in its entirety, which is equal parts fascinating, hilarious, and terrifying. It is also extremely 2008 (those pants! Those side-swept bangs! Those flip phones!). The above is the so-called Live at Leeds portion of the film, condensed into an uninterrupted set. You may wish to forward to around 47:30 for the climactic closing song, “NY Excuse.” Nancy Whang of LCD Soundsystem contributed vocals to the studio recording, and ironically she hates the song (wonder how she feels about the original “Funkytown,” from which the central groove is hijacked), but it happens to be my personal favorite, and not just because I’m a New Yorker who is running out of good excuses to live here. IS IT GOOD ENOUGH FOR WHAT YOU’RE PAYING? [sobbing as I cut my rent check]
Speaking of New York… the bad news! There are 76 confirmed cases of Coronavirus in the state as I write this. I consider myself a reasonable person, with rational, evidence-based anxieties: dying alone, collapsing sidewalk sheds and air conditioners falling out of windows, saying “you too” instead of “thank you” when the clerk at the lunch counter tells me to enjoy my meal. I don’t fear that a viral pandemic will take me or my loved ones out, though I do think there’s reason to believe more of us might eventually fall ill than not, and I have the great fortune of 1) commuting to work in a large, crowded city where they stack us on top of one another in little sardine tins, and 2) residing in a country without socialized medicine. Technically, I have bigger things to worry about than whether or not my stack of spring tours will be nuked or postponed, but this is my music blog, and that’s where my head is at. I was sounding the alarm weeks ago, and friends were brushing me off as a hysterical hand-wringer (which admittedly I am), but my fears for the effect on live music are coming to fruition. Given the looming specter of contagion, you’d figure that large, crowded gatherings of people would be the first to go, regardless of whether such precautions are scientifically warranted.
Already, BTS, Green Day, Avril Lavigne, and Marilyn Manson have pulled out of show dates in areas of outbreak. Wolf Parade called off their whole tour. SXSW is straight up canceled, full stop, which will prompt a domino effect for satellite tours that hinged on the event. The city of Austin and its workforce will be out hundreds of millions of revenue, and bands which paid out of pocket to play the festival will be forced to eat the costs.
I anticipate more of this as infections spread, and as insurance companies remove coverage related to the virus from their policies. I may not be an epidemiologist or an economist, but I am the grim variety of realist, and this is shaping up to be a very difficult spring for artists who rely on touring revenue to support themselves, especially right after the annual winter lull. Things will get worse before they get better. Show-goers: brace yourself for the inevitable disappointments – there will be many – and an industry in a state of suspended animation. We will come out the other side, god willing, with the good times correspondingly rescheduled.
You could tell me that Bowery Ballroom was an Ebola hotbed and I’d probably still be plastering myself to the front of the stage, provided the artists were willing to risk the same close quarters. I don’t blame touring bands – who are subject to draconian insurers, and pass through a months-long revolving door of crowded airports and concert halls – for electing to play it safe. It’s also vitally important for us to take any measures necessary to keep our elderly and/or immunocompromised safe from a potentially deadly infection. With that said, I would be terribly dismayed if the 2020 Threat of Viral Apocalypse strangled all the fun out of nightlife for the near future. What good is an apocalypse if you can’t dance to it?
On that note:
(HO-LEE SHEE-IT. See you in October, fellas. I hope.)
If you are healthy, able, and not under quarantine, it is right now, more than ever, that you should be out supporting your local bars, restaurants, bands, and venues who are going to take a serious financial hit in the midst of Corona-madness.
So go forth, party hard, wash your hands, and soldier on.
Josh Clayton-Felt (L) and Michael Ward (R) of School of Fish, possibly at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, though the date, location, and photographer are unknown. Photo courtesy of Michael Ward via Josh Clayton-Felt’s Facebook page memoriam.
I’ve instituted a personal tradition for the onset of daylight saving time each year. When I am released from the office the following Monday, with the sun shining miraculously in the sky at 5 PM, I celebrate by cranking up the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” in my headphones, and running most of the way from the Garment District to Grand Central Terminal. Despite the freezing cold – it’s always cold in New York in March – the early sunlight is a glimpse of the finish line, and for me, an injection of straight euphoria. Gregg Alexander’s anthem about mustering strength and love in the face of the capitalist machine pairs with the occasion like a glass of champagne. I don’t know why this is, but I do have fond memories of the song being in heavy rotation as a child. I was ten in 1998, the age when my awareness of music was just beginning to stretch beyond the boundaries of incidental exposure.
It’s two decades later, and we’re at the tail end of another shitty New York winter (though it’s been less shitty than most, so I shouldn’t bitch). I have another week to go before my daylight saving ritual. I’m grinding through the last of the frozen doldrums with another short-lived nineties band, School of Fish. Unlike the New Radicals, School of Fish’s lone hit features nowhere in my rose-tinted childhood recollection – their single “Three Strange Days” was released in March of 1991, and it took me until October of last year to investigate the album which contained it. If the two songs share a common feature, it is that the mood and subject matter have aged unusually well for a couple of one-off guitar bops from the alternative era.
It is my lot in life to fall hopelessly in love with the comprehensive output of bands whose name recognition is bound up in a single three-and-a-half-minute smash. Fastball, Primitive Radio Gods, Harvey Danger, Fountains of Wayne, School of Fish… the list goes on. I have accepted my fate with grace and good humor, except in those cases where the band in question is broken up, or otherwise not actively touring, or subject to some kind of personal or industry-related tragedy. School of Fish ticks all the boxes. After one promising album, and a sophomore effort that failed to generate comparable success, the band broke up and its founding pair went their separate ways. Michael Ward, lead guitarist and songwriter, maintains a career in music and has been a member of both The Wallflowers and Gogol Bordello. Josh Clayton-Felt, guitarist/vocalist and also songwriter, pursued a respectable solo career until he was diagnosed in December of 1999 with choriocarcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. He died on January 19, 2000. He was 32.
Looking at his photograph, I am struck by a feeling of loss that is… cavernous. I never knew him, obviously. I have listened to two School of Fish records and a handful of his estate’s posthumous releases. I have adored everything I have heard, and so I get stuck on the idea of all the songs we’ll never hear, the talent which was stolen by sickness and an early death. I wonder what he would look like at 52, if he would be the kind of artist I might catch on club tours at downtown hole-in-the-walls, smiling and undaunted by the aging, thinning crowds at rock ‘n’ roll gigs in 2020. Maybe, like Gregg Alexander, he would have eventually stepped out from under the stage lights, and opted instead to ghostwrite for the household names.
Maybe he might have contemplated a School of Fish reunion tour in 2021, to mark the 30th anniversary of the band’s eponymous album.
These are selfish fantasies, I realize, because as usual I am hung up on the image of a young man with a guitar, and this is a young man who was also someone’s son. No parent should ever lose a child. He was a brother, a boyfriend, and a beloved friend. I wish I knew what he was like beyond the projections of my imagination, and that spending the past several months becoming deeply attached to his work did not simultaneously feel like the evaporation of a dream.
I want to change the way the world affects me, he sings during the intro above, some of my favorite lyrics to ever open an album. I want to dance in the face of all that could be. It’s the thesis of the record, and our transition into the aforementioned “Three Strange Days,” which condenses the psychedelic musings into what could be a scene plucked from the real world:
For three strange days, I had no obligations. My mind was a blur. I did not know what to do.
When I hear the song, it brings to mind an unstructured long weekend from the previous summer. Having been temporarily unmoored from the autopilot grind of commute/work, commute/sleep, I was left with the feeling of being similarly detached from reality itself. As I wandered the Manhattan sidewalks, guided only by my physical senses and immediate impulses, the whole of my existence seemed absurd, and the city around me an elaborate fabrication. No, I was not on any drugs.
School of Fish is a meditation on the inherent strangeness of being in the world, a soundtrack to highlight the universal moments of disconnect we all experience in modern society. It offers no solution to the confusion, but I am touched by its humility, its embrace of whimsy. Clayton-Felt conveys resignation with a smiling solemnity, enough to lend even the simplest observations an air of profundity: Sometimes I find what I need, he tells us in “Speechless,” and sometimes I don’t find anything. Ain’t that the truth.
It is a testament to the strength of the songwriting that I am more or less unbothered by the album’s only real shortcoming, a stale and pitiful programmed rhythm section. This is a record for guitar people, ultimately, and thankfully I could easily lose myself in Ward’s rich tones and hypnotic maneuvering, all of the sharp edges coated in a fuzzy daydream glaze. “King Of The Dollar” is “Satisfaction” – literally, at one point – filtered through crystalline jangle; “Talk Like Strangers” a lazy prayer to the gods of distortion. One of the album’s most beautiful moments, in fact, comes courtesy of an acoustic, in the “Norwegian Wood”-like intimations of “Fell.”
They save the best for last, though, with the heart-stopping “Euphoria,” and it is possible that the best instrument on display is Clayton-Felt’s voice, which so perfectly encapsulates the breaking point at which misery finally gives way to defiant joy. Lately, with its patient promise of eventual triumph, it is the song that has been comforting me through the cold.
Human Cannonball, the group’s 1993 follow up, leaned away from the sixties-skirting pop embellishments of their debut and into a heavier kind of groove. Personally, I have no problem with the second album’s post-grunge affectations, and there are some intensely rewarding high points: “Take Me Anywhere” is irresistible, head-banging fun, and “Fountain” is a striking, rough-cut gem on par with anything that preceded it. There is an actual drummer and an actual bassist on every song (thank god), and they play hard and heavy as if to compensate for their original glaring absence. I find the whole thing terrifically enjoyable, but it was a pivot that landed with a thud, and in 1993, it may not have offered enough to distinguish itself in a hyper-saturated market of tunefully edgy guitar bands.
What’s really missing, though, is whimsy, that magical element which suffuses the whole of School of Fish and makes it so unexpected, off-kilter, and totally riveting.
Josh Clayton-Felt, the world is less magical without you in it. I wish you were still with us to share your wisdom, your honest and empathetic songwriting, and the lives of your family members and friends. I feel your presence in the day’s small but poignant interruptions, in the occasionally paradoxical relief that comes from noticing the strangeness all around you, and because of your music I walk through the remainder of this winter with a newfound serenity. I only wish I had discovered it sooner.
