Tag: coronavirus

I know a place where I’m all alone

Hello everyone. I hope you and your loved ones are staying safe, sane, and healthy.

It is starting to feel like an empty refrain, and uncomfortably automatic. “I hope this blog post finds you well.” Ugh. Eventually I’ll figure out how to express the sentiment, and phrase a sensitive, relevant introduction that does not drive its readers to one of those sustained, high-frequency, gritted-teeth kind of noises.

I am trying to write a little bit every day. Mostly it gets funneled into half-cooked drafts and WIPs which will never see the light of day, or pseudonymous projects which will never bear my public authorship. That’s fine. The point is to do it and keep doing it, so that the muscles don’t atrophy, and also so that I don’t go crazy. For that matter, there is a lot going on in the world that does not require my commentary, that would in fact be cheapened by it, and any methods to address what is going on are exponentially better served by my ability to listen and act accordingly. It’s the summer of 2020, and the social media opinion dispensaries of yet another White Chick with Thoughts and Feelings ought to rank appropriately low on the priority list.

Perhaps luckily, organizing those thoughts and feelings continues to prove laborious. I remember feeling awed by the sudden influx of free time that materialized at the start of the pandemic. Lest I be misinterpreted here, I would give anything for the option to smash a giant reset button, but an appreciated, if unsolicited, gift of the lockdown was close to three and a half hours of the working day that were no longer devoted strictly to commuting, or preparing to commute.

The pendulum has since swung back, naturally. On top of working a full-time job (from home), in an industry battered by the coronavirus (retail fashion financing), I am also playing the newly minted roles of makeshift nurse, lacto-ovo-vegetarian chef, financial advisor, holistic life coach, and lone housekeeper. It is an abundance of hats. There are not enough hours in a fuckin’ day, man.

Don’t get me wrong: I consider us outrageously, extraordinarily fortunate that our recent health scare – not COVID! More on that in a moment – has left us shaken but otherwise unscathed. I am grateful for the roof over our heads, a thus-far-intact savings account, and the friends and family who rushed immediately – socially distantly – to our aid. Mom, Dad, Lynne, Liana: you may or may not be reading this, but boy, we sure would be screwed without you.

My husband has gotten a lot better, and is feeling a lot better, since that terrifying morning six weeks ago when he bolted upright next to me in bed, at 4:30 AM, in screaming pain, and unable to walk. Oh yeah, PSA for those of you who thought gout was some antiquated, funny disease restricted to over-indulgent 17th Century monarchs: it’s still a thing! A genetic thing, by and large, although bad luck and a big steak dinner might be what tips you into your first acute attack. It is agonizing, debilitating, under-recognized, under-diagnosed, poorly understood, poorly treated, and requires lifetime maintenance, even once remission is achieved. And yes, it can happen overnight to your perfectly healthy and trim and non-smoking 34-year-old spouse. Which is exactly what it did in June!

In case you still felt even remotely sorry for me, running around like a chicken with my head cut off, an integral part of Adam’s long-term treatment plan is No Beer and No Shellfish and No Red Meat. BOO! HISS! What the fuck kind of bullshit chronic illness doesn’t even permit you to drink the pain away?! (Fear not, I’m helping to pick up some of his slack. If my parents and/or colleagues are reading this: responsibly! After 5 PM! Scout’s honor!)

So there has been some shit going on. I am sure you have your own. And you have my deepest sympathies. Feel free to message me, email me… anything! I know I’ve been somewhat quiet on the usual haunts, for a lot of reasons. Some of which are summarized above. But I am here. I am responsive. I would love to hear from you. In spite of what my history of unfocused, interminable Instagram yakking with Ernie in my lap might have suggested, I am, in fact, a good listener.

We’re at that mile marker in the Corona-drag where the path of least resistance is to get bogged down in the daily drudgery, cleaning away the shit that never stops piling up. We started this thing reaching out to one another constantly, desperately, almost out of panic. Psychologically, we needed it. The shock was acute. The world had capsized, and the safe havens we took for granted to cope – things like hanging out with friends, visiting family, congregating, touching, hugging – all gone. Too risky.

Reaching out shouldn’t have to be any of those things anymore, constant or desperate or panicked, but it should be reasonably consistent. As consistent as you can make it. What I mean is, don’t get complacent.

I promise not to turn this into some kind of feel-good, inspirational bullshit essay because this is not a space for health and wellness recommendations; I am not that kind of blogger, I myself am replete with bad habits, and as a nervous wreck I am predictably shitty at motivational pep talks. I know I am not the first person to feed you bland platitudes, to remind you to talk to the people you love and cherish, and to be deliberate in making time for that. Been there, read the New York Times op-ed. But this is a reminder for me as much as it is for you.

And, crucially, I am also talking about the spontaneous, unstructured kind of reaching out. The importance of the socializing that comes in small doses, like the organic fragments of conversation with acquaintances or even strangers that used to evolve in coffee shops and bars and restaurants and, yes, concert theaters; little bits and pieces which are deceptively restorative for their short duration and casual origins. Their benefits are elusive, aggregate, and with COVID’s annihilation of the public space as we knew it, they vanished. Somehow, we have to find ways to cultivate what was once unpredictable, organize what was random, and scratch that low-effort, low-impact itch with new and creative and probably non-intuitive outlets. (At least they will be non-intuitive at first.)

I don’t have a single magical answer or a carefully researched plan of action, just a hunch that working on this will make us happier, and keep us safer. I worry that an insidious contributor to so-called “quarantine fatigue” – caution fatigue, really – is not strictly acclimation to threat, but a lack of this type of enrichment. Socializing that hinges on novelty and happenstance and… wandering. How do you replace the fruits of wandering, literally and metaphorically, when there are no safe places to wander?

P.S. no, refreshing Twitter or Instagram or your Facebook feed doesn’t fucking count! It does not factor into any conceivable solution, not at all, not one iota, ever. We were doing that before this shit started and it sucked our souls right out through our eyeballs and fingertips. Twitter especially. Scrolling Twitter isn’t wandering, it’s rubbernecking at hot takes and racists and celebrities and the shotgun aim of mob justice. It is actively fucking evil and it is bringing out the worst in you and all of your friends. I’m a hypocrite, I know, I have a Twitter account and I am pretty sure it is linked right there on the sidebar. I did say this was a reminder to me, too.

I think we need forums, virtual ones, where we can authentically, curiously, and fearlessly drift around each other; platforms that have the mass appeal and utility of the usual suspects, but none of the poison; and what they offer has to be close enough to what we’ve lost, enough to feel satisfying long-term.

So let me know if you figure that one out.

Speaking of social media and hypocrisy, I started writing this post because Instagram reminded me I went to a Hans Zimmer concert three years ago, so I posted on Instagram that I might write a long-overdue post on my blog about Hans Zimmer, as it is frequently impossible for me to think about the actual, intended, and ostensible subject of this blog, which is to say rock ‘n’ roll, for more than five minutes. If I do I want to curl into the fetal position and scream.

I put that out there on my stories and promptly deleted it, so I could put it here instead, where it won’t vanish in 24 hours. That means I actually have to, you know, do it. Sooner, I hope, rather than later. But the accountability has at least been published.

I feel obligated to leave you with a song. I can recommend you this one, by a band called Ivory Wire, a Chicago relic you’ve never heard of and which cobbled itself together from the remains of Dovetail Joint, another Chicago band you’ve never heard of. Both are extremely good, and long gone, but right now I’m really grooving to Ivory Wire’s 2003 album The World Is Flat. It’s easier for me to find some unsullied enjoyment in bands I’ve never seen live and never will. And the lyrics in this track are readily repurposed for current events, quite conveniently generalizable:

Is it any wonder with the pressure that I’m under that I’m panicked?

Until next time,

Bux

a very simple process takes you there

Hi there. It’s been a while. I’m still here, hanging in and chugging along, and I hope you are, too.

Regular Sunday night updates are kind of a pipe dream when you are running the daily mental health equivalent of triage, a reality I’ve come to grudgingly accept over the past few weeks. I am still walking around, mostly within the confines of our little one-bedroom, feeling like an open wound. Trite an observation though it may be, I thought this year was going to look very different. I thought this blog was going to look very different. I never thought that listening to rock music — my greatest, most reliable refuge — could take on an element of anguish. For a while, the idea of writing about it seemed about as appealing as dunking myself in a vat of acid.

Now, to quote my favorite Queens of the Stone Age song, I’ve resolved to go with the flow, wherever that takes me. I’ll post what I want, whenever I want, and if my pretenses at any sort of topical coherence and insight were feeble to begin with, well… just you wait!

I’ve adjusted to the point where I’ve mostly stopped spontaneously bursting into tears, which is good. And I’ve been cooking a lot. Cooking, in fact, is how I am staying sane. It is also how I am learning to experience music again without pain.

For someone who was raised mostly on delivery orders, neighborhood restaurants, fast casual lunches, and the occasional Shake ‘n’ Bake, I have fashioned myself into a respectable home chef over the past 15 years, an accomplishment of which I am very proud. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I am a bonafide David Chang of the shrunken apartment kitchen — well, maybe more like Brad Leone if you count the regular episodes of total brain derailment. Whatever. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but I think I’ve sharpened my skills more in the past seven weeks than I have in the past seven years. My husband is the primary beneficiary of this development, and though he has to hand-wash a few more stainless steel pans, he seems generally happy about the situation.

I love food almost as much as I love rock ‘n’ roll, which is to say… a lot. I am the restaurant obsessive of the family, checking Eater and Grub Street as religiously as BrooklynVegan and Stereogum. Prior to this whole lockdown nightmare, dining out factored prominently and necessarily into my series of live music rituals. Fueling up before a gig: essential. Making sure it’s delicious: non-negotiable! Capping off the festivities with a midnight snack before racing to catch the last train out of Grand Central Terminal: extremely probable.

I miss scarfing down noodles at Ivan Ramen, Ichiran, Ippudo, Cocoron, Momofuku, Little Tong, Madame Vo, or Xi’an Famous Foods before a show downtown; I miss curries and teishoku on Sixth Street; I miss hot pot in the East Village and dry pot in Bryant Park. I miss spilling out of Penn Station after crazed pilgrimages to Philadelphia, and the night shift server at Sarge’s Delicatessen who has only ever seen me at 1 AM, downing pastrami and matzo ball at light speed during the brief gap between trains. I miss the couple nights a year I would splurge at Wollensky’s Grill, which is sort of like Smith and Wollensky’s slightly less stodgy, insomniac cousin, and ordering a filet at the bar — rare, side of baked potato, while mowing down three or four Cokes in the glass bottle — even though I stuck out like a sore thumb beside the jetlagged lawyers and finance guys, who I figured had been flown into town and put up at the nearby Midtown hotels, and who benevolently tolerated the sweaty, frazzled urchin in their midst.

I was a well-oiled, timetable-memorizing, power-walking machine, ricocheting among my favorite haunts like a slightly drunk and highly motivated pinball. My favorite haunts are all closed now, some potentially permanently, so my options are limited to what I can recreate in the kitchen. I have been stubbornly, impulsively ambitious in that regard. Check it out:

My plating and food photography could use some work, but it’s not like I’m serving meals at Eleven Madison Park, right? Already I’ve got mapo tofu and blisteringly spicy lamb vindaloo, two of my favorite restaurant meals, down to a home-cooking science (thanks to a lot of repetition and fine-tuning). A life without Sichuan cuisine and Indian curry is not a life worth living, after all.

I never cook without music on, and on weekends in the spring and summer this was my most-indulged stay-at-home recreational activity: throw the windows open, pop the cork on a bottle of wine, crank the tunes, make dinner and drink and dance and sing. Unfortunately for Adam (husband) and Ernie (the cat) I carry a tune about as well as Keith Moon, but they put up with it in service of my culinary greatness.

Now that every night is a stay-at-home night, cooking dinner is the way I unwind, and a blessed reprieve after a day spent working remote and browsing nerve-rattling headlines. It is one of the few happy fixtures of my life that has prevailed, almost entirely unchanged, since the world as we knew it turned upside-down. It is the one fossilized fragment of a previous existence that I can contemplate without horror, without invoking torturous reminders of what we had and have no longer.

Yesterday evening I was listening to Chris Carter’s British Invasion on the Underground Garage, as I was simultaneously pulling pots and pans out from the cupboards and arranging my mise en place for a white chicken chili (JKLA’s best, in case you were wondering). One of the things I did after the lockdown was sign up for satellite radio, because I wanted to listen to music but felt too fragile to be in control of it, if that makes any sense. Somebody else had to take the reins; I knew that if I went back to my usual roster of playlists and albums, most of which were centered around upcoming and now-canceled tours, I would be right back to swimming in a pit of despair.

So, I was listening to Chris Carter’s British Invasion, and half-listening to Chris Carter’s commentary, when I heard him mention all four Beatles, with Eric Clapton, and Nicky Hopkins on the keyboard. I had a moment, that rapturous moment of immediate recognition and giddy anticipation, where I knew exactly which song he was about to play — one of my favorite songs of all time — and I was genuinely excited and happy to hear it. No strings attached, no qualifications, no wistful and peripheral fantasies about hearing a band playing it in a dimly lit club. I was just so fucking stoked to hear the song, in and of itself, in the most blissfully uncomplicated way.

I cheered and I danced and I sang along, terribly, in the kitchen. I roasted some poblano peppers with garlic and onion. And I felt, for a few minutes, totally contented. You might even say I felt hopeful: cautiously but resolutely optimistic. I had a sense that I could excavate these bits of joy, no matter how scary or uncertain things have been, or are, or are likely to continue becoming.

Oh, that’s right! The song!

Here it is. You should listen to it.

Until next time, whenever and wherever: stay safe, stay sane, and keep dancing.

-Bux

and there in a golden ray of light

I got the texts Wednesday night, during my weekly sanctioned grocery outing. I was looking for elbow pasta when I felt my phone go off in a trio of bursts.

It was one of those moments that your memory preserves instantly in amber. I pulled my phone out my pocket and read the notifications: all variants of “I’m sorry” or “Call if you need me.” I knew immediately, but I plugged in a panicked Google search, hands shaking violently, and scrolled through the headlines while my heart cracked into pieces.

I could have been a character in a Fountains of Wayne song. There was something indisputably Adam Schlesinger about the scene, or at least elements to it that he could have elaborated upon with his devastatingly clever and often tragicomic songcraft.

A woman weeps and sniffles in a suburban grocery aisle, motionless for several minutes as the carts creak around her. The dampness of tears on a face mask is a new sensation, something she’s never felt before. At the same time, an old song plays in her head. There is the juxtaposition of old and new, of crushing loss with the mundane realities of daily life. Cry though she might, she still needs to lug a few boxes of elbow pasta to checkout.

There is so much to say about Schlesinger that has already been said, and said better, than I could ever hope to express. Much of it is very recent. The outpouring of appreciation has been gratifying in the wake of his death, but it is also maddeningly belated. To Schlesinger, songwriting was not a means to an end for stardom; songwriting was the end in itself, self-evidently necessary, an expression of obsessive love and devotion and respect. He was a performer and musician, but his brilliance was as an author and collaborator outside the spotlight. Schlesinger understood that the end product was only as good as its foundation, and whatever he built or had a hand in building was jarringly, outrageously, consistently rock solid. A mind-boggling variety of entire creative projects hinged on that foundation. You’re familiar with at least one case in point.

He was a pop musical polymath of staggering genius. I do not use that term lightly, but it is applicable without question. A talent like Schlesinger comes once in a generation, and we should have been shouting his praises from the rooftops while he was still alive to hear them. We knew, and everyone in the industry knew, but like the man himself, we were at the side of the stage or behind the scenes, whispering to one another our admiration.

He had so much left to give us, undoubtedly. He gave so much already. Dayenu.

Some things are so important they bear repeating, over and over again. As Pesach approaches, I am thinking about the role of ritualized storytelling, of what we gain from going over and going back. I am thinking about how we revisit the songs of our childhood, an especially feverish impulse for yours truly in the weeks since the lockdown. It is more complicated than nostalgia for happier, easier times. I am digging for a steering mechanism, a magnetic north. When you are lost, how do you find the way forward? You ground yourself in the indelible. You re-establish the fundamentals. It’s understanding who you are, and how you got here.

Schlesinger was a versatile writer, one whose compositions swelled with a rare depth and sincerity that could adapt to almost any mold, and often ballooned beyond them. He churned them out prolifically, from bands to film to television to Broadway; he wrote in service of function, and he made it work and made it believable. That he could conjure such a variety of art on demand, and that the demand itself never shortchanged the quality of his art, is nothing short of miraculous. If I had ever cried at a toothpaste commercial, I would have known immediately that Adam Schlesinger was behind the jingle.

But he also told the same stories over and over again, iterating within the same basic structure, and that was what I fell in love with him for. He wrote what he knew. He wrote what I knew, which was what made his work so special to me, and my adoration for him so inevitable. I don’t just mean the offbeat cast of tristate slackers, lovelorn Amtrak commuters, and existentially frustrated office drones who might have become caricatures in less capable hands. Schlesinger’s angle was of celebratory reverence for the three-minute pop-rock guitar song, even as its kingdom faded in the rearview mirror. He embraced its intrinsic limitations and infinite possibilities and didn’t give a shit whether it was cool to anybody else but himself. He knew when the old rules were good rules, and that if you were smart enough you could reinvent dusty old tradition into something fresh and exciting and… indelible. A familiar story, to be sure, but it’s so good you just want to keep it in your car stereo for months on end.

A perfect pop-rock guitar song is sorcery. Listening to them is my greatest, most inexhaustible source of happiness, an experience with which no other worldly pleasure can compete. And they are all just rearranged sets of the same component parts, new and sometimes exceedingly lucky permutations shaken from an ancient bag of tricks. You can call me a simpleton, and I’m sure I am, but the simplest formulas can also be the most elegant. E = mc2, and she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Schlesinger was on my wavelength. He was an astonishingly good sorcerer.

My route to his work might be similar to yours. It’s a well-tread path, carved by a universally recognized and beloved song, a so-called “one hit wonder.” There’s an irony and injustice to that association, given the incomparable legacy of meta-hits he has bestowed us in so many imaginary universes.

The year was 2003, my freshman year of high school. I wish that my first exposure to “Stacy’s Mom” were as crystalline in my recollection as I am certain the evening of Wednesday, April 1st, 2020 will prove to be. I don’t know if I heard it on the radio, or saw the music video on MTV. I know that I must have recognized it instantly for what it was, because I do remember listening to it, and Welcome Interstate Managers, over and over. It was perfect. It was far from the only such specimen.

There would have been more. But today, as I am grappling still with the waves of grief as they ebb and flow, I will be grateful for what he left us with.

He gave us so much already, and it would have been enough.

-Bux

I’m not sick (but I’m not well)

How’s everybody holding up?

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.

…EVERYBODY SHORT OF THE SHOEGAZERS.

(Cheers, @hotcoffeelawsuit.)

See you in yet another quarantined week,

-Bux

the world’s still spinning around

Boy, a lot can change in a week, huh?

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 you know 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.

Plenty more sleeves to fill, when the time comes.

Talk to you next Sunday,

-Bux

washing up

First, the good news:

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.

Until next Sunday,

-Bux