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