In 1993, I was in
a death metal band. It was weird, because I didn't really like death metal all
that much. At least, not death as these guys liked. I'd rock out to Obituary,
Death, Sepultura, Fear Factory. Sure,
there was the occasional Cannibal Corpse song that ruled, but a drummer playing
blast beats typically lost me. It's just sort of a personal preference I guess.
At the time, there was a lot of other music in my collection of CD's and tapes
which got more play. Either way, all that changed when one night after death
metal band practice, we decided to go hide under an overpass on Old Hammond Hwy
and throw glass YooHoo bottles at cars.
I was grounded for
the summer and my band career was derailed until early 1996. We played 3 or 4
shows in garages full of people with bands we all knew. Later that year, we
played our first bar show to familiar faces. Years went by, bands broke up, and
bands reformed. Shows were played out in cow pastures on flatbed trailers, in
storage rental units, in bedrooms. But one recurring theme was that we usually
played with other bands we knew and hung out with. It seemed like there was some collective of
the same people that would always come out, and the shows started to reflect
that. After several years of drunken antics, parties, sharing members, caravans
to out of town shows, and late nights sitting around a dining room table, we
decided to call ourselves Love Affair Records.
There was nothing
special about us. We were just one social circle of college kids from the same
couple of old high school cliques and other similar peer groups. A tribe of 20
year olds that went to a few of the same parties as the thousands of other
hordes of kids. They all had their bands. Their shows. Their bars. Their art
galleries. Their skate parks. I guess they just didn't come up with dumb names
for their groups of bands. Either way, we all just kept playing music at
different bars and drinking ourselves into oblivion. Looking back, I don't
remember a definitive night I can say it all officially started. But there's
one recurring event that always swells our group of friends to their rawest and
deepest cores: Death. And never through disease or old age. Just tragic,
accidental death.
My buddy Brett was
driving down Airline Hwy, coming back from some trashbag strip club in
Prairieville, when he lost control of his red, 1994 Pontiac Sunfire. We always
kind of assumed he passed out, but I never really asked all that many
questions. His car slowly drifted off the road, eventually crashing into a
ditch in between the north and southbound lanes, flipping and rolling, and
throwing him right through the windshield. The day after, a bunch of us drove
out to where it happened. Before Bayou Manchac, across from the vacant state
fairgrounds. There were a bunch of dents in the grass, marked by spots of
orange spraypaint from the investigation. We found broken cassette tapes,
notes, one of his shoes, and some of those little, circular white sticky things
the ambulance puts on people they're trying to revive. It was April 7th, 2000. He
was 20 years old.
It was the first
time that we'd all had to deal with this wave of emotion. Suddenly, that guy from your band is gone.
That guy you wrote songs with, the guy you talked to about girlfriend problems.
He's dead. What do we do now? I remember he had a black Stratocaster with this
weird, glittery pickguard. Used a BOSS distortion pedal and a DOD stereo flanger.
During practice, he'd always have to borrow somebody's tuner. I remember seeing
his guitar leaning against the wall when we were all in his room, after his
funeral. His mom was giving away a bunch of his t-shirts. We were all standing
there and she was handing them all out. We took this big, group photo in the
backyard. We're all standing there, wearing shirts and ties, smiling big
smiles. When I look back on all this and where we all are now, that event
seemed like the first bookend. Music started with death metal. And music
collective started with actual death. An odd way to think about it, but that's
pretty much the long and short of it.
From there on, we
were off. Band after band. Beer after beer. We rented storage units to practice
in, and tore up every rental house we could get our hands on. I'm pretty sure
if you poll everybody in that picture in Brett's backyard - I bet none of us
ever got a single security deposit back. Just like every other group of kids in
America, we were living the dream. We'd drag around boxes and boxes of 4-track
cassette tapes, broken guitar cables, and our Love Affair Records sign from
house to house. It was all we needed. It was all we wanted.
At some point, groups
of people and what draws them together start to diminish. Of course, there's a
wide variety of factors as to why that is: Marriage, babies, jobs. We all started to find ourselves at different
crossroads. The band I'd always considered my musical home slowly splintered
off to Seattle, Shreveport, St Petersburg, Nashville, New Orleans, and Atlanta.
Even more broad, the people in that picture started to drift away. From New
York to California, some people refused to stop writing songs, but probably more
than not, guitars got stashed in people's closets. It's probably the natural
order of things, really.
But then one day, the roof caved in.
Getting a phone
call at 6 in the morning is never good. Especially when you look and you
realize there are a few missed calls from a certain group of people. You just
know. There are really no words to
express it, but you'd think that almost a decade later, there would be some
internal preparation you could manifest. There's not. You basically count the
people who called, and you realize now you know that at least all of them are
still alive. But who didn't call?
Eventually, you get the bad news. Another vehicle. Another
windshield. Nine years later. The world kind of stops spinning and you try to
make sense of things. I took a shower and went to work. I called three people
to tell them, and then I stopped answering the phone. Justin was in Illinois
somewhere when his truck flipped over. Inside were his girlfriend Molly and
some guy whom I haven't ever gotten the story of who he was, and why he was in
there. Everybody walked away except Justin. I don't know what happened. I have
no authority of guessing what happened and it's never been any of my business.
All I did know is that we had to prepare. There was going to be a revival.
In my mind, I
think of the things that occurred in those 9 years. There are sounds I have
archived, CD's I have, and whole albums available on bandcamp. Sometimes you
have to get a little crazy and dig up an old myspace link. But there's whole
lifetimes of projects that spanned that near decade. Some songs about dying. In
fact, some songs Justin wrote about Brett dying.
Life's kind of funny that way, I guess.
