Cars, Bands, and Death.

                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.