Sometimes, Always

We all have them (hopefully); those fond memories that are tied directly to a piece of music. You hear that one refrain and you are immediately transported back to that one summer or that one car ride. My fondest one takes place in the back of a school bus; diesel fumes may or may not have played a part in the following nostalgia.

One of my all-time favorite bands is Jesus and Mary Chain. At Fetch practice a few weeks ago, I boasted that I think I am the youngest person in the world who listens to JAMC, at the ripe age of 27. Their prime was long before my time; they released their first album Psychocandy when I was 7. But I got into them retroactively somewhere during my freshman year in high school when they had maybe their biggest radio hit (and not even really that big), “Sometimes Always” from Stoned and Dethroned.

Back in my formative music listening years before I had to take a 20 minute ferry and drive twenty miles into Seattle to be able to buy CDs, I used to order cassettes from the local library. Once I found the album I was looking for in their database, I would usually have to wait 3 or 4 weeks for it to come in. Let’s just say that the librarians knew me extremely well because I probably ordered anywhere from 30-40 albums a month. After I checked them out, I would dub the album on cassette by putting duct tape over the two holes in the top of the library cassette (a trick my dad taught me). And I would photocopy the album art and liner notes, producing my own little bootlegged copy. This was my racket.

As adolescent as it seems, it was a pretty good racket, so I continued it well into my teenage years. And it was in my sophomore year when my class took a field trip to Everett Community College for a ‘College Day’; one of those events where college reps show up and have tables and hand out pamphlets to the young and aspiring.

I don’t specifically remember the College Day – what schools I talked to, or who I walked around with. But I do remember how much I hated field trips. Don’t laugh, but field trips always made me sad and depressed and I’ll tell you why. I’ve always been kind of a loner and was always the kid in the class who’d rather talk to the teacher or parent than another kid. Seemingly every year, our class went to the fucking Woodland Park Zoo. Every year. Wonderful imagination from your public school. And every year, as everyone buddied up in groups with one of their friends parents (who would always, without fail, buy their kids and kids friends lunch), I would always get stuck with either the teacher or the one parents of the weird kid and I would be stuck talking to the adult about news of the day or Tom Wolfe books as I ate my humble sack lunch and watched everyone else eat elaborate lunches of hot dogs, potato chips and pop.

Don’t cry for me, Sally, just giving you my back-story here. But to this day, I refuse to go to the Zoo.

Anyway, at the end of the day everyone all piled on the bus and I took my customary position on the field trip return home: in the back of the bus, alone, with my Walkman. On my Walkman that day was the library copy I had dubbed of Jesus and Mary Chain’s Stoned and Dethroned. I had become obsessed with the album. Ironically, it is the black sheep of the band’s albums; radically different from their discography of white noise, Phil Spector-inspired new wave anthems, Stoned and Dethroned is mostly acoustic. As tame as it seemed, the album still retained the sugar-sweet pop sensibilities that had prevailed throughout their other albums and had made JAMC the darlings of England in the 1980s.

I remember sitting in the back of that bus, listening to that album, probably the song “Sometimes Always” and thinking this is how I want my band to sound like. I had just begun writing my own songs and I responded immediately to the simplicity, but utter genius of JAMC’s melodies. And it wasn’t that I wanted to copy them, copy their sound, but I wanted to capture the same aesthetic. The music of JAMC is undeniably cool. You feel cooler listening to it. And I wanted that; I recognized its subtle genius, even then.

Now, some 12 years later, I’m lucky enough to find myself in a band with guys who were actually old enough to see Jesus and Mary Chain in concert (sorry to age you guys!). And that band is one of our main influences.

Our first show with me as a member of the band is tonight, and we are covering a Jesus and Mary Chain song, “Between Planets” off Automatic. And I swear, there are moments when we play that song as a band, that I am perhaps the happiest I’ve ever been. And maybe its because that 15 year old in the back of the bus, lonely and grumpy and hiding under a pair of headphones, grew up to actually play music the way he, then, could only dream of.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you “Sometimes Always” by Jesus and Mary Chain (w/ the enchanting Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star on vocals!)

*press the green note to play

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Stagger and Swoon

Besides my beloved Neil, Canada has contributed some real gems to the music world in the past 30 years. Joni Mitchell, Sloan, Bachman-Turner Overdrive just to name a few. No doubt you've heard you've heard of these folks, and you probably own some of their records (c'mon, you love "Takin' Care of Business"...). But I bet you've never heard of Joel Plaskett, and Sally - in a country of musical giants, he stands on their shoulders.

I remember as clear as Pepsi Clear the first time I heard Joel Plaskett: it was in the summer of 2003 and I was at a BBQ at my good friends Brent and Amy's place in Bellingham. That summer was a pretty epic one for me. I had just lost the first girl I had truly loved; I worked graveyard shift at a shit job that spilled me everynight in a heap of hunger and exhaustion into a booth at the all-night diner the Ranch Room, reading Dave Eggers and eating grilled cheese sandwhiches until daybreak. At the conclusion of summer, I'd be moving to Chicago, leaving all that behind.

My friend Brent had been telling me about Joel Plaskett for awhile, but it hadn't quite stuck. But at his BBQ, he put on "Down at the Kybhar", Joel's second solo record. I don't remember paying all that close of attention to the record; I was in a social mood and talking up Dave Crider about Chicago and what bars to go to (for the record: Delilah's and the Empty Bottle). But it was with the first notes of the album's closing track, "Light Of The Moon" that I finally perked up and took notice. It was one of those "what the fuck is this?!!!" moments. From across the lawn, I asked Brent who this was. "It's Joel Plaskett", he said.

The song is a monster, beginning with a quiet, haunting acoustic guitar and Joel's piercing croon, and then erupts into a volcano of distortion and drum fills as epic and powerful as any song I've ever heard. It was everything about music that I loved: fragile, beautiful, haunting, and it, well...kicked serious ass. And as I soon came to find out, it concluded an entire album full of these kind of moments.

The "Down at the Kyhber" album completely changed how I thought about and played music. It's fair to put it in the terms of Before Joel and After Joel. Here was a guy with a voice a lot like mine - kind of nasally and whiney, writing songs I wished to fucking hell I wrote. I bonded it with it immediatly, like a girl you fall in love with the moment you see her and it seems like you've known her forever and that you're life was just some strange dream before.

And what was also so great is that he was completely unknown. I had never seen his picture in a magazine or seen one of his music videos. It was one of those rare, almost unheard of moments when you connect with the music, purely on the music's merit. You aren't corrupted with how cool they looked in that Spin spread or buzz you'd heard from hipster friends. In this ultra saturized times we live in, I don't think this happens anymore. You can never quite seperate the look from the music, even subconsciously (the Strokes music is pretty good, but goddamn don't they always look so cool doing it!).

Now perhaps it's not an accident that that day at the BBQ I got the most drunk I'd ever been and have been since, drinking the majority of a bottle of Beam I had brought as a gift, and ended up passing out in my car...at about 6 in the evening. Maybe that rosey blur adds to the nostalgia of the day and of the recollection hearing Joel Plaskett for the first time, I don't know. But, all cheesiness and cliche aside - and among many mornings and evenings I've long since forgotten - it's a day I'll never forget.

And now, 3 years later, Joel's music, and especially "Light of the Moon", has reached that pinnacle in my conscious that seperates it from being just a piece of music I love, but one that frames a moment in time when everything was changing, and nothing would ever be the same. It became the soundtrack for the end of one part of my life, and the beginning of another.

After all this time, I had never seen Joel live. He's very well regarded in Canada, but has absolutely no presence in the US, so he never tours stateside. But about a month ago, he came to Chicago, to the Empty Bottle, on a Sunday night. And it maybe wasn't an accident that I was going through a extremely rough spot at the time, and perhaps it was Joel coming through to save me again.

There was no one at the show; maybe 20 people. Maybe. I sat on the risers to the left of the stage and took in the moment. I was a fucking wreck before I went to the show, but seeing Joel sing those songs I'd loved so much for so long and that meant so much to me, was something I just can't put into words. He was playing for me; it didn't matter that there was no one there. And in fact, it only encouraged me to treat it like my own private concert, yelling out song requests to which Joel kindly obligied.

I tried not to sound like a tool yelling out songs, but i didn't care. After playing the two songs I kindly requested, I was still waiting for "Light of the Moon" when he ended his set. It went something like this:

Joel: Thanks, goodnig...
Kegan: Light of the Moon!

Joel kind of laughed and said, "alright, we can do one more". I mean, you have to imagine, there was no one there. The few that were there were on their way out, no one was calling for an encore, except my dumbass. So he played "Light of the Moon", for me and probably me alone, and it was transcendiary.