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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