Reunion Tour

Here and there, throughout my shift, in moments of distraction, or intense concentration, in the drafty staircase, at the foot of the bailer, firing up the weed whacker, pouring the dirty contents of the mop bucket into the floor drain, or simply strolling down the corridor behind the push broom, they just come to me. Without having to summon them, they just pop out of nowhere. From one minute to the next, there they are: the band names.

Chew Toy

Nací con Ojeras

Hot Slop

Pato Afónico

This is, to be fair, nothing new. The margins of my notebooks, stretching back decades, are filled with scribbled names, written in a tense and jerky hand, in sharp contrast with the rest of the text, so measured and characteristically unhurried. Not just any bands, but punk bands, back before punk ran aground on the shores of indie rock and the hipsters took credit for a cultural revolution they hadn’t started. And not just any punk bands, but potential ones, future ones, for when I finally work up the courage to break years of silence, decades already, and call up some of the old crew, the rearguard, to see who’s up for a jam session, for old times’ sake.

A Little World Made Cunningly

Bicicleta Sin Asiento

Crying in the Breakroom

Campera de Musgo

Old habits, they say, are hard to break. It is like the skater, sitting in the window seat of the public bus, who studies the city and admires, here and there, a handrail, a set of stairs, a well-placed curb, rating them in her mind according to their skatability, even though it has been years, more than she would like to admit, since her last kickflip, board slide, smith grind, or pop shove it.

The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body

Los Cuatro de Copas

Clement Sea

Las Baldosas Flojas

Normally, this is just a harmless pastime, a remnant of a past life washed up on the shores of this one. In my thoughts and on paper, I keep the list going, adding a name now and then, more for fun than anything else.

But, recently, something has shifted. It started when I took this job, when I stepped into the coveralls for the first time, in all their beige glory, and clipped the key ring, heavier than expected, onto the carabiner attached to the beltloop, like a superhero stepping out of a phone booth in tights for the first time, transformed. Now, when I am rinsing down the floor mats or squeegeeing stagnant water in the direction of the drain or wiping down the seventeenth toilet seat of the day, there is a new urgency. Somehow the stakes are higher. It is no longer dabbling, no longer indulging in a little nostalgia, no longer reassuring myself that I haven’t sold out, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

No, it is not a brief foray into the past from the security of the present, to which I can return promptly, painlessly, when disillusion sets in. No, it is not as simple as closing my eyes and clicking my heels three times to find myself whisked away to the safety of my bedroom in Kansas. This is something altogether different, altogether more dangerous: it is the past invading the present, colonizing it, claiming it as its own territory and jurisdiction; it is the past rising up from the cold depths, wrapping its tentacles around the little boat of the present, pulling in under the surface, and rushing it in a swirl of bubbles towards an undisclosed liar. 

Yes, the balance has shifted. What was once an innocent phantasy is now close at hand, a plan taking shape, just a phone call away.  

Mouse Ear

Té Aguado

Log Pile

Grava 

Here's how it plays out in my thoughts.

I pick out three chords, four if I’m feeling particularly inspired. Any chords on the C major scale will do, as long as they are power chords and one of them is an A minor, which is non-negotiable, as it has always been, the dealbreaker. I arrange them in no particular order, in 4/4 time, for 16 bars. This is the first verse, and it will do the trick for now. If the second verse comes easy, I can sketch that out as well, but it isn’t necessary. The melody for the chorus and the bridge will have to wait, though, since they clearly exceed my musical capabilities, limited as they are, as they have always been. In any case, we can work out those details when the time comes, that is, at band practice.

The lyrics are the easy part. That is what the notebooks are for or, at least, one of their potential uses. I grab one from the shelf, open it to any page, pick a scene, one with meat on the bone, and proceed to mine it for the details, the best ones, the most condensed. On a separate sheet of paper, I organize the horizontal rows into two columns separated by a thick line. Each row represents eight beats, separated by the vertical caesura which divides them into two sets of four beats. The trick is to distribute the details more or less evenly, placing them in their respective slots until the verse is complete.

There is a trade-off that happens in the passage from the notebook to this new sheet of paper. The longwindedness and circumspection of the narration gets whittled down, shedding all the duplications, all the meandering, all the logical connectors even, until all that is left are the hard kernels, a loosely connected set of images. What the notebooks state, the song suggests. It juxtaposes more than it sets in motion. Something about an unsent letter atop a stack of books / a pile of clothes on the floor / the three words on repeat in your head / a ray of light from under the door.  It doesn’t have to be perfect. There will be plenty of time later to clean it up. The important thing, for now, is to have something to work with.

Now I’m ready. Nothing is stopping me from making that phone call. Two words will be enough. “It’s time.” The members of the rearguard will know right away what I’m talking about. How many times have they thought the same thing? Despite the decades of silence, despite the way that I left, they will know.

To prove I mean business, I have the verse. See? We already have new material. A new seven inch is already on the horizon, and then a quick tour for its release. All we have to do is get the band back together, either that or start a new one. Then I add, nonchalantly, that I have been thinking of potential names.

Cluttered with Shopping Carts

Seseo Sosegado

Fake Mustache

Verano en la Oficina

This impulse, which, with each shift, inches closer to becoming a reality, is nostalgic in the truest sense, which is to say that it is not exactly a longing for what once was but, more precisely, a longing for what could have been, not for an actuality but a potentiality.

You see, I am not much of a musician, nor have I ever been. Oddly, this didn’t stop me from contributing to the production of several punk albums and going on tour with punk bands throughout the nineties. 

Even stranger is the fact that there was no misunderstanding involved, no lack of transparency, no identity crisis. I have never been circumspect about my musiclessness, my dis-inclination, which I how I usually describe my pronounced lack of vocation in the area. Think of those birds who have feathers but don’t fly, the chickens, the kiwis, the dodos. Now think of them trying to do so. That is what I imagine it must be like to witness me try to play music.

My contributions to punk, I have always insisted, lie elsewhere. Write a zine? Put on shows? Produce records? Book tours? Distribute books? Host a pirate radio program? Yes, absolutely, all of the above, every chance I got. But lunge around on stage with my shirt off, slinging a guitar, phallic symbol if there ever was one, sweating and writhing and panting, No, no thanks, not really my thing, not much a part of my identity.

The problem was that the category of intellectual was less operative in the punk community than that of musician. Punk, as a social movement, as an alternative mode of producing, distributing, and consuming culture, was always in danger of being reduced to a mere musical genre. This was a common misconception of those on the outside of the movement. Yet, the pull to make it only about the music, as if you couldn’t be a punk without a Fender Stratocaster, was also felt on the inside.

A considerable number of my punk fellow travelers played in bands. Most of the squats and flophouses where I lived had practice spaces in them. Naturally, I spent a lot of time sitting on the floors of those practice spaces, with my back against the foam inlay, giving feedback on an intro, a riff, the chorus or a bridge. The pages of my notebooks were always available for a loose image or a turn of the phrase to find its way into a song. As a natural communicator and organizer, as someone who knew the punk circuit, I also helped book the shows. And it goes without saying that, little by little, I learned my way around a soundboard. How could I not? This, I suppose, is how I ended up on tour so many times, every couple of months, for the better part of the nineties.

This seemed like a reasonable arrangement to me, a comfortable role. Yet, for as much as I saw myself as an organizer, a punk intellectual, there was also pressure to cross the line, to become something else, something more musical. In the van or backstage or at a rest stop, there was enthusiasm, a drive even, evangelical in proportion, to show me the chords, the strumming patterns, the most important notes for unlocking the fretboard. Someone was always talking about adding a cowbell or a tambourine to a song to get me up on stage. As tour wore on, taking its customary toll on body and mind, I occasionally did backup vocals to temper some of the strain on the rest of the voices. No one seemed to mind that I couldn’t hit a lot of the notes. Eventually, this process reached its logical conclusion, which is to say that eventually I knew the songs well enough to play a simplified version, enough to cover for a bandmate, if need be. Chord by chord, note by note, I stumbled my way, in such cases, to the end of each song, thankful just to make it across the finish line and scurry back to safety, back to the merch table or the loft of the van, where I belonged.

My appearances on stage were an anomaly, and I preferred to keep it that way. For as hard as it was for others to accept, I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t a real member of the band.

God Hid Uncle Djuro's Keys

Ni Lo Dudo

On the Count of Three

Seda Soez

It is late by the end of my shift, and The Community Center is quiet and dark and calm. The lights have all been turned off; the trash, taken out to the curb; the doors, locked; the swirling water has disappeared down the floor drains; my body is weary; my limbs are heavy; my thoughts have run their course; the ghosts have all been interrogated and, in turn, have all interpellated me; the phantasies have been disarmed; the well is dry; the words has come to an end; and my notebook, the one I keep in my back pocket, is full of new names, band names, and the words of the email, my let’s-get-the-band-back-together speech, my punk pep talk.

Perhaps, come morning, that is where it will stay, in my back pocket, in a notebook that will never be read and will end up, like all the other ones before it, in a milkcrate in the dusty recesses of the closet. Perhaps, come morning, the past, the punk past, will have receded from the surface, returned to its rightful place, an undisclosed place, an underwater place, down in the shadowy depths, shrouded in a cloud of impenetrable black ink.   

The truce, in any case, won’t hold. There is always another shift. There is always more cleaning to do. There is always more settled dust to stir up. There is always the reckoning, the tentacles, the tendrils, the pull of the past, the punk past, interrogating the present, demanding something from it, something less, perhaps, than a reunion tour, a seven inch, and something more, in any case, than a band name.

Blanket Fort

Lo que Quedó del Pepino

The Active Listeners

Mangue de Magoa

Photo from the Sleepytime Trio archives. Sleepytime Trio & Four Hundred Years European Tour, Summer of 97