If there's anything more glorious than a Bluebird winter day in the San Juans I truly don't know what it is.
My Garmin watch says I need 65 hours of recovery and my training was 'unproductive'. Which is exactly why we need to start telling all the gizmos to go screw themselves. Because I'm fleeing there again tomorrow and the day after that and again until my legs won't turn the pedals anymore. I'm going to make stupid Garmin weep.
Time was so tangible I'll never let it go.
Yeah, 2020. There's not much else to say and yet so much to say. I've kept quiet here on the blog because there's so much out there, does the world need more? But now with the black era of Trump coming to a close and news of a vaccine I'm feeling like maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe. We'll see how this vaccine thing pans out, for now I remain skeptical but hopeful.
Another reason I've kept quiet is that life isn't all that much different for me but life is terribly different for most people and I know how difficult it is to listen to someone else going on about how relatively normal their life is when their own life is not so much. I'm impacted of course but in ways that pale in significance to most people. I feel for everybody suffering, especially those who can't avoid being in harm's way.
That said I did get stuck inside for some stretches of time this summer, not because of the pandemic but because of smoke from all the wildfires. The protests, anxiety over the upcoming election and general state of political unrest combined with being stuck inside sent me to best place to detox from social media and soothe the inner angst - Cure videos on YouTube. And if you watch enough Cure videos on YouTube this particular video will eventually pop up in your feed.
Jonny had tried to tell me about this some 6 weeks previous but he mumbled at me from the other room and all I heard was 'mumble mumble doing a Cure cover and Robert Smith is in the audience.' I was probably in the middle of lifting some heavy barbell over my head in an attempt at Crossfit at Home so I 'Yes Deared' him and said I'd watch it later. I also made a mental note that he needs to go the optometrist once Zombie Apocalypse is over because those grocery store readers are no longer sufficient. In what crazy world is Robert Smith watching someone do a cover of one of his songs? And what band would have the cajones to try to pull off that bit of madness?
But it's for real and it pains me to say it but it's fantastic. I almost even prefer it to the original and I can't even believe I just typed that out loud. Because I love The Cure. So much. And who the hell are AFI? I somehow have a few songs by them on an old weight lifting playlist but I barely knew the songs, they mostly blended into the background of my workout. And I certainly didn't know who any of the band members were or what else if anything that they'd ever done. Then their cover of The Hanging Garden came up and my jaw dropped. It's the closest I have to a favorite Cure song, it's hard to pick just one but hold a gun to my head and I'll likely say The Hanging Garden. I drove my poor college roommates batshit playing it over and over and OVER until they finally bought me headphones. I've never heard a cover of it. So now I have to figure out who AFI are and how did they escape me? Because their cover of The Hanging Garden was released in 1998. 1998! How? How did I miss this?
I'm amazed to discover that AFI have been going since 1991 and were still touring as of 2018. Ten albums, four (?) eps, a career spanning nearly 30 years and somehow I mostly missed it all. Where do I even start? There are all the albums and b-sides/rare tracks and zillions of live fan footage, live professional footage, interviews, etc. It's interesting and a bit disorienting, having a whole band's 30 year career laid out in front of you, watching and listening to it all at the same moment in time rather than piece meal over the years and in context. Especially this band because starting with the 4th record, each record is very different from the last. Seven months later I'm still wading through it, have barely touched the first 3 punk rock records. Because the stuff that came later is so good.
December, 2018
I can't believe the quality of phone video these days and while all the phones would drive me crazy if I was at the concert, I've been enjoying the videos that people have posted. Almost makes me want to go to a show. Almost. Except yeah, there are no shows even if I lived in a place where there are shows. I suspect there won't be shows for a long time, especially these kinds of shows.
And yeah this is batshit crazy, even in the before days. I don't know what the hell he was thinking. I've had the wind knocked out of me a couple few times in a crowd like that, I felt my chest tightening just watching it. Davey Havok taking his frontman duties to the next level.
But that's the very heart of punk rock, the lack of a barrier between the band and the crowd. I don't know when they started having that moat between the stage and the crowd, I don't think I've ever seen this but I stopped going to shows in the late aughts and I kept to mostly smaller venues. I guess if the crowd can't come to you . . .
Sing along with the Bhopal Stiffs (the beginnings of Pegboy) at Club Exit in Chicago, circa late 80's. Also note that this photo is not zoomed nor cropped, I was actually that close. I probably was singing along as well.
Going down these rabbit holes also led to the solution to a mystery that's been nagging at me for a couple of decades. Back in the mid-90's I wandered into a club called the Fireside Bowl in Chicago on one of my trips home. I didn't know any of the bands playing that night but I had a soft spot for the Fireside, dump that it was. Back in '90 when I still lived in Chicago my friend Russ would have Punk Rock Bowling Nights there. He was trying to convince the owner to allow punk rock shows but the owner was worried the punks would tear the place apart even more than it already was torn apart. So in order to convince him that we wouldn't he invited the civilized amongst us to Punk Rock Bowling Night. He would bring an old timey record player with attached speakers and played DJ while the rest of us pretended we knew how to bowl and the guys did their best to avoid getting cut up in the drug dealer knife fights that would break out in the men's restroom.
Four years later the Fireside finally started having shows and it was Chicago's version of CBGB's. They had shows most nights so I had wandered in just to get out of the house and hang out at the Fireside. There was a band there that the crowd was really excited to see and the band turned out to be better than your average punk band. I wanted to remember their name so I'd thought up a mnemonic. I did manage to remember the band when I got home to Colorado but I never bothered to write it down and over time I finally forgot. And for some reason years later it continued to bother me.
And then while I was down the AFI rabbit hole this popped up on my YouTube.
And it did seem familiar. My mnemonic had to do with an image of my aunt's house, turning the doorknob and the first interesting thing you see is her fireplace. And what is a fireplace but A Fire Inside?
But memory is a funny thing, was I reverse engineering the mnemonic? It fit but I wasn't completely convinced. It seemed too much of a coincidence. Then 6 months later, just the other day, I saw a flyer for this very AFI show online and I immediately recognized the flyer and the names of the other bands and was finally convinced I was there. Figuring this out made me a lot more happier than it should have. And I guess I had crossed paths with Mr. Havok and company lo those many years ago and I had realized they were a great band. Jonny had bought one of their disks, 'Sing the Sorrow' back in the aughts which is how those couple few songs ended up on my computer and eventually my weight lifting playlist. He claims he tried to play the disk for me but I complained bitterly about the screaming and the high pitched vocals and begged please to make it stop so he took the disk to work and I completely forgot about it. I have zero memory of this and Jonny is prone to hyperbole. I do now sort of remember loading the disk onto the computer and there were supposed to be all these 'enhanced' features, links to videos or something and between our crappy internet and Windows ME I couldn't get it to work. I took a break for dinner then got distracted by something else, forgot about it and Jonny took it to work. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
But better late than never, I've been thrilled to have so much great new music to explore. And there's even more - Dreamcar which is No Doubt minus Gwen Stefani plus Davey Havok. And I've only started to scratch the surface of Blaqk Audio which is Davey Havok and AFI guitar player Jade Puget, the talent behind all the AFI song writing. My mp3 player is fat with all the new songs and I've been running more than I probably should just so I can listen to it. So so happy to have so much new music, I guess 2020 had one small bright spot.
Coming back to the present I'm not sure if any of these bands are still together or plan to tour or put out music once the Zombie Apocalypse ends. I'm loathe to join celebrities' social media - I'm loath to all social media at this point - but I have in an attempt to find answers. Unfortunately none of it is very helpful, least of all Davey Havok's though somehow he knew that a picture of Robert Smith under the mistletoe was just what I needed to see on Christmas Eve morning.
Hopefully you all have something nice under your mistletoe this year and have a Happy New Year. I'm going to write more this coming year. Blogs are so old timey and out of fashion and I think that's exactly what appeals to me about them right about now.
