Wish you were here, Psyche...
This write-up is specifically for my friend Psyche Ready, who could not come with me to Irving Plaza Saturday night because she is very responsibly committed to paying her rent, and so had to go into work on Sunday morning in Virginia, where she now lives.
Psyche and I met when I was in grad school and doing some part-time work in Penn’s Office of Career Services to make ends meet (ha-so I naively hoped) and she was doing some full-time work there also to make ends meet. We turned out to have a lot in common-a fascination with myth and fairy tale (I was getting my PhD back then and studying feminist revisions of fairy tales; now Psyche is getting her degree in folklore); dark curly hair; a lifelong passion for punk rock.* And then in a move at once flattering and frustrating in that it meant we couldn’t really hang out much, she registered for my class-how could I drag her out to see bands and go to-goddamn, what was the name of the punk night at that club in Phillie I used to go to? I have no idea and google doesn’t know either--on inappropriate weeknights if I was supposed to mark her essays with a pretense of objectivity (“Psyche Ready is super brilliant and a lot of fun and can hold her liquor far better than I can. A+”)?
After that, she upped and moved to Oregon.
And then she came back to the East Coast! And then I won tickets to Irving Plaza to see Stiff Little Fingers and the So So Glos last Saturday night, and tried my best to get her to come up to NYC and use the other ticket with me, but she couldn’t, which was fucking tragic, it really was.
Irving Plaza is all ages in general, and this show was quite seriously all ages, and I don’t mean that as a euphemism for “kids too young to legally drink,” I mean that between the kids too young to legally drink who were there to see the Glos, and the dudes pushing 60 who were there to see the Stiff Little Fingers, there was quite a wide age spread in evidence, and I was smack in the middle, too young for the Stiff Little Fingers crowd and too old for the So So Glos crowd and if that isn’t the fucking story of my life musically speaking, I don’t know what is. But it was quite nice not to be the oldest person there (and I’ve had enough of being the youngest person at any bar or club to last me the rest of my life, thank you very much). And it warmed my heart to see the teenage girls dressed the way I dressed back in my teens when my mother would force me to put on a trench coat before I left the house.
I still get disoriented at how clear the air is in bars and nightclubs in NYC these days. When I was a teenager, you’d know you’d been out all night and seen a great show if your clothing reeked of beer and cigarette smoke when you woke up the next morning (for a given value of “morning” that included one in the afternoon). I used to wake up and bury my face in the clothing I’d worn the night before just to inhale the scent. I’d wake up with my throat sore from the smoke-it went along with the temporary loss of hearing and the hangover. But now smoking is Not Allowed in clubs and bars, and that’s probably a good thing because people have to work there and why should they run that risk, and the air is clear as crystal and there’s no haze to see through and my throat is fine, and when one older gentleman bumped into me and I caught a whiff of the smoke caught in the folds of his clothing-I guess he’d just been outside to smoke-I was hit by such a wave of wistful nostalgia that I had to lean on the wall for support.
I never started smoking because even as a teenager I already knew that if I started I would never, ever, ever stop. In the words of Hildy Esterhazy from On the Town, I never give up anything I like. No will power at all.
Here’s something else: the bands went on on time. Like, on the dot on time. What’s up with that? I mean, I guess I appreciate it-particularly when the venue in question has no chairs and your friend couldn’t make it so you don’t really have anybody to hang out with, hanging around and waiting loses what little charm it has,** and it’s not like I had a book with me (even if I had, I’m reading Joshi’s biography of Lovecraft these days and, well, it’s not so enticing that I wouldn’t rather drink some cider and stare blankly around me).
Look, Psyche, I’m screwing around here with reminiscences about cigarettes and wondering how you end up two hours late because I’m not sure how I can say this in any way other than I’ve said it before: they were amazing. They kind of always are. I was prepared for them not to be amazing, because Irving Plaza is a venue that I don’t love-it’s big, and the stage is significantly higher than the audience, and there’s a real separation there that you don’t/didn’t get at places like Death By Audio and the bars I went to when I was young, and I’ve never liked that as much. At some point, I made it a rule never to go see a show at Roseland, because it was never that much fun. Whatever kind of energy the band had couldn’t cross the divide over into the audience. So I was ready for Irving Plaza to do the same thing.
But it didn’t. That’s the band’s magnetism at work. Charisma, maybe, but I saw it the very first time I saw the Glos play, when I literally hadn’t heard of them before that afternoon, when I was bored out of my mind with myself and realized how much I was longing to go out and see a band again, picked up a Time Out, went through listings, looked at bands’ facebook/myspace pages until I hit a song that sped up my pulse, and went from my apartment in Jackson Heights to Market Hotel in Bushwick, and hung around drinking beer and listening to music. I hadn’t been keeping track of how many bands had been on already, and didn’t know what order they were going on in anyway, and had never seen so much as a picture, but when Alex and Ryan Levine, Zach Staggers, and Matt Elkin went to the stage and started fucking around with mike hook-ups and suchlike, my head snapped around and I thought “That’s the band I came here to see.” And I was right. It’s the same thing that makes you move close to the stage when they’re playing. It’s not like I can hear any better six feet closer to the stage. It’s not like the sightlines change drastically. It’s just a compass needle swinging north, I guess. You want to be nearer.**
In “All the Young Punks” off the Clash’s second album, Strummer refers to Mick Jones’s guitar as a heart attack machine. This probably isn’t so nice if someone you love has just had a heart attack,**** but it always felt to me exactly right-rock and roll, punk rock, when it’s right, when it’s on, is like getting an electric injection of adrenaline and speed straight to the heart, your pulse races, and you might explode or die, and if you did it would be worth it, it would be well worth it, and you don’t care. I can feel the bassline sometimes inside my ribcage, and it feels like being shaken into pieces from the inside. If I have to die, and who doesn’t, I can think of worse ways, and I honestly can’t think of a better one (why the focus on dying in this paragraph? I think that remembering Jenna’s death brought it to the forefront of my mind.). I’d like to read the obituary on that one: “Veronica Schanoes, scholar and writer known for her work on fairy tales, died on Saturday night. The cause of death was a particularly resonant bassline.” Of course, I suppose that I wouldn’t be able to, under those circumstances. Just as well I survived, then.
I’ll tell you what else I love about the Glos-they look like they’re having a tremendous amount of fun when they perform. I was a ’90s kid, and grunge was supposed to have changed my life, 1993 was the year that punk broke, blah blah blah, but I tell you what, grunge bored me then and it bores me now. I kept listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and so on, and watching footage of them perform, and all I could think was “Why do these white boys keep staring at their shoes and whining?” You’re playing rock and roll! People are paying you for it! You’re being cheered and applauded! Why do you look so bored? My life was boring and miserable back then. I’ve been through major bouts of depression. I turn to rock and roll to blast me out of that, to burn out the misery and the cobwebs and electric shock my heart. That doesn’t mean everybody has to be happy and poppy and butterflies, but punk rock isn’t working at McDonald’s or on an assembly line or even going to high school: you don’t have to do it. If it makes you miserable, if it’s nothing but drudgery, you can just stop. So don’t get up there and act like you’re trudging through the Slough of Despond;***** I spark on anger, but I want adrenaline and hedonistic joy too, because it’s contagious, because I need it. And I’ve never seen anybody look like they’re having a better time than the Glos playing a show.
And I guess that’s what it comes down to, Psyche. I love this band, and I love seeing them play because it makes me feel alive, it makes my heart race and my head spin and my body move. So you should’ve been there Saturday night, and consider this your invitation to come crash with me next time they play.
Oh yeah, some band called the Stiff Little Fingers played too. I guess they were all right, if you like that sort of thing.******
* I once got a marketing email from Amazon.com that said something like "We've noticed that customers who enjoyed Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales also like Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution," and I thought "I have got to get a look at that database." Uncanny
** I like to pass the time under those circumstances by imagining what’s happening backstage. When a band goes on two hours late, what precisely is happening? When I saw Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, they went on two hours late and claimed that it was because their taxi driver went to the wrong borough, which I still think is a pretty feeble excuse given that they had played in the same venue the two nights previous. What is happening backstage? Is it the equivalent of me not being able to find my shoes, and then finding my shoes and realizing that I have no idea where my keys are, and then finding my keys and getting out the door only to find that it’s raining and I could’ve sworn I left my umbrella in the closet where it belongs only it’s not there? Or is it more like when I’m hanging out with a friend and I know I’m supposed to be home by 5 PM to make dinner, and it’s 4:15 now, but another fifteen minutes won’t hurt, and anyway, if the trains run right I could leave at 4:45 and get there on time, and then I look at my watch and it’s 4:55, but I still don’t really feel like going anywhere, and I know I should phone, but I feel kind of guilty and don’t want to admit that I haven’t left yet, and anyway, it’ll be quicker if I just get up and go without calling, but you know, it takes fifteen minutes or so to say good-byes, and then I have to wait 20 minutes for a train because the MTA has fucked up? I mean, if you’re already, say, an hour and a quarter late, what is the precipitating factor at an hour and forty-five minutes that makes you say “OK guys, really, we really have to go do this now”? I’m rambling.
*** Um, not in a creepy way. It’s not like I spend my spare time stalking musicians.
**** I’m only half-joking. For quite a while after we took my late best friend off life support after she had been declared brain-dead, I visibly, physically flinched whenever I heard anybody refer to themselves as “brain-dead” when they meant tired or absent-minded or forgetful. But I got over it, eventually, because time goes by and hyperbolic metaphor is a vital part of the language.
***** Yes, that is a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress. What? I’m a goddamn English professor, for fuck’s sake, I can throw in a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress if I want to.
****** This is a joke. I’m being facetious. I know who the Stiff Little Fingers are. Do not under any circumstances comment and explain it to me, particularly if you’re some dude who thinks he’s going to school me on 1970s UK punk. Just don’t. Nobody will come away happy.
Psyche and I met when I was in grad school and doing some part-time work in Penn’s Office of Career Services to make ends meet (ha-so I naively hoped) and she was doing some full-time work there also to make ends meet. We turned out to have a lot in common-a fascination with myth and fairy tale (I was getting my PhD back then and studying feminist revisions of fairy tales; now Psyche is getting her degree in folklore); dark curly hair; a lifelong passion for punk rock.* And then in a move at once flattering and frustrating in that it meant we couldn’t really hang out much, she registered for my class-how could I drag her out to see bands and go to-goddamn, what was the name of the punk night at that club in Phillie I used to go to? I have no idea and google doesn’t know either--on inappropriate weeknights if I was supposed to mark her essays with a pretense of objectivity (“Psyche Ready is super brilliant and a lot of fun and can hold her liquor far better than I can. A+”)?
After that, she upped and moved to Oregon.
And then she came back to the East Coast! And then I won tickets to Irving Plaza to see Stiff Little Fingers and the So So Glos last Saturday night, and tried my best to get her to come up to NYC and use the other ticket with me, but she couldn’t, which was fucking tragic, it really was.
Irving Plaza is all ages in general, and this show was quite seriously all ages, and I don’t mean that as a euphemism for “kids too young to legally drink,” I mean that between the kids too young to legally drink who were there to see the Glos, and the dudes pushing 60 who were there to see the Stiff Little Fingers, there was quite a wide age spread in evidence, and I was smack in the middle, too young for the Stiff Little Fingers crowd and too old for the So So Glos crowd and if that isn’t the fucking story of my life musically speaking, I don’t know what is. But it was quite nice not to be the oldest person there (and I’ve had enough of being the youngest person at any bar or club to last me the rest of my life, thank you very much). And it warmed my heart to see the teenage girls dressed the way I dressed back in my teens when my mother would force me to put on a trench coat before I left the house.
I still get disoriented at how clear the air is in bars and nightclubs in NYC these days. When I was a teenager, you’d know you’d been out all night and seen a great show if your clothing reeked of beer and cigarette smoke when you woke up the next morning (for a given value of “morning” that included one in the afternoon). I used to wake up and bury my face in the clothing I’d worn the night before just to inhale the scent. I’d wake up with my throat sore from the smoke-it went along with the temporary loss of hearing and the hangover. But now smoking is Not Allowed in clubs and bars, and that’s probably a good thing because people have to work there and why should they run that risk, and the air is clear as crystal and there’s no haze to see through and my throat is fine, and when one older gentleman bumped into me and I caught a whiff of the smoke caught in the folds of his clothing-I guess he’d just been outside to smoke-I was hit by such a wave of wistful nostalgia that I had to lean on the wall for support.
I never started smoking because even as a teenager I already knew that if I started I would never, ever, ever stop. In the words of Hildy Esterhazy from On the Town, I never give up anything I like. No will power at all.
Here’s something else: the bands went on on time. Like, on the dot on time. What’s up with that? I mean, I guess I appreciate it-particularly when the venue in question has no chairs and your friend couldn’t make it so you don’t really have anybody to hang out with, hanging around and waiting loses what little charm it has,** and it’s not like I had a book with me (even if I had, I’m reading Joshi’s biography of Lovecraft these days and, well, it’s not so enticing that I wouldn’t rather drink some cider and stare blankly around me).
Look, Psyche, I’m screwing around here with reminiscences about cigarettes and wondering how you end up two hours late because I’m not sure how I can say this in any way other than I’ve said it before: they were amazing. They kind of always are. I was prepared for them not to be amazing, because Irving Plaza is a venue that I don’t love-it’s big, and the stage is significantly higher than the audience, and there’s a real separation there that you don’t/didn’t get at places like Death By Audio and the bars I went to when I was young, and I’ve never liked that as much. At some point, I made it a rule never to go see a show at Roseland, because it was never that much fun. Whatever kind of energy the band had couldn’t cross the divide over into the audience. So I was ready for Irving Plaza to do the same thing.
But it didn’t. That’s the band’s magnetism at work. Charisma, maybe, but I saw it the very first time I saw the Glos play, when I literally hadn’t heard of them before that afternoon, when I was bored out of my mind with myself and realized how much I was longing to go out and see a band again, picked up a Time Out, went through listings, looked at bands’ facebook/myspace pages until I hit a song that sped up my pulse, and went from my apartment in Jackson Heights to Market Hotel in Bushwick, and hung around drinking beer and listening to music. I hadn’t been keeping track of how many bands had been on already, and didn’t know what order they were going on in anyway, and had never seen so much as a picture, but when Alex and Ryan Levine, Zach Staggers, and Matt Elkin went to the stage and started fucking around with mike hook-ups and suchlike, my head snapped around and I thought “That’s the band I came here to see.” And I was right. It’s the same thing that makes you move close to the stage when they’re playing. It’s not like I can hear any better six feet closer to the stage. It’s not like the sightlines change drastically. It’s just a compass needle swinging north, I guess. You want to be nearer.**
In “All the Young Punks” off the Clash’s second album, Strummer refers to Mick Jones’s guitar as a heart attack machine. This probably isn’t so nice if someone you love has just had a heart attack,**** but it always felt to me exactly right-rock and roll, punk rock, when it’s right, when it’s on, is like getting an electric injection of adrenaline and speed straight to the heart, your pulse races, and you might explode or die, and if you did it would be worth it, it would be well worth it, and you don’t care. I can feel the bassline sometimes inside my ribcage, and it feels like being shaken into pieces from the inside. If I have to die, and who doesn’t, I can think of worse ways, and I honestly can’t think of a better one (why the focus on dying in this paragraph? I think that remembering Jenna’s death brought it to the forefront of my mind.). I’d like to read the obituary on that one: “Veronica Schanoes, scholar and writer known for her work on fairy tales, died on Saturday night. The cause of death was a particularly resonant bassline.” Of course, I suppose that I wouldn’t be able to, under those circumstances. Just as well I survived, then.
I’ll tell you what else I love about the Glos-they look like they’re having a tremendous amount of fun when they perform. I was a ’90s kid, and grunge was supposed to have changed my life, 1993 was the year that punk broke, blah blah blah, but I tell you what, grunge bored me then and it bores me now. I kept listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and so on, and watching footage of them perform, and all I could think was “Why do these white boys keep staring at their shoes and whining?” You’re playing rock and roll! People are paying you for it! You’re being cheered and applauded! Why do you look so bored? My life was boring and miserable back then. I’ve been through major bouts of depression. I turn to rock and roll to blast me out of that, to burn out the misery and the cobwebs and electric shock my heart. That doesn’t mean everybody has to be happy and poppy and butterflies, but punk rock isn’t working at McDonald’s or on an assembly line or even going to high school: you don’t have to do it. If it makes you miserable, if it’s nothing but drudgery, you can just stop. So don’t get up there and act like you’re trudging through the Slough of Despond;***** I spark on anger, but I want adrenaline and hedonistic joy too, because it’s contagious, because I need it. And I’ve never seen anybody look like they’re having a better time than the Glos playing a show.
And I guess that’s what it comes down to, Psyche. I love this band, and I love seeing them play because it makes me feel alive, it makes my heart race and my head spin and my body move. So you should’ve been there Saturday night, and consider this your invitation to come crash with me next time they play.
Oh yeah, some band called the Stiff Little Fingers played too. I guess they were all right, if you like that sort of thing.******
* I once got a marketing email from Amazon.com that said something like "We've noticed that customers who enjoyed Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales also like Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution," and I thought "I have got to get a look at that database." Uncanny
** I like to pass the time under those circumstances by imagining what’s happening backstage. When a band goes on two hours late, what precisely is happening? When I saw Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, they went on two hours late and claimed that it was because their taxi driver went to the wrong borough, which I still think is a pretty feeble excuse given that they had played in the same venue the two nights previous. What is happening backstage? Is it the equivalent of me not being able to find my shoes, and then finding my shoes and realizing that I have no idea where my keys are, and then finding my keys and getting out the door only to find that it’s raining and I could’ve sworn I left my umbrella in the closet where it belongs only it’s not there? Or is it more like when I’m hanging out with a friend and I know I’m supposed to be home by 5 PM to make dinner, and it’s 4:15 now, but another fifteen minutes won’t hurt, and anyway, if the trains run right I could leave at 4:45 and get there on time, and then I look at my watch and it’s 4:55, but I still don’t really feel like going anywhere, and I know I should phone, but I feel kind of guilty and don’t want to admit that I haven’t left yet, and anyway, it’ll be quicker if I just get up and go without calling, but you know, it takes fifteen minutes or so to say good-byes, and then I have to wait 20 minutes for a train because the MTA has fucked up? I mean, if you’re already, say, an hour and a quarter late, what is the precipitating factor at an hour and forty-five minutes that makes you say “OK guys, really, we really have to go do this now”? I’m rambling.
*** Um, not in a creepy way. It’s not like I spend my spare time stalking musicians.
**** I’m only half-joking. For quite a while after we took my late best friend off life support after she had been declared brain-dead, I visibly, physically flinched whenever I heard anybody refer to themselves as “brain-dead” when they meant tired or absent-minded or forgetful. But I got over it, eventually, because time goes by and hyperbolic metaphor is a vital part of the language.
***** Yes, that is a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress. What? I’m a goddamn English professor, for fuck’s sake, I can throw in a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress if I want to.
****** This is a joke. I’m being facetious. I know who the Stiff Little Fingers are. Do not under any circumstances comment and explain it to me, particularly if you’re some dude who thinks he’s going to school me on 1970s UK punk. Just don’t. Nobody will come away happy.