I was in the attic tonight looking through memorabilia, and in the bottom of a box of high school things found one burgundy Converse high top. On the rubber toe cap, someone had scrawled in black Sharpie “the currents will shift”. I guess that’s what passed for profundity when I was sixteen.

Whiskeytown might be reforming. So what? Whiskeytown was known as much for destroying stages as releasing albums, so why should rumors of a possible reunion register on the musical radar, especially in the wake of the reunions of so many other bands — Mission of Burma, Slint, Dinosaur, Jr.? Somewhere between Jeff Tweedy “inventing country rock” and Ryan Adams’ solo debut “Heartbreaker” sits Whiskeytown — Uncle Tupelo’s flash-in-the-pan snot-nosed little brother. It shouldn’t be that five years and three albums should mean so much to so many people.

But it does…

I don’t remember much of 1999. The previous year had ended very badly for me with the death of a friend. It was one more shock than I could take, so I guess my brain sort of shut off. At the time, I didn’t recognize the forgetfulness — I kept a job, paid rent, played in a band, and had a girlfriend — but it has only been in the subsuquent years, after reading birthday cards, letters, and old emails that I recognize just how much happened that year, and just how much of it I cannot remember. What follows is drawn from those emails and letters, and the reverberations of one amazing event.

One thing I do remember is the time I spent sitting behind a drum set in the back room of my house on Lorimer Road in Davidson, helping my friend Cameron finish his demo. He wanted to move to Austin, the country-rock capital of the universe, and get famous. I needed something to do.

The house on Lorimer Road was an old fraternity house with huge common areas, wrap-around floor-to-ceiling windows and a patio that comfortably sit 25. (If anyone reading this has pictures of the old place, I’d love to see them.) Built into the exterior wall of the kitchen was a huge commercial-sized exhaust fan, designed to suck the air from the room in the event of a grease fire, activated by a tiny switch right above the comically underpowered electric stove. Flipping the switch would cause the fan to roar to life, darken the rest of the house and raise the noise level in the house by several decibals. It sounded like a rocket launching into space and so we christened the house “The Lauchpad”.

In the fall of 1999, I was introduced to Cam over beers at the Davidson Depot through a friend who knew I played drums. I’d seen him around campus, and because Davidson was so small, we had some mutual friends, but we had never been introduced. Cam was looking for a drummer and place to practice, so we convinced a mutual friend Christian to play bass and moved all of the equipment into the back room of the house, set up shop and got ready to record Cam’s demo.

Cam wanted to call our little project AM, after the first Wilco album, and I wanted something a little longer, so chose AM-80. At the time, all of the bands on the radio had numbers in the band name; Seven Mary Three, Matchbox 20, Marvelous 3. We chose 80 because it looked really cool in a font that Cam had picked out (Lucida Typewriter).

I’d not played drums in years, so to shake off the rust and immerse myself properly in the genre, I sat down with Whiskeytown’s Faithless Street album and practiced until I could play the entire album front to back. For an encore, I moved on to Stranger’s Almanac, Son Volt’s Trace, Uncle Tupelo, Old 97’s, The Backsliders, and Six String Drag. By that time, we had worked out the different song parts for the demo, and got ready to set aside some time to record.

And so it went. The week before New Year’s Eve 1999, Cam told me that he’d read in the newspaper that Whiskeytown was playing the the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, ringing in the New Year by playing their two albums, Stranger’s Almanac before the New Year and Faithless Street right after. Yes, we went.

I don’t remember most of the first set, but towards the end, right before midnight, Ryan Adams introduced the last song of the set, then got ready for the toast. We all drank the drink — Cam and I both kissed the girl standing in front of us — and as Whiskeytown broke into the first track from Stranger’s Almanac the flood gates opened in my head and the entire year’s worth of memories, everything I experienced but not remembered during 1999, rushed into my head. My knees buckled under force of it all and I sat on the floor of the Cat’s Cradle, breathing deeply, ringing in the New Year, listening to Whiskeytown.

In the years since, most of those bands I listened to have disbanded and Ryan Adams went from alt-country poster boy to loud-mouthed debutante.

For my part I’ve tracked down a bootleg of that New Years Eve show so I can remember what I’ve forgotten and made peace with the year I lost.

Yesterday was my 29th birthday, traditionally a time of reflection and recollection. Fortunately, I have long since learned that in times of great personal reflection, I tend to reflect on the worst, focusing only on my shortcomings and never on my triumphs; I turn mauldin, melancholy, and some would say become a big pain in the ass. As a result, I have taken to avoiding my birthday entirely, devising every scheme to make it pass as quickly — and with as little fanfare — as possible. And so, yesterday, to the multiplex.

A quick sidenote to my parents and friends who knew was day it was and wished me well and sent presents. The best one was a cooking class from Kym; thanks to Kym I will spent next Saturday at Sur La Table learning all about the fine art of making homemade pizza. Thank you all. You are counted among my triumphs.

Anyway, after a spirited morning of laying about, Kym and I took in the afternoon showing of The Dukes of Hazzard movie. My review — three stars. It was totally unapologetic about being dumb, fast and loud; exactly what I needed to get past the birthday blues. The plot — Bo and Luke have to stop Boss Hog from strip-mining Hazzard and save the Duke farm, all while winning the local road rally and keeping Daisy’s top on. SPOILER ALERT — they succeed at all three.

Many people have criticized the movie for being dirty, foul-mouthed, low-brow, and for appealing to the lowest common denominator. Guilty as charged. But what do you expect from a late summer remake whose two most popular characters are a hotrod and a girl’s ass? I had no problem with the foul mouths and shaking asses, except when it came to Uncle Jesse.

I’m not a moralizer, but I’d always imagined Uncle Jesse as the quiet rock of the family; a reformed moonshiner who had settled down and taken on the huge responsibility of the raising his niece and nephews. Willie Nelson plays Jesse as a dirty-old man. That was a huge disappointment.

In any case , the rest of the day passed without much fanfare. I played some video games, read some of the Baroque Cycle, and before I knew it, it was time for bed. Another birthday successfully avoided.

Next year I will hit the Dirty Thirty. Let’s hope there is an A-Team movie

Last weekend I drove down to Cheraw for an event of Great Import — my ten-year high school reunion. Back in the summer of 1994, I left that town in a hurry, and I honestly never thought I would ever see any of those people again. I was glad for it; I was always just a little bit outside of that world, never quite ostracized, but never quite welcome either. I never got beat up, but I wasn’t the prom king either. I was a little person, mostly invisible to the Big People, and when I was visible, my presence was tolerated, but never really welcomed.

I’m not going to bore you further with the particular details of my high school geekdom — you either lived through geekdom or you saw it in John Hughes movies. You were on one side or the other, and you know which side you were on. Nothing I can say here will change that, and I don’t really care to try.

Ten years later, just last weekend, I went back, and I’ll still not sure why. There was no one that I particularly want to see. No one that was on short list of people to say hello to. I didn’t even have a list. I guess I went back there partially to prove — to myself and others — that the Real World hadn’t eaten me alive. I went back there to boast. I went back there to show how much distance there was between the person they knew in 1994 and the person welcomed in 2004.

A strange thing happened. Those people, the people who I ran away from in summer of 1994 welcomed me back. They were glad to see me. I was shocked. I’m still shocked. And I was glad.

But I’m also thinking… were they glad to see me back in 1994? I wouldn’t have been glad to see me back then. I spend so much time in my teenage years trying to get away from people, trying to get away from that town that today — looking back — I realize that I never welcomed them in the way that they welcomed me. I thought that I was invisible. Maybe I was invisible, or nearly so.
but there were some people who were trying to see me back then, and they are still trying to see me now.

That’s good I think. That was a lesson worth waiting ten years to learn.

In the summer of 1993, Glasses Jack and Eric G. organized an all day barbecue dance party in Charleston, South Carolina. Somehow, Eric convinced the town fathers to cordon off two blocks off of King Street for a night (the equivalent of shutting down Main Street) and let the kids throw a party. I’m still not sure how Eric pulled this one off, but my gut tells me that some sort of Wiccan magic had to be involved, or perhaps a tremendous amount of blackmail.

In any case, most of the night passed without incident. I enjoyed the good food and truth be told, getting my teenage groove on to lame mid-1990s proto-techno wasn’t too bad, but my ears need The Rock. I like beep beep just fine, but I go crazy over chunka chunka. Suddenly, Smashing Pumpkins’ I Am One cranks up — what DJ has a copy of U Can’t Touch This and Gish? — and the punks and freaks crash the dance floor. Dance floor? The street. but Eric started a mosh pit anyway, because he was a big fan of inciting a riot.

I Am One is a supercharged guitar drenched rave-up, and two minutes in we were all covered in sweat, knocking elbows and knees, and generally causing havoc for one another. Meanwhile, Jack stalked the group, skanking the perimeter of this improvised pit, until suddenly he unleashed his body upon mine, and knocked me to the ground. I slid down on my hands and knees, hit the pavement with a thud and lie there with the wind knocked out of me. A few minutes later, the song ended, and I pulled my bloody palms, knees and elbows to the curb, still gasping for breath. That’s what I remember about the Pumpkins.

We all know what happend next.

Smashing Pumpkins spent most of the latter part of the 1990s like I spent that night, bloodied and stewing on the sidelines, until the final inevitable collapse under the crush of Billy’s ego, Jimmy and D’Arcy’s drug use and James’ indifference.

But before Billy Corgan morphed into a his paranoid and gothic electronica-cum-guitar melancholy, he was a cetified Rock God, Say what you want about the later work (the pretentious Adore or the forgettable MACHINA/The Machines of God), if Cherub Rock didn’t make you jump around in your room then your feet were probably nailed to the floor.

Which brings me to Zwan, Billy Corgan’s new band. Do they sound like the Pumpkins? Of course, but it’s the Pumpkins you love.Corgan — who is listed in the liner notes as Billy Burke — brought back Jimmy Chamberlain, whose shuffling drums were always the shifting foundation of the Pumpkin’s sound. Jimmy drumming sounds as frenetic, vigorous and splashy as ever. And the songs, Good God Man, the SONGS! It seems that with Zwan, Corgan has made an uneasy peace with the Pumpkins legacy, or maybe he’s finally grown into himself.

In any case, Corgan seems to be out of his “tortured rock-star” phase and Mary Star of the Sea pays accurate tribute to that fact. These fourteen songs are positively ebullient, the sort of anthemic guitar rock that’s missing from the airwaves since the implosion of alternative-indie-underground-whatever music in the late 1990s — an implosion caused in some small way by the rock-diva antics and preposterous posturing of Corgan himself.

Songs like the radio-ready Honestly and Declarations of Faith hint at this older and wiser Billy, thinking more about family and friendships than spilling some carefully crafted angst across the stage. Billy’s done with his “rat in a cage” bit, and if you don’t believe me, take a listen to “Baby Let’s Rock” and “Yeah!” Goth Billy would never have used exclamation points.

Has Corgan returned again to save rock and roll? Probably not. For all of its sonic brillance (and sonic is the word here) there are a few rough spots. Ride the Black Swan feels like a MACHINA outtake and Corgan seems to be simultaneously channeling Adore and Pink Floyd with the flaccid Jesus I/Mary Star of the Sea but twelve out of 14 ain’t bad, so I’m willing to overlook those two stinkers if you promise to let me listen to Settle Down one more time. Ignore the fact the Honestly is on TRL on go buy this album now.

In my last entry, I mentioned the ill-fated Ned’s Atomic Dustbin show. Here then, is the story of that night, and then events that transpired.

Spring 1992.

Michael got wind of a rock show happening in the Great Northern Metropolis of Charlotte, North Carolina. After a fair bit of ticket wrangling and cajoling, he convinced Amy, Pam and me to travel and see the mighty Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Mind you, this is God Fodder era Ned’s. . . pre-”Not Sleeping Around” and well before the trainwreck that was their cover of the Bay City Rollers’ Saturday Night on the So I Married An Axe Murderer soundtrack.

The SIMAAM soundtrack(!) which includes two versions of “There She Goes“; one by The La’s — which made them very famous — and the other by The Boo Radleys, which should have made them very famous.

Anyway, we traveled on a rainy Friday to the legendary 1313 Club. Legendary. . . every club in Charlotte was lengendary at that point, because they were all owned by Bill Flowers, a fifty year old burn-out who couldn’t hold a decent conversation, but was an idiot savant when it came to booking a venue. Bill also owned The “Legendary” Milestone club, a rat-infested hole-in-the-ground which was the place to play in Charlotte between 1988 and 1997. Speaking of “legend”, legend has it that J Mascis carved “Dino Jr.” into the bathroom wall the first time that Dinosaur, Jr. played the Milestone, then Lou Barlow scribbled “J Mascis sucks” on top of it during Sebadoh’s first engagement there. I’ve seen both, but who knows how the scrawl got there.

Where was I? Oh yes. . . we four traveled to the 1313, and on the way Michael kept bugging Amy to pop in the new Gin Blosssoms album, but Amy stood steadfast in her resolve to play only the compilation that Mark had given her, featuring Polvo’s Channel Changer and Pegboy’s Through My Fingers, and also Jawbreaker’s Bivouac.

In any case, we went to see Ned’s and Hot House Flowers (this is the part of the story where I introduce the central conflict) only to discover that it’s an 18 and over show.

DRAT! For Amy was 17 and I was a mere lad of 16, so we were not allowed into the show. We made heartfelt promises and pleaded and begged, but the doorman stood firm. Michael and Pam went into the club, while Amy and I scalped our tickets, hopped into the Saturn, and set off with a little pocket money and four hours to kill in Charlotte, NC.

Let me take a moment here to kill the suspense and answer the question that each of you is asking in your heart-of-hearts. . . no, I didn’t kiss the girl. In retrospect — and when I say retrospect I mean two weeks later when she dumped her boyfriend — I realized that I should have kissed her, because she was the sort of girl who looked like she wanted to be kissed, and I thought I was the sort of guy who could do the job properly. But, I didn’t.

Gentle reader, I’m not sure how much you know about Charlotte, but in aside from being the financial center of the Southeast is a sleepy little burg, where the street lamps shut off at 10:30 and the sidewalks roll up around midnight. It was well past 10pm and all the movies had already started, it was league night at the bowling alley, both Milestone Records and Repo Records were closed — Repo Records, Charlotte’s only punk rock record store/adult bookstore, owned by Jeff Clayton of Anti-Seen.

So, what are a boy and girl to do? That’s right, we rode around the beltway listening to Bivouac, and stopped at every Taco Bell we could find. There are alot of Taco Bell’s in Charlotte and I think we visited every single one that night, finally returning to the 1313 with time to kill. We sat in the parking lot of the club, laid the seats back and blasted. . you guessed it, Bivouac, until Michael and Pam arrived.

To this day, I’ve never seen Ned’s live, and I don’t know how that show was. Amy and I wouldn’t let Michael and Pam talk about it, so if you have any Ned’s bootlegs circa 1992, pass them my way. I’d appreciate it.

The moral of the story is two-fold. . that means there are two morals, a pair of lessons you should learn from this tale:

The first is that listening to Jawbreaker, while perhaps not actually solving any problems, causes any problems in the foreground to dissolve into the background. It helps to have a cool spring night and a pretty girl around, but these are not strictly necessary.

Which brings me to the second moral, the important one. If the opportunity presents itself, Kiss the Girl. It will probably go poorly, and you may wish you hadn’t, but in the balance it’s much better to wish you hadn’t that to wish you had. And sure, it might make things bad and it might make you miserable, but you’re probably going to be miserable anyway, so you might as well be miserable for a reason. Think of it as Pascal’s Wager, but with lips.

Postscript: Three years later, in the summer of 1995, I kissed Amy. Once. It was like kissing my sister. But at least now, I know.

I’ve got to warn you, this one is going to be intensely personal. So, if you don’t want to know, and I mean, if really don’t want to really know, then I suggest that you go somewhere else. It probably won’t make sense to anyone but me, and I’m probably going to regret writing all of this down. I’m just to write and publish without proofreading this. One draft, check the spelling and pull the trigger.

I just left a party, well not really a party, just a gathering at work. Everything was fine and then the hermit part of my brain kicked in and told me to leave. I fought it for a while, and then this part of my brain kicked in. These ideas have been simmering in my brain for a long time, and for some reason, everything crystalized tonight. My brain started writing this and I just fled. I knew I had to get home home home, I had to get home before I lost it, because I knew, and I know, that if I lose it this time, it will probably never come back.

Right now, Dinosaur Jr’s Without A Sound is playing. This is playing and not something else because this is one of few albums that is just for me. All of the other songs that I know are tied to someone else, and right now, I need to hear something that is just for me. I’ve got to finish this before Seemed Like the Thing to Do comes on, or I’ll never ever finish.

I told Ivan once that every time I hear a song, it reminds me of a person, and conversely, any time I thought of a person, there associated song played in my head. He told me that he thought it was odd that my life was “mediated by music”, as he put it. I think the odd thing, the sad thing, really, is that I can’t tell the story of my life without talking about these songs.

Blake wrote “the singer said something I could only feel”, and while that is true, and goes along way to explain how I got to where I am today, I prefer the thing that Michael wrote, “This one is on the soundtrack ot the story of my life”. He’s my brother, so of course I like his better.

I don’t know if this is odd or not, or exceptional, but what I said to Ivan is the truth. I really can’t think about people without thinking about music. Every memory I have of my life is tied to some song.

My very first memory is walking barefoot with Michael down a sandy road, delivering my Dad’s lunch of bologna sandwiches to him while he was DJ’ing at the local AM radio station.

My second memory of my life is a rainy night, laying in the backseat of my parent’s car with my Michael. My parents were stopped at some parking lot, I think in front of the JC Penny’s near my hometown. I lay quietly in the backseat watching sheets of rain pour down the windshield while listening to Blondie’s The Tide is High.

Every person I know is tied to a song or an album. My father is Dire Straits, my Mom is Reba McEntire; Michael is REM’s Dead Letter Office and also 7 Seconds Walk Together, Rock Together. Vincent is Johnny Klegg and Sivuka. Sebadoh belongs to the first girl who broke my heart and didn’t know it; Wilco’s Box Full of Letters belongs to the first girl who did. Black Box Recorder is the one who got away. Pam is always going to be my Velocity Girl, Mark is always going to be 16 screaming Fugazi’s Waiting Room in the basement of the junior high, and Zac is always going to be Liz Phair’s Chopsticks, dancing in his living room yelling “that way we can fuck and watch TV”.

Alot of people write diaries so that they can forget. I listen to music so that I can remember. In too many cases, the person is gone and their song is the only thing I have left.

I was thinking about “the soundtrack to the story of my life” a few weeks ago, which is how this whole thing starting percolating the first place. I was making Holly a compilation, and it was horrible, so I tossed it. I started anew and decided to make for Holly that soundtrack. In all honesty, I’d been thinking about it for months, but never gotten around to making it because I never had a reason.

I finally had a reason. I think it’s really important for friends to understand one another, and I mean really get how the other person clicks. I have a few friends for whom this is true, and it is partly because we share the same songs. If I just say the word Freakscene to Rebecca, she knows my precise mental state. that counts for something I think.

There is this small, strange part of my brain that had been trying to. . . I don’t know. . . force some understanding through visual osmosis. Like if I looked at Holly fiercely enough, for long enough, that I could force the entire contents of my brain into hers through some sort of telepathic mind meld. Or maybe make our brains switch places. Which, upon further reflection would be the worst sort of punishment that one person could inflict upon another. Most of us have our hands full dealing with the strange currents of our own minds, and I for one know that I couldn’t take on another person’s in addition to my own.

Seemed Like the Thing to Do is on. I’m sunk.

So I did the other thing. I made the compilation. I made the “soundtrack to the story of my life”. I also did another smart thing, which was making myself a copy. The thing is that I can’t listen to it. I get about half-way through and lose it. There is something about hearing my own voice singing back to me that really unnerves me. So now I have this thing that finally tells my story in a way that I never could, and I can’t even listen to the damn thing.

What would Blake say about that?

Ok, I’ve been back at work for two days, now, and I’ve gotta say, work is for chumps. I walked in yesterday morning, and within 30 minutes I was all jittery with a headache. I told you I was on vacation, don’t send me a voice mail asking where I am. On top of that, I have a big project due in a week, and I am in no mood to get it done. Whatever, I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

In cool show news, I found out that Hey Mercedes and Piebald are coming to the 9:30 Club, on August 14th, my birthday. That’s gonna be awesome. The last time I went to a Hey Mercedes show, I made the mistake of taking a girl with me who I was trying to impress, so I couldn’t spazz out and act like the fanboy that I am. I will not make the same mistake twice.

More cool show news, and on the J Mascis front, J and the boys are playing at the 9:30 Club next weekend. I am so very excited .. well, I’m just very excited. Hopefully, the actual Fog will be playing with him — Mike Watt and Kevin Shields. Chris From New York said he saw J at NYU, and that the show was lame — J just phoned it in. I guess Chris From New York doesn’t want me to get my hopes up.

One wrinkle in the DC show though — SHE will probably be there, which could be awkward. Of course, SHE already knows that I am a spazoid fanboy, so there are no cool points involved there.

HT says she doesn’t believe in cool points, but I saw her sporting some fresh Steve Madden’s today, so it may be a front. We’ll see how that shakes out.

One story related to shows on my birthday, and then I’ll be out. . .

Michael hates this story.It’s about my sixteenth birthday, my first car, and the first time I ever drove at night.

For my sixteenth birthday, my parents gave me a car. Sure it was my Mom’s old silver Chevrolet Celebrity “Eurosport”, but it was mine, and it was cool. The day before my sixteenth birthday, I drove to Greenville to pick up Michael. On the morning of my birthday, we went off to Columbia to see Jawbox play with The Belltower at (the Lengendary) Rockafella’s. About half way through the show, Michael asks me for my car keys, he wants to go to another show across town. So, I gave him the keys, thinking that we would all hook up after the show at Scott’s. Which was a great plan.

When the show ends, it raining. Sczott, Anutron (?), Gary (?) and I go out to Sczott’s car. The battery is dead — which sucked. Luckily, the guys from Jawbox were at the Circle K, and even more luckily, Gary was pen pals with Kim Coletta (bass player for Jawbox). So, the Jawboxen help us push the car to the Exxon for a jmpstart. . . blah blah blah, and every one gets home safe and dry.

Except for Michael.

[Special note: All of the guys from Novelty era Jawbox (Kim Coletta, J Robbins, $3 Bill Barbot, Adam Wade ) are a great bunch of guys. Jawbox made some of the best music ever to come out of DC. If you haven’t heard Jawbox, let me know. Also, check out J’s band, Burning Airlines. Finally, check out ThreeSpot Media, Bill Barbot’s New Media company.]

Anyway, back to the story.

6pm turns in 7pm, skips right over 8pm, and goes straight on to 9pm. We’re all sitting around Sczott’s apartment, watching Cops and waiting for Michael to return. Around 10pm, he sticks his head in the front door and pulls Sczott into the hallway. After a few minutes, Michael walks in, sits down next to me on the bed, and in a very quiet voice says, “I’m OK, but don’t be mad.”

Friends and neighbors, I’m sure you can guess the rest of the story. Michael had indeed wrecked my car. Totaled it. Rear-ended some guy at a stoplight. I was , indeed, terribly angry.

My parents had to drive down from Cheraw at midnight and pick us up from Sczott’s. I drove back to Cheraw that night. For two hours. In silence, except for when my parents were taking turns “talking” to Michael. It reminded me of that DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince lyric,

“It was a tough ride home,
I don’t know how I survived it
They took turns
One would beat me while the other one’s driving”

So, that’s the story of my 16th birthday, the first time I ever drove at night, and the wreck that took my car.