(A personal story about, among other things, the redemptive power of rock-and-roll music.)
“have you seen my hands
just look at ‘em shake
and the song just keeps on beatin’
drop the needle again
and I dance with your ghost..”
- Gaslight Anthem, “45”
I got an email from Michele sometime in June, hey, saying, Gaslight’s playing at Webster Hall on July 24th, whaddya say we get the band back together and hit this?
Well, I got a baby in the house now, and some older ones, too, but the baby makes getting the band back together a near impossibility these days. Tough to ask the wife to stay home with the whole brood while I run down to the City to party like it’s 1999 with old and dear friends. And I didn’t even ask, nor should I have; I just sent the regrets along to Chachi and told her and whoever else went along to have a good time without me.
A few days later, for shits and giggles, I checked Gaslight’s page to see their complete tour sked. Hmmm. July 23rd, Upstate Concert Hall, Clifton Park, NY, 8 pm, a short drive away. Hmmm.
If you love music, or, should I say, what they call rock-and-roll, you very likely found a bunch of bands that fit your tastes in your teens, or your twenties, and no matter how much you try to keep up, no matter how hard you try to keep your tastes up-to-date, the bands you got high on during that initial personal era of music exploration mean more to you than anything you’ve discovered since. Yeah, you dig other stuff, and in your forties you can still manage to avoid embarrassing yourself if you wind up talking new stuff at work or elsewhere with kids half your age, but nothing quite rocks your world like the stuff you listened to when your eyes started opening and you started figuring out what the fuck was going on and where your place inside the goings-on lay.
For me, growing up in the late ‘80’s, artists like The Clash, The Smiths, The Pogues, The Waterboys, The Pixies, Tom Waits, Social Distortion, and, most of all, The Replacements, provided the score to the era of my life when I chose the ground I’d stand on for the next few decades, met the people (like Michele) who’d become friends for life, made my first real big bets on love and career. Sure, as time went on I discovered other stuff, I got turned on to what they call alt.country, had a friend turn me on to jazz, developed crushes on The Strokes and The White Stripes, had a torrid affair with trip-hop in the ‘90’s, and, in the second year of the new century, caught an epic, ear-drum-shredding show from The Raveonettes at the Bowery Ballroom (and, with my best friend, crashed their after-party). But while my tastes grew and deepened over the years, nothing meant quite as much to me musically as the tunes I grew up with. Nothing sounded quite as magical as the stuff I’d tuned into during my formative years.
Until, in my mid-forties, in the midst of a deep mid-life crisis, I stumbled upon The Gaslight Anthem.
&&&
One thing about your formative years, they often set the agenda for the rest of your life, and I certainly thought that was the case for myself. I stumbled into a career in IT, first for a bank, then with a lefty political organization. I met a woman, fell in love with her, married her, bought a house, then another, with her, had one, then two, then three children with her. At one point, in a quiet moment in that second house, I turned to that woman and said, I love this place, and I plan on living here with you for the next forty years or so.
And then, quite unexpectedly, we sold the house, and a year later, she died on us.
The agenda had been shredded. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I quit the job and stayed home with my kids, it seemed like the thing to do. Life had pressed the reset button on me and I was beyond unprepared. I took the kids to beaches, loaded the two youngest into a jogging double stroller my sister Deb had bought me for miles-long walks. We went out for lunch every day, took countless rides on the Congress Park carousel. I bounced up and down; for the first few months I was, as my father never tires of telling people, completely catatonic, and from there, I was all over the map. One day the kids would do make me feel a joy unlike anything I’d ever felt, the next, I’d lie awake crying half the night.
Sometime near the end of 2008, with a wicked sinus infection and the post-one-year-anniversary blues in full effect, I spent a lot of time driving around listening to the radio. One evening I heard a song that rocked my world. “What was THAT?!?!” I thought; it gave me chills, the way “Dirty Old Town” had twenty years earlier; it gave me something I had thought music could no longer give me. I hunted the song down, learned it was something called “The ’59 Sound” by a band called The Gaslight Anthem.
I wound up downloading the entire album, and their first album, and the EP they’d released between the two albums.
I was obsessed with The Gaslight Anthem. The obsession ran so deep it almost left me ashamed. But I started turning friends on to them. I played nothing but their stuff in the car for months; even the kids got into them, Bailey partial to “The ’59 Sound” and Evie and especially Riley, all of two-plus years old, very into “Blue Jeans and White T-Shirts.” At the end of the year my boy Dan came to town to ring in the New Year with me. On New Year’s Day 2009 we made a close to four hour drive over to a casino in Connecticut while Lauren’s mom watched the kids; the entire way over, we listened to Gaslight at top volume. We ate dinner at a place called Kraft Steak, a few tables away from KC of KC and The Sunshine Band fame. We raised glass after glass to the idea that 2009 would be a new beginning for me.
&&&
By the fall of 2009, I had fallen into a deep, serious depression. My money, which had once looked endless, had pretty much run out. I’d employed some lawyers to investigate the seemingly suspicious medical circumstances surrounding my wife’s death, and they had told me the case looked too tough to bring to court. I was apoplectic; yeah, I needed the money, but way more than that, I wanted those fuckers to suffer some shame, some embarrassment, some kind of harm for the hell they had put her through. I took to walking around in my bathrobe until three in the afternoon. The family and friends whispered amongst themselves: what the fuck are we gonna do with Dave, he’s coming apart. I’m the type of person, physically and psychically, that people do not like to confront. Everyone wanted to talk to me, but everyone felt scared I would go ballistic if they did. So I wandered around like a robot, taking Bailey down to the school in Albany he’d gone to since pre-K, wondering the whole time how I’d come up with next month’s tuition payment when I could barely manage to keep gas in the car. I can’t even describe the anger I felt as the realization that Lauren’s doctor’s were going to get off scott-free; the anger led me into replaying, over and over and over, the awful month she spent in the hospital, the operation that would supposedly have her home in a week instead leading to one debacle after another.
I couldn’t catch a break, or so I thought. A rare foray into playing the horses led to a much-needed $1500 windfall, and then two days later, before I could even write checks to catch me up on some things, the van unexpectedly crapped out and cost me $1375 in repairs. I sank in even deeper. I just gave up, to be honest.
Finally, one morning, while sitting in my bathrobe drinking coffee, with Bailey at school and Evie and Riley next to me coloring, I saw my sister Deb walking up my driveway with a box of Munchkins and two plastic cups of coffee. She’s a few months younger than me, but she’s the de facto oldest of the four of us. She gets things done.
And she got things done that morning. She read me the riot act. I listened impassively until she brought the haymaker: Lauren would give anything, she said, to be here with these kids. Lauren would be heart-broken to see you like this.
That last one got to me.
She set me up with a new therapist (I’d ditched the one who had served me so well for almost two years when he dared to push me a little further than I wanted to go) who wound up walking me through very specific ways of dealing with what she insisted was post-traumatic stress disorder (Lauren’s stay in the hospital got very, very ugly, in both emotional and purely physical terms).
I started feeling a little better. In December, my boy Dan called me and offered an all-expenses paid trip to see Gaslight in Montclair, NJ. The concert fell on an important anniversary in my relationship with Lauren. I accepted the invite. He bought me a round-trip train ticket to and from the city, we stayed with Michele and Kevin out in Brooklyn for two nights. The show left my legs numb. When we walked into the venue, packed with somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 people, I felt a little weird, thinking my salt-and-pepper hair pointing me out as some foolish old dude trying to re-live my glory days, but as soon as they started playing, I felt like the youngest guy in there, and I sang along to everything they played.
The next week, still feeling buoyant from the show, I walked into a coffee shop back up in Albany and saw this woman I sort of knew in there. Beautiful enough to leave me somewhat intimidated, but still feeling good from the show, instead of chickening out, I walked right up to her and started chatting her up, the first time in forever that I had felt what they call interested. A few months later, I asked her out on a date. A year and a half later, we got married.
&&&
July 23rd, Gaslight Anthem, Upstate Concert Hall, 8 pm, the listing said.
Bailey, 13 now, had heard about the show on the radio, and he started agitating to go. After all, I’d made him listen to their stuff on and off for years. He’d gotten into them.
It’s a club show, Bailey, I think you have to be 18 to get in.
He kept begging, so just to put his mind at ease, I called the club. They explained that if accompanied by an adult guardian, a child of any age could attend the show.
I let him know.
As soon as I did, I knew I’d have to take him.
&&&
July 23rd.
I married Bailey’s mother on another July 23, all the way back in 1994.
A Monday, this year, a Saturday the year we got married.
The day dawned with a closing-in grey sky, and, though I had decided days before I wouldn’t let the anniversary bother me, it did.
I got out of bed to start the day with memories of that long-ago bouncing around my mind. It’s moments like this that, almost five years after her death, re-married and living a whole new happily ever-after, I still can’t believe everything that happened, happened.
When I got in the car to drive to work what came back to me strongest was sitting down, at the hotel I slept in the days leading up the wedding, to a traditional English breakfast the morning of the wedding; fried eggs, beans, toast, bacon, and sausage, along with what passed for coffee in those parts, in those days. I wolfed it down and then snuck out for a smoke, the sun shining, the day warm and bright, the kind of day we all dream of getting married on. I thought, for some reason, of the boxers I put on that morning, some sort of tartan pattern that I deemed perfect for the occasion.
I thought of a lot of things about that day as I went about my day and truth be told, by the time I got home, I felt a little downhearted and I had totally forgotten about my promise to take Bailey to see Gaslight that night.
What’s wrong with you, Dad, he asked as I sullenly made the family dinner.
Nothing, I said.
Are you mad at me?
No.
Jeez. I thought you’d be excited, going to see Gaslight Anthem with your son.
I am, I said. I am. It’s just…
&&&
We got there early, the ads said 8 pm show and didn’t mention an opening act, and they had a show in the city the next night and their new album coming out that night, too. Truth be told I thought, given all of the above, that they might mail it in and get the hell out of some anonymous club in Clifton Park, NY, as fast as they could.
We walked in, Bailey thought there would be seats. It’s not that kind of place, son, I said. This is how you see bands when you’re young, before they turn into Coldplay. This is how I used to see shows, back in the day.
He laughed; he always does when I utter the words “back in the day.” It’s a little joke of ours.
We took a spot about thirty feet from the stage, and dead center. Already a large crowd had formed and we were stuffed in there pretty good. Bailey seemed nervous, almost.
You alright, I asked him.
He looked around at the stage, at the crowd.
Yeah.
&&&
Turns out there was an opening an act, a guy called Dave Hause (I think); he played his electric a lot like early Billy Bragg and told some pretty decent stories. Bailey liked him.
The crowd grew larger; a pretty impressive assemblage for a Monday night in the middle of nowhere, I thought.
A stage hand came out and lit some incense near the drum kit.
Alright, Bailey, I said. They’ll be on soon.
I could see he was getting tired from standing crushed together in the middle of a large crowd on a hot summer’s night. I put my arm around him and felt sweat on his t-shirt. I wondered if I’d made the right move, doing this. Maybe he was too young for this, I thought. Maybe this is all wrong; at forty-five plus one, I may well have been the oldest guy in there, and at thirteen and a half, Bailey may well have been the youngest.
Finally, Gaslight took the stage.
Any fears about them mailing it in were soon dispelled. They opened with a number from “The ’59 Sound” and then went right into “45”, and took off from there. They played for over two hours. People around us danced, sweated, sang along. I sang along, at the top of my lungs often enough, and Bailey didn’t even seem embarrassed. When they played “Blue Jeans and White T-Shirts” I thought of Riley, of all those long-gone hours in the car, with him yelling at me from his car seat to play the song again. They wrapped it up with a scorching rendition of “The ’59 Sound”, and we danced and sang along and high-fived. My voice was a little shaky the next day, and I felt good about that.
We walked out of the club into the remnants of a thunderstorm.
So, what’d you think, I asked him.
They were awesome.
I chuckled and asked, so you wanna be a rock star now?
Nah. I still wanna play for the Jets when I grow up.
Alright, I said.
This was no time for telling a kid his dreams were a million to one to come true.
I looked at the clock as we made our way home.
Eleven thirty.
For a moment, I thought back to eleven thirty on a July 23rd many, many, years ago.
I felt choked up, and I wanted to tell our son about that day, I wanted to tell him so many things, but no words would come out.
In my mind, I thought of him wanting to play for the Jets, and how his dreams will change, often now as he sits on the cusp of rocketing through the vortex of adolescence and young adulthood.
I can’t say anything, but the with the music still ringing in my ears, I think, keep dreaming, kid. Keep dreaming.