[A Beer Engine Literary Reclaimed Timbre Treatise]

From late 1997 into 1998 I was mostly interested in hardcore, and metalcore. A pivot began late one night while riding around town with Mike Lundmark on our way to White Castle to pick up chicken rings and jalapeño sliders. You know, in his car with the loudspeakers he used to blare? Living Sacrifice double bass kick drums blast-beating into your chest like you were willfully trapped in a box in some sort of otherworldly, nightmarish industrial factory?

Mike showed me this CD by a band called Brandtson – which was a few guys from the hardcore band Six Feet Deep. ⁽⁰⁾

He’s like, “this genre is called ‘emotional hardcore’. People refer to it as ‘emo’ for short”.

As someone who prided himself on digging for the strangest things, a new (to me) sub-genre was something intriguing.

The circuit was connected with my friends Derek Blackburn and Brian Poskin, through whom I’d discover Rainer Maria’s Past Worn Searching, specifically “Tin Foil”.

God dammit I’m not talking about my heart like it’s something you could break

I overheard Dayton Nolan in conversation at Cornerstone 1999 mention a “really good emo band” called Recess Theory. I found their EP They Would Walk Into the Picture at a merch table for Takehold Records and bought it straight out.

Drug stores make me feel good

Later that same summer, I’d send away through mail order to purchase the split EP From the 27^th State by Recess Theory and Further Seems Forever.

When the split EP arrived, it came with a handwritten letter from a dude. On a sheet of loose leaf paper, he was humbly thanking me for my purchase. The CD was mailed from his home address in Florida. I didn’t know who Chris Carrabba was, and for years I just assumed the letter was the bassist Chad who was previously in Strongarm, the band’s former iteration.  

Also, in ‘99 I followed my friend Brandon’s band, East of Rutherford, to see them play a show in Valparaiso in some sort of a grimy dive-café. They were opening for Further Seems Forever and Recess Theory (who would change their band name to Legends of Rodeo around that era). ⁽¹⁾

The first song of the Further Seems Forever set was the singer doing a solo acoustic number. The final chord of his song rang out in unison with the entire band crashing into the first key of the next song. I came to find that Chris, the tiny, horse jockey-sized vocalist (not Chad Neptune, the chubby guy), had a fully acoustic side project called Dashboard Confessional. ⁽²⁾

In the late 90s I discovered Braid’s albums Age of Octeen and Frame & Canvas, as well as The Get Up Kids’ Four Minute Mile and Something to Write Home About. Not to mention all of Braid and The Get Up Kids EPs and B-sides and 7-inches and everything else you can think of. Not only were all the songs so personal and introspective, but the layout and design of every record was just as reflective.

Every Braid 7-inch had cool photos and artwork it became fun for me as a collector by nature. I loved the pastel purple with flying robots on the Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About. Anthropomorphic cyborgs holding Cupid’s arrows.

And your chest is a cage for my letters

Braid became my obsession, though by the time I really became interested in them, they were breaking up – right after their third proper album. I recall a sadness when I got the “Please Drive Faster” 7-inch. Playing it on Dereck’s garage turntable and realizing it was basically the best stuff they had done, made me blue. They were already no longer a band by the time I bought that 7-inch.

The Hey Mercedes EP that would come out a year later revitalized me, I will say.

Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool, with its borderline sadistic yet appealing approach to emo songwriting was yet another offshoot. They had a beef track that was not unlike 2pac’s “Hit ‘em Up”, albeit more relatable. It was partially geared toward an ex-girlfriend and a fantasy of tossing a full glass of lemonade in her face. Not very nice, but ya know… what was she going to do about it?

That Saves the Day album, as well as their acoustic EP with the monarch butterflies on the cover, formed some sort of zeitgeist-defining scheme within my essence of low self-esteem and constantly shattered self-confidence.

“Hey, you know what, man? I’m fat and I can’t seem to land a date because I have limited internal value. I’m through being cool!”

Pedro the Lion’s The Only Reason I Feel Secure EP and Weezer’s Pinkerton hit me hard (neither the former nor the latter were truly considered emo, but definitely well-accepted into the realm), and it would be an understatement to suggest that Clarity by Jimmy Eat World wasn’t a life changing album for me.

During the time I would ride with Jason Sippel in The Machine while “Can you Still Feel the Butterflies?” would spin on his discman, connected through wires to his cassette deck.

I haven’t done the math in a while, but Clarity is deified and surely heralded as a top twenty album ranking contestant for me. The glossy production and electronic elements of drumloops set something adrift in futurity.

And your handwriting’s better than mine

I bought records from The Promise Ring and Reggie & the Full Effect. During this time when Nu Metal, Boybands, and Rapcore where the rage, I became a persnickety aficionado yet somehow offset this with emotive theatrics.

Songs on the radio were so bad they pushed me further down the rabbit hole of spelunking for independent music. I got to make fun of the masses and their ridiculous music. It continued to solidify a front. It became something for me to belong to.

Death Cab for Cutie’s albums We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, and Something About Airplanes both played roles in creating this universe I became enthralled with.

Metalcore, political screaming, vegan straight edge, and guttural, pissed off over-the-top wailing let go of the reigns as the hardcore bunch would all be dumped by their girlfriends only to seek an outlet to their shut down romantic feelings.

I still love those insane metalcore and death metal albums of the time. But the epoch was but a messy chord progression into full on post-hardcore. Second-Wave Emo.  

Midwest Emo – which I attribute to being sparked by the man himself, Bob Nanna (though he’d disagree). I was there to burn my money on the hoodies, and the CDs. The blue Braid stickers were always free. I rocked one on my Fender jazz bass that I pretended to know how to play, and I stuck one on my car as a badge of pride describing me as a dude who listened to music you didn’t know about.

American Football, Texas is the Reason, Joan of Arc, The Gloria Record, Planes Mistaken for Stars, The Rocking Horse Winner, and Cap’n Jazz (who was arguably First-Wave Emo I suppose). Albums from record labels Jade Tree, Polyvinyl, Deep Elm, and Vagrant.

I liked them all, even though technically they aren’t great. I suppose that was a portion of the charm, as most would attest to, I think. Sort of a downcast Do-It-Yourself perspective which lent itself to this sub-genre. I’ve been listening to a lot of Mineral and Christie Front Drive during the creation of this essay.

Open the desktop behind me, sending crayon valentines

We had to work for the music. It wasn’t like people today, myself included, who have every song they could ever want to explore, just in their pocket for free. We had to perform the due diligence of discovering bands from seeing them as openers at shows, and from the backs of catalogues, and taking gambles at used CD shops. When we were able to establish a musical troupe of interest, it became but a relic of bragging rights.

In 2000 I bought the long-awaited apocryphal Swiss Army Romance by Dashboard Confessional. This record, in combination with Bright Eyes’ Fever & Mirrors, there would be no holding back the tears any longer.

Sad boy emo would become part of my woe begotten ethos. Rejection by the opposite sex became my downtrodden trope of the day, doing absolutely nothing other than fueling the flame. A member of the Guild of the Forlorn with highly functional depression.

In such a cyclical echo chamber, I’m sure I just had a completely magnetic personality at the time.

And I reply – will you marry me, loligirl?

…

I followed these local bands including The Emily Shrine, The Pocket Knife Gang, Whatever Heather, and a few others. A lot of these were the same group of guys trading off instruments through every version of their bands, but their songs and live performance antics will live on in my heart and brain as canon. One show in Joe LeVeque’s garage, they played in front of a slide show carousel, projecting some family’s old thrift-store purchased vacation slides on to a canvas. Completely ingenious.

Seeing John Stahl leap off that fucking bass amp, into the air while hitting that down note? Like what the fuck, man. One time they played a 45-rpm record on a turntable at 33 rpm while they stabbed each other in slow motion, and all died on stage.

Why this group of individuals with such great stage presence and incredible songs, never made a career in music will always perplex me.

Why’d you take all my reason?

…

2001: An Emo Odyssey.

I’d argue that the year 2001 was the pinnacle and the peak for this type of solemn outcry. Just an avalanche of albums let loose on unsuspecting pierced and tattooed, early twenty-somethings, fully intent on crying over spilt soy milk. For me it was a realm of isolation and despair, of course coupled with pitchy melodies.

My lack of direction in life combined with my lack of funds was a common denominator with these bands and their lack of world-wide audiences.  

Death Cab for Cutie released their third record The Photo Album that year. Jimmy Eat World would drop their first major label release, Bleed American the summer right before 9/11 and I’d purchase it from Threshold the day it was set on the racks. Jimmy Eat World agreed with Dreamworks that they’d remove the album title from the CD cover shortly after that since they didn’t want to seem insensitive to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Saves the Day’s Stay What You Are, with the continued brilliant nuance in masochism, and Hey Mercedes’ Every Night Fireworks, Bob Nanna’s next endeavor post-Braid, also both came out in 2001.

When Rainer Maria released A Better Version of Me, my aforementioned compatriot and roommate Jason played the CD in our living room. I dropped whatever I was doing and we both got in my car to drive up to Threshold in Tinley Park from Kankakee just to buy the CD. We got right back in the car to head directly home so we could listen to it in full. Not one thought given to stopping anywhere else, mostly because my minimal level of disposable income was just zapped with gasoline cost and a 15-dollar CD.

For me, the Further Seems Forever album The Moon is Down walked off with all the 2001 accolades. It was my favorite of the lot. Was I embarrassed that it was on Tooth & Nail Records? Well, yes.

But it was listening to the technicality of Strongarm and Shai Hulud, but with vocal melodies to pull my heartstrings to an oblivion of sorrow – mostly over whichever girl at the time only wanted to be friends with me.

The composition itself, with a pink album cover, was just completely mind-blowing for a twenty-one-year-old sad sack, depressed indie music fan who appreciated the absolutely ridiculous songwriting. Songs to help me triage. To assist me in sorting out the issues I was going through.

Thursday’s Full Collapse seems like it was a mainstay for a lot of people. I own it on CD, but I’ve never been a big fan. I feel it’s noteworthy here because for one, it was the first emo band I ever saw on MTV2. Good or bad, that actually signified something to me. Among a friend group of geeks, the local gossip wasn’t about relationships or drama. It was more like, “hey did you see Thursday was on MTV2?”

Around that time, I was working at an asphalt lab located at O’Hare airport and I remember this guy, Dr. Bruce, coming into a meeting with a photocopy of a check. It was written out to his son who owned Victory Records. The “one” followed by six zeros was the amount his son sold Thursday to a major label for. ⁽³⁾

Then of course the second Dashboard record was released as well, ushering Chris Carrabba to the stars via the aforementioned MTV2, and subsequently MTV Unplugged. You know that live set with the unintentionally hilarious crying kid who clearly didn’t know the lyrics to the earlier material, but pretended to mouth them anyway?

While normal people were having regular parties, we had CD burning gatherings at The Shickadance Household in Kankakee where I lived with Chey and Jason. We’d invite other freaks of nature to listen to CDs in real time as we burned mix tapes for each other on our $300 external burner, that Chey, Jason and I had split the cost for three ways.

Tunes ‘n jams in the living room on our silly couch beneath framed photos that Chey took on his own film camera and developed in the dark room we had in our own home. Alchemy and chemicals from filtered aperture, Rainer Maria band members in cool, double exposure.

I would talk more about the levels of nerd that encompass all of this, but even describing the very idea… I think as the reader, you get the point.

…

The Fireside Bowl.

I saw a plethora of bands play at The Fireside in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. The Fireside, to this day I will proclaim in confidence, had the best sound in the city. Kick drums thumping and reverberating in your chest the same way Mike Lundmark’s car did.

It was dilapidated of course, with the moldy asbestos-covered ceiling tiles caving in due to rain leakage. On nights when they sold too many tickets, they’d open up the weathered bowling lanes for people to stand in. Tickets cost a pelt or perhaps a bag of Tuppence.

I saw Coalesce, The Get Up Kids, Bane, The Castket Lottery, Rainer Maria, At the Drive In, Zao, Dashboard… I don’t even remember what else. A lot of times I’d just drive up there with friends and arrive for a show where I didn’t even know who the bands were. I just went to go.

This would be years before I could legally drink. As a Straight Edge dork, alcohol wasn’t in my wheelhouse anyway. I was purely there for the music, and The Fireside with its antiquated bowling trophies and bowling team plaques, was the heartbeat of the scene for me. ⁽⁴⁾

I saw Braid play at The Fireside a few times – including their final show of the Midwest Emo era. Braid would almost be considered the self-professed house band for this place. One Braid show that stands out was this time when they played “The Chandelier Swing”. There was a guy standing outside the door with some sort of a walkie talkie, connected to the PA system. He did the “this is the chandelier swing” lines as Braid played the song in real time. 

I would regale Bob Nanna with this memory circa 2015 while standing in my own living room as Nanna would become a friend of mind in the future. He already knew the story. But he was polite. Probably thrilled that I remember the set to be honest. I came to find that he has every single show he’s ever played, logged in a spreadsheet, accessible by his phone.

One time in 2000 some friends and I drove up from Kankakee to see Jimmy Eat World and Pedro the Lion at the Fireside. We discovered perhaps for the literal first time ever in life that the show was sold out. For me it was a jarring bout of disproportionate eminence. We packed our shit and went back home. I couldn’t believe it. Who else knew about these bands? How was this a thing that was happening?

Getting tickets beforehand at a show like this just… didn’t happen. I mean there weren’t tickets. You’d just show up and they’d write an X on the back of your hand with a marker. The show selling out would never have been in our periphery.

…

By the end of 2001 my tastes had already begun to shift a bit. Radiohead’s Amnesiac came out. I was introduced to Red House Painters. Thom Yorke and Mark Kozelek had the same overarching themes of misery, to be sure, but a bit more artistic and a lot more vague than some of the bands I was previously interested in. Thoughts began to change shape.

Third-Wave Emo was a steaming pile of bull plop garbage. It made me and everyone else fully embarrassed to ever have embraced the status of “emo kid” in the past. For me, emo ended well before nail polish and scream-o. Years before you could just go to Hot Topic at Orland Mall and pick up a band shirt or a 22-dollar CD.

I can’t even mention the term with a straight face, and neither can anyone else for that matter, due to the third wave white belt emo stuff. “Emo Parties” at breweries are all bands I’ve never been interested in or even heard of. The White Sox have an emo night at the stadium. I’m now the old guy who states that people “don’t get it”.

But today I still put on those early emo records from my generation – from back in my day, once in a blue moon. Out-of-tune vocals, extremely low-fi, muddy production. No polish. But I love those records.

…

In 2010 I hung out with Joe Leveque ⁽⁵⁾ who had been living in Logan Square for years, because that’s just how fucking cool that guy is. He told me that he was once biking drunk. He rode up to the Fireside on his BMX and tried to kiss the wall from the sidewalk off Fullerton Ave. He drunkenly fell off his bike while attempting the romantic maneuver.

The nostalgic sentiment was there, and I fully identified with it. It was a notion of the great divide between the late-nineties/early 2000s to what was currently the scenario. A window of a wistful, syrupy era where no one knew what emo was. Before all my rockstar legends were forced to go get real jobs.

For the time, it was ours.

The Fireside Kiss explains it all.

…

I’ll keep you here right next to me, and I promise to wait, if you say your still coming

….

…

..

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{Beer Engine Literary Music SubSeries: 012}

Footnotes

(0) Shortly after that conversation I pieced together that other metalcore bands were branching off into post-hardcore bands as well. Dudes from Strongarm and Shai Hulud would form Further Seems Forever. The guy who sang one line in a Zao song, left to start a band called The Juliana Theory. So, my introduction to second-wave emo was sparked in the semi-legit/semi-irritating Christian scene.

(1) The entire drive from Kankakee to Valpo, I annoyingly used the wrong turn signal for literally every turn and lane change while the band members from East of Rutherford drove behind me, following in a caravan of cars. I remember at the show, approaching the singer Dave Snipes to ask him if my turn signal was working properly. I guess just as an awkward social experiment. He looked at me and stated, “you know, I didn’t even notice”.

It was sort of a lesson in my stint as a dumb, immature late teen. There’s no way he didn’t notice my shenanigan. In fact, I’m positive the full ridership in that vehicle behind me for that hours-long trek expressed complete annoyance and hatred toward me the entire trip. I shudder now to think of it. But he handled it with grace. Thanks, Dave… and also, sorry about that.

Also, my band would get to open for Legends of Rodeo at some point in 2003. None of their stuff is on Spotify as of this writing and I don’t know what happened to them. They vanished.

(2) “Whoa! The name is Dashboard Confessional? This guy also vents depressing, teary-eyed frustration about heartbreak in his car alone – just like I do!?”

(3) Dr. Bruce sucked so much. One time Chey met him, and after Chey extended his hand with the expectation of a normal handshake, Dr. Bruce merely extended his index finger. He made Chey shake his finger. This was an odd power move on some level of an executive treating a QC technician like a toddler.

(4) The Fireside was shut down for a while. They refurbished the lanes and it was opened to bowling again. It was featured in some movie with Jennifer Aniston, much to my dismay. By the time I was in my thirties, the only time I’ve gone back there was for an actual bowling stint. I brought my own bowling ball that I’d purchased at a garage sale. The turquoise sphere entitled “The Cougar” split into multiple pieces on my very first roll down the storied lane.

(5) Joe LeVeque is a genius, by the way. This guy not only had the coolest jobs I’ve ever heard of: Chicago record store clerk, bowling alley attendant, and pinball machine technician at Logan Hardware, but he was the main guy behind the local bands I mentioned above – namely Pocket Knife Gang and Whatever Heather.

He also invented a way to transmit radio waves back in time by speeding them up to rates faster than the speed of light. He became the world’s first trillionaire, but nobody knew because he never talked about it. He was able to convince his father in 1986, from radio waves he generated from the future, to sell his property and invest all the family assets in Microsoft IPO. Or something of that nature.