For Want Of…

A Welcome Post

Nothing You Can Hold: An Introduction

This has been a long time coming. I have one of those small chat groups of long-time friends. For a couple years now they’ve been telling me I should write about music, and I’ve spent those same years not doing it. So with their nudging, and finally out of excuses, here it is.

I should tell you who’s talking. I’ve been inside music since I was 13, making it, setting it up, sharing it, listening to it, traveling on tour with it, and going to see it, mostly in the DIY punk scene. I played in a run of bands — Network 34, Eldritch Anisette, Midvale, Dorian Gray, Dear Tonight, Young Lady, and Boysetsfire — and from 1993 to 2012 I was also one of the people putting the shows on, first in Newark, Delaware and then in New York City. For a long stretch, music wasn’t a hobby I had. It was most of the structure of my life.

Then it thinned out, the way these things do. Until last weekend, the last show I played was a 70,000-person festival in Germany in August 2012 with Boysetsfire (video of the set is actually online here). After that show, which was the last one on that tour, my brother, the drummer, quit/was kicked out, and I was told to choose him or the band. So, I quit. For a long time, I couldn’t go to a show. I couldn’t pick up my guitar or my bass. I didn’t want anything to do with it. To be honest, it was too painful. I kept listening (I never stopped listening) but I stopped making anything, and with the exception of a handful of shows, I stopped going for nearly a decade.

It all seemed like a former part of myself. A distant memory, of something I once knew, but that no longer had a relationship with. That me that was living with music, seemed like someone else. Then two things happened that really changed it all.

One happened about a year ago: Eldritch Anisette got reissued by Numero Group. We reconnected as a band, started playing together again, and I realized how much I missed creating music with people I love. There is a power in creating something deep from within myself, sharing that creation with other people, hearing their response and creation, and building something new as a collective. I’d been starving. I needed the grounding of a personal connection to music and the release of making it. And then seeing the thousands of younger people out there, responding to this music we made three decades ago and creating their own music, inspired me. It made me discover a part of myself I thought I lost.

It took me a while to be able to say plainly what I’d been missing. Music is the strangest thing we make. You can’t hold it. It’s universal and yet it’s completely intangible, the one art with nothing to grab, existing only while it’s happening and then gone, which is exactly why it asks you to be there for it, present, now. Live, it does something stranger still: a room full of people agree to be present together, at the same moment, for something not one of them can keep. Your own expression meets everyone else’s, and for a few minutes you stop being only yourself; you’re part of some larger body that exists only because everyone showed up. The best word I have for that is one I’ll probably overuse around here: it’s a kind of magic. It’s also, I’ve come to believe, a kind of need.

This next part actually came first, before the band ever got back together. Three years ago I was in Portugal and wandered into a record store, and I was floored — not by punk, but by how much vast, living music I’d spent decades standing next to without ever walking into. So many musical subgenres from around the world. Whole worlds of it, from everywhere, and a great deal of jazz. Jazz wasn’t even new to me: at 15, right around when I started Network 34, I’d been discovering Coltrane alongside punk with my best friend Tim Nichols, the drummer for Network and Eldritch, who used to sit in at a jazz club near us. It was amazing watching this 15 year old kid stun the old timers in the jazz club. Portugal woke that back up. I came home and decided to actually learn the music this time, not dabble, learn it. Not just dip my toes but jump in head first. Over the next couple years, I took more than ten classes at Jazz at Lincoln Center, went to every concert I could, worked through documentaries, read more than twenty books, and bought over a hundred records.

The part I’m proudest of is how I did it: with the algorithm switched off. No “you might also like.” I found everything the old way…word of mouth, liner notes, names dropped in the footnotes of books…and by walking into stores and asking a human what I should hear next, which turns out to still be one of the great conversations available to a person. It rhymed, hard, with how I’d found punk in the first place, back before any of us were online: slow, personal, a little effortful, and therefore yours. Discovering the music was inseparable from discovering myself, the same as it had been as a teenager.

I went deepest into the jazz of the 1960s and ‘70s — the spiritual and free end of it, Coltrane and Don Cherry and Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. And the deeper I got, the more I kept hearing things I already knew from somewhere else. I’m going to save that argument for its own piece, because it deserves the room, but here’s the shape to come: this music and the punk I came up in are far closer kin than almost anyone says out loud. There’s a lot more coming on that.

I’ll be honest that all of this arrived right when I needed it. Work was hard, life was throwing a few things at me, my stress was high and my bearings were off, and going this deep into music, old and new, mine and everyone else’s, put my feet back on the ground. It reminded me there was more to the picture than the part that was wearing me down, and that I need music in my life the way I need the short list of other things I don’t bother questioning. This blog is my attempt to hold onto that. Or, since you can’t hold music, to keep showing up for it.

So here’s what For Want Of is going to be. Some of it will be me thinking out loud about music and the metaphysical, because that’s where my head tends to go. A lot of it will be a series I’ve wanted to write for years: perfect punk albums. I mean “punk” as broadly as I always have — hardcore, emo, screamo, punk rock, the whole thing. It was only ever “punk” to me; the subgenres came later, and mostly from outside. And I mean “perfect” in a specific, nearly mechanical sense that streaming has just about trained out of us. In an era built to hand us one smooth, disposable song at a time, I’ve spent the past year going back to albums, front to back, and a few of them stopped me cold. Not because they’re necessarily the band’s best, or hold the band’s best song, but because there’s no skippable track anywhere on them. Every song earns its place. Nothing you’d reach over to skip. That’s the whole standard, no skippable song, and it’s rarer than it sounds.

And lastly: jazz. I want to discuss that era, that scene, the music theory, the politics, and its parallel to the DIY punk underground I keep circling back to. If I’m lucky, I’ll even get to sit down with a few of the people who were actually there.

That’s the plan. Thanks for being here for the first one, it only took a few years and a few patient friends to get me to start. The next one won’t take nearly as long.

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