There was darkness. There was hope. Somewhere around 36,000 feet above the ground between Seattle and Fairbanks the two were wrapping themselves together in my soul, arriving through drop-D tuning. As I sat in my seat, hitting rewind for the near 100th time on my CD player, something within me was stirring.

Marine Corps boot camp fresh in my memory, a few days home on the horizon and the soundtrack to a movie I’d yet to see — Singles — in my ears, I gazed out the window and felt that maybe, finally, a shift was coming. Skipping past Mudhoney, past Mother Love Bone, Alice in Chains’ “Would?” was the object of so many touches to my CD player and in that deeply dark sound, I was finding hope.

Fairbanks, home, was an absolute whirlwind. I’d left abruptly without notice and needed to spend some time explaining things to folks — not least of which was the 50-pound weight loss I’d undergone in just three months, making me nearly unrecognizable to most. Patrick and I had stopped into the Market Basket in North Pole, picking up something for Mom. Tina, our dear friend from high school, happened to walk by. I called her name, she didn’t hear, so I spoke louder. She turned, recognizing Patrick but looking at me without recognition, her eyes narrowing as she tried to place me and then going wide as the puzzle piece snapped into place.

“Maurice?!” her voice escaped, not confident in her question. During our sophomore year Tina had decided that I looked more like a Maurice than a Benjamin — so sayeth the shepherd, so sayeth the flock. I was Maurice to my friends from that moment.

“Yep,” I replied as a wave of confidence filled me. I’d always had a thing for Tina and standing there proudly in my new body, I was brimming with optimism.

We hugged, exchanged a few words and then went our separate ways. Mom’s last-minute assignment of picking up some items at the grocery store was a mere diversion to my true mission some 13 miles down the road in Fairbanks.

“So where to next?” Patrick asked as we jumped into the car.

“Pizza Plus, see Dawn and Rick and then Fred Meyer, man — I’ve got to get that Alice in Chains album,” I replied.

One thing worth noting: Patrick is about as close to me as any one person can possibly get — we’re Irish twins, him born in January of ‘75, me February of ‘74. We shared almost everything growing up and neither of us was ready to fall asleep until we’d chatted for at least a few minutes, each of us in our bed, about the day’s events, why we were mad at the other, or whatever needed to be said. We shared a room every day of our lives until I left for the Marine Corps. All these years later, we still spend most Saturday mornings up in the wee hours before our collective households are awake, chitchatting about life, music, and whatever else comes our way.

Grunge had already done the necessary work of displacing hair metal bands by that time and thank God. I’m not going to sit here and say that everything from that era was horrible — there were a lot of amazing songs released. But. It would be a massive stretch to suggest that any of those bands were populated by decent human beings. Nothing turns my heart a darker color than thinking of the recent resurgence of bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Skid Row.

We made the stop at The Plus, spent some time there before we finally headed down College and pulled into Fred Meyer — away from the main store and the separate music shop. Immediately grabbing Dirt, I took a few minutes to see what else was available. This was 1993 and release after release was absolutely amazing — the biggest issue at the time was the lack of funds to get everything I wanted. I grabbed Dirt, Nevermind and Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? All I wanted to hear for the long car ride home was Dirt.

But it wasn’t to be. After much discussion we settled on Nevermind and I promptly got swept up in the tsunami that was Nirvana. Already a fan through a friend’s cassette a few years earlier, catching this wave wasn’t much of a shift for me. I was a fan and for a spell, the only thing I cared about was this band, Alice in Chains temporarily set aside for the moment. My leave came to an end and I was on a plane, heading for Camp Pendleton and life as a newly minted United States Marine.

I must have looked like an absolute lost lamb wandering around the streets of Oceanside, taking everything in, not enough hours in the day to absorb everything I was trying to make a part of me. The music was alive in ways I’d never experienced. We had our share of outdoor concerts growing up but when summer is limited to a few months a year with the rest of the year in some state of freeze, there tend not to be many opportunities — let alone an amphitheater with an ocean backdrop. Music to me was something experienced in the dark of your room, on a long bus ride, or in the seat of your car, not with ten thousand of your closest friends all sharing the same space, all moving with the same rhythm. But none of that prepared me for Lollapalooza 1993.

I had dreamed about this festival for years. Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction threw the first one together in 1991, envisioned as a farewell tour for his band. But it picked up steam and just kept going — I hoped it lasted long enough for me to make one. A copy of Rolling Stone spread open across the steering wheel of my 1984 Nissan pickup, I fantasized about finally getting out of Alaska and being somewhere this show was playing. I’d already missed Ministry, I’d already missed Nine Inch Nails — I didn’t want to miss any others, ever again. So when my Marine buddy Richard asked me if I wanted to go, it was a no-brainer. I coughed up the last bit of money I had, bought a ticket and waited. August 7 finally rolled around and four of us loaded up on an Amtrak in Oceanside, destined for Los Angeles — or more specifically the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area in Irwindale.

If you’ve not looked at the lineup for the show, and why would you have if you weren’t there, the lineup was simply out of this world. The second stage was packed with Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Front 242 and Babes in Toyland. And that was the second stage. Main stage? Arrested Development, Fishbone, Dinosaur Jr., Primus, and Alice in Chains.

It was absolutely sweltering that day and the biggest trick was avoiding sunburn and dehydration for the day-long event. There was a moment halfway through the day I felt almost as though I had an out-of-body experience — I genuinely could not believe what I was seeing, what I was hearing, what I was feeling. The music, the energy of thousands of fans crushed into the tight space. I’ve often wondered what it felt like to have seen Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones when they were still young, still unknown — my story is seeing Rage Against the Machine and Tool when they were still mostly unknown, playing second stage at a traveling music festival.

The sun finally began to set and with it the temperature began edging down ever so slightly. Primus erupted onto the stage and Les Claypool dazzled the crowd for nearly an hour with his theatrical stage antics and masterful bass lines. As much as I loved the show and am a huge Primus fan, I was here for Alice in Chains, the final act. The heat, the lack of water, the sunburn — all of it led to this moment.

A curtain of chains descended upon the stage and the dark, foreboding bassline of “Angry Chair” erupted from the speakers. It’s no understatement to say the crowd erupted into bedlam as the band exploded into their set, Layne in his signature dark sunglasses — if only we’d known — and for twelve songs, I was swept up in a moment that still leaves me slightly taken aback to this day. People were climbing the chain net and diving into the crowd, mosh pits opened and closed across the throng of people and the music drove a generation.

The ride home on the train was a blur, my mind too overwhelmed, too sensory overloaded to properly place what I’d just seen — so I just stared out the window into the passing darkness, the occasional lights of an approaching town the only indication movement was happening. If someone had looked close, I would have had to explain away a few tears — not tears of sorrow, not even tears of joy, tears of release. Tears that come whether you want them to or not, when you’re so overwhelmed and the energy has to go somewhere.

Few things are certain in this world. One certainty is that life will continue moving forward. I moved around Camp Pendleton offices, landing at the Division Information shop. I moved homes, coming to rest in an apartment complex just outside the back gate. A terrible decision on a marriage left me struggling to figure out how to pay rent and thus a revolving cast of characters — or perhaps, more precisely, a revolving cast of wallets — took up residence in that Oceanside apartment. At different times I shared a room, slept on the couch, slept on the floor — whatever it took to never move back to the barracks.

Very few nights found me alone and on those chance occasions where everyone else had something better to do, I would drift off to my headphones. I would upgrade to a stereo system courtesy of one of those rent-to-own places, trading my headphones for club speakers. Richard was gone, Jason was gone, Gary was gone, Tim was gone. I slipped Dirt into the CD player, turned it up as loud as I could without a visit from the property manager, stretched out on my couch and closed my eyes.

My dad was a career military man, having done 20 years in the Army. When he finally retired, he immediately went to work as a civilian doing the exact same thing he’d done in the military — running mess halls. Reagan came along, my dad voted for him, both times, because military votes Republican. Reaganomics set about restructuring the federal workforce, one part of an economic policy that worked to increase the gap between the poor and the rich. Alongside the cocaine, decadence, and the highest highs for the wealthy, stagnation, real wage loss and economic downturn was the consequence for those on the lower economic scale. This is where the hollowing out of the middle class began in earnest and in our home some thirty miles outside of Fairbanks, we felt it.

Out of a job with six mouths to feed, a mortgage and the ever-escalating expenses of living in an environment that made everything harder, my dad finally landed work handing out basketballs at the base gym. I was too young at the time to understand what was going on, but some rule about laid-off federal workers gave him rehire rights for anything that came along on the federal side — so he handed out basketballs and wiped down weights at the base gym.

By the time I was alone in my Oceanside apartment, Clinton was in office. Maybe it was him as president, maybe it was this exact moment in my life — separation from the Marine Corps just down the road, my life about to get going — or something else entirely still unknown, but I felt a shift. The opening chaos of “Rain When I Die” filled the darkened room, the droning harmony of Cantrell and Staley giving it voice as Cantrell’s guitar wah-wahed through the opening. Nirvana may have been the generational lightning rod, Soundgarden may have had the voice in Cornell, but no one did dark harmony like the combination of Staley and Cantrell. Locked in, their voices wrapping around each other as they sang “She won’t let me hide / She don’t want me to cry,” a thought running counter to the music was beginning to take shape inside me. Those lyrics operate on three levels simultaneously: the drug, the witness, death itself. Staley was already living inside the album he was making. And somewhere amidst all of that, I felt like everything was going to be okay.

And for just a moment, it was.

Walking down Washington Street in Sonora, my 12-year-old nephew in tow on loan from his Wyoming family, we turned up the stairs into the venue, Black Bomb. There was a band playing tonight that I was keen to see — Aaron had clued me in, they had talent. Added bonus? Their guitarist, Cash, was the son of an old Army and Forest Service friend, Shawn. I hadn’t seen Shawn in a spell, so the chance to catch up was a nice addition to seeing the band. Wicked Ambition blistered through their set. Aaron was right. For being so young — the bassist still in high school — these kids held promise. Through no fault of the band, it wasn’t their originals that stopped me cold. It was their cover of Alice in Chains’ “Rooster” that transported me back to that couch in Oceanside, and a feeling of heartbreak washed over me.

Without ever directly expressing it, grunge broadly, Alice in Chains specifically, came loaded with promise and hope. They gave voice to darkness and forced a generation to sit with that darkness, own it. Implied in the albums they made — if you can sit with this, you can get through everything. But the promise fell apart. Kurt committed suicide in 1994, Alice in Chains played their last show in 1996, Layne found dead in his Seattle apartment in 2002. Pop punk exploded onto the scene as the whole culture decided it couldn’t look into the mirror grunge had put in front of them. Alice in Chains asked us to look deeper. Collectively, we blinked.

Some of us didn’t.

Sitting in front of my records, I pull Dirt from the shelf, dust off the record and move the stylus to the grooves. The couch in my house is eerily similar to the one I had in Oceanside — that one black, this one brown. Waves of emotion wash over me as a sense of betrayal rises. But that’s not right. All that hope I felt hearing this record for the first time — that wasn’t naivety. Those bands, those records, they earned it. Our culture just failed to deliver. But something deeper begans to take shape as I saw my 20-year-old self stretched out on that couch — that album gave me hope, gave me the armor to face the space between then and now. You’re going to have moments that will outshine anything you’ve felt up to this point. Some of those moments are going to leave scars so deep they still mark you today, but you can’t stop. People are going to try and tear you down, situations are going to seem impossible, but you can’t stop. Maybe the culture didn’t deliver, but you can. Fuck every single one of them. Get up. Keep going.

Album of the Week: The Afghan Whigs — Gentlemen (1993)

By 1993, the Afghan Whigs had already spent years proving they didn’t fit the Sub Pop mold. Cincinnati rockers who stood out among the grunge roster for their soul influences, splitting the difference between Hüsker Dü and Prince, they’d built a reputation on brooding, off-kilter records before jumping to a major label. Gentlemen was that jump, recorded largely at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Greg Dulli producing, released October 5, 1993 on Elektra.

I hit this record hard in my early twenties, full hormonal force, a young man coming into his own adulthood with all the swagger and sneer that entails — and Gentlemen has swagger and sneer to spare. It took years, and more importantly actual experience, to hear what was really on the record. What I once heard as pure attitude I now hear as something closer to confession.

The title is the album’s first joke, and its cruelest one. Dulli intended it ironically — the record chronicles a bitter breakup, guilt, manipulation, self-righteous anger, and raw, unhinged obsession, all filtered through a narrator playing a character while genuinely seeking catharsis. This isn’t a breakup album in the diaristic, wounded sense so many alt-rock records of the era leaned on. Dulli casts himself as the villain of his own story and dares you to still find him charismatic.

What keeps Gentlemen from collapsing into pure ugliness is the same thing that made the Whigs outsiders on Sub Pop in the first place — the soul. Dulli’s clearly studied Stax and Al Green as closely as he’s studied punk, and that tension between grimy alt-rock guitar and genuine R&B phrasing gives the record a swagger most confessional rock albums don’t have. It sounds seductive even when the lyrics are indefensible, which is the whole, uncomfortable point.

I still love this record, but I see it more clearly now for exactly what it is — the ugly breakup album, dressed up as a strut. Dulli remains, in my book, one of the most underrated songwriters of his generation, and Gentlemen deserves a lot more shelf space in the conversation than it gets.

Dominic lost his right leg three years ago. Coincidentally it was about that same time K and I made a deliberate decision to visit Wyoming family every year for an extended period over the summer. Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger and one of the perils of having children later in life is the risk they’ll miss knowing extended family.

The men in this family have always been early risers. Maybe, as with so many things, it all started with Dad, spending so much time in the military and then running a house of five kids forty-five miles away from their school. Whatever the case may be, Dom came limping out of his bedroom and plopped down at the table. Dad and I were already on our second cup of coffee and the sun was just shaking the cobwebs.

“Where you off to, bud?” I said to Dom as I handed him a cup.

“Gotta take Bluey for a walk,” he responded as he took his cycle of medications.

Bluey was a rescue. Some wildly comic mix of corgi and heeler rolled up in an affable grumpy old sausage body. Bluey had three legs.

“Let’s talk Casper when you get back,” I said.

“Allright, but are you sure you don’t want to do Billings?” Dom said as he walked out the door.

I returned to my conversation with Dad as Dom walked out the door. Dammit, I’m going to Sonic Rainbow. I texted Patrick who’d recently moved to Grants Pass, Oregon, one of the five and my second in command. I’m the oldest, Patrick is 11 months younger than me.

“You ever been to Sonic Rainbow?”

Blue Dots

“I think I went there once with you back in the day, why aren’t you going to Billings?”

What the actual fuck here … these two taterheads have lived in Sheridan for this many years and they’ve never made it to Sonic Rainbow? I let it slide. He’s right, back in 08 we made the trek to Ernie November’s in Cheyenne for the first ever Record Store Day and shortly after that I dragged him to Sonic Rainbow.

“I’m buying you a t-shirt, is there anything you’re looking for?” my thumbs connecting to my brain and send.

Blue Dots

“If you can find it at a reasonable price, I’m looking for a copy of Pablo Hony.”

Normally Pat would have headed over to see Jesse at Time Machine Records. Since moving to Grants Pass he’s become a regular customer at the little record store and struck up a friendship with Jesse, owner of the store. For reasons unknown, the Radiohead record has eluded them, which says something. Time Machine Records is generally considered the best record store in the country that isn’t in a major city. Jesse is the hinge point, stocking the store with records he would listen to, with all the personality you’d want in a store run by its owner. But greatest record store not in a major city? Sonic Rainbow has some thoughts on that claim.

You ever been somewhere and you just knew instantly you were home? Maybe it was a new city or a new apartment, but somehow it just felt right? I have this theory, as much as we like to think we control things, we don’t — the universe has an incredible sense of humor. Not in any sort of ten commandments way, more in your gloriously off his rocker uncle in the basement playing with his revolutionary war toy soldiers. You’ve learned to ignore the occassional hoop and holler coming from below but every so often something catches your attention. We don’t pick places or things, they pick us and they find us at the right moment. Sonic Rainbow picked me.

Casper, Wyoming isn’t the sort of place most people would consider for a vacation. It’s north enough to be damn cold and east enough to be desolate. Cows intermixed with prongies and oil rigs dotting a landscape that resembles its residents — weathered and worn but built for the fight. Something truly strange took place in this northern Wyoming town as it clawed its way back from the devastating closure of the Amoco refinery in 1991 — an unlikely punk scene emerged. Suddenly, all those abandoned warehouses and other spaces became performance venues for the myriad of noisy punk bands formed by disaffected and bored youth. Into that landscape stepped Jude Carino, one half of the ownership team of Sonic Rainbow, with a dream. Sonic just celebrated their 30th anniversary as a Casper institution in 2025.

A whole lifetime ago I lived in Wyoming managing a newspaper, the Pine Bluffs Post, at the extreme southeast of the state. I was also a member of the Wyoming National Guard and made my way up to Casper once a month. Mere was one of my Soldiers with the unit. When she wasn’t busy college-ing or soldiering, she worked at Sonic Rainbow. We would, when circumstances allowed, ditch drill early and make our way to the record store at 140 S. Center St — her to connect with her music family, me to dig through crates. We’re talking sometime around 2009; vinyl was still a footnote to everyone beyond the die-hard and collectors. Within those walls, you could feel the family, the shared inside jokes, stories of everyone’s favorite obnoxious customer and of course what each of us was listening to at that moment. Mere turned me on to Volbeat and the Airborne Toxic Event because they were selling out at Sonic Rainbow. Some months later, Mere would find herself deployed with me to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — where we collected Fidel Castro bobbleheads, stories for the day job and sea glass because it was pretty — but that’s a song for another day.

Dom walked back in the door. We’d been talking about Bad Religion the day before — how Generator was his favorite album and mine was Recipe for Hate.

“Dude, I didn’t know “Portrait of Authority” was on Recipe for Hate,” Dom says as he tossed the leash down and Bluey scampered to her couch.

“Told you it was fuckin’ good,” I snapped back.

Dom took his hat off, rubbed his leg and sat down.

“So have you really never been to Sonic Rainbow?” I ask, somewhat incredulous.

To be fair, Dom was never much of a driver, and the loss of a limb wasn’t helping matters. He proudly wears a t-shirt that reads — don’t pull my leg, no really, it’ll come off. So I had to cut him some slack, just maybe not so much as to take his other leg.

“Never made it there, dude, always wanted to, just never did.”

“Cool,” I said, dropping the sigh of authority only an older brother can. “We’re going tomorrow and the monkeys are coming with us.”

Sheridan to Casper is just over a two-hour drive. I had wanted to get on the road around 8 a.m. as Sonic Rainbow opened around 10 and I didn’t want this to be a trip that went into the evening as I am wont to do. The monkeys had other plans so about 9 we pulled out of Sheridan and eased onto Interstate 90. As the miles unfolded Dom and I talked the talk of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in more than a year — how’s our brother Shaun doing, music, how are Mom and Dad doing, music, you hungry, yep I’m hungry, music — with an occasional interjection from the back seat as the boys lobbed tangents from underneath their headphones.

“I don’t know what Shaun’s going to do when Mom and Dad pass,” Dom says, talking about our somewhat troubled brother.

“Me either, man,” I sigh, knowing this problem we’ve debated for nearly twenty years wasn’t getting solved in Shaka, our 2016 Xterra. The monkey’s say it came from the name of a dragon in one of the books they were reading, I’ll allow it, but I prefer to think it’s after the warrior king.

Pulling off the interstate I tossed Dom my phone.

“Navigate me the last few miles,” I said to him.

“Cool. Turn left at the next light,” Dom replied.

I wasn’t expecting downtown Casper to be as busy as it was but we circled the block a few times looking for a place to park. We tumble out of the car, stretch and make our way down the street. It’s been nearly 15 years since the last time I walked this sidewalk, but there it is and except for a few new stickers on the door, it looks exactly the same.

“Hoooollllly Shit,” Dom exclaims as we walk down the narrow store doing an initial glance at the records in their crates. There’s the new releases, there’s the punk, there’s the metal. Tristan runs up to me and tugs at the bottom of my shirt.

“Daddy, where’s the kids’ section?”

Directing Tristan to the counter, I have him ask the clerk, who looks slightly taken aback by the question. He thinks for a second and then moves from behind the counter and directs Tristan and Lucien to a crate tucked between the soundtracks and the bargain bin. I chat the fella up as we walk to the back of the store.

“Been about 15 years since the last time I was here,” I say.

“Oh really, wow,” he says with that polite retail banter that’s hearing what you’re saying even if not completely interested.

“Yeah, one of my Soldiers, Meredith, used to work here years ago and we would come over after drill.”

He stops, sort of turns and looks at me with a quizzical expression — “Wait, Meredith?!”

“Yep — wait, did you know her?!” I replied.

“Oh hell yeah, that’s awesome — what’s she up to now?”

Now we’re friends.

Dom digging through the 7-inches, the monkeys working together to dig through the kids’ section, I shot Mere a text.

“Visiting fam in Wyo — made an intentional stop in Sonic Rainbow in honor of you and to add to my collection!”

Mere is a notoriously bad texter; it may take days for her to get back to a message, but it’s also totally understandable. An absolutely fabulous and committed full-time elementary school teacher and single mother to two young adult children, she has her hands full. Soon after we returned from Guantanamo she hightailed it out of Wyoming for the Pacific Northwest, a lifelong dream of hers. I stuff my phone back in my pocket only to immediately feel the vibration against my body.

“Oh wow! That’s awesome <3!”

I pop her a photo of me with Dom in the background deep in the hunt.

“Are you still there?!” and I can hear the little squee Mere gets in her voice when she’s excited.

Tristan is struggling to reach the crates and I can see his frustration growing. They may be twins but that’s where the similarities end. Lucien came into the world at 6 pounds, 15 ounces; Tristan 3 pounds, 9 ounces.

I reach down, grab around his waist, hoist him up, resting his body against my waist. Content, he starts flipping through the records. I hand Lucien my phone, knowing full well what I’m asking. At seven years old, Lucien considers himself a maestro at everything he touches and everything he touches becomes a process.

“Take a picture of us?” I ask him.

He enthusiastically agrees.

“Ok, hold on, move to the left Daddy, look down brother, a little to the right.”

“Take the damn picture, monkey!” I say, my eyes widening a little with exasperation.

“Fine,” he responds and the shutter drop sound of the phone camera is audible.

Tristan and I go back to the soundtracks … wait a minute, holy crap, is that what I think it is.

“Tristan, flip back two albums.”

“This one?”

We negotiate the too many forward too many back until I see what I thought I saw — Flash Gordon, original soundtrack by Queen.

“Holy crap,” I mutter as I pull it out and immediately add it to my must buy pile. You just don’t find this in the wild I think to myself.

I send Mere the picture of Tristan and me.

“Just got here, passing the torch.”

Heart emoji

“Who’s behind the counter? If it’s a tall skinny guy with an epic mustache, that’s Brandon and you can tell him I say hi 😜”

I yell down the store — “Hey brother, I’m talking to Meredith right now, what’s your name?”

I make out that he used to be a customer and started working there a couple years ago but his name is lost to distance and din.

“It’s apparently a customer who came in a lot when you worked here.”

“Joe Eason?”

I yell back down — “Did you say Joe?”

He mumbles something and again comprehension and hearing are beyond my reach.

“Fuck maybe…. I’m fuckin’ deaf, I think he said Stink and I’m not asking again! 🤣🤣🤣” I text back.

Sorry man, whatever your name is, now it’s Stink.

I begin my search in earnest; Flash Gordon tucked under my arm, I saddle up to the new arrivals. I pull a Franz Ferdinand and a Dave Brubeck live record. Dom walks up to me thrilled about a Cherry Poppin’ Daddies 7-inch he found. We both go back to our search as I set my collection down and flip. Dropkick Murphys’ “The Gang’s All Here” comes into view and I pull it out — I should get this one.

“Dude, check it out,” I say to Dom and I hand him the record — I just broke the first rule of record buying — never, under any circumstances, pass a record without laying claim.

“Oh, that’s awesome,” Dom exclaims, “I love this record.” As he slides it into his must buys.

Dammit. Well, my mistake. I go back to searching and hear an excited glee come from Dom. I flip around all wide-eyed and ready to be wowed.

“Dude! Flash Gordon! This is so coming home with me!”

“Whoa, man, that’s mine,” I snap back, genuine concern filling me — Dropkicks conceded, I am not losing this one.

“The hell it is, I found it,” Dom says.

“Yeah, you found it in my stack,” I say, pointing to the stack of records that are, admittedly, sitting with all of the other records. “Not even a just-got-hired knucklehead is going to stack Flash Gordon, Dave Brubeck and Franz Ferdinand together!”

We make posturing facial expressions at each other for a minute and he finally gives in.

“Fine.”

Flash Gordon is safely back in my pile — Gordon’s alive!

We both go back to our search and I come across Pablo Honey and quickly text Patrick — “Still want it?”

The phone rings. It’s Patrick.

“What’s up, bud?” I say.

“How much is it?”

I give him the price and we chat while he thinks about it.

“Yeah, go ahead and grab it for me, please.”

I drop the call from Oregon and show Dom Patrick’s new score.

“Oh I so want that one,” Dom exclaims.

“Sorry bro, just got off the phone with Pat, grabbing it for him.”

“Dammit!” Dom exclaims and I start making my way to the counter feeling like I’d pushed my luck enough for one day.

Lucien and Tristan are both looking at the sticker book at the counter as Stink rings up my haul.

“Dude, tell you what, I’m gonna give you the Flash Gordon record for two bucks,” Stink says.

I can’t even get out a thank you before I hear Dom.

“What?! I lost the record and now you’re getting a discount on it?! Why universe, why?!”

We all laugh as the records are put into a bag. Taking one last look behind the counter, trying to write every moment to memory, I see it and a laugh erupts from me.

“What?” Dom asks, very confused by the moment, and I point to the bookshelf behind the counter.

Tucked away in all of the knick-knacks and toys — a Fidel Castro bobblehead and the universe laughs.

Who in their right mind puts “The Lemon Song” by Led Zeppelin on a mix tape for their eight year old son?

Oh wait, I gave the answer away already.

Well, no one ever accused my father of being in his right mind. Though he is left-handed. Appropriateness and the years it took me to fully understand exactly what in the world Robert Plant was singing about aside, a far more important seed was planted.

Like any seed, germination rates may vary and it took a hot minute before this one took root. But it took root solidly and this seed was transmission. There is a rather famous adage that goes “That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.”

Which is why, near 50 years later and a lifetime of spending my last nickel to see shows both grand and hyper local, trading mix tapes, then CDs, then playlists with friends, young, emerging artists still occupy my turntable and fill my headphones.

Battery Operated Orchestra and Brigette Rose recently published a substack piece entitled Slave To The Algorithm: Why Working Class Musicians Are Giving Up On Being Heard. I highly encourage you to go read it and then come back to this piece. In the article, BOO talks about the myriad issues facing musicians as they work to gain traction in a world more and more defined by social media algorithms and virality versus talent. There’s not much in the article I disagree with. I do think BOO left a very important piece of the equation off the table, that of the music fan, the music consumer. BOO frames the question as such:

The question for listeners is: what kind of music culture do we want? One where discovery is orchestrated by marketing agencies and every trend is potentially manufactured? Where our favorite artists spend more time strategizing TikTok hooks than writing songs? Or one where we have a human to human connection which grows organically. It might be slow, but just as good lumber is grown slowly with its rings closely pressed together, it will be strong.

And herein is where I think a category error has emerged. As I read it, the question is posed to music listeners the world over. There is no distinction between the truly passionate, truly engaged music lover and the casual fan, the one who can’t list a single band when you ask them what they listen to and they blithely answer – Oh, a bit of everything. These are not the type of people who are going to drive more than 100 miles to see their favorite artist nor are they the ones willing to stand in line for several hours waiting for the record store to open so they can snag the newest release.

A few months ago I was standing outside Rock Cellar Records in Truckee, California. It was a record store day event and I had called ahead to get a sense of how early I needed to be there. The voice on the other line assured me that an hour or two early and I should be fine, so by 8 a.m. the next morning stadium chair in hand I pulled up in front of the store. Not hugely to my surprise there was already a line. I set up and began chatting with the folks ahead of me.

“What time did you two get here?” I asked the two young ladies in front of me.

“Oh, we got here at 6 a.m. and drove from Reno,” they replied, looking for a copy of Bring Me the Horizon’s Lo-Files album.

This is not a casual fan.

The only real solution to this system is a culture change. When people stop inferring opinions from social media and start connecting directly with other people again.

The idea that we’re going to get that large a population to change their habits is, in my view, a non-starter. The casual listener has always been a problem for musicians as they have always been dictated less by passion for the music and more by the whims of the moment. In past decades that has been dressed in social acceptance and radio play; today that looks like TikTok hooks and social media moments. At the end of the day, to be successful music requires transmission from me to you and so on. Stripped back of all of the drag placed on it by corporate entities looking to squeeze the last dime out of anyone willing to play, that’s all social media channels are – transmission lines. Terrible transmission lines, but still.

But shouldn’t an artist work to engage these fans? To convert more casual listeners to dedicated fans? No. We shouldn’t. We’ve already noted an artist’s lack of time to be creative in the sea of obligations required to be successful. Why would one spend time trying to turn back the ocean when a more elegant solution is already in front of you. More directly engage those obnoxious, obsessive, outliers in the music community to do the work for you.

I can’t decide if the argument BOO makes is intentionally less confrontational than it should be but it feels a bit like a piece written in the moment of now. In this moment we’re less willing to go direct, to attack the source with language that leaves no question as to whom it is leveled. And so I will. Fuck the casual listener. At least in terms of your marketing plan.

Expecting them to be the saviors is like expecting weather to plant a forest.

Because here’s the trick – if you activate that small core of die-hard fans, the ones who were given a mixtape at a way too young age, who grew up with music as an indispensable part of their life, they’ll do the work for you and bring those fans along. Don’t fight the ocean, let the ocean do what it does best – bring nutrients from the ocean floor and wash them to the surface. The question shouldn’t be framed as posting less content, it should be whose hands are we going to ensure this lesser amount of content gets to.

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favor of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

But a return to what, exactly? “Tangible” and “real” aren’t destinations — they’re descriptions of a relationship, and relationships require someone on the other end. If artists are pulling back toward the hyper-local and scene-based, they’re pulling back toward us — the obsessive, the outliers, the ones who showed up at 6 a.m. in Truckee. BOO sees the shift coming but stops short of naming who’s standing on the other side of it. I’m not going to make that mistake.

I’m not exempt from this. I’m not some elder statesman dispensing wisdom from outside the system — I’m as much a node in the transmission lines now as my father was the day he handed me that mixtape. Music is one of the main things my oldest son Kerry and I talk about, tank crews and turntables apparently having more in common than you’d think. And in our house, music plays near constantly — not as a lecture, not as homework, just as the air my seven-year-old twins Lucien and Tristan breathe, the same unobtrusive infection my father gave me.

But it’s not just downstream. My brother Patrick has been a transmission line running the other direction for as long as I can remember, and there’s a core group — Hannah, Bethany, Aaron — who are every bit the obsessive outliers I am. We trade what we’re listening to, play snippets for each other, argue about it. None of this is algorithmic. None of it is optimized. It’s just people who care, talking to other people who care, the way it’s always worked.

I know it’s not fashionable to wear your heart on your sleeve about something as “trivial” as music. But some of us do. We bleed for this stuff. And that — not the algorithm, not the casual scroller, not the TikTok hook — is whose hands musicians should be fighting to get into.

BOO gets close. The piece gestures at a coming shift — artists pulling back toward the hyper-local, the scene-based, the real — but stops short of naming what that actually requires: not a better platform, not a smarter algorithm, just more people willing to be what my father was to me. The Who said it best, decades before any of this: the kids are alright. They always were. Someone just has to hand them the tape.

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There is a difference between a gatekeeper and a guide, and we have spent the better part of the algorithmic age confusing the two.

A gatekeeper hoards. A gatekeeper decides who gets in and who doesn’t, who deserves access and who should wait outside. Gatekeeping in music is real and it is corrosive — the velvet rope mentality that turns taste into a weapon and enthusiasm into a qualifier. Nobody should have to pass a test to love a record. Nobody should feel stupid for not knowing who produced it or what label pressed the first run. Music belongs to whoever needs it.

But a curator is something else entirely. A curator has done the work — the obsessive, unglamorous, deeply personal work of spending time with music that most people will never sit still long enough to hear. They’ve read the books, seen the biopics, followed the threads back to their sources. They know things not because they want to hold those things over you, but because they couldn’t help themselves. They fell in. And having fallen in, they reach back a hand.

We need curators. We need them more than ever, actually, in an age when algorithms have become the default recommendation engine for most people’s musical lives. Spotify knows what you’ve listened to. It does not know what you need to hear. It cannot feel the difference between a song that confirms your existing taste and a song that cracks something open in you. It has no heartbeat. And music — real music, music that matters — should always have a heartbeat. So should the recommendations behind it.

One of the threads that runs through nearly everything published here at Playin’ in a Traveling Band is the idea of transmission. Whether it’s a mixtape passed hand to hand, a dubbed cassette, a burned CD riding shotgun on a long road trip with your best friend, or a playlist published for the world to see — music exists to be shared. It has always relied on a grassroots exchange, that ancient and essential hey, you need to hear this, it’ll change your world moment passing from the hardcore devotee to the second-tier fan to the casual listener and back again.

This is the unseen infrastructure of music. For an artist to travel from garage band heroes to selling out stadiums, for the world to fall in love with the people on that stage, a dedicated corps of music lovers must exist in the undergirding, unwittingly ensuring the continued flow of discovery. They are not famous for this. They are rarely thanked for it. But without them the whole thing collapses.

I consider myself one of those people.

To be a music geek means more than a casual listen. It means reading the biographical books and going to the biopic and obsessively knowing the details that most people will never care about. I knew what halos were before most people knew who Nine Inch Nails was. That is not a brag. That is the passion and the vocation of a fan far left of the casual.

Vocation comes with obligations. The obligation, in this case, is to keep doing the homework. To keep listening with intention. To resist the comfortable groove of returning to the same records you already love and to remain open to being surprised, challenged, even uncomfortable.

So I have decided to embark on a journey.

The fine folks at the 1001 Albums Project have built something quietly remarkable. The premise traces back to 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, edited and curated by Robert Dimery, a freelance writer and editor who has contributed to numerous music publications. You sign up at their website. They serve you a random album from the list. You listen — maybe once, maybe two or three times. Four listens is my personal rule before I render a verdict. Then you write a short review and rate it, and only then does the next album unlock. You cannot skip. You cannot cherry-pick. You surrender the choice to the node and you stay until you have something true to say.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The generator is not just a randomizer. It is an accountability mechanism. It is saying: prove you were here.

I will be working through this list and sharing short reviews — a few hundred words, a star rating, an honest account of what happened when I actually listened. Some of these records I will love. Some will challenge me. Some may not land at all, and I will say so. What I will not do is phone it in.

I would love to hear your thoughts as we go — on the albums, on the project, on whatever the music dredges up for you.

Keep Listening,

Mr. B

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I used to think Iraq was the edge of the world. Seventeen or so miles north of Baghdad, Camp Taji felt like the last outpost on your way to Hell. Then I deployed to Guantanamo Bay. I know it seems counterintuitive but there’s something far more isolating about seeing the city lights, hearing the rich, vibrant thrum of life just outside your reach that is far more isolating than anything the Sunni Triangle threw at me. When you’re dying of thirst, is it better to have no water in sight or an oasis just beyond your grasp?

Remember back in the day when you could call into a radio station, speak to a live DJ and request a song? Maybe it was someone’s birthday, an anniversary, whatever – you called, somehow you got through, you nervously talked to that famous voice on the other side and then you waited.

Coleman was sitting at his desk across from me, my deputy there in Guantanamo. We were arguing about something inane as Soldiers and Sailors are want to do when we got on the subject of music. My routine in the morning, once I got into the office, was to connect to Seattle’s KEXP and let the calming voice of John Richards and his incredible The Morning Show fill my late morning and early afternoon.

“You’ll never get through,” Coleman said as he shot a look of smug assuredness pointed in my direction.

“Fuck you,” I shot back “Watch me.”

Picking up the phone, knowing I was about to violate several federal laws as well as play a game Russian roulette with our notoriously bad phone service, I dialed the code to get an outside line, I dialed the number – busy signal.

“Told you.”

Daggers.

I tried again, this time a tone.

“KEXP, this is John with the Morning Show, whadda wanna hear?”

A smile slowly made its way across my face as I turned to face Coleman.

“Hey John, good morning,” I stammered. “Listen, this is Ben, I’m calling from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and I was hoping you could play “Dry the Rain” by the Beta Band for all of us here in GTMO, maybe sell a record or two.”

“Cuba?” the voice replied. “Wow, ok – we’ll see what we can do, thanks for calling.”

And I waited.

About an hour or so later, we’re all getting ready to head to the chow hall for lunch. I think I hear the unmistakable shuffle drum beat and the slow guitar strumming and then the words “This is the definition of my life/ Lying in bed in the sunlight” I glance over at Coleman, a shit eating grin spreading over my face, give him a friendly smack on the arm and we make our way out the door.

For better or worse, radio has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up in rural Alaska, our mornings were filled with the news and country music sounds of 970 AM, KIAK. As soon as I was old enough to have a preference, my love became KSUA – the quirky and off-beat college station broadcasting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Here was where I heard Rocky Horror for the first time and learned of Sweet Transvestites and would stay up into the wee hours of a Friday night listening to the station’s three-hour metal program that kicked off sometime around midnight.

The Marine Corps was my ticket out of the frozen hinterlands and the culture shock going from Fairbanks to San Diego in late January of 1993 is hard to overstate. Marine Corps bootcamp has undergone major changes since I stepped foot on those golden footprints but back then your final week before graduation was spent in what they called service week. Essentially it was free labor for the Recruit Depot as recruits worked in the chow halls, mowed lawns and cleaned common areas of the barracks. I was assigned the barracks detail.

For the last 80 or so days I had been completely cut off from any culture so when I heard music coming from someone’s room it was like a moth being called to the flame. The song was magic, crushing and ear splitting at the same time delicate and all I would remember for the next few weeks was “But I’m a creep.” And the words “Equis tay erre ah efe eme Baja California Mexico – 91X.”

Back from boot leave and on to my first duty station, Camp Pendleton, I had a mission – find that song, find that radio station. Neither was hard, Radiohead’s “Creep” was blowing up across the nation and 91X was a San Diego institution going toe-to-toe with Los Angeles’ KROQ. In the early 90s San Diego was still pretty proud of its anti-LA character and hadn’t fully embraced it’s “America’s Finest City” identity. Los Angeles was spit and polish, San Diego was scrappy and edgy, Los Angeles had Richard Blade, San Diego had Michael “Hooligan” Halloran. Sandwiched between the two metros areas, I had them both.

In my car and in my office, the radio dial lived on 91x. And yet, a friend of mine from LA and I would, most nights, find ourselves parked on the beaches of San Clemente in Richard’s Dodge Neon, the better to hear Dr. Drew and Riki Rachtman give sex advice to an eager and young KROQ audience. For four glorious years, those two stations were the soundtrack and social calendar of my life. Concerts hosted by both consumed my free days and the in-between moments were filled with DJs electrifying my ears.

Near the end of my Marine Corps tenure, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While I was busy preparing to separate from a life of military service, Congress was busy separating radio stations from the local communities they served. Was this what they intended to do? I’m just jaded and cynical enough when it comes to national politics to believe that, at least at some level, enough of those casting votes knew exactly what the score was and how this would all go down. How else does one explain a law having the exact opposite effect of its stated goals? As stated, the act’s purpose was to promote competition by deregulating the telecommunications industry throwing off the yoke of ownership limitations and allowing anyone to enter any communications business.

In 1996 the two largest radio groups owned fewer than 65 stations each. Six years later Clear Channel alone owned 1,200. One third of all independent radio owners disappeared in that same window. In a short 25 years, KROQ went from a single-owner independent to a corporate asset inside a company owning hundreds of stations nationally – I heart radio, indeed. The station that knew your name, that played Creep before you knew what Creep was, that soundtracked your years was now being centrally programmed out of a warehouse studio thousands of miles away.

Thousands of miles away from my son, Kerouac, was where I found myself many years later – he in California, myself in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba the last long-term deployment of my military career. Kerry, as we called him, was a veteran of my deployments but this one was particularly hard – his mother and I were engaged in a nasty divorce.

As the senior enlisted member of my unit, I tried to make a point of staying out of sight from my troops during the off hours. In their infinite wisdom the Navy saw fit to stack nearly everyone in the same barracks area, so senior enlisted was living directly next door to junior enlisted – no one felt comfortable relaxing. So, I stayed behind closed doors as much as possible and listened to the radio streaming in over purchased internet connection. More often than not, my little computer speakers were pushing KEXP.

Unlike KROQ, KEXP forged a different path, one that made them functionally invisible to the buyers following the passage of the Telecom act. The station that is the heartbeat of Seattle started life as a plucky little college radio station with the call letters KCMU – 10 whole wats broadcasting from atop McMahon Hall at the University of Washington. What followed is a series of “they never gave up” type scenarios, any one of them could have been the stations death knell.

In ‘81 budgets forced them into a community supported, listener powered model. By 2001 KCMU had been through a decade of internal conflict and institutional drift that had left it in an awkward position. Somehow Microsoft becomes the hero in this story?! Well, not Microsoft but Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder.

Allen was a huge fan and didn’t want to see the station disappear. He worked with station employees to help navigate the process of leaving the university and becoming an independent station. The call letters were changed to KEXP in 2001 following the launch of a ten-year partnership with Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project. Ten years later, they’re keeping a lonely Soldier in Gitmo company.

Then the final, structural move that made KEXP permanently unconquerable? In 2014 the UW Board of Regents voted to formally transfer ownership of KEXP 90.3 FM’s broadcast license to the Friends of KEXP 501(c)3 nonprofit arts organization.

While Clear Channel and Infinity were busy buying anything with an audience and a broadcast license, I was busy keeping to my Guantanamo room looking for ways to connect with my son while keeping a low profile with my Soldiers. My mom would have said I should write letters and I did some of that but that never felt right – what eight-year-old kid wants to read a letter? Maybe a postcard with something quick and snappy, but a full-on letter? Sorry, Mom.

When we lived in Ohio, most days I would take him to kindergarten about 15 miles away from the house. I used this time to amp my little man up, get him in the right headspace for school and to me, amp up meant music! We’d kick the drive off with the Dropkick Murphys’ Cadence to Arms, a smattering of the Ramones and, assuming time allowed something current, whatever that may be. Fist pumping, steering wheel tapping, making the car dance between the lanes amp up. There may have been one or two mornings where he got to school slightly disheveled, shirt askance, hair needing a comb - looking like he’d just left a concert.

Darek Mazzone, KEXP’s evening DJ at the time was saying something through the speakers but it barely registered as I thought through some way to stay connected to my son so far away. My brain squirreled for a second and landed on how cool it was, that all the way here in GTMO, I could hear a Seattle DJ talking to me, damn technology is amazing. Wait a minute, holy fuck! This DJ is talking to me … I can talk to my son like this. WKRY was born.

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And so it began – over the next 8 months I would sit in my room microphone, headphones, computer and an early edition of Garage Band recording everything. Two songs and I would talk to him, tell him about my day, what I saw in the water, three songs, how things were going, what we were going to do when I got home, three songs, you’ll never believe what happened, dad advice of some sort, three songs, do your homework, listen to your mom, three songs, I love you, bud.

My biggest challenge was keeping my words to him in something that felt more like an overzealous DJ, excitable, maybe talking a touch too long but you felt his vibe and granted him the latitude and not turning the whole experiment into a long-winded audio book from Dad. A famous author once wrote that the only people for him were the mad ones, the ones who burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles. Speaking into a microphone in my 10x10 barracks room in Guantanamo — an oversized Clash poster looming over me — to my son in California. That was burning. It was the only thing I knew how to do.

Some of them made it to him, some of them didn’t; all of them were mailed into a divorce. Even in physical format, sometimes a broadcast suffers interference. KEXP kept me connected to the world in a place that made a habit of turning people into alcoholics, gym rats, bible thumpers or all of the above. And then it gave me the most important thing in the world, it gave me a way back to Kerouac.

The road not taken, while fun to speculate is something we can never know. What would have happened had KEXP not gone listener supported, had Paul Allen not infused his clout and cash into the system? Would there have been a phone call from Guantanamo to the Morning Show? Had the UW Board of Regents not transferred the broadcast license is there a WKRY? I have no idea and honestly, it’s something I prefer not to dwell on, the road taken was hard enough.

I got sole custody of Kerouac and to say things were difficult is putting it lightly. One little human fighting so hard to grow up while everything around him was imploding. Even if it’s a “good one” divorce is hard on kids, and this one was not good. We fought, we fought over the mundane and the important, over grades and girlfriends. At seventeen he dropped out of high school and moved in with a friend, at 18 he moved back to Ohio to be with his maternal grandparents, at 19 he joined the Army. Somewhere between bootcamp and advanced training he gave me a call.

“Hey Dad … you remember those radio station CDs you made for me when you were in Gitmo?” his voice filled with a new confidence, GED acquired, bootcamp conquered, tanker school on deck.

“Yeah of course,” I replied somewhat taken aback at the left-field inquiry. “Why?”

“Do you still have them anywhere? I’d really like to have them again.”

Something is in the air.

Aaron and I circled Harlow’s in Sacramento looking for parking, having just made the two-hour trek to see this show. I had convinced Aaron to make this trip with me, he wasn’t overly familiar with the night’s lineup of Faetooth, Iress and Nightosphere but we’ve learned to trust each other’s taste in music and he’s become my de facto concert companion.

We gave ourselves plenty of time to make the two-hour drive so of course we were extremely early. And that was when I first felt it. At 615 or so on a show that didn’t even begin until 830 there was already a line forming outside the venue.

“That’s odd,” I commented to Aaron “wouldn’t have expected that.” He agreed. I chalked it up to the warm spring evening. We found somewhere to park and made our way around the block, ostensibly looking for something to eat, mostly to just stretch our legs after the car ride.

Somewhere along Highway 99 just before we exited for surface streets, we’d started talking about the current state of music – the conversation picked back up as we ambled through Midtown – I pointed across the street to the park where one of my twins and I had spent hours playing while the other was in surgery just up the road.

“That was an interesting day,” I said as a moment of real fear washed back over me – I held it for just a second and moved on.

“Think about it,” I said to Aaron “they killed their golden goose and now they don’t know what to do about it.”

Our conversation had taken a turn toward the corporate greed of the music industry that ran headfirst into the streaming model at the expense of the artists. Did you know the average band on Spotify makes .003 per stream? Somewhere around the late 2000’s bands realized the only way to make a living was to hit the road.

“Yep,” Aaron replied. “Concerts became the go to and now no one can afford the damn ticket.”

We’re not breaking any new ground here — anyone who’s gone to a show in the last few years has uttered some version of those exact words. It all seemed to reach some kind of peak with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. That tour burned so brightly it blinded us to everything happening in its shadow. When a star that large finally burns out, you start to see what else is in the sky.

Do you think the kids watching the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June of ’76 had any idea they were witnessing history? When you’re busy being in the midst of something that notion doesn’t really occur to you. We all have visions of grandeur from time to time but there’s no way Bernard Sumner had any idea he and his friends would go on to form one of the most influential post-punk bands.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves -- as at this point the history is still to be written. Over the years I’ve found myself at the forefront of plenty a monumental occasion, so I will say at some level, I’ve got a gut for these things. There’s a revolution underfoot in the music scene and it’s being led by women.

But the parallels.

In 1973 economies the world over were crippled when the Arab members of OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. This isn’t a history lesson, but we need something of a framing to see history rhyming. This oil crisis caused crippling stagflation across the western world as a nearly 300 percent price hike trickled into all sectors of the western economy. Historians call this the lost decade for the British economy and on this side of the pond, the consequences were much the same. Any of this sounding vaguely familiar?

Social unrest caused by widespread unemployment fleeced what little remained in people’s pockets. And what was the establishment’s response? Doubling down in the form of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who came to power with a conservative outlook and an austerity gameplan. The economic misery of the mid-70s didn’t just create hardship — it created a generation with nothing to lose and nothing to believe in. The counterresponse was inevitable. You can only tell people there’s no future so many times before they start building their own.

The music industry didn’t need a conglomerate of oil producing nations implementing an embargo for its economic woes - this was a self-inflicted wound. The funny thing about making a deal with the devil is you always walk away thinking you got what you wanted. It’s always the devil who wins – Lucifer Morningstar is undefeated. Streaming was the devil’s bargain but deep in that contract was the algorithmic commoditization of art, the collapse of a fan driven support infrastructure, generative AI, and platform fatigue. The working musician didn’t just struggle — they nearly ceased to exist.

But no one told the underground musicians or the music lovers that such a diabolical deal had been struck. The message began reverberating out; the infrastructure is gone, your livelihood in jeopardy -- save yourself. Many a calamity facing our world today can be laid at the feet of the Covid pandemic but there is an interesting footnote – physical media sales began increasing and with it, the desire for something real, something beyond the algorithm. The message heard, scenes began reacting, coalescing, consolidating. Some version of this argument had been playing in a loop in conversations between Aaron and me -- tonight was no different.

“So what are you drinking tonight,” I asked Aaron as we stood at the bar. I had initially confused the line for Faetooth’s merch table for the bar line and had to ask a young man which was which. Directions received, I disengaged from the one to step into the other.

“Are you seeing this,” I asked Aaron as I handed him his drink. The merch line was across the bar. I spotted the man who had clarified things for me, in front of him was a young girl, she couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12. I walked back to him.

“Excuse me, is this your daughter?” I asked.

A hesitant look in his eye he gave me a nod and an affirmation.

“Dude, you are the coolest fucking dad in the world,” I said and walked back to Aaron.

By seven or so the place was mostly full as bodies jockeyed for stage position – Aaron and I had found a table and were sitting down for a minute somewhat in disbelief at what we were seeing as people continued to flow in. The spell was broken when a waitress came over and asked us if we’d like to purchase the table – um, no, so sorry, we’ll be moving along now.

By eight, moving from one side of the venue to the other had become a series of starts, stops, excuse me’s and finger gestures.

“How did you discover music when you were a kid,” I ask Aaron leaning in close to his ear the better to be heard over the din.

He thinks about it for a minute and while we’re twenty years apart in age, the answer is strikingly similar for the both of us.

The coolest friends were the ones who always had something amazing you needed to hear or you caught them lost in the music and you interrupted just long enough to ask them what they were listening to. After they got past their annoyance at the disturbance they would typically tell you with more detail than you could possibly imagine. Around my sophomore year of high school, I received a package from a friend of mine living in Seattle at the time - it was a TDK cassette tape with a note that read simply - LISTEN TO THIS. Scratched across the cassette tape were the words BLEACH. The closest we have today is the music we chose to accompany a social media post most notably on Instagram or TikTok. I was scrolling along one night and was stopped by an entry from my friend, Niki. We had recently become friends working together with the Sierra Mutual Aid network, a loosely formed group of like-minded individuals working to support each other in damn-the-man type stuff. I don’t even remember what Niki’s post was about, what I remember was being stopped cold when I heard the sounds of “October” by Faetooth coming from my phone.

The next morning I went to the bands webpage and ordered the vinyl of Labyrinthine. A few days and many streams of the album later I was looking up their upcoming shows – Sacramento, May 16. I immediately texted Aaron – whatcha doing on the 16^th? Wanna go see a fairy doom metal show? In Aaron’s typical deadpan the response was “Um, sure…”

Nightosphere was wrapping up. The three piece from Kansas City plays an interesting sleight of hand on the audience — members Claire Delaney and Brittany Sawtelle trade bass and guitar throughout the set, and the rule is simple: she who holds the guitar wrote the song. As the opener I came in, like many others I suspect, not knowing who they were. I went home with one of their CDs.

I am of the mind that concerts are best experienced with just a bit of intoxication – not stumbling drunk, not even slurred words drunk, just a slight letting down of one’s guard to better appreciate what is often new. I slide into the end of the bar, order another drink and watch as the band disassembles their set.

I am somehow both surprised and completely unsurprised when I look over and see Niki. She recognizes me as well and we both hug each other in something akin to deep recognition. She utters her disbelief in me being here – why do the cool kids never realize they’re cool? We talk for a few minutes, she introduces me to her partner and we separate, melting into the crowd.

Iress took to the stage.

Michelle Malley, Iress’ lead-singer and guitarist, is often cited as the Adele of Doom and the comparison holds. Commanding in presence and demanding in delivery, Malley forces you to hear her going from lilting and delicate to confrontational and powerful within a few breaths of each other. This was a band that had spent 16 years building their chops together. That cohesion and familiarity wrapped the crowd in a spell, drawing them closer with Malley’s delicacy before exploding them backward in a sonic assault.

Iress done, Faetooth in the wings, I made my way through the crowd to the bathroom. Maybe it’s cause I’m 52 and kind of just don’t care all that much anymore but coming back from the bathroom I spotted a concert poster of the night’s show on the wall. Quick look left then right, pulled it down, rolled it up, stuck it in my pocket and made my way back to the side of the stage.

All three of the acts on that Friday night stage at Harlow’s were amazing. Every single one of them deserves your time. They deserve your money so they can keep doing this.

For the uninitiated doom metal carries a significant amount of weight and most of it wrong. What comes to your mind? For many, it brings forth images of Phil Anselmo – esque guys, shirtless, sweating, guitars screaming in an unabashed display of testosterone. In the hands of the women, it becomes something else entirely. To be sure Faetooth is heavy, they can grind with the best of them but if the boys bring the obvious, the girls bring the suggestion – the suggestion of menace, of an atmosphere that will transport you to the land of nightmares. The play here is not to intimidate you with a vulgar display of power but instead to merely whisper something in your ear and let your imagination do the rest.

Aaron and I make our way toward the front of the stage. At the edge of my awareness I feel a presence and turn to see Niki’s partner next to me, Niki next to him. We all embrace, talking over each other about Iress, about what’s coming. My triangle is complete — to my right the one who brought me, to my left the one I passed it to. A woman, Niki, started this as we all marvel at the women on stage. Nascent though it may be — the gauntlet has undeniably been thrown down — it’s our turn.

Faetooth took to the stage opening the set with the album’s initial entry – Iron Gate. As strong a show opener as it is on the album, the song begins with a slow, chugging bassline and a meditative drum rhythm that establishes a hypnotic and chant-like energy. From this very moment you feel it in your bones — these three women are channeling something ancient, something ritualistic. Whatever misgivings you had when you walked through the door slip away as you come under the band’s charm. For more than an hour they lead you on the journey they want you to take, let us pray you have Charon’s obol in your pocket.

While the team of Ari May and Jenna Garcia are both credited with vocals on the album, it was Jenna who drew me in – her voice was the scream of a fae scorned and hell was in her wake. This is a doom metal outfit after all and doom metal is anchored by the bass guitar. Rah Kanan drove the whole thing from behind the kit, buried behind the amps and stacks the way drummers in small venues always are — felt more than seen, the invisible architecture everything else is built on. Holding her Dunable Gnarwhal Jenna’s presence feels almost impossible, this tiny, petite woman screaming with a fury that summons demons while driving the band forward with an instrument nearly as long as she is tall. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe that such a person could bring forth such Valkyrie like power.

The set ends and I feel I’ve been released from a trance. Exhausted Aaron and I make our way back to his car. In an ultimate, embarrassing call back to my younger days through a series of events for the both of us, we’re taking Aaron’s Mom’s car. Aaron unlocks the door and I turn, stretching one last time before the journey home. About 50 feet in front of me I see the young father and daughter walking away. I don’t know what to yell out but an impulse is pulling me so I yell out DAD and he stops and turns. I run up to him, pull the slightly crumpled poster from my pocket – I look at him, I look at her.

“For your daughter, man – have a good night.”

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Is there a direct connection between quality and satisfaction? I think if one is to honestly engage in the vinyl versus CD conversation then this framing must be considered. Compact Discs reproduce sound at a higher fidelity than vinyl records – that fact is indisputable.

I’m the type of person who likes to gaze upon a sunset and still have my breath taken from me by the sublime natural beauty. I have an understanding of how the properties of light refraction impact the hues performing their symphony as colors blend into each other, the sun slipping beneath the horizon. That knowledge neither adds to nor subtracts from the wonder. The wonder simply is. I think vinyl records are of higher quality. Let’s get into it.

The vinyl versus CD debate is just the latest iteration of a conversation that has been happening since humans first tried to reconcile what they could measure with what they could feel. Nietzsche framed it as Dionysian versus Apollonian, Pirsig shifted things around slightly and developed the romantic versus classical. In our more common vernacular, we might think of art versus science — you and me, we see it as vinyl versus CD.

Pirsig’s argument probably serves us the best in this conversation, but this is a landscape we must tread through carefully. Pirsig wrote what is arguably one of the most important, accidentally philosophical, novels with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Published in 1974 (coincidentally, the same year I was born), Pirsig’s novel was deeply polarizing, initially drawing extravagant praise from literary heavyweights before facing academic backlash and mixed reception from later readers — where have I heard this song before? Over the course of more than 400 pages Pirsig guides us through a conversation that focuses on the pursuit of quality through his alter ego, Phaedrus. Named after a figure in Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus was a ruthlessly logical philosophy professor whose obsessive pursuit of the definition of quality drove him to insanity. As Phaedrus, Pirsig lost his mind — as the book’s author he found his way back.

Pirsig writes: “A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.”

And here is where a motorcycle becomes relevant to our conversation. Pirsig’s novel unfolds as the story of two characters — one, our narrator who lovingly maintains his bike through a cross-country journey, the other, Phaedrus, who loses his mind chasing an idea. I don’t know about you, but before I drop the needle, I wipe down my record removing the dust, visually inspecting it for anything that could impede playback. The vinyl listener is the narrator. The audiophile chasing ever higher resolution digital formats is Phaedrus. Compact Discs are just one milepost on Phaedrus’ march toward insanity. If we continue down this road then we must consider high-resolution digital audio — demonstrably superior to the CD — thus leaving vinyl in the dust. The pursuit for quality, for perfection consumes us and we keep marching as technical advancement improves quality while ultimately subtracting from what got us here in the first place — the music.

Pirsig eventually found his way to the ancient Greeks but may have arrived too late — had he encountered H.D.F. Kitto’s concept of aretē earlier, he might have saved himself considerable anguish. Pirsig can be forgiven for not coming to Kitto sooner — renown in academic circles does not always equate to cultural relevancy, a consideration we deep lovers of music are all too familiar with. Throbbing Gristle, anyone?

According to Kitto, aretē implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency... or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

Compact discs are man in service of the machines chasing a zero-sum game of an ever-dwindling, quantifiable definition of quality where 1s and 0s capturing dynamic frequency ranges become the singular defining characteristic. Vinyl is machines in the service of man that in its own imperfect reproduction of a moment in the studio is quintessentially more human. Who doesn’t have flaws? We fool ourselves in the impossible pursuit of perfection — our humanity is found in those moments where we embrace those imperfections and more fully become them.

The house is impossibly quiet, only the hum of the HVAC system and the shuffling of my feet disrupt the silence. My feral monkeys are with the love of my life, their mother, on a road trip to Wyoming, so it’s just me. Flipping through my records, I land on my father’s copy of L.A. Woman by The Doors. Pulling it from the dust jacket, I can’t help but wince slightly as the light, surface scratch caused by my brother and me many, many years ago comes into focus — I know from experience it won’t affect the record but it’s a reminder. I wipe the record down, slip it onto the turntable and drop the needle. The crack and pop, even after the deep cleaning, fill the speakers before ‘The Changeling’ breaks on through. I know I could sit down at my computer, open Amazon or something similar and tomorrow have a brand-new CD of this recording. Not a doubt in my mind the quality would be better but as I slip into my chair and let the music surround me, I am deeply satisfied.

Ever wondered what Radiohead might sound like if they’d grown up playing in Dublin pub sessions and the music was four hundred years old? Let me introduce you to Lankum. More specifically, let me introduce you to 2023’s False Lankum.

But like Radiohead, the version of Lankum that made False Lankum had to be earned. The four piece band consisting of brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac MacDiarmada, began in 2014 as Lynched — named after the brothers’ surname until the word’s darker associations made the name untenable — releasing Cold Old Fire before becoming Lankum proper in 2017 with Between the Earth and Sky -- each record darker, heavier and more ambitious than the last.

Pathways mean something here. How can they not? At their core, Lankum is an Irish folk band breathing new life into music handed down from generation to generation. There are rules involved here and Lankum works to break every one of them -- how else do you make an album that aspires to heavenly beauty while reveling in devilish cacophony? If you’re thinking happy-go-lucky Irish jigs, disabuse yourself of that notion immediately. The band holds kinship closer to the likes of Sunn O))) than The Dubliners.

Like so many in our current era, Covid lockdowns became a defining moment for Lankum. Preparing a performance to be livestreamed from Ireland’s historic Abbey Theatre titled A National Disgrace, the band hit upon an epiphany — weave all their songs together into a single continuous piece.

“Figuring out how to make a song slowly morph and grow into another, even if there was nothing matching it,” said guitarist Daragh Lynch.

That revelation became the cornerstone of False Lankum — twelve interconnected songs unfolding across an epic seventy-minute duration, less a collection of songs than a symphony imitating the sea: crashing waves punctuated by deceptive moments of tranquility.

And then there are the fugues – three short, abstract soundscapes serving as intermissions. Recorded as one continuous improvisation and then dissected, the fugue is allowed to serve double duty as musical interlude and that psychological state in which a person loses all sense of identity.

If the fugues dissociate you, then Radie Peat’s vocals ground you. The accolades laid at Peat’s doorstep almost certainly would make her blush. Otherworldly, fierce, like moonlight playing on swirling dust … the Irish Examiner called her one of the great modern voices in folk or any other music. While the cynical listener might scoff at this, the album’s opening track forces you to see the error of your ways. Peat’s voice stands alone for the song’s first sixty seconds demanding you follow her on a journey into the story of a young girl who died for love, four hundred years in the telling.

“Go Dig My Grave” arrives in Lankum’s songbook carrying centuries of grief. A traditional ballad that travelled from the British Isles to the Appalachian Mountains and into the hands of Jean Ritchie, who recorded it memorably with Doc Watson at Folk City in 1962. Peat, who learned the song by hearing Ritchie’s recording, carries that lineage forward into something altogether darker. Where Ritchie’s version is an Appalachian folk ballad, Peat and Lankum turn the song into a nine-minute, doom-folk dirge filled with Irish keening (a vocal lamentation for the dead) and a chilling mix of traditional instruments used in nontraditional methods to create a terrifying wall of sound. And just like that, the stage is set for everything that follows.

Of all the considerable baggage this album carries, perhaps none is more insidious than its method — the way Lankum excavates the darkness buried inside these songs and refuses to let you look away. In an interview with The Attic, Ian Lynch described what he feels as the band’s manifesto.

“In the past, Irish music was misrepresented in a way that it was all really happy, upbeat and frivolous. But there is another aspect to it — very dark and much grittier, which usually people don’t realize — so we really enjoy finding morbid dolls buried and bringing them back to show to people.”

Dark, foreboding, haunting -- not words most people reach for when describing Irish folk music. False Lankum is like a Rorschach test where the beautiful butterfly slowly turns into something horrific upon deeper reflection – it was always there -- you just missed it on casual observation. This album demands you sit with it -- and let me state this plainly – if you are one who prefers their music easy, accessible and radio friendly, this album is not for you. But if you are of the other sort, one who enjoys following the breadcrumbs a band leaves even when they lead to a witch’s house, then you will be rewarded handsomely. This is an album that will be talked about twenty and thirty years from now.

Lynch is unambiguous about the stakes involved: “We have a bit of a personal mission to try to redress the balance.”

The album’s liner notes tell the story of those morbid dolls’ excavation, as in the case of “On a Monday Morning” – “On a Monday Morning” was written by Cyril Tawney. We learned it from Beanie Entwistle of the Manchester based band Sallows. With the liner notes, Lynch and his bandmates are making an artistic declaration -- gone are the individual band member acknowledgements, in its place, the song’s lineage and pathway to the band. The band is saying directly to you, we didn’t create this darkness, but we refuse to bury it.

And so then the question – did they succeed? I have already made plain this album isn’t for everyone. But for me, it is a magnum opus, a musical achievement that anyone with more than a passing fancy for music should know. And so then the question can only be answered by you. In whatever way you choose to hear your music, give this album a listen, then listen again and realize you might need more than two or three listens to come to your conclusion. Understand this, False Lankum opens new pathways in your musical brain, and it may take several listens before the construction is complete.