“When you’re with a group of semi-psychotic people, you kind of lose track of reality; it’s almost like being in some sort of cult or something.”
— Tommy Ramone
Now I’m a rock-n-roll angel, earned my wings, easing out over the graveyard in the middle of the night. Everyone leaves things behind. For me, it was the music. The band. I left it behind, I don’t know why. That’s the other thing/ you don’t know why you do things a lot of the time in this life. But that’s also how you know you’re on the right track. If you are still maintaining a lot of who you were 20 years ago or whatever, you are probably all kinds of bent inside. That’s not science, it’s just me saying it. But I say that because I feel like it must be true.
Out in the ethereal mist, I’m an angel smoking cigarettes, letting ash fall on its own down, down, down from my spot 12 feet up in the air. I let the ashes grow long as strange fingernails, watch them break on their own/ float down to the night ground. Every headstone down there is a moment I lived when I was alive in the band. Every chiseled stone’s faded words, evaporating dates, it all corresponds to things I saw. People I met. People I saw. Things I met.
It wasn’t until I let go of the band that I began to appreciate what it meant to me back when it was such a centerpiece of my life. But at the same time, it wasn’t until I walked away from it that I also began to understand just how much a thing you loved can someday break your heart in ways you never ever could have imagined possible.
So let’s see.
Let’s see where that even takes us, huh?
On a motel bathroom floor, somewhere on the outskirts of Chicago, I woke up to susurrous voices chattering from inside an old song. The shower was running but no one was in there. This I know because I’m the one who’d flipped it on when I slid down the wall/ last night/ technically: earlier this morning/ after the gig/ after the gig at the small loud club.
I was drunk/ happy/ alone.
I’m probably staying in a room with someone else but I don’t think about it. For me, rooming with bandmates was never something I particularly enjoyed. I mean, I know I saw enough of the person, whoever it was, in the van; saw enough of them in the truck stop looking at candy bars; saw enough of them in the clubs, after soundcheck, walking around aimlessly: each of us crossing paths as we nearly collided looking at posters on the walls for the other bands who were playing here soon.
Around every corner, there was a drummer. A bass player. My brother. A keyboardist or someone who was just there traveling with us for whatever reason. A stranger in a strange land was the idea behind rock/roll, but somehow once you get into a band and take to the road, you are never able to completely unmoor yourself from the connections that the band as a vessel of existence insists upon. Why? Well, I think it’s because being in a band means you are running so panic’d and frothing and hard from so many things at once.
Which also means that the other people in the band are running too. Right beside you. All the time. No matter what.
You join a band and you work hard and things start to happen and you push off the dock and it’s as if you are given a wilderness all to yourself. A mirrored lake for which to row out into/ vast and crystal/ ringed by real mountains/ engulfed in Northern Lights and shooting star glow/ there is a true sensation of intensely acute liberty that washes over your regularness, your averageness, and shifts it into something so much more electrifying than any experience you have ever had before. Alone, your body is awash in the feelings of self-fulfillment, the whiff of radically foreign pride taking shape around your heart where previously there had never been anything even close.
And it all comes from the nature of collective effort, that is true. I mean, if the band is what got you there then how else could it be? Still, the personal outshines the communal quite a lot. It is how humans are hardwired. Within the band’s group effort there is brotherhood and achievement. But the self can never be fully integrated into the community. That’s the entire reason you found yourself playing a guitar in your shitty little bedroom at 11 years old to begin with. You wanted to feel alive by feeling apart.
As it all happens then, you are unaware at times of how interconnected you really are with the mothership. You row out onto the placid glass of a magic land, your heart beating so loud that you can feel it in your eyes, as you come face to face with this new version of you who is doing it, man. You’re out there doing it. And it feels utterly heroic/ like opiates/ that pirate freedom in your sails/ powering your oars.
You find yourself shooting up with the most powerful dope known to mankind.
A sense of self.
Well, I did anyways.
Being in a band defined me at last. Being in a band took the tape off the mummy, set that dried-up shrunken little fucker loose upon the land.
It was mythical, the titillation. The sense of wonder. The possibilities that come when being no one and nothing one day leads you towards the light.
Then you realize that they’re all there too. The other band members. Just standing there smoking a sad bowl under an awning on the side of the Motel 6 where no one cares what you do. They cough because their lungs are stoned. Their black duffel bags are blocking the glass door. I am about to go get the van, pull it over here, watch them all pile in, aim us towards the next town. The next gig. The next chapter.
The rain is pounding down. The sound of it is like the shower back in the room. You are freer than any man could ever want to be. And you are shackled to these other freedom junkies. Look at them, blowing factory clouds of pot smoke into this heavy iron Gary Indiana morning.
Fuckers.
My mouth was beefy, oniony. On the filthy tiles of that bathroom, I began to see things coming into focus. It wasn’t wink-wink movie focus either; there is hardly any cinematic charm to most moments in a band as they are going down. Just like with anything in life: most magic occurs in retrospect. And to make matters more difficult to wrap your head around: there is only an instant of real time life versus the endless looking back on things that once happened in life. And so there is that issue to contend with. It’s easy, as you grow older, to fantasize that you were always in a perpetual state of good times when you look back on the years in that life. Maybe it is the mind’s way of moving you forward. Or maybe it is a sign that we are less evolved than we like to think.
Unless, of course, you were born under a whack sign like me. For all of this consistently made me quite curious. A witness, I became, right there as things were unfolding beneath my proverbial feet! Free! Alive! Out in the wilds and no one knew where the fuck I was at any given moment! I lived, for a spell, in a touring life before cell phones! Can you possibly imagine?? If you lived that life too then you understand the truest meaning of adrift and untraceable. But very few did. It leaves me feeling special that way.
Curious then. I was curious about why I was so frequently overcome by a kind of fathomless blues that only seems to exist for travelers (as far as I can tell). A unique brand of stifled and unsure, these were chains around my limbs that seemed to drag me down into ethereal blues way more than I would have ever expected. I’d always been somewhat depressed, I figure, but this was different. It was purer. It felt more rooted into the landscape and the sky-scape than anything I’d ever known or read or heard sung about in a song, Hank Williams came close, I guess. Ralph Stanley, Robert Johnson. Stevie Nicks. I don’t know. It’s not for me to say.
It wasn’t constant either, this cloud, I swear. But I did find myself very regularly under the spell of whatever it was. Tiring mystical sadness rising up from nothing. It appeared to roll up off of the Wyoming plains/ to wash up over all those bridges on the Charles River. In parking lots in rural Nevada a wind would strike down out of the forbidding mountains laid out before me and I would see the other guys walking ahead of me laughing, smoking, happy to be out of the van for ten minutes, and I would lag behind/ all alone/ feeling dense/ invisible/ maybe even doomed.
Now, hidden from the world in this motel, hidden from my bandmates by a couple doors and the late night need to entomb myself away from them, I looked down at my boots still tied tightly to my feet and I had this vigorous rush of fellowship for this person laying right where I was laying.
The running water had long ago shifted to cool. The steam it had filled the room with when I first cranked the shower knob had left condensation on the walls. The diseased fuchsia paint was soaked. The whole room appeared wet but I was mostly dry. My skin was clammy but that was to be expected. I was still wearing my vest and dress shirt from last night. My pants were the same ones I’d been wearing on stage for weeks now without being washed. They were tight and I was thin and I hoped that it turned women on even though none of them ever said anything.
I was a damp lad.
I had no idea what time it was.
I pulled my backpack close to me, felt the heft of my books in there. My novels.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Silas Marner.
Mountain Man.
I became awash in unusual feelings. I was contented. I was upset. I was horny. I wanted coffee. I was exhausted. I was eager. I was so very proud of being here: alone on that floor: not much to my name: no one wondering where I was or how I was. The whole world out there acting as if I had never even existed to begin with.
I sighed and rubbed my eyes.
My contacts were still in.
I smiled, sheepishly.
Then I closed my eyes to die.
But that’s not how these things go.
Guitars in stands, a bass leaning against a Fender amp that’s set up on a cheap rickety red vinyl and wood chair, lights on pedals/ flickering and going dark/ a mostly empty room but muffled laughter coming from different corners. A telephone ringing off in a room somewhere. The smell of snow on people’s jackets as they come in. The whiff of the cold night clinging to their smiling faces. An unmanned cafe table with CDs/ stickers in a small pile/ handwritten prices scrawled out in black Sharpie on a single piece of white paper. Two different patterns of T-shirts, each on a hanger hung from above.
Familiarity in the voices of total strangers.
Cigarette smoke etched into the beer glass like stained glass cathedrals. Cold pale ale. The smoldering woods of a Marlboro Light. A sound guy in pen light back behind the board. The phone ringing again. Bar maids who smile and bar maids who never smile.
Music starts on the house system. A cool comp someone made.
First song: Dinosaur Jr.
Second song: The Ramones.
Third song: a Japanese punk girl.
Fourth song: We Built This City on Rock-and-Roll.
A few people stand kind of close to the stage. A young dude comes through a dark door and carries two Bud Light cases back behind the bar. There are Christmas lights, a neon Killian’s Red light, a clip on light above the cash register for the people working. There are different colored lights on the stage. Mostly red. Someone walks up to look at the floor of the stage, at the band’s gear maybe. Or at a setlist if there is one. Then they walk back to their friends/ slowly/ grinning a little/ sipping a Jack and Coke. Underneath this building there are buried bones of Indians who died long ago. No one knows they’re there. No one ever will. In the backstage area the bands all mingle between stacked plastic crates of recyclable empties. Some smoke cigarettes, some puff on a joint. There are a couple local bands and a band from far away. Everyone is trying to fit in. Some are better than others. Sometimes there is tension but not usually. Mostly it’s just imagined in the heads of the rabidly insecure. There’s a small mini-fridge that was filled with domestics. It’s almost empty now though, even with a half-hour to go before anyone plays a note. Someone’s mom and stepdad come back to say hi. People laugh. There’s a Johnny Cash poster tacked to the drywall. He’s staring straight into the camera, menacingly. He’s flipping the photographer off. You know the photo.
You were born inside of it many moons ago.
We all were.
Many, many moons ago.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
