Lust For Life

This is what music can do to a person when music is the only thing you love

I thought about California a lot this week.

It’s been nearly 2 years since I moved out of the state where I was born and called home my entire life, but I’ve been trying to put it out of my mind for much longer. Even when I still lived in California I wanted to forget, and ever since leaving, I’ve wanted to avoid facing up to the real reason I felt I no longer belonged there. Yet the news of Chet “JR” White of Girls’ death at the age of 40 this week made it impossible to keep lying to myself. Nothing sobers you up quite like mortality.

I was never really a fan of Girls, but the band was emblematic of the California music scene in the 2010s, which was my music scene. It was through being a part of that scene that I learned what it meant to commit my life to music and how it felt to truly belong somewhere. It was the loss of that scene that sent me spiraling into a persistent state of grief that I’m now beginning to understand has been subconsciously directing my life and work for many years. 

Though the music scene itself faded out of cultural relevance years ago, 2020 has been remarkably unkind to its memory. The news of White’s death coming so soon after the cancellation of Burger Records early in the summer felt like another nail in the coffin for a cherished time in my life that now seems to be being played for a cosmic joke, one gut punch after another as people gather round to kick the corpse of something that once felt filled with magic and meaning.

California was a special place in the 2010s. If you’ve never been part of a music scene or wanted to be then it will be difficult to understand how lucky you feel when one erupts around you with such force that it appears to move the cultural needle just by existing and just how great the potential for emotional wreckage when the scene dies, and a life that once seemed gilded at the edges becomes dull and ordinary. For most people, White’s death must seem just the natural progression of a story that never changes. You’ve read the books, you’ve seen the movies. I don’t need to give you details. All music scenes are the same.

I suppose this is the part of the story where people start to die. While the outside world chalks music deaths up to substance abuse or whatever, that’s only a symptom of what really does a lot of music people in. Obviously I can’t know the exact circumstances of White’s death, and what I write here should be understood as a projection of my own feelings upon the situation, but I suspect it might have had something to do with what happens to music people when the thing which has given their lives shape and meaning recedes into memory, only to be replaced by the biggest nothing of all.

Music demands so much from those who love it, in a way that seems more spiritual than other artistic disciplines. This might be due to the nature of music itself, how it plugs directly into your soul and then shatters it into pieces because it’s so personal and universal at the same time. To be a part of a tight-knit music scene takes the art’s capacity for shared intimacy and magnifies it times a million by tethering you to other people who feel exactly the same way. There’s something very pure about it. It’s not ideological. It’s holy. Music becomes the love between you and everyone you know—and everyone knows everyone in a music scene.

It’s great while it lasts. The greatest. You feel as though you live at the pulsing center of a benevolent universe where every choice is the right one and even the bad ones are seemingly without consequence. Everywhere you go there’s a friendly face, always something fun to do, a good band playing every night, and a place to belong in a lonely world. The tragedy is that it has to end. Bands break up, the scene withers away, and the people who populated it scatter to the wind. When it is gone, what are you left with? Golden memories, a drinking problem, and a hole in your soul. If you cannot find a way to fill it with a family or a job or whatever else, then all that looms ahead is the gaping abyss of another 40 years on the earth bereft of that which gave you reason to walk it. This is why music people die. 

I got a taste of it myself. These past few months have felt like a personal reckoning in terms of finally uncorking all the bottled up feelings of emotional scarcity that have plagued me since fleeing Los Angeles for the Bay Area and then Brooklyn after that, with stops in cities all over the country for reasons that now seem unfathomably sad. I made jokes about being constantly “on tour,” but that’s all they were—jokes. The reality was that I was grieving. My scene died and suddenly I was an exile from my own life as I had understood it. Without the music community that had given me a sense of purpose and belonging, what was there to do except go looking for something to fill the void? So I did, packing up my suitcase every other month and shuffling through my contacts whenever I arrived in a new city, the list filled with entries reading [First Name] [Band Name], in search of anything or anyone that could make me feel like a human again while my heart crumbled to ash inside my chest. That’s what music can do to a person when music is the only thing you love. If it weren’t for Bandcamp to make me feel that I was still of some actual service to music and musicians, that anything I did mattered at all, I honestly don’t know what would’ve happened to me.

I should’ve known that would be the case, though. There’s always a risk associated with pledging your heart to something intangible and transient like music. That’s part of the story, too. Nothing saves like rock and roll, but nothing kills like it, either. I think White understood it. When I read about his death, I recalled this interview in Paste where he talked about thinking closely about what it would mean to commit to a rock band when he had already established a stable career and what would happen when the band inevitably broke up. So there was a choice. But for some people, it isn’t really a choice at all. I’m paraphrasing because I haven’t got the book in front of me at the moment, but Robert Plant is quoted in The Hammer of the Gods as saying something like, “I decided 5 minutes in the music scene was better than 50 years outside of it.” And that really is how it feels. That’s how it felt to me, anyway.

Perhaps this is why I’m so bratty when it comes to music writers who treat their profession with a flippancy that suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of what it really means to love music. When the Almost Famous retrospectives began rolling out earlier this year for the film’s 20th anniversary, I was shocked at how, in all the misty-eyed recollections from music journalists crediting the film with inspiring their careers, not a single one seemed to understand that the message of the film is not Lester Bangs’ prescriptive (and, in my opinion, incorrect) proclamation that, “You cannot make friends with the rockstars,” or teen journo William Miller yelling about being “the enemy,” but what Sapphire the groupie says at the end: They don’t even know what it is to be a fan. To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts. That’s what my time in the California music scene taught me: to be a fan, to truly love some silly little piece of music, some band, so much that it hurts. If you cannot understand that feeling and why it’s worth sacrificing so much for, can you really understand music, let alone the people who make it, at all?

This probably sounds like magical thinking, and a romanticization of something that isn’t unique and doesn’t really matter in the larger scheme of things. There’s nothing special about being depressed, the same way there’s nothing special about a music scene. Why should I feel so sainted? Nobody asked me to be a martyr for rock and roll. Nobody should care that I suffered for my own self-destructive choices. I understand. I told myself the same thing for years. If only love can break your heart then it’s safer to pretend that it was never love in the first place. It was just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Just a stupid music scene, the same as every other music scene. Who cares? I don’t care. Except this music scene wasn’t every other music scene. It was my music scene and I did care. I cared with all my heart. That was the problem. But it was also the answer—an answer that was invisible to me until this week, when I finally admitted to myself just how much I loved my stupid little music scene, how broken I became when it was gone.

I’ve written before about how I’ve always been very dogmatic about my music writing in that whatever I write must be meaningful beyond its use as a cool form of advertising. What I hadn’t realized was that it also needed to be meaningful to me. Looking back over my work from the past few years, a theme emerges. I suddenly see in it the ways I’ve been subconsciously chasing after that feeling of human connection through music I once felt so strongly in California. It’s almost as though, through the things I chose to cover and how I chose to cover them, I had been trying to convince myself that if I could find it again, even if it was a simulacrum, it wouldn’t matter that I had lost my scene because it didn’t have to belong to me to be real. If I could find it and make it real for other people by writing about it, then it would belong to everyone and that would be enough.

And I see that I did find it. It was there that gloomy April morning in Pittsburgh, when Conor Murray of tape label Crafted Sounds showed me the zine he made of disposable camera photos taken at local shows. It was there the night I sat glued to my phone for the Den Tapes 5th anniversary livestream gig, in awe at the beauty of the Seattle music scene rallying together on Instagram. It was there in Honolulu, where pop-punk bands play with ska bands and metal bands because nobody tours to Hawaii. It was in West Virginia, where the mountain punks keep DIY alive every day just by existing. It was even there in last week’s tribute to Eddie Van Halen written by my friend Ben Katzman, whom I met because we were part of the same music scene. The whole time I felt empty and lost, what I was really doing was filling the void bit by bit, word by word, patching up my broken heart by documenting the love of music that connects so many people every day, everywhere. Scenes die, but the spirit that creates them never does.

Today I did an interview with a musician who was part of an obscure music scene in the early 1980s. As we went through the basic inquiries about people and places, underneath my mind raced with the questions I really wanted to ask: What was it like to be part of a music scene? Did you understand it was special when it was happening? Did you walk down the street aglow with the knowledge that you were in the exact right place at the exact right time? Did it feel pure and blessed? Did you miss it when it was gone?

He told me about the club in town everyone would go to, the way you could meet people just by showing up early to soundcheck, the touring bands crashing in the living room, how every band was good and everyone was friends, everybody bound together by a love of music, which is the same as a love for life. My heart caught in my throat at the familiarity of it all, memories of California flashing before my eyes. I was flooded with gratitude for having had the chance to experience these things for myself and to know exactly what he meant down to the littlest detail, though our scenes were separated by decades. How could I have ever felt alone? How could I have ever thought it didn’t matter? All music scenes are the same, after all. But every music scene is the best music scene, especially the one that is yours.

PS. California, see you very soon! <3