It’s my second night in Huntington, West Virginia, where I’ve come to spend two weeks vacation drawn by the promise of a place where everyone sings the same song. It is also Halloween.
Though the morning was sunny and temperate, the weather became instantly cold around 3 pm, when a bitter wind started whipping through the town followed by a threat of thunderstorms. Huntington canceled trick or treating for the kids at the last minute, moving it to Saturday night. This is something I’ve never heard of being done for a non-official event, but maybe that’s just what happens in West Virginia. I’m from California. What do I know? Nothing about bad weather.
I decide to go for a walk when it gets dark to look at the Halloween decorations, zipping my puffer coat all the way up to my face against the cold, plugging my ears with headphones, and stashing an open beer in my pocket. I’ve surmised that the woman who owns the Airbnb I’m rooming in is a Mormon from the lack of coffeemaker and photograph of the Mormon Temple in the living room, so it feels weird to drink in her home. Drinking on the street is obviously the better, less weird option.
This was one of my favorite activities in the Bay Area, where living my best life consisted of getting drunk alone and walking around North Berkeley, listening to music through headphones while looking at the colorful houses and wild gardens filled with tomatoes and pink roses and wire sculptures strung with fairy lights, agonizing over why I couldn’t be happy in what seemed to be the most beautiful place in the world. It will take me another year accept that constantly telling myself that I was a terrible person combined with an unwillingness to stop pouring alcohol down my throat probably had something to do with it; but for now, doing the same thing on a residential street in Huntington, I’m still mired in the mindset that drove my move to Brooklyn earlier in the year, still stupidly shell shocked that my problems didn’t magically disappear when I left Berkeley.
The neighborhood I’m staying in is quite beautiful. This must be a rich area, whatever that means around here. It’s certainly an older one. Some of the streets are still made of brick. Others have been paved over, but you can see the brick underneath in spots where the pavement has worn away and not been replaced. The houses are large and set back on big sloping lawns, all in the same colonial style with three stories and three windows across the front. I notice that in some of the houses each window holds a small light or an electric candle, one after the other so you know the placement is intentional. One home has three lamps with matching stained glass shades lighting up the attic windows. That its Halloween night gives the otherwise cozy aesthetic a sort of spooky vibe and I pause on the sidewalk to gaze up at them, shivering in the frigid wind that has now become strong enough to be audible over the sound of La Luz pouring into my ears.
I love La Luz. They’re one of my favorite bands of all-time. Their sound is a combination of all the genres I like the most—surf, garage, girl group, psych—rolled up into one luscious, fiery, haunted whole. It really speaks to me. I listened to La Luz’s Floating Features so much while bouncing around the country over the past year or two that I cannot hear the record without also picturing the golden dome of the Colorado State Capitol building glinting in wan winter sunlight, crushed beer cans and cigarette butts in the snow outside a Bushwick punk house, the immaculately tiny imitations of domestic life in the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. This year I’ve been obsessed with La Luz guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland’s new solo record, Night of the Worm Moon, and have listened to it nonstop for months, poring over songs like I’m trying to decipher runes from a book of half-remembered dreams.
It seems to me that records you listen to obsessively oftentimes find a way of seeping into your life, not only coloring your perception of events, but even shaping them in some ways. It’s as if through the love of them you begin to live them out, too. Or maybe you listen obsessively to a record because it reflects your life in the moment, articulating something in your heart that cannot find expression any other way. Whichever way it goes, there’s something about Cleveland’s hushed tales of wandering through weird realms populated by ghosts and creatures unknown that feels very meaningful to me. All year the chorus from the title track from Night of the Worm Moon has played on a loop in my brain: “Nothing’s the loudest sound/ In a house when no one’s around/ I get what I deserve/ Putting my body first.”
My friend Erika and I are going to a Halloween covers show later at the V Club, a place she’s been patronizing since she was a teenager with a fake ID. I know Erika from California, when we were both scrambling around the Echo Park DIY garage punk scene in the mid-2010s. I booked and promoted shows around Los Angeles and wrote about local bands for my website, Lo-Pie. Erika was a DJ on KXLU and played in a bunch of bands as well as making music as a solo artist. When I got it into my head to go to West Virginia earlier in the year, I began casting around in my memory for any connection I might have to the place and remembered her: the girl from West Virginia who loved Elvis. I knew there would be someone. There’s always someone. Music is good for things like that.
Erika and I shared a memorable experience coming back from a wild show I booked in Tijuana on the last day of summer in 2013. Meat Market and Corners played. You won’t have heard of them, but they were two of the biggest bands in our scene at the time and they were our friends. The bands played in a seafood restaurant, the “stage” just a cramped area by the bar where the tables had been cleared away and replaced by a backline provided by the local openers, San Pedro El Cortez. We spent the night on a balcony overlooking the bands and crowd, the tables around us dusted in so much snowy cocaine it felt like we were in Fleetwood Mac. A liter of beer was only two dollars if you had to pay for it at all. After crawling back over the border the next morning, hungover to the point of sickness, my car broke down and stranded us on the side of Interstate 5, just north of San Diego. My parents had to pick us up from the side of the highway and drive us the two hours back to L.A. Erika has since moved back to her hometown of Huntington and is teaching journalism at Marshall University. I’ve been living in New York City for 8 months, wishing I felt at home anywhere.
When we were texting before my trip I mentioned that I didn’t know anything about the music scene in Huntington, but it’d be cool to go to a show or something while I was in town. Erika doesn’t know much about the local music scene either, but she finds the show at V Club while looking for things to do on Halloween. It seems like our best option, the others being sipping wine with 30 year old Marshall University professors or going to a karaoke bar. We’ve looked up the band names beforehand, but aside from the headliner, who hopefully promises to melt our faces, we can’t find information on any of them.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to a show on Halloween. I can’t remember what I did on Halloween the last few years. Probably nothing. Back in L.A., there were always cover shows, with bands playing as the Misfits, the Velvet Underground, the Cramps, etc. Basically a mix of groups everyone agrees are cool who also make music that’s easy to learn relatively quickly. Mostly it showed that even punk music can be a lot more complicated to play than to listen to. But I shouldn’t be cynical. They were brilliant.
The show is $7 with costume and $10 without, so we dress up. Erika dresses like a princess in a puffy pink dress, painting her eyelids blue and lips magenta. She glues jewels under her eyes and wears a tiara. She loans me a pair of cat ears to wear, and draws whiskers on my cheeks and a black heart on my nose with an eyeliner pencil. Since I don’t have a proper costume, I choose the most whimsical item of clothing I’ve brought with me to Huntington: an oversized sweater with the Sub Pop Records logo on it, except that instead of “Sub Pop” it says “SUP BRO.” My recently-ex-roommate Alicia gave it to me when she moved back to Seattle to take a position designing book covers at a small press, her dream job. I cried when she left, suddenly stricken by the realization of how much I would miss her. We’d only been roommates for 6 months, but Alicia was a beam of sunshine in a city that felt bereft of it. She was my friend. I didn’t want her to go away.
Alicia and I went out for drinks the night before she moved at a bar close to our apartment. David Bowie was on the stereo and Lord of the Rings was on the television. Alicia marveled at the synchronicity, singing along to “Heroes” with a ring of Elvish characters tattooed around her arm. She looked at peace with her decision to move home. “When you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing,” I told her. “The universe lets you know.”
Unsurprisingly, hometown girl Erika knows many people who’ve come to celebrate Halloween at the V Club. Her friend, Eric, is in town from St. Louis, and he asks me why I’ve come to Huntington on vacation. Many people will ask me that over the next two weeks and I will never not feel a little bashful about the answer.
“Tell him the song story,” Erika encourages me.
I told her the night before about being inspired by John Denver to come to West Virginia, apologizing in advance for how corny it sounded. To my surprise, she was touched by it, putting a hand over her heart and confessing that she cries every time she hears “Take Me Home Country Roads.” Eric thinks it’s cool, too, which makes me happy. The last thing I want is for people here to think I’m being condescending when I’m deadly sincere. Like John Denver, I’m just a rich kid who never saw a country road in her life, but I’ve followed the sound to West Virginia in hopes that I can find a way to counter the black noise inside my head that has begun to blot out the light, make me feel lonely, and fill me with fear.
The first band we see is a straightforward rock act called Friendly Fire. The highlight of their set is a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” which I think is kind of cool. Nobody covers Orbison. Everyone is great at their instruments, and that helps it not sound like bad karaoke. One guitarist is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and playing a Telecaster. He’s excellent. I find out later this is Colton Settle—such a musical name!—sort of Huntington’s own Jerry Garcia. He will play in every band tonight, knows everyone at the show, and switches costumes three times, ending the night in a wolf mask at the merch table where his own band, The Settlement, are selling everything from t-shirts and CDs to pins and patches.
Between bands, Erika and I joke about walking back into the green room behind the stage. We both spent plenty of time in the green room at the Echo in Los Angeles, finding a way to get upstairs where all our friends were, smoking cigarettes and drinking the band’s beers. Sometimes it was easy and you could just walk up. Other times there were passcodes. Alternately you could carry an instrument or try and slide in by following a band member up. There were lots of tricks. It’s easy, I’d say when people would ask me how to get upstairs. Just act like you belong. Of course it’s easy when you actually do.
The Settlement are dressed like the Power Rangers and open with a cover of “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody),” by Talking Heads, an extremely ballsy choice as the song is so rhythmically complicated with a lot of room for terrible fuck ups in the wrong hands. But the band is absolutely nailing it, with a trombone player and bongo player and a cool girl bassist with a pixie haircut (she’s the Pink Ranger.) We’ll later find out they’re all students from the music program at Marshall. Though I’m usually put off by bands with more than 5 members onstage at one time, I’m very charmed by The Settlement. “This is my new favorite band,” I tell Erika as we dance.
There aren’t many people here tonight in contrast to Halloween shows I’ve attended in the past. Huntington has a population of slightly less than 50,000 people, so it would probably be very difficult for a promoter to pack out a room this big (this assumption will be challenged on my final night in town, when the bar will be completely overrun for a show featuring bluegrass and old time bands.) But everyone at the show is stoked to be there and wearing some of the most creative costumes I’ve ever seen. One woman is dressed as Orville Peck, a popular Sub Pop artist who does the whole singing cowboy thing while wearing a fringed Lone Ranger mask (he’s since signed to Columbia.) I’m delighted and insist on taking a photo together to send to Sub Pop, which I do the next day. Another girl has the most genius costume either Erika or I have ever seen: a black thong leotard over fishnets with a pair of big googly eyes pasted on both of her butt cheeks. She is sublimely shameless and twerks upon request, the eyes ping ponging around her ass. It’s amazing.
“And we’re from right here: Huntington, West Virginia,” Settle announces at the end of his band’s set to the cheerful crowd. We’re in a totally different world than that night in Tijuana all those years ago, but maybe basing my self-worth around the supposed hipness of my surroundings is partially what set me on the road to madness in the first place. If this is what Huntington’s rock scene has to offer, it’s more than enough. For the first time in a very long time, I actually do feel like I’m in the right place. My tab at the end of the night for 5 or 6 or 7 PBRs is a whopping $10. Erika and I agree we made the perfect choice in coming here.
When I get back to my Airbnb later, drunk and happy after the best Halloween I’ve had in ages, I look up the meaning of the lights in the windows I saw earlier. It takes a bit of searching around, but eventually I find them. They’re called friendship lights. They’ve been around since colonial times, when people would put them in the windows to signify both the warmth of home and an open door. For a lonely traveler walking an unfamiliar road in an uncharted country, to see those lights would mean that you had found a temporary place to shelter from the endless dark of the night.