A strange thing happened when I went to see Sparta recently. The band was on tour playing their album Wiretap Scars all the way through for the record's twentieth anniversary. Geoff Rickly, from Thursday, was one of the openers and it was great to see him play songs from that band completely stripped down with only his guitar.
I was running around getting pictures of Sparta's set and suddenly my vision started to blur. It took me a second to figure out that I had started crying for some reason. I was able to get what I hoped was enough pictures to at least make something out of nothing while editing. I ended up hiding in the corner on stage right next to Jim Ward's amp and spent the rest of their set trying to keep my shit together.
I couldn't figure out what brought the flood of emotion on. No knock against the band because I am a massive fan but Sparta does play a rather innocuous brand of rock music so I wanted to dig in farther to see why my brain did what it did. I had seen Sparta three other times in the past year and had nowhere near the reaction that was brought out of me this time around. It felt like Geoff Rickly was the primer and then Sparta was somehow able to break the dam to start up the waterworks.
My first thought was the obvious. After spending the past four years standing next to Jeff Submachine's amp and feeling his tone cut through me, I wasn't ready yet for a similar experience standing so close to Jim Ward's. I thought that was it but the current load of grief from Jeff's passing was only part of it.
After I dwelled on it for a few days, things started making sense a bit. I had a very Vonnegut moment of my brain becoming unstuck in time. This is starting to happen to me more frequently these days because all of the other grief, trauma and damage of living a life is starting to pile up around me and this is making me a sentimental old fool as the years go by.
By the end of “Cut Your Ribbon” I was sent back to 2002 during my first live-in relationship situation. We were planning on making the trip to the ballroom at the Agora Theater to see Thursday and Sparta. I don't know if what had happened that morning could be considered an argument but some weirdness occurred and set the tone of dead silence on the trip to and from Cleveland.
This was back when I was young and stupid and was living like I was told and expected to my whole life. We were clearly incompatible people and should not have been dating let alone living together. I have since become a few decades older and slightly less stupid and have figured out that societal expectations are a heaping pile of bullshit.
During this time, I worked downtown and would use Pittsburgh's sorry excuse for a subway system to commute back and forth. Outside of the subway station there was always a street vendor on the sidewalk selling flowers. Periodically, I would pick up a dozen roses before catching the train and take them home on a Friday.
It was a few months after this ill-fated trip to Cleveland that I had bought the dozen roses and arrived home to find that all of her stuff was gone. There was no warning or “Hey, I'm moving out.” It was like a fucked up David Copperfield illusion. >POOF< her and her shit had vanished.
Since I no longer had someone to split the rent with, I ended up having to move back home for a while. Which was not the greatest place to hang my hat with the large amount of awfulness that I was feeling at the time. Two of the records that I was constantly mainlining on repeat to help me get through this were Full Collapse by Thursday and Wiretap Scars by Sparta. Mystery of the crying old man solved.
Given the amount of years and other life events between then and now, I had not thought about that period of my life for a very long time. And now here they were, those memories were now showing up in vivid clarity like they happened yesterday.
As someone that medicates with music, I tie way too much weight to the records that I listen to. Time, place and personal history have always figured into my listening habits. There are entire sections of my record collection that I can't touch anymore because of what I've attached to them. As more time goes by, the stacks of untouchable records are growing and my nonsense is now spreading into live music for the first time.
Music is something that I need in order to live so going without it is something that is just not going to happen. So I guess crying at punk shows is a thing that's going to happen to me now and I'm just going to have get used to it. Great.
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