ROCK N’ ROLL ZERO – PART 1: NEW DAY RISING
FIRE Aethernaut, Mr. Fate, documents the soaring highs and epic lows of the endeavor to reunite his punk band after a 25-year hiatus for one last tour.
BEGIN THE BEGIN
I walked off the stage in front of a sold-out crowd of thousands. I’d like to say that I felt jubilant, like some sort of bloodied Norse berzerker come home after laying abject waste to a nearby enemy village, but really I didn’t. Actually, I didn’t feel much at all. Me and my band had come so far, worked so hard and for so long. And we’d killed it tonight. As the lights went up and the house music began blaring, I went to our dressing room, packed my equipment, grabbed my girl by the hand, and then we just walked out of the huge, open backstage doors. Out into the night, out into something I could never, ever imagine. Out into silence.
We’d been at it for nearly 10 years and we all knew that we’d hit our zenith and that this was it. It was a spectacular, beautiful, wild ride and…it was over. Veni, vidi, vici and all that. We, all of us, knew, but we never spoke those words aloud. There was no inglorious scene, no screaming, weeping or gnashing of teeth. Neither rage nor sorrow. There was silence, and only silence, as I drove home beneath a clear, dark late-Winter sky.
A DEATHLIKE SILENCE
I’d been listening to music effectively non-stop since I was 11-years old. Music was the gasoline that powered my life. A life without music was, in fact, a life simply not worth living. I could not ever, ever function without it. Until I did.
After that last performance, I stopped listening to music. Period. It wasn’t a conscious or deliberate decision, it just sort of imperceptibly occurred. Later that year, Mrs. Fate took me to the “Blackest of the Black” tour to, specifically, see Motorhead (RIP Lemmy). There were others and it was an awesome show. Little did I know it would be the last live music I would experience for a very, very long time.
To quote another band I was in, “something inside me had died.” I just couldn’t hear music anymore. An then, without warning, I went silent for 6 years. My life was filled with rooms of rare records, CDs and, yes, even tapes, but I eschewed all of them. The silence continued until along came Bob.
A SATELLITE MOMENT
In absence of music and all the associated activity, I had a surplus of discretionary time. In a bit of an ironic twist, I started fishing and becoming an outdoorsman during this period. It was amazing. I’d spent my entire teenage and adult life in darkened, smoke-filled clubs so when I got a real and protracted taste of the great outdoors, I was totally in. I particularly fell in love with fishing. Fishing gave me the exact same sort of serenity that music did, but I was not dependent upon others to make the feeling happen. I lost myself on the beaches and offshore in kayaks for years, never thinking about music…ever.
If you’ve read my “A Side Hustle to Save Lives” post, you know that I got into soap making to save cats and that I befriended the super-cool James Bowen & Street Cat Bob. I purchased the soundtrack to their amazing 2016 film with Luke Treadaway (and songs by Charlie Fink) and I kept listening. I’d not actively heard any music for over 6 years. Then, I listened to that soundtrack for 2 years straight. Nothing else. It was brilliant and it was getting me closer to something; something boiling just beneath the surface.
Maybe I just needed a break? Perhaps there is a saturation point where the human body, like a sponge, cannot take any more musical stimuli before it bloats and becomes supersaturated. I don’t really know, but somewhere around the zillionth listen to soundtrack, I pulled over and plugged in the iPod, loaded with over 10,000 songs, that sat dormant in my glove compartment and I, instantaneously, came back. And, I came back after 8 years with a ferocious vengeance. It was truly a satellite moment.
NEW DAY RISING!
As a lifelong connoisseur of music, I am always, completely perplexed and confused about musicians or studio folk who allegedly “discover” “lost tapes,” “recordings never heard before,” and “alternative mixes.” I always believed it was a cunning ruse; a sham of a way to get consumers to purchase or re-purchase “new” product. Seriously, who in a band ever forgets recordings or puts original master tapes and videos in some dark vault until forgotten about? Who has ever recorded and album and then had a producer remix the whole thing while keeping the original and then expunges the experience from memory? Answer: Mr. Fate, that’s who.
Whist rooting through my home in preparation for our impending relocation, I systematically rummaged through every nook and cranny in an attempt to organize all our worldly possessions. In the process of doing so, I was astonished as to what misplaced gems I was inadvertently stumbling across buried in sheds, attics, and basements. I don’t know if these places constitute an archive, but that’s where I found them.
I felt like Laura Croft raiding some musical tomb. Every few minutes of my search, I would bring up gold – buried treasures from my band that I’d long forgotten. The 3-day excavation was insane. I found completely remixed albums and EPs, hand-drawn posters and fliers I couldn’t ever remember having seen, thousands of digital photos, hours of live footage and boxes of merchandise.
Little did I know that strange omens and portents were spinning wildly in the abyss as I started to come across relics from my early music career. Back to my first-ever band. The punk band! This discovery was even better as there was very little to find. In the band’s heyday, there was no internet or instant photos or easy recording – it was all done on cassette tape and promoted with fliers. We played punk for three years in a curious period after the original scene had died, but before it was commercially resurrected by way of Green Day and their ilk. Even as interim torchbearers, we had style, a sound, and slogged our way through the years building our audience until we suffocated amid our own inertia. It was wonderful to re-live all those memories while listening to our music recorded on boom boxes and crappy 4-track recorders a quarter century earlier.
INITIATION
It was shortly after this that I was in my buddy’s back yard drinking some home brew and shared with him the fruits of my recent musical disinterment. It happens that this buddy is also the guitarist in said punk band. I told him I found a lot of our old stuff and it had, surprisingly, aged pretty well. We then stepped in to the “Way Back Machine” and started to reminisce. I told him we’d never done an interview, so we started to interview ourselves by posing questions and then, by way of hazy memory, attempted to answer them (poorly, albeit hilariously I might add).
During the afternoon, my buddy mentioned that a friend of his had started a new music magazine and our band was slotted to be featured as part of a larger article on the old So. Cal. punk scene in the inaugural issue.
Before we knew it the bright afternoon sun began to slowly fall, yielding to a fine California summer evening. We were both having a great fun telling old tales and sipping exceptional Hefeweizen. As is wont to occur under such circumstances, I asked my buddy, “What do you think about getting the band back together for one last show?” He was in, but it was contingent upon getting our singer on board. After a quick text, it was officially a go!
I’d not played music at all in over 8 years, thus I was the inveterate pro relative to my band mates on guitar and vocals had abstained completely from anything musical for nearly 25 years. Oh, and we had no drummer either. Sounded like a quintessential punk rock recipe to me. “Well, this should be interesting,” I thought to myself later that night before falling into a deep slumber filled with fevered dreams of a rock n’ roll resurrection.
UP NEXT!
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Rock N’ Roll Zero series and go backstage to read the details from Mr. Fate’s real-time journal as the story unfolds and reaches it’s epic finale. Coming on Halloween October 31st at FatesOnFire.com!