Be Here Now · breakbone

BE HERE NOW

Five assignments due and The Stooges' Raw Power on repeat, loud enough to feel in my teeth. Iggy Pop cut that record in about a week and it still sounds like the truest thing anyone ever put to tape, which is the only argument you need at 3am running on bad food and three hours' sleep against a deadline that doesn't care how you feel. That is the fuel. Not because it feels good; it doesn't. You do the work because at that hour it's the only thing in the room that's actually yours.

I went quiet for a while. I won't dress it up as some noble retreat, because it wasn't, it was survival. You drop off the map for a few weeks and the quiet doesn't stay yours; what you learn is that it fills up. People you've never had a real conversation with come away with detailed opinions about your life, and the story gets handed down the line, every mouth adding a bit, until the version going around is sharper and dumber than anything that actually happened. You sit in your room with your headphones and let it, because the other option is arguing with an echo.

So you do the thing instead. Black Flag, Minor Threat, Sunami back in rotation, the stuff that lit the fuse before I started reaching for clever words instead of true ones. Phone face down. One assignment out the door, the next one loaded. Cut my own hair to save the trip into town and made an absolute mess of it, but hair grows back and the work doesn't write itself.

I've been thinking about Be Here Now, the actual record, not the phrase. 1997, the biggest band on earth walk into the studio so far up their own legend and so deep in the gear that nobody left could tell them eight minutes of one riff under thirty stacked guitars was not a song. The party that made Definitely Maybe had already gone home; they kept the lights on and played to the empty room like it was packed, because admitting it had emptied was worse than the racket. And the songs were still in there, that's the part that gets me; the b-sides from that stretch buried half the album. Noel had it the whole time. What he didn't have was the nerve to stop, take the break, and write the true thing, that he was burnt out and frightened and holding a band up on a mountain of nothing. I think about that more than I should. Running this thing with people watching, making something on an empty tank, the old crowd gone and me still up here playing the room like it's full. Be Here Now is a warning, not a title. Don't stack thirty guitars on the one true line because the quiet frightens you.

Here's what two years in this city taught me, and it took going quiet to finally hear it. The people who build something, who hold a scene up instead of just standing around in it, don't do it to be seen doing it. They do it because the music won't leave them alone. Every band I've ever loved, The Saints through to Findaway, was a gang before it was a name. Nobody great was ever a lone wolf; that's a story you tell yourself when you're scared the gang won't have you.

I miss the floor. I miss Ithaca Hall, Piss Off mid set, Arran winding me head to toe in duct tape until I was a mummy in the front row, and that being better than any room with a roof and a ticket price worth bragging about. Twenty people who mean it will beat two thousand who turned up, every time. I want fast, loud, moshable, played by people who'd play it just as hard to an EMPTY room. Not the midtempo plod that would be twice as good at twice the fucking speed.

This issue is Whitt's End at Paddington Skatepark. The best band in the scene, playing like the place was sold out when it absolutely was not, let down by an event that had no idea what it was and refusing to let that touch a single note. The noise will say what it says. The music was THERE regardless.

Be here now.