Written last night at a coffee house in Des Moines.
The first time I ever saw Frankenixon, I was standing around at the Octagon (my Ames heads will know what I'm talking about) after I'd just played with Witches of Weir, killing time at one of those shows where it's just the bands playing for each other simply for the joy of saying we were here, in this little nowhere everyone overlooks and ignores, and we were there and playing music that no one else would play. We all labored under delusions then, for good or ill, and in retrospect, I think the reason why I'm so scared and stymied musically now is because I'm so scared of resurrecting that delusionality, that ability to completely give away my sanity to something I've created.
Anyway, I'd seen the band's name on a flyer or two here and there about the area, and, watching them set up, I noted casually that Jeremy Grace was playing with the band then, not entirely surprising considering how we all played with each other's bands, even me, barely competent at my own shitty instrument, because we all fucking gave a shit about making something we liked. Anyway, I decided to stick around for some reason, probably because Patrick told me that they were really good, and I took his assessment at face value--even then, I was a music fascist--until they started playing.
And christ, they were amazing. Jeremy, a pianist more than anything else, had a viscerality to his drumming that somehow seemed perfect, even though his mastery of the set was slightly different than the virtuosity the others seemed to possess. Truthfully, I miss Jeremy sometimes when I see them today, even though Weston is perhaps the perfect rock drummer (apologies to Jesse Hernandez), because Jeremy hit every drum head and cymbal like he were discovering it for the first time, because he was obviously feeling the music more than he was playing a part on an instrument, and I still envy that, I can only do that with my voice, and barely at that. Anyway, the group's musical niche I found questionable--piano-driven-jazz-rock with hints of prog and lo-fi punk--but the ensemble as a unit was so fucking dynamic. Back then, they were still pretty shoegazer-y in approach, focused on musicianship and so stern and serious, but something about them crept into my brain and stuck, because, the next thing I knew, they were playing their fourth song and Darius had materialized behind me, bewilderment on his face.
"These guys are fucking great," I said.
"Yeah they are," he replied.
I saw them so many times over the next stretch of months that I didn't even think of their evolution as a band, they were just a great band, one that I enjoyed seeing and saw so often for free, one I would pay to see even though they were friends of friends. By the time they released their first E.P., I was salivating at the prospect of hearing their greatness captured on digital.
And it was great, I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever, for me, those songs were fantastic. I dropped what I was listening, what I was liking, and focused on them, because I saw something in them, something I didn't see in Pookey Bleum or Shiloh Church or Grubby Ernie or Everyone Loves Delaware or any of the other great bands from my neck of the woods that I loved more than I loved my own pedestrian attempts at music, I saw a glimmer of a music that could become something everyone would love. Or at least, should.
So I started playing their music on my radio show, over and over, making the lo-fi, simple recording the soundtrack to my discovery of myself, something I normally only did with the CD's by the bands from places across the country or the world. When the Iowa State paper asked me about bands on the fledgling local independent record label, I said the only thing I could, that Frankenixon was amazing, that their album was easily one of my favorite albums of the year.
The DJ's at the station I was music director of started taking notice. By then, Weston had joined the band, he used to be in a nu-metal band and knew one of the guitarists in my old shitty band but to me, he was just this monster of a guy, unassumingly dressed in a button-down, collared short-sleeve shirt with slacks and a cute hat, slightly round, slightly short, seemingly perpetually intoxicated, hitting the drums so hard I though I was going to die, because my life was hanging on every note the band played by then. It was like falling in love, which was easy to do with Evelyn's voice and her piano, and Ben's enviable bass set the throb of my heart, and Joe's guitar just did so many things that I never wanted a guitar to do, but always dreamed they could. The metal drummer, the jazz bassist, the classical frontwoman, the prog-metal guitar nerd, they all just fucking created, not just existed but created, it was unreachable and yet impossible to let go.
Time appeared and disappeared, and I got lost in it, but never stopped keeping track of the band. I was a friend to them by then, genuinely, sharing conversations in apartments shrouded in cigarette smoke, talking instrumental post-rock with Evelyn's husband James, who paid me the impossible compliment of listening to my radio show and had the best record collection I had and have ever seen. I sang along to everything, losing control of myself and dancing, fucking dancing. It was them I missed when I moved, them I missed first, if not most. They were home, their haunting, gorgeous sounds and their friendship. I loved them.
So I left, I moved, and it set in, the fear that cripples and kills me now, but I never forgot them, and I never once stopped listening to them. When their second album, even more majestic and even more a labor of love, arrived in the mail after Christmas, I knew I had a new soundtrack. Home had come to me, home hadn't forgotten about me, even though I was imploding over a thousand miles away. When I visited Iowa in February, the very day I got back, they played a show, and I sat in the front row, ecstatic even though everything at the core of me was consumed with lost opportunity and bad choices, moving and singing like I wanted to do the first time I saw them and was too dumbstruck to move.
And now it's December, the end of the year, an event horizon I just might have to acknowledge for real, and I'm more scared than I ever thought I had been.
And I'm here, in this place I once called home, a place that now seems as impossible to understand as any language I do not know.
But Frankenixon is about to play.
And, goddammit, I'm fucking home.
The first time I ever saw Frankenixon, I was standing around at the Octagon (my Ames heads will know what I'm talking about) after I'd just played with Witches of Weir, killing time at one of those shows where it's just the bands playing for each other simply for the joy of saying we were here, in this little nowhere everyone overlooks and ignores, and we were there and playing music that no one else would play. We all labored under delusions then, for good or ill, and in retrospect, I think the reason why I'm so scared and stymied musically now is because I'm so scared of resurrecting that delusionality, that ability to completely give away my sanity to something I've created.
Anyway, I'd seen the band's name on a flyer or two here and there about the area, and, watching them set up, I noted casually that Jeremy Grace was playing with the band then, not entirely surprising considering how we all played with each other's bands, even me, barely competent at my own shitty instrument, because we all fucking gave a shit about making something we liked. Anyway, I decided to stick around for some reason, probably because Patrick told me that they were really good, and I took his assessment at face value--even then, I was a music fascist--until they started playing.
And christ, they were amazing. Jeremy, a pianist more than anything else, had a viscerality to his drumming that somehow seemed perfect, even though his mastery of the set was slightly different than the virtuosity the others seemed to possess. Truthfully, I miss Jeremy sometimes when I see them today, even though Weston is perhaps the perfect rock drummer (apologies to Jesse Hernandez), because Jeremy hit every drum head and cymbal like he were discovering it for the first time, because he was obviously feeling the music more than he was playing a part on an instrument, and I still envy that, I can only do that with my voice, and barely at that. Anyway, the group's musical niche I found questionable--piano-driven-jazz-rock with hints of prog and lo-fi punk--but the ensemble as a unit was so fucking dynamic. Back then, they were still pretty shoegazer-y in approach, focused on musicianship and so stern and serious, but something about them crept into my brain and stuck, because, the next thing I knew, they were playing their fourth song and Darius had materialized behind me, bewilderment on his face.
"These guys are fucking great," I said.
"Yeah they are," he replied.
I saw them so many times over the next stretch of months that I didn't even think of their evolution as a band, they were just a great band, one that I enjoyed seeing and saw so often for free, one I would pay to see even though they were friends of friends. By the time they released their first E.P., I was salivating at the prospect of hearing their greatness captured on digital.
And it was great, I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever, for me, those songs were fantastic. I dropped what I was listening, what I was liking, and focused on them, because I saw something in them, something I didn't see in Pookey Bleum or Shiloh Church or Grubby Ernie or Everyone Loves Delaware or any of the other great bands from my neck of the woods that I loved more than I loved my own pedestrian attempts at music, I saw a glimmer of a music that could become something everyone would love. Or at least, should.
So I started playing their music on my radio show, over and over, making the lo-fi, simple recording the soundtrack to my discovery of myself, something I normally only did with the CD's by the bands from places across the country or the world. When the Iowa State paper asked me about bands on the fledgling local independent record label, I said the only thing I could, that Frankenixon was amazing, that their album was easily one of my favorite albums of the year.
The DJ's at the station I was music director of started taking notice. By then, Weston had joined the band, he used to be in a nu-metal band and knew one of the guitarists in my old shitty band but to me, he was just this monster of a guy, unassumingly dressed in a button-down, collared short-sleeve shirt with slacks and a cute hat, slightly round, slightly short, seemingly perpetually intoxicated, hitting the drums so hard I though I was going to die, because my life was hanging on every note the band played by then. It was like falling in love, which was easy to do with Evelyn's voice and her piano, and Ben's enviable bass set the throb of my heart, and Joe's guitar just did so many things that I never wanted a guitar to do, but always dreamed they could. The metal drummer, the jazz bassist, the classical frontwoman, the prog-metal guitar nerd, they all just fucking created, not just existed but created, it was unreachable and yet impossible to let go.
Time appeared and disappeared, and I got lost in it, but never stopped keeping track of the band. I was a friend to them by then, genuinely, sharing conversations in apartments shrouded in cigarette smoke, talking instrumental post-rock with Evelyn's husband James, who paid me the impossible compliment of listening to my radio show and had the best record collection I had and have ever seen. I sang along to everything, losing control of myself and dancing, fucking dancing. It was them I missed when I moved, them I missed first, if not most. They were home, their haunting, gorgeous sounds and their friendship. I loved them.
So I left, I moved, and it set in, the fear that cripples and kills me now, but I never forgot them, and I never once stopped listening to them. When their second album, even more majestic and even more a labor of love, arrived in the mail after Christmas, I knew I had a new soundtrack. Home had come to me, home hadn't forgotten about me, even though I was imploding over a thousand miles away. When I visited Iowa in February, the very day I got back, they played a show, and I sat in the front row, ecstatic even though everything at the core of me was consumed with lost opportunity and bad choices, moving and singing like I wanted to do the first time I saw them and was too dumbstruck to move.
And now it's December, the end of the year, an event horizon I just might have to acknowledge for real, and I'm more scared than I ever thought I had been.
And I'm here, in this place I once called home, a place that now seems as impossible to understand as any language I do not know.
But Frankenixon is about to play.
And, goddammit, I'm fucking home.