“25 years. I still remember standing at the merch table in the back of Crush Warehouse buying my copy of Teenage Politics. Still remember singing Every New Day the last time I saw Five Iron. There are days I do miss the music.”
There is a picture in my head that I don’t know that I could ever fully articulate. Who I am now is a long way from the kid buying stickers in the back of an old warehouse waiting for the next band so he could jump back in a pit. But at the same time there is a part of my that will never not be that kid.
(So many bands. And in so many venues. But it will always be the warehouse.)
I want to say I have always been a word guy. But what I probably should say is that I’ve always been a lyric guy. I’m a sucker for the right lyrics woven in the right riff that just skips all the pretense and cuts straight to the heart.
And there was just so much that the teenage kid in that warehouse wanted to say and needed to say that he just couldn’t find the words for – anthems he wanted to shout, questions he had to ask, anger he needed to scream, dreams he had to dream, prayers he need to pray. And the bands gave him those.
And the music. I loved the music.
Yes there were the questions. And yes there were the prayers. And all the rest.
But I loved the music.
I was a teenager. Of course there was a person I was trying to be, an identity I wanted so badly to convey. But looking back … I just kind of shake my head. I said it before, but there is a part of me that will always be the kid in that warehouse. I’ve opted for different fashion choices… sometimes. I still collect stickers… they just don’t cover the back of my car. When someone makes a statement of almost any kind my answer is still, “Why?” And my response when someone asks me why is usually, “Why not?”
When I think back on those days there are a lot of good things. It is only in hindsight that I see a lot of them, unfortunately. But there were a lot of crappy circumstances I was going through, questions I was asking, pain I was trying to deal with.
And when I think about navigating from one side of the various struggles to the other, one of the things that helped carry me was the music.
Sometimes it still does.
p.s. As I worked through a draft of this post I wrote more about the warehouse. And then I realized that as many shows as I saw at the warehouse, I saw as many if not more at other places. But as I mention above, it will always be the warehouse. And I think that is because, for me, the warehouse was the entry point to a community that even to this day I value so very much.
p.p.s. The MxPx/FIF show was on January 18, 2020 and I’ve had a Draft for this post ever since then. I’m leaving the posting date as is, but this entry is quite a bit older than is appears.
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