Preface 1: I switched from Blogger to Tumblr earlier this month just for the ability to embed audio into my posts. So click on the song above. It’s called “Jolene” and is by a ska band from Connecticut called Spring Heeled Jack. (Put aside your ideas of ska being silly or irrelevant or not cool enough for you and listen to it anyway!)
Preface 2: Since I can’t figure how to add a title to an audio post yet (is this possible?), this is Thank You Card #9.
Okay so…back in September I was driving down Cabrillo Boulevard in Santa Barbara with the windows down, Mishka in the passenger seat, and Yuuki with half her body sticking out the back window. We were listening to Sunny Day Real Estate’s How It Feels to be Something On like we didn’t have a care in the world. Back then I was starting qualifying exams, so I had a lot of cares (a lot of cares), but at that time it felt like my only responsibility was to drive past the beach singing songs I loved while my big dog was leaning against the armrest and my small dog was smelling the sun and the sky and the ocean. We drove past the spot where Tom and I got married a few months prior and I was happy to remember how after we were pronounced husband and wife, we walked back up the aisle to the third track off that record, “Every Shining Time You Arrive.” That record is beautiful, and the music is the marker of one of the most important and best days of my life.
I thought about how amazing if would be if I could see that band live. They’d broken up in 2001 before I had the chance. In a strange coincidence, as the dogs and I pulled into the parking lot of a pet store, I saw I missed a call from Tom. I called him back and he told me Sunny Day Real Estate were doing a reunion tour. OMFG. We bought tickets when they went on sale and drove down to LA in October with our friend Chris, who has good taste in music and often accompanies us to shows.
It’s hard to know what to expect when a band plays together after years of inactivity, but this show was rad. They played most of their debut record Diary, plus a ton of stuff songs from the follow up LP2. Unlike my better half, I find it difficult to describe emotionally powerful musical experiences, so you’ll have to be creative here and extrapolate in your own mind beyond my limited and insufficient description.
It’s one thing to travel 90 miles for an amazing musical experience; it’s another to fly across the country for one. There’s only one band I’d consider doing that for, and that band had been broken up for more than eight years so there was no real chance of that happening. Or so I thought. But one day in February, I was sitting in a coffee shop getting some work done on my dissertation proposal when my cell phone started going crazy with text messages from friends telling me that Spring Heeled Jack was going to play a reunion show. OMFG.
My initial excitement was overtaken by the disappointment of realizing I was likely going to miss it. I mean, I wasn’t really going to fly across the country for a show. Seriously? It’s okay to do that when you’re an adult person with a real salary that covers your rent, bills, 401K, etc. (for instance, I always admired/envied how my older brother Alex would fly to places like Vegas to see his favorite band, moe., before he moved to Australia in 2009) but it’s not feasible to live that dream when you’ve gotta make $18K last in one of the country’s premiere rich person enclaves. Ergo, traveling cross country to see my favorite band from when I was 15 didn’t seem like the decision a financially responsible adult would make.
But in true best friend fashion, Tom changed my mind. He said things like, “This is one of your favorite bands of all time.” True, true… “They haven’t played a show in years, and probably won’t play another show ever again.” Also true. “You’d really regret not going.” Yeah, you know they always say you’re more likely to regret the things you didn’t do rather than the things you did do. And finally, “We’ll figure out how to afford it.” I wasn’t so sure of that last one but overall it was a convincing argument, so once again we found ourselves buying tickets for the show online the day they went on sale, figuring we’d figure out the whole “getting from California to Connecticut” thing later.
And that, my friends, is where American Airlines’ horrible service comes in! The whole time we were waiting to get back to California from San Juan I’d been thinking “Hell yeah! Bring on your worst service ever AA!” figuring it would get to the point where we would be compensated with free travel vouchers. Airline have different rules for compensation, and as I recently learned, with American even if you’re the sole survivor of a fiery plane crash, you’re only going to be comped 15,000 bonus miles for your troubles. This equates to a one way ticket, which in the grand scheme of airline compensation isn’t that great—for instance, I’ve been on overbooked United flights and gotten free round trip tickets for switching flights (plus an upgraded to business class, plus a $100 voucher for complaining about this “hardship”). But it just so happened that Tom and I had enough frequent flyer miles with AA that this bonus let us fly to Connecticut for the Spring Heeled Jack show for free. A month after we’d bought tickets for the show, the problem of how to get there was solved. (OMFG!)
With Auntie Stacey watching the dogs, we flew into NYC and rented a car to drive up to Connecticut in the middle of the night, stopping at a diner at 3 am when we got into Milford. The following evening we went to Miya’s, and then me, Tom, and Adam even had time to hit up Rudy’s, our favorite New Haven Bar to watch the Yankees beat up on Josh Beckett for a few innings.
All this before the show itself even started, which was incredible, and truly the best part of what was possibly the best night ever. There were a bunch of reasons for this. First, Spring Heeled Jack is just a flat out great band. They write catchy songs and each person in the band is a really good musician, so you can listen to what any individual instrument is doing and be interested. (Tragically, their original drummer passed away in 2000, so they were playing with a friend who did a good job filling big shoes on drums). Second, so many of my friends (and family) were there, from those with whom I’d gone to a million shows with back in the day, to folks like Stacy’s husband Eric who hadn’t ever seen the band live before. I can’t say enough about the joy of knocking into friendly faces on the dance floor. Third, even if you’re not into ska music (I know, cause you’re too cool), it’s undeniably fun in a live setting because every forgets to care and dances like an idiot. So many shows I go to these days people just stand and watch the band with their arms folded in front of them — nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it’s fun to move to music, too. Fourth, their trombone player was wearing Yankee gear and taunting Red Sox fans. Okay, this isn’t a real reason the show was awesome, but it kinda was? Haha… ;) Fifth, because the band had agreed to play two shows, a lot of us there that night knew we had the next night to look forward to, and that made the first show even more enjoyable because you didn’t have the bittersweetness of “Wow this is so fun, but I have to remember how it feels cause it’s never going to happen again!”
Afterward, Tom, Adam, and I went to yet another 24-hour diner and played Scrabble at 2 am amidst drunken, cussing Milfordians.
Someone threw half a set list into the crowd during the show, and one of us picked it up (ha - little ska joke there for y’all), so below you can see some of the songs they played.
All in all, we got to Connecticut for free, spent time with our friends and family and saw some friendly faces we hadn’t seen in years, and danced to one of my favorite bands two nights in a row. It was a fantastic time that was enabled by a confluence of mystical forces conspiring to bring Tom and I back to Connecticut to share in the magic. But, mostly it was enabled by a guy named Matt Flood, because he was the one who started the ball rolling by convincing the band to reunite for two shows when, again, they hadn’t played in eight years. Flood’s been keeping the flame of Connecticut ska alive for 15 years and recently his label, Asbestos Records, re-released SHJ’s two records (Static World View and Songs From Suburbia) on vinyl. Even if Tom and I’d had to hitchhike back east and sleep on the street corner with Shakespeare Lady, we’d have managed to be at those shows. But had Flood not persuaded the band to get back on stage none of that awesome stuff would have happened. So we gave TYC9 to Flood, and it was funny cause he was kinda like, “WTF is this, a thank you card?”…yeah, OMFG THANK YOU FLOOD! :)
