Madder Rose

How amazing is this life?

I've had a pretty bad week. I am not a man who easily maintains a median attitude toward life and I indeed fall toward the extreme in most things. This week I have been very sad.

I'm not real sure why, it's just the way things are.

So I'm here, my bones just strong enough to keep this insomnia from pulling me down to sleep. Just strong enough to keep me sitting up directionless and hopeful so that I can get past this tonight and spend Shabbat with my wife, eating and laughing and enjoying one another's company, as is usually the case.

The hope of joy is always a weight to troubles.

I am drifting awake from place to place and cup to cup of herbal tea. Chamomile reminds me of playing guitar with Erik. Licorice reminds me of the really sad nights with Ella when she cried and cried until it was time to go to bed and cry alone. My wife drinks a rose tea that reminds me of being a kid, sitting in the sun and feeding roses to our tortoises. It makes me sad to think of places that aren't covered in six inches of snow halfway through April.

I imagine that I will go to sleep this way, and awake the same.

There was this point in high school when I didn't know anyone (except Kevin, 100 miles away) who loved the music that I was so in love with. My Bloody Valentine, Unrest, the KItchens of Distinction, Ride, the Cranes, Madder Rose, the Blake Babies...I could sit here all night telling you about the the chorus to "Saturn 5" by the Inspiral Carpets, that first guitar coming in on "Happy" from Ned's Atomic Dustbin, that tragic line from the Bats ("Just you wait, there will be morning skies, bringing you some peace tonight...") carving its way across my bones like a clumsy butcher, the hopelessness of "Spiral" closing out the first side of "Ring" by the Connells, a song so final that it would take an insistant knock at the door, an environmental tragedy, sensational auditory and visual hallucinations maybe, just to get you to get up and flip over the tape.

For a while there, I had a celebrity crush on Juliana Hatfield. I know, she was hardly a celebrity. But she could write an amazing pop song. The hours would disappear in moments as I listened to "Hey, Babe" or the singles for "Forever Baby" or "I See You" while drinking pots of coffee and writing bad poetry about whatever it was I was sure the government was trying to get out of me from the cameras hidden in the trees outside of my window. In retrospect, that almost sounds crazy.

Except it's absolutely true.

After a couple of years of sending good (desperate, pitiful) vibes her way, Juliana Hatfield finally answered my call and came out to see me under the pretense of touring to support her new record. She was a clever minx. Kevin and I went out to see her at the Roxy and it was incredible. Sure, she was everything that I expected, she was great. But what grabbed me was the guitarist for the opening band, Madder Rose. Billy Cote swayed and strummed with an energy that was impossible over waves of effects and modulations of previous effects in a world that was his, an incredible bullet of soul that tore the air around him into the shapes that he desired. And yet, he did not stand apart from the band. Mary Lorson delivered her beautifully heart-stopping lyrics with a poetic simplicity over her own guitar with Matt Verta-Ray and Billy Kick building the house that they would kick over song after song. And yeah, I remember their names. They hit me pretty hard.

After the show, I waited with Kevin for a while to try and meet Juliana Hatfield but that never materialized. He got tired and left, and I kind of wandered around to the load-in part of the back.

Madder Rose sat in their spent glory in the back of their van, drinking beer and hanging out together. I wandered over and gushed a bit. They were very nice, we talked about the bands we liked, playing music that nobody cared about, and I sat on the edge of the van. Eventually some other guy wandered over to gush in a similar fashion and we all started talking to him. His name was Mike Watt, and he was just as cool as they were. It was a really good night.

The only real problem with the whole thing, was that nobody cared. I didn't really have anybody I could talk to about it when I got home. I saw a man crack open the earth with a guitar, and nobody heard. I was in a school with 1,500 kids in it and there wasn't a single fucker listening to Madder Rose. This is probably the tragedy of Madder Rose, that they were so good and there just weren't enough people to love them the way they deserved.

For a long time, it made me a little sad to listen to them just for this reason. They were a daunting little section of my cd collection, something that made me uncomfortable no matter how long I owned the cd's, and no matter how incredible I felt every time I listened to them and felt the echoing brilliance of "While Away" or that broken kind of swoon of "Razor Pilot".

But eventually, technology opened them back up to me again via the glorious (blessed by a thousand angels wearing bowler hats and striped nylons) itunes random function, revealing that radiance all over and gave me a chance to finally talk about it.

About a year and a half ago, I lived in one small room in a really crappy little apartment in Brooklyn with no heat in a neighborhood where everyone wore very skinny jeans. My walls were lined with books, my guitars sat at one end, and a desk crowded the window. Zo and I sat on the blankets that we'd bought so we didn't have to share my sleeping bag on my floor. We were listening to random music and drinking coffee, waiting for the little space heater I'd bought to kick in and remind us that there were warmer places than New York. A Madder Rose song came on and I started to think about the wonder of listening to them when I realized that Zo was singing along.

"How do you know this song?" This is what I said.
"I love Madder Rose." This was her reply.
"I loved this band in high school. Nobody else even knew who they were. It drove me crazy."
"I loved them in high school, too. Yeah, I don't know anybody else who was into them."

Clearly, she wasn't quite as scarred as I was. She is a very strong woman.

Why the fuck am I talking about this? Has anyone actually read this whole thing? Probably not. But I started off the night sad, waiting for the pictures Sara was sending me on her cell phone of the My Bloody Valentine show she saw tonight, wishing I could be there. They made me feel worse, the cold made me feel worse, the thought of watching a soccer game made me feel worse, the book I'm reading made me feel worse. Of course, it's Russian so it's kind of supposed to. But I came down into our office and turned on some music and started thinking about my life. And when I stumbled across Madder Rose, I thought about Zo. Upstairs, sleeping in a little flannel cocoon and waiting for me and I remembered how incredible this universe is. That I probably passed her in a hallway in a school 3,000 miles from where we met, gently humming the same songs with us waiting to ripen to something greater is amazing.

But not as amazing as fucking Madder Rose.