Bedlocked
“Do you remember how much shit you gave me for listening to Elliott Smith in college? And you’re putting this out?”
I am nothing if not inconsistent. I’ve even come around to some of those early Thee Oh Sees records. Not Castlemania though. Great sleeve, novelty record.
This summer marks twenty-five years since I graduated from Skidmore College. It was an ignominious end; I’d fallen out with most of my friends in what I now recognize as a passive-aggressive “you can’t fire me because I quit” denial of impending change. Which for someone like me is synonymous with impending doom.
My heart is detached; keeps me running in circles.
Moving back home was a palliative regression. I needed to do it, I wasn’t ready to move to New York City and sign a seven-year lease on a bombed-out Kent Ave. warehouse. My memories of that summer are relatively clear: I worked as a dogsbody at Fort Apache Studios, which afforded me the following experiences:
I shook David Bowie’s hand during a pre-concert lineup with the crew and told him I loved Christiane F. “Dark stuff, that; thanks for helping out with the show.”
I discovered Beck was an unbearable prick at that point in his life. He threw a tantrum about the same backstage arrangements Bowie hadn’t mentioned, and locked himself in the “green room” until showtime.
I was given a copy of the Breeders’ Pod demos on DAT. Likewise everything Helium had recorded to that point.
I was asked to prevent a persistent Rivers Cuomo from locating Juliana Hatfield backstage at a Radiohead concert. It was an extraordinary show at an extraordinary moment marking Radiohead’s arrival as the coolest band on the planet, but it’s unfortunately tainted by my remit.
I don’t mean to be mean, I just don’t want to see you.
I was also continuing to bat 1.000 in a multiyear, MVP performance as a worthless boyfriend, which compounded the breakdown of even more college relationships and left me in an embarrassing state of comically misguided self-pity. Palliative regression. What that means is getting back in touch with your high school habits (cruising, smoking), your high school music, friends and especially your high school girlfriend. And what that means is drinking a full highball of Smirnoff blue neat at a party at her house because you’re so consumed with rage at overhearing a Phish fan get laughs with the line, “Friends don’t let friends listen to punk.” My high school girlfriend was an absolute Best New Music smokeshow. I blacked out and woke up on her bedroom floor. Way to go, dude: you saved punk rock.
Wish I never came down.
By late August the routine was: wake up, watch some indie movie like Trust or Kicking and Screaming for the fiftieth time, drive over to my buddy’s house (also living at home, also looking for a job), lift weights in the basement while listening to The Fall, Minutemen or Jesus Lizard, work whatever landscaping, carpentry or painting gigs we’d scrounged, then I’d sit in my parents’ laundry room playing Zork Nemesis or later Riven to beat the afternoon heat, make loop music in Goldwave, and help around the house before taking off at dusk to listen to a mixtape in our third-generation Chrysler Town & Country.
I still have two of those tapes, which I’ve assembled a decent simulacrum of in Spotify (missing: a bunch of upstate NY bands, half of Rob Crow’s Lactose Adept, and the original Built to Spill version of “Scarin’”). These tapes still put me right back to that summer, which is remarkable, as there are few summers, winters or really much of anything left in my past that stirs such a specific, winsome nostalgia. Earlier this spring, my friend Will — whose music brought me back to similarly forgotten places — told me that this band Sprawl (who’d put out a great dirge-guitar album a few years ago) had a new record ready as Bedlocked. He sent me “See Through,” and I was completely transported. I mean the guy behind these eight songs is in his early twenties, I don’t think he’s heard Codeine before, or Bedhead, certainly not Swell…it’s that thing of how the longer the internet goes on, the less distinct any lineage of style becomes. You can get to this sound from so many different directions, it doesn’t indicate the same kind of flag-waving allegiance to a particular scene, or the dogmatic way of approaching music — and indeed how music gets to you — that informed Gen X’s jealously-guarded rules of engagement.
“See Through” somehow put me in the same frame of mind I was in twenty-five years ago, driving around wallowing, waiting for my real life to begin. A number of events have stacked up in recent months that explain why and how, twenty-five years later, I’m experiencing this sort of emotional time travel. You start out with positive checklists early in adulthood — you get married, friends get married, you have kids, you work at being a better partner and parent — and then it flips at some point, and you’re ticking off friends getting divorced, friends dying, and friends’ kids dying.
The void of the summer and fall of 1997 was a unique period of vexation, and I’m back in it because of the pointed lyrics across Bedlocked, which deal with navigating finality. The process of losing friends — growing apart, realizing you’re seeing the world in incompatible ways and so have nothing in common anymore — is often difficult, drawn-out and vague. It will occupy the majority of your twenties. And for a certain sort of person, you will need to settle these porous situations in order to move forward. You’ll be compelled to let people know that you no longer consider them a friend, or that there’s an emotional asymmetry in your relationship that you can’t live with. It’s a different sort of death. It’s having to tell another person, “I don’t mean to be mean, I just don’t want to see you.”
“I wish I never came down.”
Bedlocked is available on CD from Mutual Skies and View No Country.