When you are 12 and your mother drives a Ford Crown Victoria (1988. Powder Blue. White Landau top. Obv) certain things are givens. Settling into the plush, navy blue velvet-like seats and intaking the acrid smell of your step-fathers cigarette smoke...it is hard not to feel a peculiar blend of immortality twisted with a somewhat suffocating fragility.
If I remember one thing from our summer vacation, 1998 (besides the gut crushing nature of those old school lap seatbelts which just got tighter and tighter every time you inhaled), it is this.
I remember finding out that..
I was emo.
Rewind, shall we. On April 28, 1998, 3 plucky young fellas from Southern California...teenagers really...released an album. It was not stupid like Blink 182...it wasn't totally pansy like Tonic (whom I love)...none of that. It was Third Eye Blind...marinated in both the summer sun and monsoon rains of Southern California, produced by three dudes who probably listened to their share of Green Day. It was a simple album of three dudes...three instruments...exceedingly intelligent wordplay...and a grating first single that made Say What? Karaoke competitors shiver at the sight of the Wheel of Death.
Yes, my friends. I am speaking of the first full length release from Eve 6. Perhaps the greatest pseudo-post-pop-punk band of the late 90s/early 00s. If that album was a record, i would have worn it out...and in fact the CD is scratched beyond listening. I had to purchase it digitally when I made my conversion to the new century in 2004 with the purchase of my first (of 7...story for another day. long and short...i'm clumsy) iPods.
So it's August of 1998. We are piled in the Crown Victoria cruising eastward to parts unknown in a stiff, driving rain. Traffic surrounds us and the collective misery of a million people stuck on the Mass Pike weighs on the car. It should be known now that I could never talk to my step-father Mike (from herewithal referred to as Mom's mistake husband) for more than 2-3 minutes, much less with his godawful driving begging for my adolescent scoffs, eye-rolls and general pissyness.
So Mom's Mistake Husband (MMB) is probably being a dick...what else is new? Lucas is asleep in his booster seat, my mom is praying that we get to scenic Cape Ann (yes we lived large) without me being throttled and Mike being a HUGE dick the entire week (Save the suspense...both failed). But EUREKA! (i have found it)! My dear blue discman...and an Eve6 record I purchased on a whim...probably at Camelot Music or RecordTown...because SHIT Inside Out is a sick jam.
Tony's rolling drums...Jon's 3 chords of magic...and then...Max. Max and his teenage-quality bass playing. Max and his altogether common yet completely unique warble...
Spare the details...this record was played nonstop for the next...year? Yea probably a year. I could blame Eve6 here and now for any attitude/perfectly legal drug "problem"/anxiety issues that would come flooding over me like the rain that week for the next several years...but no. Obviously not. Eve 6...made me a shithead. But the shithead I am today. Fact.
Why does this matter? I saw Eve 6 live last night, April 23, 2009. Next week is the 11th anniversary of the self-titled magic that is Eve 6. They sound and look the same as they did then...and we are old as we wax nostalgic about a band of 30 year olds , ourselves just 23.
They played all the jams and could not help but let the rain of nostalgia come down...wake my dreams...wash away my misery. I felt the thunder. I screamed. I let the rain fall down.
I came clean. And as I drove home last night. As I brushed my teeth, ears ringing. As I lay in bed staring at the ceiling...I remembered things I haven't remembered in years. Things I thought I had lost to holes bore in my brain from one more day of this...or two more hits of that.
Mistakes made as I cried to "Jesus Nitelite"
Events that conspired during singalongs of "Heres to the Night"
People in cars singing "Open Road Song"
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