hell (oh) friends,
It’s been a little while…I’m having a good yet sappy night off in the land they call Vancouver and I’m feeling compelled to drop you all a public love note. Nine years ago tomorrow our band played its biggest show of our young yet saucy career. It was the proverbial “big break” moment that every kid in a band, in a movie, in a sitcom, in a real-ass life waits and drools for.
A band (Coheed and Cambria in our story) can’t make it to the hugest most awesomest show (which will be played by The Allentown Fair , Allentown Pennsylvania 8/31/02, possible attendance approx 10k - 12k… feels like a million) opening up for a band you love, listen to, have every record by (in our story, Jimmy Eat World)….and goddamn it you and your best friends get a magical phone call asking you to fill in. The sky opens up, Angels start to sing, women swoon (just kidding there were absolutely no women) and somehow with little time to prepare you rent a van with no money and shitty credit, and show up to a dream sequence.
Now for reality’s sake i must say this wasn’t “IT”. There was a lot of hard work leading up to the ‘dream show’ opportunity, and god knows a ton more of hard work after it, but it was a glimpse. A little sliver of what could be…and sometimes that is all your lucky enough to get.
Anyway maybe I’m getting all ‘emo’ in my old age, or maybe i just spent an amazing weekend playing some of the biggest most memorable shows of my life, but for whatever reason these past few days I’ve been getting nostalgic and thinking back….
…back to the beginning sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table looking through my Dad and my Grandfather’s date books, seeing all their gigs penciled in…
….back to when i was old enough to travel with my dad to his weekend gigs, helping out with load in and setting up his drums on stage. The feel of people’s eyes staring at me, knowing i had no business being in that fucking bar. That smell of old cigarettes and stale beer that hung on the microphones and the foam in his cases…..from those early experiences i knew what i wanted to do….i day dreamt about being in a band and playing shows for a living nonstop.
….thinking back to when my dad first bought me a guitar, an off-white Fernandes Strat copy he got from the guitar player in his band. i learned 3 chords and then wrote a horrible little song with them…I played it and tortured my poor mom with it until my fingers bled. (yeah that’s right, that fucking Bryan Adams song was real to me dammit!)
…back to peanut league baseball when a kid asked me what kind of music i liked. We both agreed that Nirvana was, and i quote, “the fucking coolest” and so my first band was started. But he played guitar, i had never been in a band before, and his hair was longer therefore i had to play the drums…at least until we found a replacement, i begrudgingly agreed. (we never found a drummer)…
….back to high school when i met a funny kid who wore a bow tie everyday. He had a car and would give me punk rock mixtapes. We became good friends and went to local shows together. We decided to start a band and played our first show together a month later at a dance i wasn’t old enough to attend…(we covered a Nirvana song)…
….back to working part-time at a Pathmark in Belleville NJ, located conveniently in between the KFC and the ‘rape tunnel’. i was payed a surely minimum wage and used every penny i saved to buy the 100 tickets my band needed to sell in order to play a battle of the bands. Top prize, opening slot on the NJ date of warped tour. We lost to a ska band who’s singer was fucking one of the judges, later my girlfriend dumped me for our drummer….
….thinking back to meeting, getting to know, and eventually being lucky enough to call family some of the weirdest, kindest, most talented people i have ever encountered in my entire life….and finding out they wanted me to join their band and then months later jumping in a van together and learning everything i know about life and the world by their side….
I must say its been a strange ride so far. But y'know i think it maybe human nature to forget how good you have it while the going is good. But if you’re really lucky (and i mean really reeeeeeeeally fucking lucky), every now and then life nudges you and reminds you of where you came from. I know what it’s like to be young and have dreams…I’ve had my heart broken and cursed the heavens when things didn’t go my way…but i also know what it’s like to be lucky enough to have those same hopes and dreams full filled. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the good and the bad and I am thankful for every second of it. Tomorrow is an anniversary…and life was nice enough to remind me of it.
so thank you to all the people that were nice enough to help us out along the way. From my family and my friends who always listened to whatever shitty song i wrote and thought was the fucking greatest at the time… to everyone who at some point over the years took the time to watch me play, maybe bought a record i made, or just fucking got it …. I would like to say thank you, a million, trillion times, it truly means the world to me.
xofrank
