Every Record I Own - Day 462: Git Some Loose Control
My old band These Arms Are Snakes found kindred spirits in the Denver quartet Planes Mistaken For Stars. Both our bands got unfairly lumped in with the emo scene despite the fact that we were basically just art-inclined hardcore kids that wanted to cull ideas from the past thirty years of rock music, filter it through a reckless punk panache, and drink a bunch of beer in the process. We did a week’s worth of shows together in 2006 and a year later they broke up.
But out of the ashes came Git Some. Planes guitarist Chuck French and bassist Neil Keener recruited their friend Andrew to play drums and their friend Luke to sing, and together they churned out this gnarly, high-energy combination of Amphetamine Reptile noise rock, Hawkwind, and late-era Black Flag. They were rowdy and revelrous. Russian Circles wound up doing a week’s worth of shows with them in 2009 and I think every show ended with Luke getting carried out of the club by either the venue staff or his bandmates. He was a sweetheart of a human being, but his performances involved an almost shamanistic level of chemical transcendence, and while that made for exciting sets, the aftermath could be sloppy.
Git Some eventually went on a hiatus. They’d been busted for pot possession while touring with Converge, Chuck and Neil got a side gig playing in the neo-folk outfit Wovenhand, and, perhaps more than anything, Luke’s drinking escalated. It apparently reached a point where he was hospitalized because his body was shutting down. His bandmates were called to his bedside to say goodbye as the doctors said he most likely wouldn’t recover. But he managed to pull out of it, got discharged, and had a brief stint of sobriety where future Git Some plans started formulating. But last I heard he’d fallen off the wagon and the people in his life were facing that hard decision with addicts where you have to figure out how to be supportive without being an enabler, And for the Git Some dudes, not being enablers meant not being a band.
It’s a sad story that I’ve encountered (and lived through) more and more as I’ve grown older. It’s fun to party in your twenties, but you’re living on borrowed time if you continue that lifestyle into your thirties and forties. I hope Luke finds a path to sobriety. And, selfishly, I hope to see Git Some in action again someday.
