the second round

(5) butthole surfers, “pepper”
sent home
(4) foo fighters, “i’ll stick around”
293-169
and will play on in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 11.

WE WERE ALL IN LOVE WITH DYING: david turkel on “pepper”

Love and life only appear to be separate because everything on earth is broken apart by vibration of various amplitudes and durations. —George Bataille, “The Solar Anus”

I dropped acid on Valentine’s Day in 1988, when I was a senior in high school. It was my very first drug. I smoked cigarette number one (of probably well over a hundred thousand) while tripping that afternoon—pulled it out of a stranger’s mouth at a sub shop on Woodward Avenue, took a puff, pronounced it “disgusting,” and dropped it back onto their table. The acid cost me three bucks. I remember holding the tiny piece of paper in my hand and thinking it was going to be a bigger dud than grocery store fireworks. You just can’t conceive of losing your mind until you do, I guess. You can’t use your brain to imagine a you that’s still you even after everything you thought of as yourself has vacated the premises. I think Foucault said that.
I remember it was Valentine’s Day because I had to take my girlfriend to a dance that night. Before that, I had to have dinner with my parents. I was sitting on the bathroom sink, staring at myself in the mirror, my face as red as a baboon’s ass, my eyes fully black to their edges. I was by this point clear-headed enough to know that it was a problem, yet still deranged enough to have settled on the following solution: I would simply stare directly into the lightbulb above our kitchen table to make my pupils shrink before looking at either of my parents when we spoke. So that was our dinner. Them: “Why is your face so red?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “We went sledding.” Them: “Where did you go sledding?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “The...library?” My mother had made soup that evening, and that I remember almost thirty-three years later because of the pepper. She cracked fresh black pepper over the soup and the whole thing started to spin.

Paul Leary—guitarist and co-founder of Texas punk legends Butthole Surfers—explained the non sequitur title of his band’s one and only hit song this way: Teresa Nervosa, one of the band’s drummers, was out walking her dog when a stranger approached and asked her, “What’s your dog’s name, Sonny...Pepper?” Can’t quite tell if the joke here is that the stranger misgendered Nervosa (the literal poster child of Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker), or that he seems to have thought he could actually guess the dog’s name. Of course, it’s really not possible to trust anything Leary says. It’s his story, for example, that the band’s van broke down during their first road trip in 1982 on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and merely coasted to a stop in front of the Tool and Die on Valencia where a punk show was in the process of loading in—a show the Buttholes not only crashed (talking themselves onto the bill for three songs), but where they met Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, who agreed to put out their first EP on his Alternative Tentacles label. What a magical shitcan of a van, huh? Which is not to say that Leary is a liar, simply that Butthole Surfers are inscrutable by design. Nervosa puts it this way: “there was this unspoken code, and this is sort of what happens in a dysfunctional family, but we had a code among us that nobody told what the deal was.”

I didn’t want to go to college when I finished high school, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that to my parents, so I did the next best thing: I enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and moved into a house with the guy who had sold me my Valentine’s Day acid. In short order, he became the guy who got me drunk and stoned for the first times, as well. He also, as it happens, provided my introduction to Butthole Surfers. The song was “Lady Sniff” off their first, full-length album, Psychic...Powerless...Another Man’s Sac (1984). That album, like the majority of their seminal 80s output, was released on Touch and Go Records, unofficially headquartered in Detroit at the time, and the band was treated there like local heroes. Their full-length concert video, Blind Eye Sees All, was shot over two nights at Detroit’s Traxx club in 1985, one of which was an all-ages show I think my new roommate had actually attended as a high school freshman. By the time we moved in together, he was a skilled drummer who played with a band that opened up for the Buttholes. The experience changed everything for them. They began employing male and female dancers clad only in raw steaks tied around their waists and shooting homemade pornography to project against their gyrating bodies.
“Take me back to DEE-troit, Paaauuullll—Yeah heh heh!!” Butthole front man, Gibby Haynes, hollers on “Lady Sniff.” My roommate hollered along with him, playing the song for me and leering above the cassette deck. “Gibby’s a god,” he said and proceeded to describe the 6’5” Texan prowling the stage at their last performance, lipstick scrawled across his face, in a pointy bra with his dick out, waving a shotgun at the crowd. At the time, I thought my musical tastes were adventurous—I liked Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart—but I was unprepared for that song. It wasn’t that it was so challenging to listen to; it was weirdly the opposite.
“Lady Sniff” rocks. Leary’s guitar tone is blistering, and the dual drum attack of Nervosa and the band’s longest-serving drummer, King Coffey, is thunderously propulsive. In seconds you imagine everything the song could be if it wanted—you can hear the boot-stomping, ass- shaking Texas roadhouse party starting—but then it downshifts. And shits. And spits and vomits and arm-farts all over itself. “Lady Sniff” is a song that flushes the talents of its own makers down the john and hocks an enormous loogie at its audience’s every expectation.
I had never heard anything that seemed to care so little about what it was supposed to be. The punk music I knew at the time was frantic and hostile, but weirdly precious, too. It seemed so concerned about what it was and what it wasn’t and who it was for and who it was against. Butthole Surfers, by contrast, clearly didn’t give a fuck.

Performance artist Kathleen Lynch was working her job at a peep show in Times Square, sick as a dog, when she accidentally defecated on the stage and then uttered the words that would become her new name: "Ta da!” Or, as she was known at their shows, “TA-DA the Shit Lady”—the Butthole Surfers’ naked dancer. Whatever pact or wordless code the Buttholes adhered to that banned any serious reflection on their musical intentions doesn’t seem to have extended to Lynch, whom Leary refers to without reserve as “the true artist of the band,” citing in particular a months-long vow of silence that TA-DA observed during her three-year stint as a Butthole Surfer. And here, despite the obvious irony, is the thing about Leary, because this time I believe him—not only that one might know a true artist by her silence, but that the raucous cacophony of a band like Butthole Surfers could in fact revolve around a mesmerizingly silent center. “A seaweed boa wrapped around her neck, and teeth covered in tinfoil, and dressed only in a loose-fitting diaper, when dressed in anything at all,” James Burns writes in the wonderfully informative Let’s Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers, “[TA DA} was the complete embodiment of the band itself. Impish: childlike, grossly horrific, yet somehow tantalizingly beautiful....it was as if she sprouted out of the stage.”
Silence, or at least an interest in absence, had been in the band’s DNA from the start. They’d chosen a name unspeakable on the radio and released their albums without any liner notes (or even, on one occasion, song titles). They spent years homeless, living out of a succession of beat-to-shit vans and busses--one of which was rumored to have been equipped with a custom gas tank that allowed for fewer stops between shows—and the result of that road warrior spirit, matched with their speed- and acid-fueled mania, was that the band seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere throughout the 80s: barely escaping the federales in Tijuana one minute, playing a New York City opera house with some of the most esteemed experimental musicians in the world the next. All the while refusing to “let on what the deal was.” They were too absurd and immature to be serious, too fanatical and outright dangerous to be a joke. Yet, even transgressive Murder Junky, GG Allin, offered more explanation for his outrageous behavior; Butthole Surfers were mum.

Being a teenager in the 80s felt like being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes—only it was the 1960s, not Lady Liberty, shattered to pieces in the surf. For all that was captivating about that decade’s counterculture, the evidence of its ultimate failure was undeniable in Ron and Nancy’s America. And that tension, more than anything, is what Butthole Surfers captured for me. They were a parody of the 1960s in many ways: punks who played in the wreckage of that decade’s demolished architecture. They gobbled acid and jammed like the Grateful Dead, lived a commune lifestyle like MC5, were as cultish as Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, as arty and profane as the Velvet Underground. They sported the cock-rock guitar- worship of Grand Funk Railroad and were as trippy at the controls as Funkadelic and as homebrewed and wrong-headed as their Texas forebearers, psych-rock pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators. But they gutted the whole enterprise, turned it all on its head.
This is how they smuggled the music of the 60s (and early 70s) past the militant gatekeepers of the American hardcore scene: by serving it up empty of meaning, idealism or any belief system whatsoever. In the process, they exposed the naivety of that scene and redefined what it meant to be punk. Because ultimately, the bands and fans of hardcore that so rigidly structured their aesthetic as an uncompromising rebuke of all things Hippie still clung to the one core tenant of 60s counterculture that the Buttholes rejected: the idea that any of it fucking mattered.
Butthole Surfers brought extended guitar solos, studio trickery, eight-minute-long songs, theatrical stage shows and direct homages to Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer, and Led Zeppelin past the purity-policing of punks who were so reactionary, they wouldn’t even let Black Flag fool around with an alternate tempo on their second album. And they pulled it all off because the Buttholes clearly cared less, looked worse and went harder than anyone else around. In their wake, punk became not a style of music and a haircut, but an actual lifestyle— an orientation and attitude which could be applied to anything, or nothing at all.
It’s not uncommon for lovers of Butthole Surfers to talk at length about the band without ever mentioning their music. Mannequins full of hamburgers, cymbals full of fire, and a band and audience full of drugs predominate. This shouldn’t suggest that the music itself was inconsequential, simply that it soundtracked a broader, more transformative experience. In this sense, their shows were closer to happenings than concerts. But unlike Hippie lovefests, these shows, as you might suspect, were pulled inside out. Rather than wash the stage in trippy gobos and art films, they showed multiple movies at once—often sped up and in reverse—featuring graphic car wrecks, scatology and, most famously, penis reconstruction surgery. Instead of triumphantly smashing a guitar at the end of a set, the Buttholes were as likely to break four guitars on their first song. Their stages were swathed in smoke and bombarded with strobe light so intense, Nervosa eventually had to leave the band due in part to the seizures they induced.
Fans frequently fell ill. After one concert, Daniel Johnston—the brilliant but disturbed Austin-based singer/songwriter that the Buttholes helped launch to international attention—suffered a psychotic break so severe, he had to be institutionalized. But perhaps their most infamous performance was a 1986 concert at Manhattan’s Danceteria, in which TA DA and her friend Kabbage sprayed the audience with “piss wands” (plastic toy bats they’d filled with urine), Leary destroyed the PA system with a screwdriver, and Gibby and TA DA apparently had sex in front of the drum riser. That show lasted all of five songs, but catapulted the band to a new level of notoriety. Within days they were earning twice as much for performances—fans now adding the possibility of a live sex show to an already dazzling list of perverse thrills in store for them.

Though I couldn’t know it at the time, this incarnation of the band was coming to a close when I first heard them in 1988. But the world around me seemed to be only then catching on. These were the NEA Four days of chocolate-covered performance artists, sculptures made from human blood, urine-submerged crucifixes. There was a growing sense that art shouldn’t just push boundaries, but dissolve them altogether. GG Allin was arrested in Ann Arbor for assault and pledged to kill himself on stage at a Halloween performance. It felt impossible at the time not to hear an echo of the word “artificial” in any so-called art that failed to trouble the notion of its safe confinement. Audiences wanted the window into real psychosis that Daniel Johnston provided, the real truth about the street as told by Ice-T and NWA. Which is another way of saying that artists were expected to be their art, not just make it. And Butthole Surfers delivered on that premise in spades. They made genre-defying music in their kitchen and toured it while eating out of trash cans, but we were just as likely to discuss rumors—that they had been stalking Michael Stipe, or were wanted by Interpol, or had set the ceiling of a Philadelphia club on fire—as we were to talk about their lyrics, performance chops, or even their D.I.Y. ethos. This was the demented monkey’s paw they offered: the idea that the music itself was somehow only a byproduct of that lifestyle, not its aim. That art was ultimately the measure of one’s willingness to go too far.

There’s a tyranny to Butthole Surfer lore. If you’re not careful, the stories take over and you end up sounding like a carnival barker shilling a freakshow. But there’s one more chestnut which I will relate, if only because no one ever seems to say what it’s actually a story about. This is the fact that Gibson “Gibby” Haynes (son of Texas’s beloved children’s TV entertainer, Mister Peppermint) was an MBA at Trinity University voted “Accountant of the Year” before graduating to take a job at Pick Markham—then the largest accounting firm in the nation. Journalists enjoy the irony but fail time and again to pick up on a larger point, which is that Gibby and Paul (also a Trinity student on track to becoming a stockbroker at the time of the band’s formation) weren’t outcasts; theirs isn’t the story of rock-and-roll salvation, of two misfit kids headed nowhere until the day they heard their first electric guitar. No, the story of the Butthole Surfers is a story of self-exile: two highly functioning adults who simply decided one day to throw themselves into a gigantic fan blade to make splatter art.
At the same time, it’s the story of their band’s almost preternatural competence. Yes, their shows were chaotic beyond measure, but amidst all the fire, nudity and gunplay, the core rhythm section of King Coffey and bassist Jeff Pinkus remained in lockstep with Leary’s spiraling, spastic guitar; and the music—barring any intervention from the authorities—never stopped. And while it’s true that they would go 15 years before a hit song, the success of their catalogue anchored Touch and Go Records for much of the 80s, fueling that label’s rise to become one of the most adventurous and influential indie labels ever.
Though much of the audience that met the Buttholes through their 1996 smash hit “Pepper” would come to regard the band as just another of Kurt Cobain’s obscure obsessions, the actual fact is that when Nirvana formed in 1987, Butthole Surfers were the most successful independent rock band in America, fetching as much as fifteen thousand dollars for a single performance. They began the decade opening for bands like Minutemen, TSOL and Dead Kennedys, and finished it headlining sold-out concerts with warmup acts like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Green River, the Flaming Lips, Jesus Lizard, and L7. If grunge can be defined as the music of the 60s and 70s lensed from a post-punk perspective and laced with a nihilist, “oh well, whatever, never-mind” spirit, then Butthole Surfers are clearly the progenitors of that dumb baby. Or, at least, they are the primordial ooze from which it crawled. With the release of Electriclarryland—the album containing “Pepper”—they would become grunge’s undertakers as well.

I was back living with my parents in 1996, finally finishing up at Wayne State after a series of misadventures. I’d returned to discover that my old poetry professor, an avid sailor, had gone missing on Lake Michigan; my favorite bookstore on Cass Avenue was shuttered following the grisly murder of its owner; and my old college roommate—the Butthole Surfer fanatic—had graduated from experimentation to full-blown heroin addiction. I was working at a record store in a mall and I remember when the promotional copy of Electriclarryland arrived—we got the “clean” cover at our store with the prairie dog—thinking that the band’s name, redacted as “B***H***”, simply ended up looking like a series of buttholes pressed to the jewel case.
Some fans of the band thought it had been the ultimate betrayal when they signed to Capitol Records in 1992. I never felt that way. To me this was always part of their deal. Is betrayal even possible when you don’t know what something or someone stands for? Leary answered the accusations with his typical absurdism—they were never an independent band, he said, they were instead “a co-dependent band”; had never been punk, but, rather, “schlock rock,” even “pop,”—“we rhymed love and dove on our first record.” You’ll never get anywhere talking to a guy like that.
Their first Capitol release, 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon, had been decent enough, but it was never just about the music. The band themselves had seen to that. All shrugs aside, the Capitol deal pretty much destroyed them. They were sent on an arena tour as the opening act for Stone Temple Pilots. None of their old fans wanted to see them that way, or share a seated venue with the STP bros who hated Butthole Surfers almost as much as the Buttholes were rumored to have hated STP. Gibby succumbed to heroin addiction and took STP frontman Scott Weiland along with him, according to Weiland’s own very public accusations.
Throughout the 1990s, Gibby became the sort of Slenderman of Grunge. Everybody knew that Kurt and Courtney—grunge’s homecoming couple—had their meet-cute at a Butthole Surfers show. That’s his drunken voice playing the maniac preacher in Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” Later, Gibby lurked in the background of one public disaster after another: onstage at the Viper Room the night River Phoenix died, bunking with Kurt Cobain at the rehab center a week before Cobain’s suicide. Witnesses claim that it was under his hero’s influence that Cobain jumped the facility’s wall and abandoned his final attempt at treatment.
More than three years lapsed between albums and by the time of Electriclarryland’s release, the real news in Butthole Surfer-land was that the band was suing Touch and Go Records. Now the band’s peers and even heroes, like Ian MacKaye and Texas punk’s founding father Biscuit Turner, leveled accusations of betrayal. The Buttholes had only a handshake agreement with Touch and Go all this time—it was a very punk thing to do, but if you didn’t just hear Leary, they were never punk—they were a pop band founded by an accountant and a stockbroker.

Even STP bros know the words to Pepper’s chorus: I don’t mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows. For George Bataille, the sun itself is a butthole. As he explains in “The Solar Anus,” his 1927 parody of a manifesto, the entire world is “purely parodic...each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.” To me, the Capitol deal, the lawsuit—it was all just one more evolution in Butthole Surfers’ parody of the 1960s. They’d simply reached the sell-out phase. As with everything else, they were going to do it in their own inimitable style.
A lot has been said over the years about the comparisons between “Pepper” and Beck’s 1993 hit “Loser.” Both songs alternate spoken word verses with psych-rock choruses in roughly equal measure, both backmask those choruses into the bridges, both use a sitar. And while defenders of Butthole Surfers are correct in arguing that the band had done virtually all of those things long before Beck ever set foot into a recording studio (or had hair on his gonads, for that matter), I would like to do my part here in setting the record straight. Yes, quite obviously, Butthole Surfers stole the song. For my evidence, I simply submit the fact that the band vehemently denies these accusations. I mean, seriously, when have these guys ever given a straight answer about their music to anyone? It’s 101-level B.S. detection.
I have to question the instincts of fans who wish to defend the band on this score. It’s like thinking you have to defend racoons against accusations of dumpster-diving. Butthole Surfers were just doing what they’d always done—playing in the wreckage—and by 1996, that’s what was left of grunge. There sat “Loser,” Beck’s admittedly half-assed track, like a house with a broken skylight, which the Buttholes just sort of pried open, to shimmy inside and ransack the refrigerator. This happened to a friend of mine (with actual racoons) while he was away on vacation—the racoons couldn’t get out of the house and they ended up tearing the whole place apart and he came home to discover them in his bathtub. That’s basically what went down here, too—the Buttholes got stuck inside the song, only they’re radioactive racoons and so they ended up tricking the thing out, made it a lot cooler.
The real comparison that needs to be drawn between “Loser” and “Pepper,” in my opinion, has nothing to do with their structural similarities or relative merit. Instead, it’s a study in perspective. “They were all in love with dying, they were drinking from a fountain, that was pouring like an avalanche, coming down the mountain,” Gibby intones in the flat, disaffected patter of his song’s verses. Not “I”—as Beck implicates himself in “Loser”—or even “we.” They. He’s singing as an observer, casting his mind’s eye back on real figures from his Dallas upbringing: nutbags, freaks and weirdos (and the “ever-present football player rapist”) who fell to car wrecks, stabbings, viruses and sordid accidents. But when the chorus rolls around and things turn “cinnamon and sugary,” we hear what anyone familiar with 60s psychedelia knows right away—this is a drug song, and the names in the verses could just as well be Kurt, Scott, River, Hillel. The music has gone loopy and an “I” emerges, tasting and scenting sweet traces.
Then, yet another shift in POV: You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes. Of all the chicken-fried lunacy to come out of Gibby’s mouth over the years, this line may have my vote as the looniest. The only thing I feel that I can say with any certainty about Gibby is that he has always known exactly how he looks to others. Gavin Bowden, director of the song’s inspired music video, puts the lie to it right away, casting Gibby as the wild-eyed perpetrator of a seedy, unspecified crime (and Eric Estrada, of TV’s C.H.I.P.S., as its victim). Guilty is how the Butthole frontman looks here. And he knows it. He keeps his head down, buries his face in his hands. He’s tired, almost relieved to be caught:

Some will die in hot pursuit and fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit while sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain

In almost every story about Gibby, there’s a moment when those on hand see the demon arrive and know things are about to go sideways. He could turn that certain look on and off like a flashlight. It happens palpably for one breathtaking instant in the video at minute 1:16. You can feel the wheels beneath you hitting black ice. It’s a look that dares you to cross the line: between music and mayhem, art and crime, freedom and madness. He’s flashed it from a thousand stages, and as one-time Butthole bassist Kramer attests in a 2020 Believer interview, in every other location imaginable, as well. Gibby has always known how he appears to those around him and what his effect on them will be. So, for me, the thing that’s most fascinating to consider about “Pepper’s” use of pronoun: the possibility that in his own mind, Gibby was never one of “them.” Like his infernally competent band, was he always a bit more in control than it seemed?
Gibby recently wrote a YA novel about a magic dog and claims to devote most all of his time these days to his sons. The band has reunited and even Nervosa (aka Teresa Taylor) is back onboard—the Buttholes having turned out to be not quite as dysfunctional a family as it once seemed. King Coffey won a “Yard of the Year” award from his Austin neighborhood committee, for god sake. Pinkus, when not busy as a Butthole Surfer, is steadily at work with his band Honky and on projects with the Melvins. And Leary has parlayed the tricks he learned recording Butthole Surfers songs in his kitchen into a successful career as a producer of acts like Meat Puppets and Sublime. And though Kathleen (TA DA) Lynch is not part of the reunion, Leary has this to say about the “true artist” formerly known as the Shit Lady: “I saw her about seven or eight years ago, and she was doing great...turned out to be a pretty normal person, with a normal kind of job, which made me real happy.”
Since I started writing this, I’ve spent more than a few nights staring at my old roommate’s Facebook page, weighing the pros and cons of reaching out, even just to ask a question or two about those early shows. I want to know if it was the Traxx show he attended or an earlier one at Paycheck’s Lounge in Hamtramck, and how their shows evolved with the lineup changes over those years from the mid to late 80s. And I also want to know if he remembers a certain night in May of 1996, when I followed him from a bachelor party to a crack house on Cass after he said to me, “You want to be a writer, don’t you?” It’s not that I don’t think he’d remember. Most of the pictures on his page are actually from those days. It’s just, how should I put this? Most of the pictures on his page are from those days.

David Turkel is a playwright and bartender--which, in pandemic, means that he is a cat-dad and personal chef. He teaches screenwriting at Oregon State University.

SOME VERSION OF PEACE: JORDAN WIKLUND ON “I’LL STICK AROUND”

First, let me say this—much has been written about what “I’ll Stick Around” is about, or to whom it’s directed, or what it means, and to explore that here would only offer more feedback to the crowd before the show has even started. There are plenty of places to read about Kurt, Courtney, and Dave, and this won’t be one of them.
What a relief. The context may matter, though—“I’ll Stick Around” is one of several singles from Foo Fighters’ first album, which is to say Dave Grohl’s first solo record. He didn’t want fans, critics, and the general public to know it was him, so he chose “Foo Fighters” as a band name because it sounded cool, referring to unknown aerial phenomena witnessed by World War II fighter pilots—UFOs, phantom radar blips, glimpses of metal and machine in the European theater. As Foo Fighters, Grohl recorded every instrument and lick by himself over five days in October 1994 mere months after Kurt Cobain’s death, a bit driftless after the dissolution of Nirvana but too famous, too young, and too talented to do anything else but continue to make music.
Thank goodness for us. He had forty songs in the tank from his days as Nirvana’s drummer and recorded fifteen. Distributed on tapes to friends, Foo Fighters quickly made its way around the industry and into the hands of label reps. Grohl licensed the album to Capitol, assembled a band, shot some videos, and Foo Fighters were on their way.
I was an early fan. In the summer of ‘97, “Everlong” and “My Hero” were staples of 95 KQDS, Duluth’s commercial rock radio station. I first heard them there, saw the videos on MTV, and borrowed a friend’s copy of The Colour and the Shape to get the full experience. From there I backtracked to Foo Fighters, bought There is Nothing Left to Lose a few years later, and went to Luther college in 2003 on the heels of One by One.
I hauled my Philips MC50 three-disc stereo set to college, too, along with a 128-disc black binder of CDs and DVDs. I still have that case, where burned copies of Foo Fighters and The Colour and the Shape still reside, as well as studio copies of There is Nothing Left to Lose and One by One. I blasted One by One when moving in, blasted it at night, blasted it all the time (far better than the constant torrent of Dave Matthews Band, who had recorded Live at Luther College in ‘96 and released it in ‘99, well within the memory of many seniors and older siblings of friends whom we knew).
I’m certain One by One was in one of the three disc trays when I met Brittany within the first few weeks. Brittany was a wispy firebrand, quick to laugh, fluent in Shakespeare, pop culture, and extremely sharp. And then I met Leah, who lived directly below me, Leah who was kinda-sorta-maybe dating my neighbor Andrew. Leah was a little taller, a little more formidable in stature, altogether a little darker, someone who held her friends and thoughts close, at least as I knew her. I dated Brittany almost the entire first year. We were together briefly at the start of sophomore year and went through the same sort of breakup many hanger-on couples do; after a feverish few weeks, we called it quits for good.
Over that summer, though, Leah and I had kept in touch. We’d live in the same building sophomore year, and we’d both be studying in Ireland during J-term. So the scope of the year was set—a common building, an uncommon destination, a couple of untethered friends.
Facebook debuted that year followed by YouTube in 2005. You couldn’t find much in the way of concert footage on it then, but now you can catch entire shows from the pre-digital era if someone had a decent camera, a steady hand, and the audio isn’t too garbled. For fans of the Foos, the ‘96 Tibetan Freedom Concert is really something:

Held on a breezy, sun-shiney day in June at Golden Gate Park on the western tip of San Francisco, the Freedom Concert was one of several fundraisers organized by the Beastie Boys to support Tibetan independence and conceived by the group during the ‘94 Lollapalooza Tour. The band list is a who’s who of the Plaidness—The Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Sonic Youth. No Doubt. RHCP. Rage. A Tribe Called Quest was also there, along with hip hop breakouts The Fugees, Odelay-era Beck, and more.
Grohl is young, mid-twenties, long black hair soaked with sweat and curling. A massive flag of Tibet backdrops the stage and dwarfs the performers in front of it. “This next song is called ‘I’ll Stick Around,’” he says, and the drums slam in followed by the guitars, crunchy and snarling, and everything is elbows and fists, headbanging ‘n’ hair flying. Grohl is skinny, his arms bare, his shirt tucked. Nothing seethes like normcore. A beach ball flirts with the stage. His gum is a beach ball inside his mouth.
On the first chorus, Grohl stares straight ahead, a literal figurehead of his own making from the scuttled Nirvana, screaming I’ll stick around as the wind swirls around the park. Water bottles fly, the crowd is a blurred frenzy. Pat Smear, his touring bandmate from Nirvana, slings his guitar around like a battle axe, careening across the stage in a blue jumpsuit and what appear to be loafers. Everything is noise.
What must Grohl be thinking, several months removed from Cobain's death and improvising his new band, his new songs, his new life? Is he angry? Sad? Elated to be there at all, howling into the mic? It’s easy to imagine everything as he holds the guitar low and develops that signature screaming, his stature and posture as recognizable then as they are now. I don’t know—maybe there’s simply no other way to sing I don’t owe you anything except with fire.

I’VE TAKEN ALL AND I’VE ENDURED

How do we avoid writing ourselves as the heroes of our own stories and songs? That’s the dilemma proffered by Grohl and “I’ll Stick Around.” How do we know the difference between what is true in the moment of writing it, and what will or could or may never be true later? How do we resist the urge to appear more generous, knowing, and reconciliatory than we really were or will be? Saying you’re going to stick around and learn from all that came from it is a tenuous proposition, a sail cast on the promise of wind. The more I listen to “I’ll Stick Around” and watch those early recordings from ‘95 and ‘96, the more convinced I am that its primary takeaway is as much a plea as it is a promise. Grohl wields the past as both bomb and barrier, something and someone to whom he owes nothing yet relies upon for growth. It’s part of the magic and dichotomy of good songs and songwriting—songs that leave you torn in two, burnt up, dried out, but still hungry for more. Songs that force you to cast backwards into the past but throw a line to the future to tether the present, at least for a few minutes.
There’s a reason the repeat button on your old MC50 is two arrows forming a circle—an analog ouroboros—an invitation to pain and pleasure, longing and regret. Punch it once for the whole album, twice for the track. Resist the temptation to close the door on that event, that breakup, that song or kiss or violence as something finished. Crank the volume, pour another drink, then toss some salt in that wound and see what happens.

There is much to say, but the short version is this: I cheated on Leah. Or rather, I cheated on the promise of her. On the last night before leaving for Christmas break and Ireland a few days later, Brittany and I slept together mere hours after I had first kissed Leah, when talk of finals and friends and Ireland turned to making good on the increasing amounts of time spent together, our bodies catching up to where our minds had already been. A younger version of me might have written something dripping with fraternal nonchalance, or chalked it up to a little booze that night, or how easy it is slipping into old habits, or some other broey bullshit to communicate how distraught I was that evening, as if that would matter, as if my heart and mind were torn by my actions as they occurred.
I can assure you I wasn’t, and they weren’t. Not then, at least.
By the time we got to Ireland, it didn’t take long for Leah to learn what had transpired the last day we had seen each other. Of course it didn’t, and of course the rest of the class knew, told to me by furtive glances and over-eager greetings. Still, we managed to be civil, hopping from class to pub to pub to pub, to castle and museum and back again. One night in Northern Ireland we joined two friends out moonlighting as “The Angles,” a Pixies cover band dreamed up by a lanky wraith named Jacoby. In denim and black, we emo’d our hair, practiced our pouts and walked the streets of Derry, imagining ourselves as broody and contemptuous rockers. Leah would sing, Jacoby would play keyboards, me on guitar, Jake on drums. Late in the night, we actually met a young record producer and managed to keep up the charade for a while—cue the music and pass The Fresh Fighter.
Near the end of that trip, little sleep, more alcohol, and a perpetual cocktail of Sudafed (bad Irish cold) and Ibuprofen (good Irish booze) coursed through my veins. One morning I awoke to a resting heart rate above 160 beats per minute, bathed in sweat, body shaking, vision blurred, head sore and scared. The professor rushed me to a clinic, where socialized medicine worked to our advantage. We didn’t go alone, however—Leah volunteered to come. We three hailed a taxi and sat in silence as a light rain fell and we veered toward the clinic. She held my hand the entire time.
They spread some cold goo on my chest and asked me to hold the bulb of what looked like a futuristic belt sander between my nipples.
“Shouldn’t you be doing this?” I asked.
“No,” the doctor said, “look.”
He pointed to a monitor where I saw, for the first time in my life, my own beating heart. It was silhouetted in ashes and blacks, vaguely familiar, and enmeshed behind two ghostly outlines identified as my lungs. The staccato rhythm of electrical impulses which power our hearts had become erratic when combined with prolonged exposure to pseudoephedrine and generous amounts of ibuprofen. The doctor told me to lay off the Sudafed, quit drinking for the rest of the trip, and take it easy for a few weeks. When asked if anything in my life may have stressed this organ, I answered “no,” to which Leah remained silent.
Hypertension, dehydration, sleep deprivation. That was all.
That was the last significant time I’d spend with Leah until next fall, just a few months later, when we drove north to St. Paul to see the Foozer tour: Foo Fighters and Weezer, co-headlining In Your Honor and Make Believe. I don’t know why she agreed to the concert but I think I know why I asked her—because she loved the Foos, too, and maybe I could express some version of shame in the form of a concert ticket and a night away from campus to salvage a friendship. We sat in the upper tier of the club section of the Xcel Energy Center directly opposite the stage; pretty good seats, more than enough to see and hear Grohl and Cuomo lead their bands through the night. Weezer covered “Big Me;” the Foos covered “Island in the Sun.”
This was the “Best of You” album, a howler driven by anger, betrayal, and finally redemption for the narrator. We were standing, two more fans amid the tens of thousands there, and at some point during “Best of You” I realized Leah was crying, neither sobbing nor attempting to hide that something had been triggered and something was being released. I didn’t know how to comfort her and wondered if she even wanted that, especially from me. I doubted I was actually capable of such a simple feat.
Only a fool would believe that Leah’s reaction to “Best of You” was a direct condemnation in tears to the memory of how I had hurt her and what that trip came to mean and be for us both—we had hardly spoken in months, and she had other lovers, other problems and joys in her life, and they weren’t for me to know. Maybe she remembered that taxi ride in the rain to the hospital, though, or the moment she learned her trust had been betrayed a thousand miles from home—I just don’t know. But I was a fool and that’s what I believed, up there in the club-level cheap seats of the X as the Foo Fighters ripped through hit after hit, and if discretion is the better part of valor, it’s also the public face of shame, hovering there in the beer-soaked air between us. I said nothing. The song ended. She came around. The bands played a joint encore.
I don’t know why she chose to accompany me to the hospital during our trip and I don’t know why she came to the concert. Tremendous reserves of strength and generosity comes to mind. What I couldn’t have explained then, at twenty years old, was that Leah knew something I hadn’t discovered yet—that one can hold sadness or even the ghosts of grief along with a tenuous friendship all at once. It is possible to wield the past and present—bomb and barrier, systole and diastole, contraction and release—in a single moment and maybe not know the difference nor even care. You can go to a concert and cry next to someone who hurt you. The night won’t collapse. The music won’t stop until it does, and you’ll shuffle out to the car together amid thousands doing the same.
There was never any pretense of a reunion or even an overnight so we drove back to Decorah that night. Leah closed her eyes and told me to rouse her if I needed help staying awake. I didn’t; she slept. South of Rochester, about 50 miles from Decorah, we were forced off the highway onto a meandering route through farms and fields, dirt roads and empty junctures, weaving our way southeast with only the occasional detour sign flashing by for any sense that we were still on the right route. The roads were unlit and the headlights flashed glimpses of silos and farmhouses in the distance, monolithic tractors and combines now quiet, opossums and roadkill as we flashed by at 40, 50, 60 miles per hour, the marbled eyes of startled deer jolting me awake for fear of something leaping from the ditch. As we finally approached the highway, the on-ramp’s streetlights glowed bright above us, strobing the car in sodium-yellow washes that flit across the windshield, there and then gone.

ONE DAY IT ALL WILL FADE, I’M SURE

We have this idea that a certain concert, a song, a beat through our bodies, music mainlined to our hearts is ours and and ours alone, inimitable, inevitable, as certain as an island in the sun. But the truth is that feeling doesn’t last—the song ends, the house lights glare. At the time, I’m sure I thought Wow, I’ll never forget this, my first Foos concert of several with someone who came to define that part of my life, but the truth is I don’t recall anything except a few vague glimpses of the stage below us, how she looked during “Best of You”—sad, strong, beautiful—and how it felt to have Leah, inexplicably, by my side.
The truth is that every fiber of your being cannot commit to this moment, and to that one, and to that one, moment after moment, lover after lover, concert after concert. Let the learning come later; there is time for that, as Grohl screams in “I’ll Stick Around.” There must be—to learn anything in the immediate is impossible. It’s just a song. You are, as most of us are, just a fan. I wish I could go back and tell myself—tell everyone, really—to not take everything so seriously, especially some imagined future memory refracted through song and lights and spectacle. Don’t make the mistake of believing you’ll never forget this moment, the taste of the sweat in your mouth, or a lover’s mouth from another time, maybe, what it sounds like, the reverb ringing throughout the arena, in your ears, in your mind as you barrel home. It’s already happened, it’s already gone, it’s a blip on the radar—a yellow reflection on the glass—something to wonder long after the show has ended.
“I’ll Stick Around” was written by a young man and offers a young man’s sentiment, half promise, half plea: that the passage of time won’t heal all wounds—won’t even come close—but it may offer some perspective on the whole fucking mess. Maybe next time you’ll be smarter, act or say something sooner, try to remember what you’ve learned from times like these before you punch the repeat button and close your eyes. Maybe you’ll form a band and let the flannel thread of grunge unravel a little more with each subsequent album. And then maybe you’ll write a song and play a show for others like you, and when the music is over they’ll retreat into the night, unsure if they want the road to take them home or for something unknowable to simply swoop down, take them up and take them away. Maybe next time you’ll recognize that rock bottom isn’t on its way but already in the rear view mirror or even asleep beside you having attained some tenuous version of peace. Maybe you’ll learn that somebody in your life needed help. Maybe you’ll even realize, much later, that it was you.

Jordan Wiklund is from St. Paul, Minnesota. His essays have appeared in Pank, Brevity, Hobart, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. He toured Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2005 as guitarist of The Angles. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @JordanWiklund.