Norman Brannon. Chicago. on Flickr.
I’ve been indisposed to blogging for the last week as I tie up a few professional loose ends and get focused on something I’ve been meaning to do (and haven’t had the time to do) for too long. I’ll write about that soon.
In the meantime, Brian Maryansky posted this photo of me from a long time ago, and I thought I’d write some freestyle notes about it. So here’s Everything I Remember About This Picture:
- I know this photo was taken at some point between 1998 and 2000 because, at the time, Brian played in Jets To Brazil and I lived in Chicago. He was on tour.
- I remember this house having something to do with someone in or associated with Alkaline Trio because Matt Skiba was sitting on the other side of this table. The house was in Chicago’s Ukranian Village, which was the place to be if you needed an even cheaper place to live than the apartments just north in nearby Wicker Park. This was before the movie of that name and before High Fidelity moved in and before MTV shot the The Real World in Chicago and that Starbucks got its window smashed in, so it was still possible for me to have a two-bedroom apartment in Wicker Park for only $675 a month. But also, people used to get beat up in that neighborhood a lot so, you know, you get what you pay for.
- Those cargo pants are now cargo shorts and that messenger bag is still in my closet. I also still have that Swatch watch, but unfortunately, I lost the glow-in-the-dark face guard.
- My hair looks kind of good in this photo. I used to go to this expensive salon in Chicago because I worked, like, three jobs (at an Internet start-up, at a record store, and as a DJ at night) and I didn’t really need any of them. I had so much money and my rent was so cheap that I really should have been on some Watch The Throne shit. Paying for this stylist was my one real indulgence, which is funny because it’s not even like anyone actually noticed. But it’s like my man Aziz once said: TREAT YO SELF. My self-esteem and my haircut are sometimes interdependent.
- Jets to Brazil played the Empty Bottle the night before this photo was taken and OK Go — who didn’t have a record deal yet — opened up. By this point, I’d actually seen OK Go over a billion times (rounding up, anyway). They were famous in Chicago not so much for their music but for the artfully silkscreened posters they’d plaster all over town for every single show they played. Like seriously, if OK Go were graffiti artists, they would have been all city kings. Thinking about this, I realize that things haven’t changed much: It’s kind of like now, but instead of wheatpaste art, they’re more famous for music videos.
- I should probably mention that one of the members of OK Go wore a Jawbreaker shirt while on stage that night. I’ve always had rules about playing shows — like no shorts, or no wearing your own band’s t-shirt, or no taking your shirt off unless you’re the drummer and you have a part-time job as a personal trainer — but I’d never before considered the possibility of wearing a t-shirt from the singer of the headlining band’s super-revered old band. As I see it, this is problematic for two reasons: Either a.) you wore that shirt because you didn’t know that the singer of the headlining band was in Jawbreaker or b.) you wore that shirt specifically because the singer of the headlining band was in Jawbreaker — and neither option seems particularly awesome. So in case of emergency, break that other rule and just take your shirt off.
One last thing: When did Saucony stop being the official shoe of indie rock?
