how i fell in love with a band, and why i record shows

[I have more to add. This is a first draft of an article I've meant to make for some time now.]

Unwound is a band that just aligns with my mind, from start to finish. Let's frame it in persuasive modes. The first time I understood them, as most people do, as most people take post-hardcore, emo music, was through pathos.

In 2015, I was a college kid - a bad one. I was waning on one of my musical obsessions, Death Grips, after they had cancelled on me the year before, and I had not quite clicked with their latest musical efforts. I'd never lived away from home before, then my parents divorced, and the house was lost. I'd never really had to study before, now I had a bunch of washout classes in a major I didn't ever want to be in. I'd been a relatively isolated and introverted only child, then I got thrust into a dorm with 3 frat boys. A couple of valuable life lessons had whizzed by me in a whirlwind, and here I was, alone in Oviedo in the summer, without a home to come back to 3 hours away, without the grades to stay in school, having made fast and fickle friends over drug use and video games, and now they were all home in other parts of the state.

Central Florida that summer was rainy, and the house I had chosen to sublet flooded its first floor whenever things got too heavy.

A clap of thunder and a darkening sky and my building rage, grief, sorrow at what I had discovered and lost in a year - that was when I decided to, by chance, put on Leaves Turn Inside You by Unwound. October All Over slithered out of JVC speakers as night fell at 2pm, as I tried to shakily smoke a joint of whatever garbage weed I had and blow it out the window.

When it rains it feels like shame.
Remind yourself after work
To find a new city to blame
Lock yourself in the house.

That wasn't the first time I had tried Unwound. That wasn't the first song I fell in love with. That honor went to Lucky Acid, a song I had stumbled upon while reading, but not comprehending, the myths, the lore behind this band, the way many of us do. Leaves went over my head in 2014. Too austere. Too standoffish. YouTube. Click. Lucky Acid?

I had had some pretty dumb, traumatizing psychedelic experiences by the time I graduated high school. One had left me scarred in 2013, where my dumb ass took 25i-nBOMe after school only to be hospitalized at a pediatric hospital and tortured by Guy Fieri's flame-heavy demonic presence on a television screen. A model train ran above my head on the gurney, around holes in the walls at the hospital, and seemed to have the most precise comedic timing every time bad news broke. "We're going to try pumping charcoal." Choo Choo.

So for Unwound to have made a song that reflected a bad trip, a punk song, a noise rock gnashing, well, I'd felt seen. A band had, in a passing glance, taken an experience that shook me to my core and said, "Would you like to see its anguish played out for you again?"

This is the lucky one. 

This is the lucky one.

My dad's favorite bands tallied Modest Mouse and Sonic Youth among them, but he had had a blind spot for Olympia (save for one Pell Mell and one Melvins cassette). I had never been more primed to accept and love a band more than I did.

In 2021, I came back to Orlando and went to Park Avenue CDs to find what I had been searching for: What Was Wound, Numero Group's boxset of Unwound CDs and a booklet of their (authorized) biography.

There is a long, long shadow cast by the giants that are Fugazi, without whose principles and documentation practices, independent music might still be languishing, vanishing, and toiling in pure obscurity. For what it's worth, Unwound studied the shape and essence of that shadow, even got in a tour or two with that shadow. $3 shows. All ages. For a cause. In someone's basement. In a VFW hall. Anywhere, anytime, for anyone. Tour, tour, tour. Write. Practice. Evolve. Tour. Practice. Evolve. Write. Tour. Pursuit.

I try to search for you...

Olympia in the 90s was a fountainhead of creativity and radical thought. You could name-drop many things, but trace it all to K Records and Kill Rock Stars, to Calvin Johnson and his anything-goes mentality - and to the Melvins. Beat Happening's courageousness had to have infected everyone. Melvins's noisiness had to have permeated the northwest's collective soul. So Unwound exuded that courageousness and noisiness, and sometimes that meant spitefulness, sometimes that meant a challenge to the audience.

Start a fire for something new.

At the onset of the COVID pandemic, I had taken up employment at a drug store as a front store cashier. Wise choice. As a wise-ass is wont to do when no one will listen to you, I took my masked frustrations out on playing music over my phone and tidying, stocking up the store as a source of esteem. One day, a kid came in with a skateboard, wearing an Incesticide shirt. Rad. You'd like Unwound. Give Fake Train a try. A month later, Dragnalus was his favorite.

When I was about ready to quit that job from all the couponers and anti-maskers and shitty hours and cruel bosses, I got robbed at gunpoint. Asked the balaclava'd guy if he wanted a coupon subscription on the way out. When I called my manager to the front of the store, he asked me if the gun was real or fake, started laughing, and then rebuked me for replying to him that he could've found out by me bleeding on the floor, dead. 

Funeral pyre for something new.

And so, in 2021, I continued onwards past Orlando into the north-northwest. I'd set my destination to Olympia, Washington's Capitol Theater from the southeastern suburban stasis of Hollywood, Florida. Vern Rumsey had passed away. So had my father. I needed a tour, an evolution, a pursuit.

I know I'm not alone.

In 2015, a VICE article came out with the title "Unwound Will Never Reunite So Just Get Over It". In 2023, I met Sara, Justin, Brandt, and Jared outside of Capitol Theater, where Thrones, Joe Preston's solo bass escapades, opened for them 21 years prior. Melvins. Take that, VICE.

2 years prior, I had made my pilgrimage to Washington in November. I spent Thanksgiving alone at a dirt road cottage, grilling and taking in the serenity that remoteness offered.

Earlier in the week, I'd arrived in Olympia and, after emailing Sara Lund and [gulp] consulting Reddit for advice, I headed to Rainy Day Records. A flyer outside the store read: "I buy Olympia punk flyers 1980 – 2001 or so". Walk in. More adorn the walls, way high up. Unwound. Spitboy. Lync. I don't recall what I said, but James, the man behind the poster, was quick to show me Unwound's first demo, a RedRumsey/Teach Me Equals split, and access to Capitol Theater's backroom by way of Dave Harvey. More punk flyers. An abundance more. Holy shit. Stuff I'd seen in passing, like poorly snapped pictures of flyers reposted on Instagram, parts of the booklet. Stereolab, Unrest, Long Hind Legs was a reality. That freaked me out.

Later that evening, I was introduced to a man named Mike Ziegler, at a nearby bar called BroHo. Mike was the primary archivist for the band Nirvana, which I had no questions for him about. Everyone called him The Kid when he roadied, and he had jumped his way to the Pacific Northwest by means of the band XBXRX. Archivist. Taper. Creator of Live Leaves. I mulled those over in my head as we talked.

Imagine my surprise when he tells me he grew up no more than 10 minutes away from my hometown, in Plantation, Florida. My cousins grew up there, too.

Knowing what I knew about Vern, I asked a few bartenders around Olympia what they knew of him. Everyone spoke the same. Sweet, sweet guy. A little goofy. A fishing trip story was shared. Vern couldn't swim, that's the gist of it.

And so my own grief was shared by others. For a different man, but grief nonetheless.

And each show after the initial reunion took on that form. Grieving for the loss of the soul. Justin, Sara, Jared, Scott all throwing flowers out into the crowd - not for us, but for Vern. For what they lost. We're sorry for all of our losses, they said, after a pandemic shut down the world. So it goes.

When the show at Olympia ended, I held one flower. Mike handed me three. He had been to many shows along the west coast, and probably couldn't take any more with him. They hang on my wall now, a dried and lively reminder.

The one show they had no flowers to toss was last year's. This time, a new, fresh grieving had dug into my psyche. My younger cousin, Daniel, had just committed suicide. Old wounds stretched new again, torn open.

During soundcheck, Jared waved at me.
Before they took stage, someone in the audience screamed "WE LOVE YOU SARA!!"
Uproar.

That set was a transfer of energy, from crowd to band and back. Grief, sorrow, rage, joy, catharsis, serenity. A cavalcade, landslide of emotions.

Arboretum was played at a funeral trudge.
Was it the THC? Was it my sorrow? What was it? I stood over my cousin's grave stone. I held 4 flowers in my left hand.
I'm alone, and now I'm sorry.

And, as if to answer that hallucination, Justin played a new riff during the bridge. 30 years of playing Arboretum. Tour, practice, record, repeat.
Eternalux...

And, as if to affirm that, Justin flubbed the false start to Fiction Friction.
Open strings.
Maybe the air, the desert wind strummed those.

His bemused, quizzical slide was a response to the call, the despair, the hurt, the ghosts by us all.

non sum qualis eram.
poo-tee weet?