Here's a thing about a band my friends were in in high school. Please know that I do not have the emotional investment in this band that the piece makes it sound like, but also know that Blacktop is one of the funniest and best things ever. That's a strange balance, I know.
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One of the most exciting times of being a teenager was when my friends and I finally got around to starting our own bands in high school. We had logged our requisite hours of learning "Smells Like
Teen Spirit" and "Dammit" on guitar and were now ready to show those around us what we had. The dreams you have of playing in front of an arena when you're young immediately become a little bit realer once you've seen people you know take that crucial first step: Starting a real band that plays its own songs.
One day, you'll look back on this band and laugh at how many silly cliches they performed, like dedicating songs to their 10th grade girlfriends or playing simple guitar solos behind their heads, and the songs will seem hilarious in hindsight, even though you thought they were so cool at the time. 15 years later, no one will think about the band or ever mention it, but 15 years later you can still say that the band was the first one.
It didn't take long for Blacktop Manhattan to occupy a central role in the lives of all of its members and their friends. Funnily enough, I didn't even hear about the band from its members, who were close friends of mine, but from other friends who had been at one of their shows. "Our friends play in a real band now!" Their legend grew from there, I guess. Blacktop's shows were a premier social event. All of your friends would be there and someone would definitely have beer and weed. You would definitely meet at least five new people through mutual friends, including girls. You would immediately get the rub from the band because you knew them. On top of the social benefits, it was also a fun thing to do because you would get to watch your friends' band play and when you are a teenager at a concert, actual quality of performance means next to nothing. Damien is playing a guitar with a Bad Religion sticker onstage? That fucking rules. One person would always do a Nestea plunge off the stage and be carried around by 5 or 6 people. A concert! This is the best! On top of all that, there would also always be at least one other high school band on the show who was so bad that they will stick in your mind until the day you die. Teen Stranger! Broken Home! The Thundernuts!
Blacktop shows were a monthly pilgrimage for teenagers where we gathered at Victoria Park Station to head to the FunHouse or the El Mocambo or Club Rockit or the Opera House as a huge group. More so than house parties or dances, this is what my friends did. For a couple of shows, a friend and I designated ourselves as "merch guys" and sold the band's copyright infringing Pulp Fiction t-shirts and some pins that I had shoddily designed on Microsoft Paint.
I can't tell you how long Blacktop were a band, but it couldn't have been much longer than a year and was definitely less than two. After they broke up, the members formed two new bands, which also broke a begat new bands after that. The family tree began to include more and more members and started to intersect in new ways, but Blacktop Manhattan was definitely the thickest part of the trunk, right near the bottom.
After Blacktop and a post-BM band had broken up, Damien, who had played guitar in both, uploaded the band's songs on the website Newgrounds' audio portal. Since Damien was an active user, another user had found them and included them as playable songs in a online Flash game he had made called Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2. Online teens are noted for their verbosity, after all. The game was a simplified version of Guitar Hero when the latter was at the height of its cultural influence. Just like getting your song in Guitar Hero could vault you into millions of t-shirt sales at HMV or Spencer's Gift, "Hollywise" being the first song in SCGMD2 immediately vaulted Blacktop Manhattan into an internet legacy that none of the members could ever have expected.
Teens from all over the world began to leave comments on Blacktop's abandoned MySpace page saying "Please come play in Texas!" Teenaged girls would add me on the site simply because I was in Blacktop's "Top 8". Things snowballed from there. One day we found a video on Youtube that was a stationary picture of my friends in 10th grade set to "Hollywise". The video itself was weird enough, but even stranger was that it had 50000 views. We hadn't even made it! We later found even more of these videos, all with the same picture, likely pilfered from MySpace, and all featuring "Hollywise". Then we found a video of a pre-teen boy demonstrating how to play "Hollywise" on acoustic guitar, but not playing any correct notes. Just playing random parts of the guitar along to the song! Before long, we found videos of tiny teen boys covering "Hollywise" in their school's gymnasium. It was so strange and unbelievable that it eventually became the most plausible thing. Of course Blacktop Manhattan had turned into a viral sensation. What else would have happened?
The group of friends in Blacktop Manhattan's orbit separated but didn't split up after high school. Some of us went away to university, some of us stayed in Scarborough, some of us started working.
Near the end of my first year at school, Pat and I got a Facebook invitation to the Blacktop Manhattan reunion show at Reilly's, a venue north of Dundas on Yonge, across from the strip club Zanzibar. The band had a good sense of humour about their status as a viral phenomenon and thought it would be fun to bring everyone together to relish it. This happened in the golden age of Facebook event pages, in which many people would post on the page's "wall" in anticipation of the event taking place. Our friends went crazy and acted as if Guns 'n Roses then-yet-to-be-released album Chinese Democracy was finally coming out. Blacktop purposefully booked the metal band that Teen Stranger had turned into to open. It was perfect.
A big difference between the reunion show and the ones we had gone to high school was that now almost all of us were 19 and getting alcohol was significantly easier. In addition to the usual cast of characters at the show, there was another generation of kids, between a year and four younger than us, who came out because they had heard of Blacktop as the "cool" band when they were starting high school. Much like us when we were attending the real Blacktop shows, this was an elite social event for them. They were all wasted.
The show was a perfect party. The band was super sloppy because they had only rehearsed several times in advance of it. They played every song they had ever performed, even the stupid one-off ones, and indulged in silly things like dualing guitar and slap bass solos in a funk song that they had for some reason. It was a ridiculous and bad show, but that was exactly what everyone wanted. Blacktop Manhattan wasn't a good band by any measure and realistically, the reunion show performance was probably not that far off from how they had sounded in their prime. Everyone was drunk and had a ball.
Blacktop booked and ran the show themselves. Quinn's parents ran the door and security and let everyone in. After the band played, the crowd lingered in the venue and slowly spilled out onto the street. The wave of younger kids, all much drunker than they had probably ever been, wreaked havoc on the venue, wrecking the banister on the staircase and climbing all over things, undoubtedly doing permanent damage to Reilly's.
This briefly turned into a serious scene. The owner of the venue was pissed that this many drunk underage people had been let into the show and done so much damage to everything. Word filtered out, through a drunk and broken telephone, that he had told the band that he would never book another all-ages show at Reilly's ever again. To risk the actual structure of the venue was too big of a gamble.
Reilly's did indeed stop having all-ages show. Not long after that, the venue closed permanently. By my logic, the success and health of the venue depended on the fact that they regularly hosted all-ages show featuring local bands, so it followed that Blacktop Manhattan's reunion show was the reason it closed. I have no idea if that's actually why, and Reilly's' online footprint is scarce, so I will never know for sure and will instead continue believing in the myth of the first real band that my friends ever formed and is much more famous than anything I have or ever will do.
