Got to Be There

Something that's become increasingly popular are bands from my youth reuniting to play "nostalgia" reunion shows or tours. I guess that this is mostly a result of me entering my 30s, and things from earlier in my life now coming around again for a second time. When I was younger, it was funny to think of old bands from the 80s and 90s being fat shells of themselves and playing small clubs because I couldn't imagine that any pop-punk band of the 00s could ever be fat shells of themselves playing small clubs.

So then, three questions to answer during this post:

1. Are nostalgia reunion tours either good or worth it?

2. Is it better to bring back the original lineup, or use touring musicians?

3. Are full album shows bad?

Now that huge festivals are the norm for live music experiences, I feel like having a marquee reunion to headline the festival has become just as normal. It's no longer enough to just gather every band under the sun to play for 30 minutes over three days; you need at least one band to play on Saturday night that people thought they would never ever see.

This trickles down to smaller festivals, and even tours too. Even if you are putting together a mid-level punk festival, it seems like securing a reunion of some band from the 90s/00s is a top priority. I can think of when I saw Lifetime and Bad Astronaut at Pouzza I (very good!) and Treble Charger at Koi Fest in 2013 (very bad!).

These nostalgia reunions can be a lot more fun when you are younger and care more about going to festivals. When you're 22 and drunk for the entire weekend, the event is almost as fun as the sets themselves.

While I was in my most pop-punk phase during university, one of my favourite bands at the time was the Movielife, who were active in the late 90s and early 00s. I missed them the first time around, but fell in love with their album 40 Hour Train Back to Penn because of the influence of my friend Brian, who I was attached at the hip with at the time. The principal songwriter had gone on to form I Am the Avalanche (in hindsight, a much better band), and there hadn't been any indication of future activity since they broke up in 2003 (4? I'm not going to look that up). They quickly became one of those "Imagine if it happened?" bands and then the singer playing a Movielife set with Set Your Goals at the extremely 2010s emo festival Bamboozle.

They eventually did a reunion tour that I missed because I wasn't listening to the band very much and had grown out of my pop-punk phase. Then, last year that did another tour playing all of 40 Hour Train Back to Penn and Has a Gambling Problem at each show. I hadn't been to a show in a while and was feeling extremely guilty about that, so I decided to go, since I loved those albums so much.

The show was pretty bad and very embarrassing. Everyone who was there seemed to be in the same boat as me, and was more interested in standing near the back than doing stage dives to 40-year-olds playing songs from 2002. The singer was getting increasingly frustrated at the terrible crowd response throughout the show. He gave some pretty cringey speeches about how much fun it was to tour "back in the day" and how good the scene used to be. Singing a song about people get too caught up in the past while being on a tour playing an album from 20 years ago. It was impossible to read it as anything other than a guy trying cling to his last bits of relevance.

I think the last time I saw Less Than Jake falls into this too.

These two experiences convinced me that seeing old bands I used to like is always bad. Unfortunately, punk is mostly a young man's game and seeing bands you loved when you were 22 has diminishing returns. I can give a definite "no" to the first question.

But then I also saw Daggermouth play a reunion show in 2017 and it was so much fun. The band was obviously there to have fun and that came through so much in the performance. As much as I'm sure they were interested in re-living the glory days, it was, somehow, done in a non-pretentious way and everyone had a great time.

So, sometimes they work?

Neither the Movielife or Daggermouth brought original lineups with them, as I'm sure the hesitance to relive pop-punk's glory days as a 40-year-old is what broke up the bands to begin with. Instead, they had capable hands with them to fill out the sound. Hell, the Movielife's only original member was the singer, I'm pretty sure. It's hard to say that getting the band together is the missing element, because I'm sure that people who moved on from playing music when they were younger haven't practicing since then.

The full-album thing still really sticks with me though, as it's gotten so popular lately. Sometimes even active bands advertise that they will play their full classic album in lieu of a regular set. I will admit that this element is what drew me to the Movielife set. I figured that if I was going to the show, these are the songs I would want to see anyways, right? Instead it came off as such a cloying desperate move to get as many people to come to the show as possible.

When I saw Saves the Day in 2012, it wasn't exactly a reunion show, as they've steadily put out albums and toured throughout their whole existence, but it was pretty well after their period they're most well-known for. They played a mix of everything, including new songs, and it was great! I want bands to be excited for their own material. Play your songs because you are excited about them, not just so that we can hear them.

I'm firmly "full album shows are bad" now. Call me old fashioned, but I like being surprised when they play a song live. I like things being different from the album. I like it being live.

So, let's give it a no, no, yes.

I Was Down in the Basement

Sometimes, all it takes for me to be a productive writer is for me to just start the process. There has to be a direct line between how my brain works while typing out a blog and how my brain work writing a paper, right? Playing the bassline to "Bro Hymn" makes me better at playing "Maxwell Murder"?

The more important thing is that I believe this to be true, so I guess it's healthy to treat IMU as an essay placebo. The friendly green confines are wonderful at taking a mish-mash of garbage that is circulating and re-circulating in my head (I'm the eye monster, Becks is Leia, Flo is Luke, and Bobo is Han) and turning it into something else. Maybe not something of value, but at least taking it out of my head and turning it into something else.

Am I getting too surreal for IMU?

Quarantine has been tough lately. Even though I'm at home all day and it feels like a weird Premature (sincerely better than Groundhog Day) of a Saturday before a week where an essay is due, I need to remember that I'm actually still in grad school full-time and am still working as a TA. Nothing has changed for me except for where I do my work. I find that others are now used to our new crazy normal where everyone is basically available all the time and have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that I am SO busy with school right now.

This isn't something that's really bothering me, but it is something that I've noticed over the last two weeks of us all being inside. I stew over small annoyances because I can't leave the house and distact myself. Normally a bus ride or class would make me forget a petty nuisance quickly, but now I have to confront them *dun, dun, dun* head on!

While we're on the topic of being a grad student from home, something I sincerely miss is teaching my class on Fridays. It was such a nice way to end my week. Even if I had a lot of work to do, I found that my first-year tutorial would always remind me of what the good parts of academia and art history are. That learning is fun and teaching is important. I didn't get to have an IRL goodbye with my class and that makes me sad.

At the start of quarantine, one of the things I prioritized right away was an extended period of active TV watching. I immediately dove into season 1 of True Detective and hopped back onto my decade-long watch of the entirety of Cheers. With deadlines now approaching and my workload ramping up, I've ditched re-watching The Wire for the lightness of Community, which I've seen a million times. Funny how we fall into that so quickly.

Has anyone done a pysch or sociology study of the effects of Michael Schur half-hour comedies on mental health? I feel like there's a thesis in there.

While being at home, I've found that I've barely listened to any punk music, in favour of classic rock and pop music from the 60s and 70s. Do I only like to listen to punk while I walk around a city? How urban is punk music?

All this and more on the next edition of I, Musical Genius.*

*Bro, I'm not gonna talk about that.

Shine On, Shine On, Shine On

Last night Adam Schlesinger, best known as the bassist and principal songwriter of the band Fountains of Wayne, died while being treated in the hospital for COVID-19. I am a huge Fountains of Wayne fan and am pretty saddened to hear this news. Though there have been many celebrities with cases of corona, and many more deaths all over the world from the virus, Schlesinger's made all of this a lot more real for me and hit me harder than I would have expected it to.

The first that I will say is that Fountains of Wayne are way more than the one song you know them for. They've suffered from the problem that plagues seemingly every one-hit-wonder in which their silliest and poppiest song (maybe not the case here, but we'll get there) is known by everyone out of the context of the band's catalogue. "Stacy's Mom" bangs, for sure, but it's not indicative of what Fountains of Wayne is like. They were such a smart and snarky band who wrote songs in a way that no other rock band does, with a layer of hooks and rock history layered throughout every song. Since I heard the new about Schlesinger's death, I've been listening to the band nonstop. I'd really recommend you doing the same. It's such a rewarding experience.

In my mid-twenties I got heavy into power-pop music, starting with Cheap Trick and then working my way through others from the 1970s and 80s. For some reason, this style of music immediately clicked with me and it felt like this was actually the genre that I had liked for my entire life. I realized that all of my favourite songs from a wide array of bands were just their power-pop songs. Something about the unabashedly sincere pop music played on electric guitar rang extremely true to me.

I can't tell you exactly when it happened, but upon hearing "Stacy's Mom" one day, I realized that it was just a blatant Cars pastiche (one of the prominent figures in my power-pop deep dive) and that was enough for me to check out the album the song had come from. Welcome Interstate Managers was not what I was expecting, but in the best way possible. As soon as "Mexican Wine" kicked into it opening guitar lead, I knew that this was the best case scenario in looking into this record and it was hitting all the notes that I was looking for in music at time.

Beyond the 3rd/4th hammer-on, that is. (When you're writing about Schlesinger, you gotta make pop music theory puns).



The best thing about the album was that it was way more intellectual than I thought it would be. Rather than the typical themes of young love and... *checks notes, no, that's it* the songs were all self-contained stories about different characters. This carried over to the sound as well, as each song was almost like a vignette of a slightly different genre, one country, one 80s, one surf-y, etc., all being covered with a power-pop varnish.

Oddly, the album seemed to focus on characters who were travelling salesmen or middle management, which also only furthered how distinct and realized it felt. At the time, I had recently watched the movie Cedar Rapids, in which Ed Helms plays a Midwestern insurance salesman who goes out and experiences the world for the first time by travelling to an insurance conference. I couldn't help but associate the two things, and Welcome Interstate Managers kind of seemed like Cedar Rapids: The Albums. Worlds were colliding!

But this is about Adam Schlesinger, not Fountains of Wayne, though I can't imagine that the band will continue now that he has died. Schlesinger was absolutely what set the band apart from their peers and huge reason they were so different from all of the other pop-rock bands. As a good bassist who was amazing at a singing harmonies he was already the dream band member for a frontperson, but it's crazy that he would bring fully formed songs to the table too. Michael Jordan doesn't win six titles without Scottie Pippen.

Watch this video and pay attention to how much singing the guy playing bass does. Now try to think about what the song would sound like without that.



I identified with him right away because he was what I aspired to be as a musician. I never really wanted to be the frontperson of a band and I was comfortable being one of the supporting musicians. Though I wasn't the face of the band I was in, I tried my best and wanted to be an active contributor, adding as much to the sound and strength of the group as I could. Did I do much beyond play bass? No, but like I said, what Schlesinger was able to do was what I aspired and hoped to do.

Even more impressive is that his music production didn't end with Fountains of Wayne. He also played in the shoegaze-y band ivy, played in the power-pop supergroup Tinted Windows (amazing name and Bun E. Carlos on drums!), and contributed songs upon songs upon songs to movies, TV shows, and other artists. Among those, the best-known one is probably this, absolutely the best song ever written for a film:



He was an incredible talent, an all-time bass player hero, and someone whose music significantly impacted the way I approach playing guitar and bass.

Following his death, Marc Maron posted an interview he had done with Schlesinger in 2012, in which he talked about his love of power pop and mentiong doing a Kinks cover as part of a tribute compilation. I can't think of a better way to eulogize him.