I'm With The Band

When I was a teenager I thought I was pretty rad. I had black hair with ruby tips and pencil thin eyebrows and a tattoo in senior year. In the way only a teenager can I decided who I wanted to be and committed to it. My persona? “I’m with the band.” And I was. For a whole decade of my life I only dated pseudo wannabe rockstars. I started with guitarists (too shy) and moved on to drummers (too crazy). In the end I settled exclusively on lead singers. I revelled in the idea that I was their muse. I established an air of superiority as I sat, casually disaffected, in a corner booth at some local Battle of the Bands. “That song... it’s about me” I’d say. And it was. Of course the inevitable drama of screaming late night fights and tearful wordy apologies and the rampant infidelity eventually got to me and I moved on from tortured artists to a little more stable fare. As I grew older it seemed obvious that there was only room for one diva in my relationships and clearly I preferred that diva be me. Still, before I saw the light I spent the entirety of my formative dating years drinking beers at band practice and imagining my name in liner notes. It wasn’t all wasted time though. If I got anything from my rockband boyfriends it was an absolutely amazing musical education.

I used to be that girl. The one who isn’t quite a groupie because her knowledge of all things rock and roll is so extensive you don’t dare whittle her commitment down to some childish desire to sleep with someone famous (or, you know, almost famous). I didn’t come by it honestly. Instead, I listened. I poured over CD collections and read music magazines and mentally noted every observation made in casual conversation. When I moved to England at sixteen my musical education deepened. I became consumed with Nirvana. I wanted to play guitar and be Courtney to someone’s Kurt. I listened to the Foo Fighters on repeat for weeks. Dave Grohl was my soulmate. That much I was sure of. Concerts were my cocaine and I attended them en mass and collapsed into bed each night exhausted from mosh pits and stage dives. You’d never know it look at me now but there were two weeks of my life where I dropped everything to follow Weezer and the Foo Fighters as they toured the West Coast. I frequented music stores and diverged from band guys only once, for a crush on a guy I still call HMV Phil. I can recite the lyrics to every song from the alternative/grunge era with ease. On a good day I can tell you the year songs were produced, original line-ups and the realities of the rise and fall of fame. I will never know anything as well as I knew that particular era of music and that’s the way it should be. It’s the only it way it can be when you fall in love with something in high school.

Somebody told me once that the bands you listened to when you were seventeen will remain your favourite for life. I didn’t put much stock in it. Still, this morning I got in Robin’s car and was happily surprised when I stumbled upon a plethora of mixed CDs I’d made in senior year in the glove compartment. Somewhere along the way I’d left my vast collection of CDs behind and being the scavenger he is Robin simply adopted them all. Driving through downtown Vancouver at 9:00am singing along to Blind Melon I felt like my old teenage self.

“I just want suh-uhm-one to say to me... oh oh oh oh... I’ll always be there when you wa-ake....”

You couldn’t pay me to trade in my happily-married-career-and-mommy-life for the crushing awkwardness and angst of those days but I can’t deny I loved the little piece of it. For a minute it felt like dancing with my eyes closed in the middle of Jenks (my favourite Blackpool club) with a Strobe (a delightful combination of strawberry vodka and caffeine) in one hand and a mohawked manchild in the other. Like the first time I lined my eyes with black or peeling off the eyelash glue I used to stick craft store glitter to my lids. Like catching a lift from some guy I just met because I spent my taxi money on 4:00am pizza. I may be ten years older now and infinitely wiser. I may have been driving out to explore the Ladner market on a Sunday afternoon with my baby asleep in the backseat. I may have given up on backstage passes and guys with ironic facial hair. I may never feel exactly like I felt when I was seventeen and got so close to the stage I could smell the rocker sweat. But this morning, this morning I got close.