Let us remember our honored dead.
I had been a fan of
Planes Mistaken For Stars going back to their records on Deep Elm. But I fell in love with them on "Fuck With Fire", this ridiculous blend of hardcore and 70s rock. It felt like everything I loved about Hot Water Music and Leatherface, but just a bit more Molly Hatchet, Black Sabbath, James Gang. Just this groove, this sexiness that most bands I was listening to didn't possess. You couldn't pigeonhole them into one scene; they'd fit just as well on a bill with Converge as they would with Braid or Life's Halt or Oxes or Dillinger Four.
I talked to Gared about it all in Detroit in 2002. PMFS was playing Michigan Fest, we'd been introduced by mutual pals in Cross My Heart a couple years back, so I dragged a six-pack and my tape recorder out to their van and away we went, just chopping it up about music and being in our mid-20s without any greater goal than to share honest art with an increasingly commercial world. They were playing in the early afternoon on the second day of a three-day festival, on a bill with Death Cab For Cutie, in what even then seemed like the last gasp of that little bit of DIY culture. Everything was on the cusp of being driven by blogs and publicists and the collapse of the physical media market. Planes were fucking great that day, just heavy and loud and raucous and everything a group of 30 or so fuzzy cheeked fellas, drunk on cheap beer and being far from home, could ask for. It was the best of times; it was the blurst of times.
Where was I? Yeah, Gared. I saw him a year later, pulling up with the band for an afternoon show at the Ottobar. While we didn't get to hang out quite as hard as we did in Detroit, it was nice to get to share a smoke and a drink after their set, to talk about the new songs that would come out the following year as "Up in Them Guts" (a terrible, wonderful name for a record) and share another moment in time. Things would move fast from then; I had my first panic attack at a Converge show a few months later, got fired from the bar, had to find a real job. I quit booking shows and fell away for a while. Got married, then divorced. By then, PMFS had broken up. Gared put together Hawks & Doves, but I wasn't really interested in hearing anyone cover Springsteen, no matter how great they'd been on other records.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. Really. I'm not feeling nostalgic, a desire to go back to those they, because while they were good, they're done. But I sure as shit wish I had gotten to have another beer in the 18 years between that show in 2003 and Gared passing away last November, because the value in those sort of moments is priceless, and they are what make this life, so painful so often, worth living.
