“My ‘South Bend Three Favorite Bands’”

So I officially have a set of three favorite bands I tell to South Bend people, when they ask me, auxiliary to my actual, deepest three. It’s not really important what they are, but they’re Sonic Youth, R.E.M. and Supergrass, whereas my actual three are Califone, Pavement and The New Pornographers.

Honestly, to tell you that a listing of these actual three would stop a concert dead in its tracks and initiate a half hour music discussion isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. And I know, I should get out of my town. Sometimes I wish I were in a town that had more concerts, where the performing artist didn’t always find YOU, specifically YOU, in the crowd, and come up and pick your brain (I mean don’t get me wrong, I love talking to musicians, it just sort of gives you a feeling like you’re the wheel of the chair and not the back-rest, ya know).
The kid last night, and he was a kid, and got did I love him, he was covering Beatles songs and Dylan but his guitar and voice sounded great, and he sang with this sky-scraping richness, but he hadn’t heard of Supergrass, at least. It’s important to name ONE that people haven’t heard of, and you know what I bet he’ll spend hours staring at his ceiling and smiling, listening to them, if he likes the Beatles, and he’ll live so in the moment, so in the moment, something I wish I could do better. He’ll shake hands with doctors, he’ll spit on the mayor, he’ll do everything a young man should do, before finding out that the beauty in himself will eventually outweigh the beauty in the outside world, and that his landscape will be filled with stomping goons braced in struggle, so needing, needing what he has, but maybe he’ll have something to fall back on, a memory of when he was the harbinger of glory, to get him by for the rest of his life, like a lit ornament on a Christmas tree.

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