Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  By the time my friends and I turned sixteen, few shows required these extreme measures. The bands we listened to played small clubs who sold tickets through local record stores, which also sold zines and seven-inches and books of tattooed pinup girls, all of which made us feel part of an elite group of insiders privy to a shadow universe that existed under the surface of the larger, dumber, consumer-droid culture.

  Punk, surf, rockabilly, psychedelic—throughout our teens and twenties we saw hundreds of shows, from Bad Brains to The Mermen to The Cramps. We saw bands that were nobodies that later became legendary, saw bands that were legendary and whose members are now dead. I stored all of the tickets and flyers in a box in my closet.

  Friends and I still talked about certain moments over a decade later. “Remember when the sax player in the Nixon mask blew fire over our heads?” “Remember when they pushed their amps over and left mid-set?” “Remember when the drummer nodded out and his cigarette fell and lit the set list on fire?” These excited reminiscences were often followed by the refrain: “That’s still one of my favorite shows ever.”

  Even now, I craved such rogue exhibitions, the wildness and spontaneity. What I also craved was the camaraderie. Being sandwiched between hundreds of sweaty strangers in a crowd right up against the stage, your shoulders unnaturally bent, stomach pressed against someone’s pudgy back while someone else’s forearm pressed against your ass, all that flesh squished together in a bizarre, malodorous union, and for that one hour of music, that brief moment in your otherwise routine life, you were family. You weren’t cutting each other off on the freeway. You weren’t vying for the last parking spot or grumbling to yourself in the grocery store line about how long they took to swipe their credit card and step aside, because really, my God, how fucking hard was it to turn the card’s magnetic strip in the direction shown on the keypad and move on already? No. You were kin. Brothers and sisters united in a bloodline of shared passion: to hear loud music and collectively unhinge. Cups of beer whizzed past your face. Elbows occasionally speared your temple. But if someone fell down in the crowd, you picked them up. If someone turned pale green, you asked if they wanted out. If they said yes, you lifted them up and gently passed them to guards over the security partition. And when you danced, your body moved with theirs.

  I would never be able to carry on without these moments. People who didn’t enjoy live music confounded me, the same way certain asymmetrical sea creatures who moved through water without fins or visible appendages confounded me. Life was visceral experience, not just the pursuit of security and the avoidance of discomfort. As I texted Chris after last night’s warehouse show: “I’d sleep in twenty gutters to see that again.”

  I’d told him about this band months ago. “You have to hear them,” I said. Within weeks he was playing their songs as compulsively as I was.

  Chris was my age. We’d known each other for eighteen years, when he was thin and I wasn’t half bald, and he was the last people in our group of guys who remained equally consumed by music: always up on new bands, constantly suggesting records to check out. Most of the best shows we’d seen as kids, we’d seen together. And for the past few years—while everyone else went to bed early, or stayed home watching TV, complaining how loud guitars hurt their ears—he and I still went to shows, weekdays or weekends, no matter how late.

  But things had changed. Where previously we would email with news that so-and-so was playing next Thursday, his common response to such emails now was: “Sorry, can’t go. It’s my turn to feed the baby.” Feeding time was 5:00 a.m. He and his wife Sasha took turns. They were trying to get their eight-month-old daughter Liv on a set sleep schedule, but she still woke up crying in the middle of the night. He got up four times one night last week. The average number was three. He and Sasha also took turns getting up to check on her at night. When Chris and I did go to shows, he asked Sasha for what he half-jokingly called “permission”—permission to stay out late, permission to drink too much beer. It really wasn’t a request so much as a pre-apology for how tired, hungover, and useless he was going to be the next day. Sasha didn’t make him ask permission. She didn’t guilt him about wanting to go out, and she loathed the term permission for all it implied about the balance of power and the nature of married life. He just felt guilty about making her carry all the responsibility.

  They traded feeding morning duties when she could, and he would text her from the show: “How’s Liv? You two okay? Love you.” But when work or fatigue meant Sasha couldn’t trade, Chris ended up on his couch at home trying not to pout, and I ended up standing in the audience alone, milling around between sets and sending him texts: “Man, you would’ve loved this.” I wasn’t rubbing it in. I was just excited, and he was one of the few people who understood why. What I couldn’t tell him—and what I hope he didn’t sense in my messages—was that I preferred this to parenting, preferred it to most anything really—to date nights spent watching movies on couches, to waking up early to have breakfast with my parents, to the comforts and security of a good job, and increasingly, it seemed, to adulthood itself.

  Unlike regular life, live music was rarely dull or predictable. It also elevated my existence without committing me to the sort of job required to finance the eighteen-plus year task of parenting. I felt self-absorbed thinking this, even immature. So many of my friends who had kids constantly extolled parenting’s virtues: “You can’t imagine how much joy kids bring you,” they’d say, “that you could love another human being so deeply.” Baby’s first steps, baby’s first day of school, the quiet moments at home alone when they looked up at you and said, I love you dad—“It’s so rewarding. I would throw myself in front of a car for that kid.” I believed them. I felt that way about my parents. Yet these were the same people who admitted: I’m always tired; I’m buried in chores; I have no time to myself; I worry I’m doing it all wrong; sometimes I can’t breathe; I’m stuck at my job at least until she starts middle school; I wish I could just jump in the car and drive to the beach and talk to no one. At night they drank too much wine to cope, or smoked occasional cigarettes even though they’d officially quit. And they warned me to be careful on this trip, to rent a motel room or not go at all, all while insisting that “Fun doesn’t end once you have a kid.” Maybe my thoughts on parenting would change. “Once you meet the right person,” Sasha told me, “you’ll feel differently.” Part of me believed her. I felt a parental instinct. Their baby Liv was a grinning, crawling, gurgling bundle of chubby pinchable dough, and I turned mushy every time I saw her: got on the ground to play, showed her how to pet the cat, lapsed into a ridiculous goo-goo voice. But between the fatigue, bills and lack of free time, I doubted I could handle all aspects of parenting, and despite Sasha’s wisdom that meeting your mate changes things, I’d given up hope that I’d ever meet the right person. So I turned my attention elsewhere.

  The history of music was marked by a few, fleeting, magical junctures: 1957 in New York jazz, 1962 in Liverpool, 1967 in San Francisco, 1970 in Detroit, 1990 in Seattle, the mid-’70s at CBGB’s. Stars had aligned to produce so-called local “scenes” whose underground bands ended up transforming music throughout the world. Whatever it was that caused such things, that mysterious convergence of talent, timing, and personalities, it was happening again right now on the West Coast, and somehow—by good luck and staying up on new music—I’d found out about it.

  If the musical eras that Chris and I had lived through in our teens were any indication of future patterns of history, then I knew that this moment would pass as quickly as the rest. The underground bands would one day be discovered by the larger culture. They’d start playing big cavernous venues with higher ticket prices and higher percentages of meatheads in the crowd. They’d tour constantly to spread the word, put out numerous singles and albums to feed the furnace of popular demand while it was hot, and as the musicians aged and tired of the road, they’d likely tire of their own musical ideas, abandon their previous sty
le, and their song-writing would change—suffer, possibly. And as they played the same songs over and over for years and years and things became as routine as a job, their shows would lose the power and purity that once made them monumental. Read any book on music history. This was often the pattern. But right now, these particular West Coast bands were young and energetic, their music fresh and unprecedented, and their intimate shows still overlooked enough to feel like a dirty little secret. Future fans would look back on this year in awe and wish they could have experienced it. And we, the informed obsessives, would know that we did experience it—that we were there—not to brag or feel superior, but to relish the fullness that comes from devouring something of substance, be it food, foreign lands, or a whole era at the height of its artistic potency. It was rare that you were aware that something culturally significant was happening while it was happening. Usually such appreciations occurred in hindsight. But I was aware of it. Chris was too. He had a different life now.

  I wasn’t going to miss it.

  I arrived at the venue around 5:30 last night to scope it out. The band’s website listed no start time, no place name, only an address followed by the letters “LA.” It was seductively cryptic. I figured the location was either an art gallery or some crumbling bungalow where people drank beer on the dead lawn and the band set up in the living room. Either would be sufficiently rowdy and intimate.

  Before I found a safe hotel lot to sleep in, I drove to the venue, to make sure I had the right place so I wouldn’t miss the music. The place was in the old warehouse district, a gritty industrial section ringed by freeways, southeast of downtown, where the city’s famous Art Deco bridges crossed the empty cement channel of the Los Angeles River. My friends and I had passed this area countless times as teenagers while driving to the beach. It appeared solely as a sea of shabby roofs on the other side of the elevated freeway. Having watched movies like Repo Man and Boyz in the Hood, I imagined the world down there as a post-apocalyptic no-man’s land where the homeless cannibalized each other, gang members carjacked you, and every fence was barbed and covered in shredded plastic bags. Turns out, the area wasn’t so bad.

  West of Alameda ran a number of streets where trash tumbled past parking meters that no cars parked in front of, and where people built shanties out of cardboard and sat on the curb drinking from bottles. But on the other side of Alameda, the area had been repackaged as the Downtown LA Arts District, and many of the old warehouses were being transformed into fancy lofts for people who wanted some idealized experience of urban living. In the coming years, the area gentrified. Back then, the process was only beginning. It still had grit. It didn’t have many coffee shops. There was a gun club in one building, a sound stage in another. One was being repainted, another torn down. Some of the old buildings were still skuzzy, though, like the off-white one at the end of 6th that had a sign painted on it that read “Global Farms Enterprises, Inc. Garlic & Ginger Wholesale Distributors.” And the one that I assumed was the venue.

  A large banner ad stretched across the front. “Downtown Artist Spae.com,” it said, misspelled:

  RENT WORK SPACE w/ TOOLS

  Fabrication Creation Location

  I parked and studied the row of metal security grates that ran along its pale grey front, a shade as lifeless as old bologna. A young guy in jeans and a white tank top shuffled into one of the units. It was the only unit whose open door wasn’t covered by a grate. I got out of the truck and approached it. A white, late-’60s VW Bug sat parked in the opening. Beyond that stretched a long rectangular corridor. The floor was cracked cement, the walls exposed brick, painted white in places, tan in others. A few pipes ran up the sides alongside some wires. “Hey,” I said. “This where the show is tonight?”

  The kid in the tank-top sat in a chair against the wall. “Yeah,” he said.

  “How much is it?”

  “I think five.” He scratched his shaved head and yelled, “Troy!” Then, “He’ll know. He lives here.”

  The guy at the other end of the unit dropped the huge rug he was dragging and looked up. He was over six feet tall and wore the same outfit as the first guy: tight blue jeans, heavy black work boots, a white tank top, and suspenders hanging from his waistband. They looked like skinheads, but no Nazi punks would be listening to the sort of psychedelic garage bands that were playing tonight.

  “Is this your work space?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, stepping beside me. “I mean, I live here too. It’s live/work.” He said he was a musician. Then he stopped talking and stared at me, suspicious of my presence. He seemed to contemplate my motives. I complimented his place to disarm him and said I’d driven all the way from Phoenix for the show. “Whoa,” he said. “Phoenix?”

  I didn’t mention Tucson. For some reason, standing there with these strangers, all the clothes and bedding stuffed in my car, my enthusiasm for music suddenly embarrassed me. All I said was, “I just love this band. They’re like no other.” It was the truth, but there was the detailed truth, and then there was the simple truth you told people.

  He offered his hand. “Troy.”

  “Nice to meet you. Aaron.”

  The other guy stood up and shook my hand. “I’m Robbie.” He lived in a unit a few doors down.

  I asked when the show started, and Troy ran his hand across his head, wagging it side to side. “Well, I dunno, nine? Eight? There’s four bands. My band opens.”

  A young brunette woman emerged from the rear. To Troy she said, “You want me to work the door?” He shrugged. She sat down on a stool and started texting.

  When the phone in Robbie’s hand rang, he checked the number and handed it to Troy. “Excuse me a second,” Troy said, holding it to his hear. “Hey, what’s up. Yeah.” I gave him a wave, told Robbie that I’d see him tonight. Then I drove past downtown and up the I-5 in search of a place to sleep. The Residence Inn was the first nice hotel I saw from the freeway, and when I exited to investigate, I spotted the underground lot, with its many parking spaces sheltered from the sun, and pulled in.

  Once on a roadtrip when I was twenty-one, I woke up in my truck’s camper shell, in the middle of the night, and thought I was in a grave. I was lying on my back. Everything was black. Something pinned my arms against my sides and pressed my legs together. The voice in my head said: I think I’m dead.

  Filled with terror, I sat up and drew a breath and tried to get my bearings. I wiggled free of what turned out to be a sleeping bag and rubbed condensation off the window with a dirty sock. I peered through the glass. Nothing. Where was I? When I opened the back hatch, the familiar smell of forest rushed in: rich soil, moist air, plant life. As my eyes adjusted, the shapes of sword ferns came into focus, a deep blue light backlit trunks of trees. Then I remembered: I was in the coastal Redwoods. Alone, on vacation.

  When I lay back down I was relieved, but I kept thinking, That’s what it’s like to be buried alive. You can’t breathe underground.

  I made one quick circle through the underground lot, confident that I would have no trouble parking there after the show let out. I got dinner, spent some time in a bookstore. Then I drove back to the warehouse district and parked on 6th near the bridge.

  The street was empty. There were a few stars in the sky. Cars passed somewhere nearby, but no headlights shone. This wasn’t the frenzied, traffic-choked LA I was used to. It felt peaceful, like a tiny desert town, comfortably decaying and happily forsaken.

  When I reached Troy’s place, two white wooden boards filled the entryway, spray-painted with the words “Happy birthday” in black. A cover, Troy later explained, to throw off police and dampen the sound. I slipped inside, paid my five bucks, and cut through the crowd to the side of the apartment that was functioning as the stage. People mingled all around. Men wearing dark sunglasses leaned against walls, chatting up women. Women in dark skirts and tight t-shirts sipped cans of Pabst. Nearby, the headlining band’s bassist smoked and laughed at someone’s joke. This fel
t more like a house party than a show. They’d even turned Troy’s kitchen into a bar. A cloth screen enclosed one side of it, with a hole cut for drink orders. A hand-written sign said: $4 vodka, $4 whiskey, $1 beer. I looked around. There were only about sixty people.

  I had missed Troy’s band but caught the next two openers. The first was high energy, so good that I bought the cassette they had for sale. The second tore through a fuzzed out set of dark, sixties pop that had the crowd transfixed and swaying into each other. But when the music stopped, the crowd dispersed and left me exposed. I felt like an idiot standing by myself, killing time between sets with no one to talk to. There were only so many times you could look at your phone. As the band dismantled their equipment, I got some water at the bar. Most everyone around me was young and chic. The way they held their beers, the way they leaned in to each other, hands in their pockets, flirting, laughing. I took a sip of water then slipped outside.

  The spring air relaxed me. Across the street stood an enormous warehouse where eighteen wheelers filled their cargo trailers with produce by day. East down 6th was quiet and dark. The road stretched outward, blank and flat until it reared in an arc like the back of a hissing cat into the bridge over the river. The street, skeleton warehouses, the dry riverbed—the world was halted and austere, a hollow carapace of unfulfilled potential awaiting redevelopment, not unlike how I felt.