Old Records Never Die (14 page)

I found a space about a mile south from Humboldt Park, in between two abandoned factories. I stepped out into a river of crushed beer cans and surgical gloves. (No, seriously, surgical gloves. I counted at least six floating along the curb.) I locked my car, waiting for the familiar
beep-beep
that gave me no sense of security. And then I locked it again, just to be sure. I walked two blocks toward the park, and then backtracked to lock my car one more time. I was pissed at myself for leaving the stroller and the portable DVD player in the trunk. Now when the car got stolen, which I was convinced it would be, they were just going to be two more things I had to argue with the insurance company about.

I was at the festival so early, they barely had security at the front gates. I wandered the grounds, looking for any vendors who might be selling anything besides $20 pretzels and T-shirts. Nothing. Not a damn thing. The guy selling Replacements T-shirts seemed honestly perplexed by what I was asking for.

“Are you selling?” he asked, pointing to the record in my arms.

“No, I brought this from home.”

“Why, dude?” he asked, scratching his neatly pruned beard. “You know there are no record players here, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I just thought . . . see if anybody, um . . . Never mind.”

I walked the periphery of the festival grounds several times, zigzagged across it like I was making a cat's cradle. I finally gave up and just parked in front of a stage to watch Bob Mould perform. After just a few hours, I was a mess, bobbing and teetering like one of those gas station inflatable air dancers. My feet were throbbing pustules, expressing their disapproval with sternly worded neurons. Rain pelted my face like it had something against me personally. There was nothing to do but stand and wait and pray that death, when it came, would come quickly, and with a chair.

And the record, that goddamn
Let It Be
that I never should have brought, I was feeling so much anger and resentment toward it, like it was somehow personally responsible for tagging along. I wanted to just let it drop, let it disappear into the flurry of stomping Doc Martens. But of course, I couldn't do that. That was unthinkable—monstrous, even. When the rain started, I tried hiding it under my T-shirt. But that made it worse somehow, creating a rain funnel around my neck that made sure both the record and my skin were as drenched as possible. So I just held it out in front of me, hoped the cardboard wouldn't disintegrate in my hands. Just holding it felt so unnatural and weird, like I was standing in a crowd with a toaster. What the hell was I doing with this thing?

And then, as a true test of whether I really want to be here, a guy wearing leather wristbands with half-inch rivet spikes pushed past me, and I felt a prick on my arm. And then I saw the blood, streaking down my forearm a little too thickly for my liking.

“What the hell?” I shouted at the guy with the wrist spikes. “You fucking sliced me, man!”

He turned and saw the blood, and offered an apologetic half smile. “Sorry, dude,” he said. “That's never happened to me before.”

Really? 'Cause I'd think if you had dozens of tiny metal spikes jutting from your wrists, shiving random people in crowds is something that happens to you with some regularity.

Before I could react, the lights went down and the Replacements took the stage. The actual fucking Replacements! I was stunned, barely able to believe my own eyes. My heartbeat was beating ridiculously fast, but perfectly in time with “Takin a Ride,” the first song of their set (as well as their discography), so it all worked out. I was way more emotional than I'd anticipated. I'd joked with friends for months that when I finally saw the Replacements play live again, I'd weep like a baby. As it turns out, that wasn't hyperbole. I cried, and I cried hard. Which is a strange thing to do when you're listening to a punk song from the eighties about driving too fast.

I got it together by the third song, “Favorite Thing.” But then I lost it again when Paul sang, “Yeah, dad, you're rocking real bad.” Because why? I had no fucking clue. Because I was a dad and I was rocking real bad, and Paul knew it? No, that's stupid. Paul wrote the song in a drunken haze, and he probably rhymed
dad
and
bad
because it was easy, not as an Easter egg for fans who would grow up to become middle-aged fathers listening to the song at a reunion concert, long after when most of us should've died from bad decisions, as we downed too many $10 beers and stood in a muddy field, our outdated hipster shoes sinking like dinosaurs into tar pits, our
aching knees threatening to collapse, and we realized, twenty years too late, “Oh yeah, I get it now. He was making fun of the future me. Nice burn!”

They strummed the first familiar chords of “Androgynous,” and my body started moving in ways it hasn't since getting my cholesterol checked became an annual necessity. They got to that point in the song where Paul sings, “He might be a father, but he sure ain't a—” And I hesitated. I stopped like I was waiting for the music to do what it always did at that exact moment on the record. It didn't, obviously, but somewhere deep in my muscle memory, I was anticipating it. The neurotransmitters in my brain remembered the skip. It was like that knee-jerk reflex test that a doctor gives you in a checkup.

The next song was “Hey Good Lookin',” and I nearly gasped with music nerd joy. A seemingly off-the-cuff cover, except it just so happened to be from the set list of their so-called “final” Grant Park performance twenty-some years ago. Playing an obscurity like “Hey Good Lookin'” was obviously a nod to the grizzled old fans in the crowd with too many bootlegs clogging their iPods, who had driven to the show while listening to the band's 1986 UK bootleg
Boink
, which includes a live version of “Hey Good Lookin'” from 1983.

I wish I had been paying more attention during that last show. I was twenty-two at the time, just out of college and full of opinions that I felt obligated to share, as loudly and as often as possible. About midway through their set, I was grumbling about how the band was playing the wrong songs. There was too much from the new album and not nearly enough of the old punk barn burners. They hadn't played “I Hate Music,” or “Raised in the City,” or “Take Me Down to the Hospital,” or even a goddamn “Unsatisfied.”

We left somewhere around “Within Your Reach.” On the ride home, we listened to the rest of the concert on the car radio. We
laughed and laughed when the DJs pondered if this would indeed be the 'Mats final performance. Those corporate fuckers just didn't get it, we thought. The 'Mats are yanking their chains. Break up? The Replacements can't fucking break up. They'll break up just as surely as one of them will die young because his liver explodes, or have a stroke like my grandfather did in his eighties. Can you imagine? Oh god, these old men and their conspiracy theories. They just don't get it.

They say life is wasted on the young. That's entirely true. Twenty years later, standing in the mud at Riot Fest, there's nothing I wanted to do more than leave early. But I'm old enough now to realize what I'd be missing. You have to snatch these opportunities while you can. When you're young and stupid, you think it'll all last forever. But it doesn't. So I stayed till the end. Even though my old-man bones were rattling, and there was so much mud that it felt like my socks were filled with mayonnaise, and oh my god I had to pee so badly, why the fuck did I have so much Dos Equis Amber? Dumb, dumb, dumb! Didn't matter. I dug in my heels and drank in every last second.

Somebody behind me screamed, “I can't believe this is fucking happening!” A few people in the crowd laughed, but I wanted to hug the guy who said it. I wanted to shout at him, “I can't fucking believe it either, brother!”

It was somewhere around this time that I remembered, “Hey, wasn't I stabbed earlier? I totally was, wasn't I?” I glanced down at my arm, and it was caked with blood. It had dripped down my forearm, snaked across my wrist and onto the record, splattering it like a crime scene. Seeing my blood everywhere should have been cause for panic. Normally, even a minor cut is enough to make me lightheaded and anxious, doing Google searches for the symptoms of sepsis. But with this . . . well, what options did I have?

Whenever I go anywhere with Kelly and Charlie, we bring a diaper bag loaded for any emergency. Bandages, antiseptic,
antibiotic cream, antibacterial wipes, anti-everything, whatever you need. But trapped in the middle of this sweaty throng, I didn't have access to first aid. Not even a child-size Dora the Explorer Band-Aid. Nobody here cared if I bled to death. I could have tried to force my way toward the exit, but even then my medical options were limited. I might as well just lose myself in the hammering bass lines and let it bleed, man, let it bleed.

When your entire existence is about being responsible and vigilant and “No, no, don't touch that” and “Because Daddy said so, that's why,” there's a wonderful freedom that comes from just letting it bleed.

I raised my arm with the crowd for synchronized fist pumping, and splattered the guy standing next to me in blood. Whatever. You don't want some stranger's plasma on you, maybe you don't come to a punk-rock show, dude!

The 'Mats played mostly everything I wanted them to play. They did “Left of the Dial,” “Alex Chilton,” and “Bastards of Young.” They skipped a few things. I wish they'd played more obscurities. I wish they'd done
Let It Be
in its entirety. I wish for so much. But that's like being the child of divorced parents and the parents get back together and your first thought is “I wish they were rich now too.” Don't be greedy, fuckhead! You dreamed about seeing the 'Mats sing “Bastards of Young” live, right in front of you, and you got that. And unlike that farewell show you half paid attention to in 1991, they didn't do anything off the “new album.” So with all due respect, shut your fucking old-man indie-snob complaining hole and enjoy the musical riches you were lucky enough to live long enough to witness.

After the show, I walked back to my car and drove home in silence. The apartment was dark and quiet—everybody was fast asleep. My wife and son purred like kittens, oblivious to the shadow with shaky knees leaving muddy footprints past their beds. I was cold and
tired and badly in need of a hot shower. But the music was still humming in my head, and I didn't want to lose it just yet.

I tiptoed into my office and closed the door behind me. I pulled a chair toward the record player and sat down next to it. I was still holding my
Let It Be
. I hadn't let go of it for almost twelve straight hours. In the light, it looked worse than I imagined. The sleeve was warped from the rain, its once-smooth surface now a crusty landscape of rolling hills and mushy cardboard valleys. And my blood, now thoroughly soaked in, had created a strangely beautiful mosaic of viscous fluid. It looked like all four band members had been sliced up by a cleaver-wielding maniac, and left to bleed to death on that Minneapolis roof.

I slipped the black disk out of its case, and it was remarkably undamaged. Maybe a spot of blood here or rain there, but mostly pristine. I placed it carefully onto the turntable, and strapped headphones to my ears. I dropped the needle like I was trying to defuse a bomb, and smiled when I heard the familiar crackle.

It was like listening with fresh ears. Something had changed in the record. It had lived through something with me. We had bonded, as only a round piece of black plastic and a tired old animal still shivering from the rain—an imperfect storage device for thoughts and feelings—could.

I closed my eyes and imagined Charlie in college, sitting in his dorm room, hanging with his roommates and listening to music, on whatever weird futuristic device people will be listening to music in another twenty years. Maybe they all have their own ear chip implants or something, I don't know. But there on Charlie's desk, next to the crushed Coke can that had been converted into a makeshift bong (because some things never changed) is my battered copy of
Let It Be
. His friends will ask him about it, and after explaining what a record is and how it works, he'll say, “It was my dad's.”

(I'm not sure why I imagined him referring to me in the past tense. Maybe I just assume I'll be dead by the time he gets to college. I'm forty-five now; what are the odds that I make it that long? I don't want to be cocky. Better to assume the worst and then be pleasantly surprised.)

“Dude,” one of them will say. “It's covered in blood. What the hell happened?”

He'll tell them the whole story, about how I took the record to a punk-rock show, and then it rained and I sloshed around in the mud, and at some point somebody stabbed me, and I bled everywhere but I didn't fucking care, and the record was baptized with blood and mud and rainwater and the filthy sweat of strangers as we all danced and laughed and sang along with songs about being drunk and unsatisfied.

“Whoa,” his friends will say. “Your dad was badass.”

“Yeah,” Charlie will say, with a smirk. “He kinda was.”

Which of course wasn't in any way true. Even I exaggerated it in hindsight. As I drove home from the show, I looked down at the bloody record and thought, “Wow. I let that happen. I'm exactly like Iggy Pop slicing up his chest with broken glass.” But I really wasn't. I didn't bleed because the cut was so deep but because I take a baby aspirin every day because I'm terrified of having a heart attack like my dad, so I'm prone to heavy bleeding anyway. And most important, I bled all over the record because it happened to be there, and I had no choice.

But I overromanticized it, and continued to overromanticize it every time I told it. I am not a punk-rock warrior any more than my dad was a brooding intellectual, smoking his pipe in his office as he listened to Willie Nelson records and pondered deep philosophical questions. He probably just thought “Always on My Mind” was pretty and he needed some alone time.