Concerning Stars and Comets

"Bill, I still hum all their songs. But I'm miles from their smiles and I've nowhere to sleep. If I don't grow old I can't become an antique. So I just stay a freak, for someone to keep."

-Comet Gain, second song on the cassette.

It was the morning of the first day after we sent out notice that our pop group, My Favorite, had dissolved. I brushed my teeth while staring in the mirror, the fine lines under my tired eyes reminding me of the fine lines in vinyl that my world once revolved around. They both revolved I suppose. I think it's entirely possible that I'm not a kid anymore.

I buy my toothpaste at a Korean 99 cent store on Roosevelt Avenue for two reasons. The first one is that it costs 99 cents. The second is that the tube of Crest is embellished with colorful Korean writing, making it look somewhat like an interior design choice.

I brushed while I traveled through time. My bathroom is like something out of Picasso's blue period as seen through they eyes of a 1970s Greek manicurist. But the blue tiles and tub and toilet sort of enveloped me and comforted me. I wore a wrinkled Harris Tweed blazer and striped tie to the college to teach my courses. I rarely ever did. I usually wore a battered polo shirt of some sort and three days of stubble. I only wore a tie when I felt in particular need of a bit of strength, and a bit of dignity.

I came down the stairs of my apartment building to find a package crammed into my mailbox. It was from a friend from the Pacific Northwest who did a fanzine back in the day. Inside was a taped cassette copy of the as yet to be released new Comet Gain record called, I think, City Fallen Leaves. I believe it will come out on Kill Rock Stars records.

Comet Gain, for those who don't know, are a real good British indie band who evolved out of the same post-riot grrl indie scene that the earliest incarnation of My Favorite had, at roughly the same time. They are one of only a handful of bands from that time/ideology who still make music under the same name. I had kept up with their releases for the most part, watching them take a shot at soulful chart pop (albeit Marxist chart pop), only to return to their original shambling folk/punk sound. This returned them to the quasi-ghetto of obscurity reserved for unfashionably earnest (or good) music.

I popped the cassette into my car stereo and got onto the Long Island Expressway. The early daylight was eerie and I felt slightly like driving off a cliff. But there were no cliffs. Perhaps that is why the expressway runs through the flat center of this tremulous isle.

The first song was a decent noisepop number, but the second song was staggering. An acoustic guitar strumming along with a single warbling synth. A voice which seemed in the space beside you, as opposed to in the speakers, like the closet mix of VU 'pale blue eyes', or The Smiths 'Please, Please, Please.' Its repeated refrain of "these are the days I forgot to write down" covered my mind like ivy as I rewinded the tape and listened to the tune at least twelve times. It seemed to be asking the same question which I had faced while facing my face in the mirror.

Why play music when not enough people listen to you? Why play music when not enough people listen to anything? Why play music when the bombs will always be louder? Why play music when you actually have to hope one of your song is used to sell m&ms....so that you yourself will be able to afford m&ms? Where are your friends? Why isn't anybody happy? Why I do think that nobody's happy?

David from Comet Gain seemed to want the answers--- and not want them at the same time.

It all struck a nerve, broke a rib.

In The Last Days Of My Favorite this July, we toured the west coast, hoping to grab the attention of labels like Capitol Records and Subpop, who we were told were coming to see our young, up & co tourmates. A decade separated us from them. There were similarities, we were both configurations of contradictions. But they were different contradictions. They had a studied carelessness, a kind of knowing naivete, which could only be grasped when seeing them play five shows in a row as we just had. We, on the other hand (despite a dozen years of doing this,) had just the opposite, a kind of careless, shambling, short-hand grandeur. They also had a bit of rock star swagger, but it was camouflaged behind Beat Happening t-shirts and American beer in a can. I dressed like The Thin White Duke's shabby cousin, clutching a sparkling inch of scotch with my metaphorically golden nailpolished fingers, but took the stage with the same awkwardness, and tentativeness that I did when giving my tenth grade oral report on The Cuban missile Crisis. All my bandmates did. Our tourmates were 10 years younger than us, but understood the music industry and how to work it 10 times better. And they were also quite good to boot. They were however, also a definite evolution of the indiepop idea which I had taken so seriously at their age, and I recognized that mutation as having something vaguely to do with The OC .

We had struggled in the last years of the band with reconciling our past with our present and future. We started out as a teenage art-pop band of fanzines, and boxing gloves and crackling 7-inches. Then we became an actually quite good rock n' roll band by accident. Through it all, I tried to write about life in a way that made sense to me, to take chances with words and artifice, to promote a kind of uncool caring. When a big management/production company flirted with trying to turn us into the next Interpol, we blew it badly, maybe half on purpose. Because in the back of one's mind, one is always doing algebra.

If X=being better & different than Interpol now, and Y=becoming similar to Interpol, doesn't Z=became similar and worse than Interpol?

I barely passed College Math. We failed Becoming a Successful NYC Hipster Band. We registered for it, but barely showed up. I kept sitting behind the Sculpure Building with the same ten freaks I already knew, smoking Gaulloises. Was it because I was scared of failing or passing...I honestly don't know.

So that final tour, save for the amazing San Francisco Pop Fest, did more to end My Favorite than anything before it ever had. Faced with the industry's ambivalence towards us, and the increasing difficulty of surviving in one of the most expensive cities on earth, people within the group had to re-examine the music in the context of their lives. And I had to examine why it wasn't making me as happy anymore either.

But one level, it wouldn't matter. It was over. And Comet Gain's song, sung with such pure intention, made me feel ashamed of our last summer as a gang. Made me feel ashamed of everything we did and everything we had failed to do, and all the things which we let hurt us which should never have been able to.

Fame, fame, fickle fame...it can play hideous tricks on the brain. But still I'd rather be famous than righteous or holy any day, any day any day.

And thus St. Stephen damned indie-dom to the hell where it now resides, where its brightest star, St. Sebastian, is famous for being righteous and holy. I wanted to make records, and for people to care. I wanted health insurance.

I've got some thinking to do. All I know is that this song, which arrived at just the right exit upon desolation road, also made me want to keep playing music. To take all those impulses--- to be famous, to be righteous, to be holy---and suss them out. Because of all the plastic gestures I have littered my life with, this one felt the most like being alive. This one was bringing me closer to a living end. I just had to make sure that I kept making soul music, for the Templars, not the Camp Followers.
Going for dollar Budweisers at The Phoenix, with jukebox money.

Love,
MGjr

"Brent, you don't surf anymore, but you drown so slow with nowhere to go. If you're fucked it's alright its Saturday Night, and you are alive, and you are alright. These are the days I forgot to write down..."

-Comet Gain