Summer 2004.
I saw a show that summer that changed my perspective on music, although I wouldn’t fully realize this fact until now, nearly seven years later.
My “cool” music education had, until that year, been pretty lacking. I listened to the radio, had a fondness for ’90s alt-rock (seeing how I grew up with it and played with Barbies while listening to “Roll To Me” by Del Amitri and “Barely Breathing” by Duncan Sheik—seriously) and quite enjoyed my first CDs, which were, respectively, the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack and a burned copy of Journey’s Greatest Hits from my stepmom.
Yeah.
I was definitely not doing myself any favors by proclaiming my admiration for Tina Turner and The Eurythmics to my peers (at that time, anyway) and so by that fateful summer of 2004, I had no real compass to help me seek out good music.
Thank God for that girl from high school journalism class! (And the fact I never got into N’Sync, Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, etc. Although I did like Christina Aguilera’s song from Mulan.)
By virtue of journalism class, I had acquired some friends who were definitely akin to Pitchfork’s Junior League. I learned who OKGO was, somebody burned a copy of The Strokes’ Is This It? for me (I thought the title, which was Sharpie’d on the front of the cd, was a question about the name of the band) and our high school had quite the little indie-rock radio station (WLHS! Lakota Radio!).
One day that summer, probably while we were getting ice cream at the Cone or whatever else it was we did as repressed suburban teenagers, this girl from said journalism class mentioned an upcoming concert that summer for some band called Modest Mouse. Personally, I thought the name was stupid and didn’t have high hopes, but I was kinda desperate to be cool (or, at the very least, less dorky than I was) so I agreed and went home to beg for permission to go to a concert without adult supervision.
I casually down-played what I thought this concert would entail; I definitely envisioned crowd-surfing and lots of yelling, which weren’t things that would endear the Parentals to the idea of my going. However, this show was at Kings Island, the bastion of security and freedom for parents and teenagers alike in the heart of suburban Southwest Ohio, so I gained permission to attend with relative ease.
I just looked up the date of the show, because like I said, it’s been almost seven years.
It turns out it was August 12, 2004.
I remember getting to the venue, the Timberwolf Amphitheater, and clutching my ticket with slightly sweaty palms. I was sixteen and nervous; I didn’t want to be on the fringes of popularity any longer, and I swear to God, this concert seemed like the perfect segue into the hierarchy of whatever the fuck “cool” actually means in high school.
There were a ton of people in the rows of benches, and it turns out there was assigned seating according to your ticket number. In retrospect, I bet that pissed off a LOT of my fellow concert-goers. I remember being really surprised by the number of bearded people that were in attendance, and by how much older everyone seemed. Some of the people there had to be at least 25! I was feeling awkward and out of place, but my little posse of high school girls and I were finally seated. There was a row of burly, bearded guys in front of and behind us, complete with their waif-like, dirty-haired girlfriends, and I remember wanting them to be impressed that this group of young girls could hang with the older kids. (I’m so fucking glad I’ll never be sixteen and that unsure of myself ever, ever again.)
The opening band started playing, and I’ve discovered it was the Walkmen, who aren’t bad and I’m sure they played a fine set. I didn’t know a single song of theirs, but it didn’t actually matter, because I didn’t know a single song of Modest Mouse’s, either! And yet there I was.
When Modest Mouse finally played, I didn’t really know what the big hullabaloo was about. The lead singer, Isaac Brock, seemed semi-whiny, and his voice was kinda weird and he had an accent I couldn’t really place. The guitars were cool though, and the amphitheater had great acoustics. I stood up obediently when everyone else stood up, and remembered a priceless piece of advice I had been imparted with by my best friend during (ignoring all jokes) marching band camp: If you mouth the word “watermelon”, it looks like any word and you can get away with not knowing the words to the song that’s currently playing. I wonder what the bearded dudes in the row ahead of and behind me thought: “Oh, that’s sweet. I’m glad they let those MR/DD kids out of their rooms for a while,” or whatever.
Anyway. The show ended, and one of the girls I was with drove us all home.
Fast-forward a few months later.
My friend from band camp, Jen, and I were total besties by this point, and had heard some song called “Float On” on the radio. Once I purchased the album at our local Barnes and Noble, I experienced the exhilarating euphoria that comes with being able to say: “I saw them a few months ago, before they got really big,” about Modest Mouse.
I consequently fell in love with that album. Jen and I listened to it for the rest of 2004 in her car. I branched out into their older albums, and fell hard for the Lonesome Crowded West, especially when I moved to Texas. The Moon and Antarctica really hit home with my emo-ness when I was 19. I didn’t really dig The Fruit That Ate Itself, but I did like This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About.
Besides helping me explore their own varied and multifaceted discography, Modest Mouse, much like marijuana, were my own gateway drug to the beautiful, distorted, clean, tantalizing world of music I now find myself firmly entrenched within.
I love all kinds of music, and have it best described on my Facebook page:
eclectic, pseudo-electronic, techno-infused, pop-touched, rap-glamour rock
I’ll edit that by adding “with a splash of indie and a hint of dirty crunchy bass”.
Additionally, that Modest Mouse concert way back in Aught Four has had an unprecedented effect on my social life.
An uncanny number of people who have become significant in my life in various ways were all there.
Like, a freakishly weird, just missed the bus that crashed and everyone died on it but I didn’t because I missed it, coincidental number of people.
I did have this thought though: Was it a really significant show, or was it just a really big show in a relatively small city?
Who knows. I certainly believe in fate, and I wonder sometimes if I brushed past these people, who would become such important figures in my life, while standing in line all those summers ago. We could have stood next to each other in line, not knowing that five and six years later we’d be madly in love with each other, or strong beams of support for each other, or bitter enemies.
How ironic that I had even questioned for a second going to that concert.
You know the whole Butterfly Effect or whatever? What if Modest Mouse was my own personal Butterfly Effect? What if going to that show changed, or set into motion, the course of the rest of my life? I’ll never know for sure. And I might be reading too much into fate and coincidence and all that jazz. Still, I find it highly entertaining, nonetheless.
In the back of my mind now, sometimes, when I meet a new person, I start to quietly anticipate asking them, “Dude, were you at that Modest Mouse concert back in 2004? At the Timberwolf?” and awaiting their reply.
Because chances are, they were.
