That’s what I kept telling myself this past Friday as I fought to stay focused on my first concert experience since Donald Trump returned to the White House.
I was thrilled when an online acquaintance who recently moved to my home of Tucson, Arizona, suggested that we meet in person for the first time at a concert.
Not only was I psyched to see the headliner Earth, a band I’d been reading about since the mid-1990s, but had somehow never seen live, the show was also at Solar Culture, perhaps my all-time favourite venue and the perfect antidote for the slick superficiality of mainstream culture.
I used to go there all the time in the 2000s, when a wide variety of independent artists would play in that shotgun warehouse by the Union Pacific main line, an anarchic communal space where you really could bring your own beverage of choice and the lonesome whistle of a freight train invariably found its way into the mix.
Solar Culture stopped regularly hosting amplified shows a while ago. A family member’s relationship with the gallery’s proprietor, who owns several arts-adjacent buildings around town, made my recent visits there awkward.
But the Earth concert would permit me to put that history behind me for a spell and introduce my new friend to the kind of alternative culture that makes Tucson a special place to live.
That’s what I thought before the show, at least.
Once inside the venue, on a disturbingly hot April night, forgetting how much had changed since my last show there proved impossible.
Although the spare, inventive keyboard playing of opening act Stebmo—aka Steve Moore, who also plays with Earth—was the sort of music my brain normally latches onto, my thoughts kept drifting to the hellscape the United States is rapidly becoming.
My political panic slid ineluctably into the personal kind, reflecting on how much has gone wrong in my life over the past two decades and how little chance there is of making any of it right.
Then something strange happened.
Towards the end of his set, Stebmo took a break from playing music to make a statement at the microphone.
He spoke about the different paths available to us. Earth wouldn’t be going down what he called the “green” path, Stebmo explained. Nor would the band be following the route of rapacious capitalism.
They were choosing a third way, one that required our participation as much as theirs.
The goal was to tap into something primal, suppressing the impulse to communicate meaning in order to access a capability that all human beings share, from very young children to the most sophisticated musicians.
I usually shy away from formulations that seem too “hippie”, perhaps because I spent my twenties in the San Francisco Bay Area, where middle-aged Baby Boomers kept reminding me that they were there, man, while I had not been.
On this steamy occasion, though, I could feel my ironic detachment sliding away with the sweat down my back.
Without ever mentioning politics, Stebmo made it clear that Earth had our terrible situation in mind.
“We can’t build the house where we want to live yet,” he concluded. “We can’t even build the door. Our job is to put out a welcome mat for the future.”
When Earth came on a few minutes later, the band’s founder, Dylan Carlson, explained that they would be playing their album Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method, followed by a few extra songs.
Somehow, I had missed the fact that the band was touring to celebrate that strange album’s twentieth anniversary. Instead of the distorted drone fests that caught my attention in the 1990s, we would be experiencing songs that resist easy comprehension but are all the more compelling because of their inscrutability.
When bands started going on tour to play their favourite albums in their entirety, some older fans were perplexed. From their perspective, the point of going to a concert is to get an experience that can’t be reproduced by sitting at home listening to a studio album, drawing attention to musical connections that cut across an artist’s oeuvre by decontextualising songs.
How much can you learn from a live rendering of something that almost always sounds better in its original form?
What the people who responded this way overlooked was how fragmented cultural experience had already become in the internet era. The point of recreating an album live, from start to finish, is to counteract the tide of distraction that has led even devoted music lovers to submit to the logic of sampling, seeking a new song to hear before the current one is over instead of permitting the sort of immersion that once characterised serious listening.
With its slow-building grooves and dearth of hooks, Hex is precisely the kind of album that is likely to get shunted aside in listeners’ search for the next cheap fix. Recognising this and understanding Hex‘s importance within the band’s story arc cast a different light on Stebmo’s words.
Mainstream music fans of my generation are more likely to remember Carlson’s problematic relationship with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain than what his own band’s early records sounded like.
The two men were friends, then roommates. Carlson was the best man at Cobain’s wedding to Courtney Love. They shared a love for the experimental hard rock made by local band The Melvins and an addiction to heroin.
When a despairing Cobain shot himself to death on the 5th of April, 1994, it was with a shotgun he had asked Carlson to buy for him six days before.
Like Courtney Love, Carlson struggled mightily after Cobain’s passing. Although he managed to channel some of that into Earth’s music, he was not able to stay sober. That’s why, by his own admission, the band stopped releasing studio albums after 1997.
Hex represented Earth’s comeback, its lack of the distortion the band was famous for, a sign of Carlson’s personal transformation. The album’s roots-oriented aesthetic is an index of his newfound sobriety. But it’s no less brooding than its predecessors.
Despite being an entirely instrumental record, Hex is self-consciously literary. The album’s title comes from William Blake and the titles of its tracks from Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian, which chronicles the stomach-turning exploits of the Glanton Gang in the borderlands between Mexico and the United States in the wake of the 1846 war between the two countries.
Hex communicates the clarity of vision that comes after a near-death experience with substance abuse. Yet that vision is more horrific than the addict’s delusions. It’s about picking up the pieces, only to realise they are razor sharp.
Bearing that in mind, the idea that playing the music on that album might conjure a doormat for a portal that does not yet exist resonates differently. If it’s hippie, it’s the darkest sort of hippie, cut from the same cloth as Altamont and the Manson Family.
This realisation is what made it possible for me to push distractions out of my mind and concentrate all of my energy on the narrow now of the music Earth was playing at Solar Culture, not to escape the awfulness waiting outside the venue, but to confront it on a bodily level, shorn of all the spin that political commentators add.
To be sure, I could not entirely transcend the part of myself that reflects on experience while it is happening. In particular, I kept thinking about the shocking recent revelations about Cormac McCarthy, who apparently wrote Blood Meridian not only to document the bloodlust that periodically surges through the American soul but also to process his own lust for an impoverished and abused underage girl with whom he fled across the border to avoid being charged with statutory rape.
That girl, now a woman in her early sixties, lived in Tucson when McCarthy met her as a teenager in the 1970s and still lives here today, mourning the loss of her lover of a half-century even as she comes to terms with the legacy of his grooming.
I could not imagine a better place to reacquaint myself with Hex, celebrating the album’s twentieth anniversary and Blood Meridian’s fortieth.
And by that, I mean not only Tucson but the specific location of the Solar Culture show, on Toole Avenue, where I spent countless hours during the pandemic trying to protect a loved one from the consequences of the same addiction that drove Kurt Cobain to suicide and nearly killed Dylan Carlson, a neighbourhood awash in the dangers that come from being so close to the border, a border which Donald Trump has now decided should be occupied by American troops, the Constitution be damned.
By the time Earth’s show was over, I understood that the doormat Stebmo had described welcomes the truths that the Trump Administration is doing its best to suppress.
It’s scary what a portal might let in, but even scarier to realise what a wall will shut out.
Please support The Battleground. Subscribe to our free newsletter and make a donation to ensure our continued growth and independence.
Photograph courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.
