7 Notes on 7 Concerts in 2023
Plus: The Top 10 Essays from 2023
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Two days ago marked our first year in Dallas after living in Austin for more than two decades. When I told my Austin friends we were moving to Dallas, they reacted as if I was telling them about a bad cancer diagnosis. “Why?!” they would say, sincerely shocked. “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t think it would be all that bad and expected to amiably tolerate a city I mostly knew from the ‘90s when I had in-laws there, or rather, here. I’m adaptable. New city, new job — and for the last 14 years, new wife — but the same me, I figured.
Then I started going to concerts.
Old 97’s
In January, K and M, friends from back when I was a political consultant, suggested we get tickets to the Old 97’s, who were doing a series of shows to celebrate their 40th year as a band. Sure, why not? Besides, their music made up much of the soundtrack for my old life. It’d be good to dive back in.
What I’d forgotten was my high school friend Anne, who had partnered up with Murry, a co-founder, bassist, and songwriter for the band. They live in Los Angeles, but she was tagging along. We made brunch plans, at which point I realized we had not seen each other for (this can’t be right… checks math… dammit) 35 years. What if we had nothing to talk about?
Turns out, I need not have worried, and I rode the highs of caffeine and nostalgia through a conversation I remember only for what she said toward the end. “We both got ‘Most Intellectual,” she said, remembering our senior superlatives, “but only you got ‘Most Likely to Succeed.’ I always said that they got that right.”
Suddenly I didn’t know what to say, suspended between an 18-year-old with a long life ahead of him and a 53-year-old who didn’t yet feel the ground under his feet in his new city. I’m a success? I thought. That can’t be right.
Dandy Warhols
Towards the end of the marriage, we saw Dig!, a documentary about two alternative rock bands, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. The knock on the more radio-friendly Warhols is that their frontman was obsessed with his career, and Anton Newcombe, the erratic and combative head of the Massacre, was more “authentic.” She instantly took to the BJM. I preferred the Warhols. You could say that I should have known then, and in truth I did.
I played the Dandy Warhols often enough driving the family around that my oldest son, then about five, learned the spoke-singing bridge of “Bohemian Like You,” which goes like this:
Wait! Who's that guy? Just hanging at your pad He's looking kinda (bummed) Yeah, you broke up, that's too bad
I guess it's fair If he always pays the rent And he doesn't get bent About sleeping on the couch when I'm there
I retroactively admit that we weren’t going to win any parenting awards for letting our son sing these lyrics, but in our defense he was really cute. (YouTube was invented a year later, otherwise you’d be able to see it for yourself.) And he got good enough at it that he could drop those bars into other songs with similar tempos. One minute we’d be listening to the Pixies, and suddenly he’d be asking about a young lady’s roommate situation in perfect time. It was like discovering your child had a genius facility with math, but cool.
He remembers none of that now, and he didn’t, as I’d been sure, grow up to be a DJ. (Did he think I took him to Pitch Perfect for the singing?) Now he’s a professional outdoorsman. Between jobs for the Army Corps of Engineers and the conservation corps, he scheduled a visit that coincided with the Dandy Warhols opening for the Black Angels at Ferris Wheelers. Where else would you expect to see the Dandy Warhols but at Ferris Wheelers?
BJ met us there and later pronounced himself impressed by my son, now significantly taller and hairier than I am. I agree, he’s a helluva young man, but I am bedeviled by my superficial urge to take him to a barber. It’s hard to appreciate how lovely he is underneath all that hair.
We got there just in time to hear the Dandy Warhols play “Bohemian Like You.” I had only reminded him of his former mastery of the song about a hundred times before the show.
“You remember this, right?” I asked, not really asking. He shook his head, smiling. We exist in so many times. He was fully himself at five, sort-of rapping in the backseat of the anti-Chrysler. He is fully himself now at 22, happier than I’ve ever seen him. And I stood there with both of them, sharing the five-year-old’s favorite song with his 22-year-old self.
It started raining during the Black Angels set before the sky ripped open and all the water fell on us at once. We shoved our now-useless glasses into pockets and said our goodbyes to BJ. Then my son reached up with his big right hand and pushed his hair back, turning himself from Sideshow Bob into Gunnar Henderson, all cheekbones and happy, intelligent eyes. And for a second, I saw the man he was becoming.
Wilco
For some reason, I felt exhausted constantly. Perhaps it was because Dallas was so similar to Austin but different enough to constantly push me off center. At first, I always wore the wrong thing. I would not wear a tie to a meeting only to find that everyone was wearing ties, so I’d wear a tie to the next meeting and no one was wearing ties. I knew Austin so well that I knew all the secret cheat codes by heart, but Dallas kept tripping me up.
Socializing was a chore, but BJ insisted. He was a dude in the Democratic political scene in Austin before leaving for grad school in Boston (no, not that one), and when we moved to town we met up for drinks. It was a perfect match: He loved to tell stories, and at that moment the holding up of my end of a conversation felt too heavy. Soon, he suggested we take our relationship to the next level; Wilco was coming to town. Did I want to go?
If the Old 97’s provided the soundtrack to much of my first marriage, Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky was the soundtrack of my divorce, particularly the eighth track, “Hate it Here.”
I try to stay busy I do the dishes, I mow the lawn I try to keep myself occupied Even though I know you're not coming home
I try to keep the house nice and neat I make my bed, I change the sheets I even learned how to use a washing machine Keeping things clean doesn't change anything
What am I gonna do when I run out of shirts to fold? What am I gonna do when I run out of lawn to mow? What am I gonna do if you never come home? Tell me, oh, what am I gonna do?
My ex left me, though it was in the end more mutual than I made it sound. And while she was great about splitting custody 50-50, that still meant half the time I was in the old house alone, padding around in my socks on the wood floors, keeping myself busy. Otherwise, I’d have to sit there, and if I sat still long enough I might run out of reasons to blame her for the failed marriage. I might even realize that when she moved out she didn’t take all the baggage I brought into the relationship. I was still me, poor sod.
I told BJ none of this. I stood there, feeling my feet on the floor so I didn’t get sucked into a black hole when Jeff Tweedy sang about doing laundry and mowing the lawn. I allowed myself the tiniest grace that I was just a dumb kid at 37, really, and had done the best I could and had held myself together, more of less, most of the time. That house that felt so empty was a lot of return addresses ago. I don’t live there anymore.
Flaming Lips
BJ brought his new girlfriend to the Flaming Lips show. The best thing about Dad Rock is that the bands are as old as I am and do not go on past their own bedtimes. I’d been looking forward to this show for a while because they were going to be playing Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots all the way through, one of only two times they would do so in 2023.
My introvert instincts were no match for the confetti cannons and demands that we sing along.
Her name is Yoshimi She's a black belt in karate Workin' for the city She has to discipline her body 'Cause she knows that It's demandin' To defeat those evil machines I know she can beat them
And no one was more shocked than I that I sang my heart out. In fact, I don’t think anyone cared that I was singing, and for a second I believed that we could win.
“C’mon you gotta keep going,” said Wayne Coyne, the lead singer. “Rage against the dying of the night except it’s been dark a lot of the time.”
In 2002 when this album came out, it was possible to imagine humanity’s victory over malevolent machines. Back then we thought the Internet could be a force for mutual understanding and benevolent self-expression. This was before Facebook and Twitter and 4Chan. This was before a lot of things.
“We’ll do this doin’ the best that we can,” said Coyne.
After they ran through Yoshimi, they dug into their songbook. When he introduced “Waiting for Superman,” he noted that it was a sad song. Back then, I figured it was a hopeful song. We wait, Superman shows up, problem solved, right?
I’ve never been good at listening closely to lyrics, but I did this time.
Tell everybody Waitin' for Superman That they should try to hold on best they can
He hasn't dropped them Forgotten or anything It's just too heavy for Superman to lift
Maybe it’s a good thing to realize that we are all we’ve got and that only the self-deluded wait for Superman. But I had never gone from the highs of unashamed joy to disappointed sadness in one night before. Maybe it’s too much to expect a civil servant to defeat giant robots in hand-to-hand combat, but can’t Superman still be Superman? Ugh. Dammit, Flaming Lips. Let me be dumb and 32 again for one night, will you?
Janelle Monáe
S says she doesn’t like contemporary music. She will say this despite evidence to the contrary. For example, she will insist that she doesn’t like modern pop music while shaking her behind to Janelle Monáe. I try not to disagree with her, let alone point out her inconsistencies, at such times. I have found that it’s best to let shaking butts be.
Everything was great. It was a whole show, not just musicians onstage playing music. There were backup singers, dancers, costumes, and sets. For a second I forgot I was an old white guy treading water in a younger, more diverse and unfamiliar pool. I was having (I think this is the right word) fun.
And then she came out in her Michael Jackson outfit, sequins sparkling on her black suit and white socks, while the band laid down the synth riff Prince gave her. It’s impossible to hear the opening of “Make Me Feel” and not hear Prince’s signature, but now she was compounding the Proustian effect by aping Michael Jackson’s debut of the moonwalk of “Billie Jean” at Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. Except in this moment, these triggers aren’t causing involuntary memories like Anton Ego eating ratatouille in the 2007 Pixar movie. Monáe did the opposite, taking strands from decades ago to pull us more fully into this moment.
For a second I didn’t feel out of place. Past failures and shortening futures didn’t weigh on me. All that mattered was the joy of Monáe dancing and singing. Even S admitted it was pretty great.
Black Pumas
For a while, I had Austin wired. Because I worked for the Mayor, I could always get on the list. And because the Mayor needed to be relevant in a cultural center, I got to be the guy to say which band he’d introduce and which song he’d say he liked. I even wheedled a seat at a taping of Austin City Limits to see Elvis Costello sing backup for Rosanne Cash. That proximity begat access and, in a few cases, friendships that survived my move.
I fancied myself in the know. I liked feeling cool. And when the Black Pumas, a local psychedelic soul band, were just breaking in 2019, I suggested to some friends in Austin that we catch them at Stubb’s in April 2020. The pandemic pushed the date twice, and by the time they played the show between the Delta and Omicron waves I wasn’t extremely keen to be in a crowd of people. Also, by that time I’d seen them play on the Grammy’s. Everybody knew about them then.
BJ and I saw them in early December, and I finally heard it. “Hello, Dallas,” said Eric Burton, who was discovered busking on 6th Street in Austin. “We’re from Austin!”
I’m from Austin, too, but I’m in Dallas now. After a year, I’ve gotten used to the idea that I’m here now. And it finally feels normal.
A lot more has changed than my address. S couldn’t be happier here, and perhaps moving made it easier for me to transition into this next phase of fatherhood. But the biggest unexpected boon to being in Dallas is becoming real-ass friends with BJ, my Dad Rock fellow traveler, confidant, and concert photographer. After years of worrying about whether I was on the list or could get around the line, now BJ has helped me settle down and enjoy the pleasures of just being a dude who buys a ticket and goes to the damn show…
…and leaves before the encore is over because we both have to get up at 5am. Shut up. I’m old. I’m excited we’re seeing Elvis Costello in January. It’s going to be great. We have seats.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
2023’s Top 10
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