The Rainy Christmas Folder

It’s Christmas Eve Eve and it’s rainy. There’s no precedent for that. I don’t remember a rainy Christmas. Or if I do, it’s raining on a snowy surface. This 2023 sitch is rainy like an early November is supposed to be. It’s disorienting. It pushes all your Christmas feelings into a carnival mirror. Christmas sits in a strange place for me. It looms large in my world, my family doesn’t celebrate it, and growing up it was all done with a wink by my areligious parents. It was sort of “let’s go pick out a tree” with a big wink “this is bullshit, corporatization bullshit”. We were like the people throwing their hands in the air for the first three beats/first two measures tops before returning them down to our sides as if the action was out of our control.

Today it’s non-stop errands all morning and a slow afternoon. Tried Home Alone 2, not a good fit for the six year old, too much stressful stuff. Went with A Muppet Christmas Carol at my wife’s suggestion. Gold star. And we have neighbors who with real enthusiasm endeavor to have Arby’s every December 23rd of the year. We joined. Shakes for the kids. Just a sandwich for me cause I had fries at lunch. My wife voluntarily gets crinkle fries when curly fries are available. Yes, it’s vexing.

I’ve got clearance to leave my family at 7:30 to see my brother play guitar at The Fine Line. The Fine Line, I played there in 1997. New band night. Amazing, why doesn’t new band night exist*? But man, new band night? Classic. 4 bands. NO LISTENERS. Comp tickets flooded out to hundreds to attract the 27 people who will come see a show on Monday. But somehow, you always learned something. Tonight Mae Simpson is leading a Festivus concert and my brother’s 90s alternative cover band 120 Minutes is the first set. It boggles my mind to think about the random, scattershot list of artists I’ve seen at the Fine Line. Finding out who you’ve seen at the Fine Line is somewhat a way of asking “what artists did you follow on their way up and which ones did you follow on their way back down”. Here’s my list: Lisa Loeb, Keb’ Mo, Tortoise, Atmosphere, Boogie Wonderland, Angie Stone, Run The Jewels, Makaya McCraven and presumably a lot more. Played there a lot with Jessy Greene. Always kind of epic nights. Played their with Dessa. Heiruspecs never opted to play our own shows there, but we still played there a lot. Before Fine Line was a First Avenue property I did a lot of just hanging at the Fine Line. Knew the manager. Sat in the back, got some drinks, loved the shit out of it. The Fine Line is a blank slate to some extent, bring a fun show it’s fun, you bring totally meh! energy and the room let’s that meh! energy sit in a pile. I don’t think the Fine Line ever had pool tables. Why not? Maybe there was no real location for them. Miss pool table life.

Well my brother Steve is an excellent guitar player and has always been a student of the alternative side of 90s rock and more widely, a fan of the alternative side of music. I’ve only ever seen Steve listen to records that could reasonably expected to be played on the stereo at the Electric Fetus. Almost no better place to hear a new record than while shopping for records and these records are almost always. . .alternative. To some extent, if a record store employee is confident enough to play an album on the speakers, that album can fairly be described as alternative.

I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about the nature of alternative music in the past month. If you listen to the Open Mike Eagle podcast “What Had Happened Was” you are aware that he is doing a season length interview of Questlove. It is abundantly clear that Questlove is aware of an monstrously huge swath of the music world and able to communicate a hands on, building blocks level of music better than anyone else, and he is also capable of intellectualizing it. Of placing his group (The Roots) into a cultural space that plays against the major jiggy stars of their coming up era and connects them with the likeminded artists of Jill Scott, Badu, Mos Def and more. This very forward awareness of the music his community was crafting as alternative music was really awesome to me. I think I’ve taken alternative music as being the center of the music universe for granted, and a lot of the reason was that my musical universe was Steve, and his universe was alternative. I didn’t have a counter factual of someone equally into music who enjoyed The Eagles, Garth Brooks, En Vogue and Bon Jovi. I understood those groups as vital, as worthy of study, as worthy of spins. But I understood them to not be the groups you would argue over for three hours at 2am explaining a nuance of production of that you are very aware the creator of the song also belabored in different proportions. So Steve holds my hand as my older brother and plays me Helmet, Pearl Jam, David Bowie, The Foo Fighters, Justice System, The Roots, Charles Mingus, Autechre, Andrew Hill, LaMonte Young, Boards of Canada, The Pharcyde, Albert Collins, Feist, Amy Winehouse, DJ Shadow and so many more. And in our life together music was the language we shared. I learned music so I could speak the same language as him. So to see him up there, on a stage we played on in 1997, was to see a history of our time as musicians. Our way up, our way down, our ways of staying on, our ways of moving on. Noah Pastor was on the drums: I remember some magic nights with Noah. I remember sharing maybe a cigarette, maybe a joint, outside of Pizza Luce Duluth, 2005, 06 sometime. And talking, and laughing and visiting a friend’s house. I remember just the constant joking. Joking was the only language permitted in that circle. If you wanted to pull over to pee you had to say it with humor, with an angle, with something to make your request memorable. It was exhausting and hilarious. Now he is back behind his kit playing so beautifully. Faithful to the originals, but not annoyingly so. He is breathing an energy into the drums that is appropriate. The singer is the sleeper hit, effective and tasteful vocal reverbs, delays and more deployed from his own pedal board. Nice guitar work too but always supportive, my brother Steve is taking lead and singy mcsingsomethingson is handling the rhythm work. IT’S REALLY NICE. The bass player is the bartender over at the White Squirrel. Believe it or not I saw him driving into work 9 and a half hours before when my wife and my daughters and I were at the White Squirrel getting stickers and t-shirts out of the Trivia Mafia office that sits above The White Squirrel. Told you we did a lot of errands today.

I’m in the audience with Chuck from Trivia Mafia and Justus and Emily, both Jazz88 albumni. It’s fun, there’s a parameter setting with cover bands that is more compressed than original bands. Like the best cover band you’ve ever seen is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY less enjoyable than the 10th best original band you’ve seen. But that cover band is going to be many times over more enjoyable than the worst original music you’ve heard. The band is pulling out shit from Blur, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode and more. The band sounds great, steve is all over the guitar stuff. He sounds practiced but loose, and inventive and committed. It is thoroughly enjoyable, it is disorienting to really get to see Steve’s awesomeness from a fan POV, usually were’ just living and sharing the stage. It was great. I have desires to see Mae Simpson. We play her music on Jazz88. She and her band are no joke. Win over crowds. Work crowds into a frenzy. Developing a thing. She’s got the great players in town on her side and she can sing. I want to see Mae Simpson. I also want to celebrate my brother kicking ass and I want to sit down cause I am old and cause yes I do.

But we don’t sit down and then a man named Dru gets up there and starts doing some hosting plus stand up comedy. At first I don’t realize he’s doing stand up comedy. The stakes are at a completely different portion of the scale for stand up comedy. The worst stand up comedy you’ve ever seen is the worst shit you have seen in your life, eclipsing the worse band you’ve seen by MILES. But the most transcendent comedy you’ll ever see might surpass all but the best musical acts in my opinion. I remember seeing Hannibal Buress defended the easiness of confusing the words Asheville and Nashville during a show in Asheville. An audience member yells “it’s easy to say the right one” and he snapped back “obviously it’s hard, I just said the wrong one. You’re theory is disproved”. I still laugh about that. Dru’s got a terrible batting average but he says a couple downright funny things. And he frames it all as his “airing of grievances”. That’s classic. That shows hard work and a willingness to meet the moment. He’s not just up there doing his regular set. He wrote for the occasion. I had seen this coming on the schedule, but I knew there would be Seinfeld trivia. I’m there with Chuck. We own the biggest trivia company in the upper Midwest and the best one in the entire fucking world (Trivia Mafia). Once the trivia question starts this feels like a scene from Rounders. I get one, Chuck gets one, Steve hands me one answer now that he is in the crowd with us. We’re doing old mechanic shit, stuff we’d never try in the city, Teddy KGB would have us thrown out. But I’m ambling over to Dylan from First Ave and writing my name down for a prize and then sending Chuck to write his address down for the second one. People are saying “shouldn’t you bow out of this?” semi-playfully cause they know who we are. But, like, it’s not our trivia. We aren’t in charge of all trivia. You think I raced home to catch the 6:00pm Seinfeld between 1998-2005 to not fucking run the board at Festivus trivia in 2023? Get thee fuck, out of here. Emily wants to smoke a cigarette and the crew moves outside. It’s a fun outside. Quiet. Rainy. We are sewing new rainy Christmas memories into our heads for the first time. They are towing all varieties of car off of 1st Avenue. We are instinctively vomiting up our different towing/parking sign debacle stories as one is legally mandated to do in such situations. We have a number of them within the group, of course we do. I think now when I have guests in the studio to check their mic instead of asking them what they had for breakfast I’ll ask them for a story where their car got towed. Wouldn’t you listen to that podcast? Joshua Redman on when his car got towed. The winter Zacc Harris’s car got towed not one, not two but three count em three times podcast? You’d smash that like button so hard.

We decide to decamp to Pizza Luce which feels so 2004 it hurts. The hang is joyous. The large spinach salad no protein is a wildly underappreciated. I’ve also tired of your Pizza Luce slander, Twin Cities. It’s a great menu and when you want a champagne and a salad after a downtown gig wherein the hell are you going? We watch the Timberwolves coast toward a win easily, then briefly difficultly, then they clinch it against the Kings. We are watching the Wolves win games they always lose. We are watching them press the ignition in ways that are firmly un-Wolves like. Why don’t the busses read “Go Wolves” right now? They are doing great. Get those signs up kings of mass transit. It feels like the non-basketball fan population of the city hasn’t quite realized that the world’s, or one of the world’s greatest basketball team might practice right down the street. Wild.

The conversation flows between alternative music, basketball, radio stories, Luce menu items. This is a beautiful spread of topics. It is raining, it’s Christmastime. I’m making my first great raining Christmas memories. I’ll be able to go back to the memory bank and see my brother nailing these guitar parts, really putting it all in and then having spinach salad and focaccia katerina and talking it out. No one I’d rather have in the mix than Chuck from Trivia Mafia. For me we’ve hit some kind of world class balance. We’ve built something amazing together, we started Trivia Mafia. You don’t have a friend if you don’t have struggle. Starting a business is a struggle. Playing in a band is a struggle. Your friends that you’ve been through it with. Like, I’ve been through a lot with the members of Heiruspecs. But we’re still going through it. If I’m sitting with Felix or deVon or Peter or any of them, we’re still on a journey together. Chuck and I own Trivia Mafia but I’m silent now, I collect my money or my no money every quarter and I cheer him on in how he runs the business with our amazing team. So we have real history, real conflict, but now we are mainly friends. He’s in the weeds but I can stand back and admire the thing we’ve built. This morning me and the kids went to the Trivia Mafia office. There’s t-shirts, there’s computers we bought with company money, there’s posters, there’s a coffee maker. I OWN A COMPANY THAT OWNS A COFFEE MAKER. I have a coffee maker that can be distributed for outstanding debts. It’s magical, it’s amazing and it started with me and Chuck. It grows without me. Beautiful. But I’m in that bitch. I tell this to Chuck, when I go to restaurants I have flashbacks to the years of building this thing. My family gets seated and I look around and think, “that’s probably where the host plugs in the mic”. I look around and see a manager at a table with a laptop out, a cell phone, a coffee, a pile of bills. I think about all the meetings I had with that guy. That walk in. “Sean hi, welcome, you want anything?”. “I’m good, I guess coffee if you have it” “so let’s talk trivia, I tried to go see one, couldn’t make it, but I think I get it, I talked to the bartender at the Old Chicago, says it’s good, is it good?” “it’s good, are you talking about Michael, the bartenders tell the truth right. They see it firsthand, they see the crowds. See that they come back, see that they tip, see how it builds”. “right, I’m thinking Sundays, do you have Sundays? What else do you do on Sundays? Maybe afternoon. But we want some special ways to make it ours. Do you know we have all the sports here, couple screens too, do you ever do sports trivia”. I’m having this whole conversation in my head. My family is looking at the menu, my daughters are losing their shit. My wife is losing her shit that my daughters are losing their shit and I’m not doing shit but in my end I’m pulling out the contract and the one sheet and explaining that the prizes need to be consistent week to week. “It’s more important that they’re consistent than it is important exactly what they are”. But now I can just laugh with Chuck, talk about Depeche Mode. Talk about drum fills.

It’s your first rainy Christmas and your memory file will start here next time it calls upon the rainy Christmas folder.

*Bbecause in many ways it can be figured out if you’re shit without making you load in all your gear.