June 12, the seventh anniversary of our wedding, brought Typhoon to the Beachland Ballroom, my favorite music venue and one where I have so many wonderful memories. It was another amazing show by Typhoon, a band that I have written so much about recently that there's no need to really review the show itself. But I did want to mention some things that lead singer Kyle Morton said both during the show and during our conversation after it.
At one point in between songs, Kyle talked about how new album Offerings (which I just blogged about) is centered around the theme of memory. He said the album describes a worst case scenario of total memory loss, but also that Kyle had become interested in exploring the topic in part due to things he sees happening in society. We seem to be losing our memories, he said. Although he did not directly mention Donald Trump, his remarks made it clear he was alluding to the horrifying way that events in this country today are echoing events from the past and how we as a culture seem to have learned nothing from that past.
He also brought up how (in a not unrelated way) people today seem to have such short attention spans, and tied this to the omnipresent phone screens that we often seem unable to go more than a few minutes without looking at. This is something I've thought a lot about myself. Just as one example, when I was a kid, when I watched sports on TV I didn't feel a need to have something else besides the game on TV to hold my attention. Now when I watch sports on TV I'm often constantly glancing back and forth between my phone screen and the TV screen because my brain rebels at just focusing on one thing for an extended period of time. Of course the TV is just another "screen" and in the past TVs were cited as a cause for shortened attention spans, so these issues aren't novel to the smartphone era. But I do think there has been a major acceleration over the course of my lifetime and the effects, both on individual people's minds and on society's collective consciousness, are in many ways alarming.
Kyle encouraged us not to get too caught up in the digital world of phones and the Internet and to be sure to give attention to real connections with real people and with the real world. Now, I know as well as anyone that the Internet, when used in certain ways, can greatly bolster those real connections - after all, not only did I meet Cara via an online game, but online messaging was the primary way we got to know each other, as we lived in different cities. So context matters, and I'm certainly not saying that online interactions should be completely shunned. But at the same time, it's important to not get trapped in that online world, many aspects of which are designed to give our brains instant gratification but not genuine long term fulfillment. There are so many things in the real physical world - a beautiful day outside, a friend with whom we're conversing, a concert we're attending, a delicious meal we're consuming - that merit our full attention and are cheapened if that attention is constantly split with that little screen in our hand.
The topic of memory and memory loss also hits close to home because I've become increasingly aware of changes in my own cognitive function and ability to remember things since last fall. My brain doesn't seem to work quite as well as it used to. This has multiple aspects, I've noticed. When I think back over my life going back to October, especially the first few months of that period, there's a certain haziness to the memories, a sort of mental fog. As well, I feel I've become somewhat absentminded about everyday tasks and things I'm doing and should be doing. There's a well known phenomenon that can be referred to as "widow brain" - but the interesting thing is I don't feel like these effects happened nearly as much after Cara's death as they did after the breakup last fall. So perhaps that breakup triggered a sort of delayed onset widow brain by compounding on my previous trauma. I don't want to overstate this - I don't feel like I'm losing my mind or anything like that, and overall I think my brain still works well. And I also think things have improved compared to a few months ago. But still, this has all been very noticeable to me.
Trauma affects our ability to remember things. And not remembering things (see: the parallels between Trump and the rises of past fascist dictators that so many seem willfully ignorant of) can help bring on more traumas. Not a good feedback loop.
On a happier note now, the show, as I said, was excellent, and I again got to talk to Kyle afterwards, and he (like his wife Danielle, of the band Wild Ones, in Toronto) was so genuinely pleased to get to see me and talk with me again. I'm very moved by that. I told Kyle about how it was my wedding anniversary, and he, like me, was startled by the odd coincidence. I also mentioned having gotten to see the Decemberists on the anniversary of Cara's death this year. Kyle said something that I really liked, something along the lines of, "We're all mortal. We're all going to go sooner or later. But when someone you love dies, I think a part of that person does live on in the people who loved them. And I think you can especially see that when those sorts of coincidences happen." I like that attitude!
The Typhoon show was a perfect way to mark my and Cara's anniversary. The day after found me driving to Detroit, having decided I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see Okkervil River - especially considering that back on that wonderful weekend in June 2011, on the day before the wedding, Cara and I attended an Okkervil River concert in Columbus. So there was a nice parallelism there, and it was one I unintentionally added to. The concert in Detroit was at El Club in Mexicantown, and given that I was in Mexicantown I naturally decided to go to an authentic taqueria for dinner - and as my tacos were served to me, it suddenly struck me that Cara and I had had a taco truck cater our wedding rehearsal dinner. So not only was I replicating the night before our wedding by going to an Okkervil River concert, I was replicating it by having tacos for dinner and then going to an Okkervil River concert! I laughed at the realization. (Oh, and the tacos, at Taqueria El Rey, were delicious.)
El Club is a cool little venue that I'd been to once previously. It was in January of this year, and it was to see Typhoon (obsesssed much?). In retrospect I'm so glad that I went to that show, because on the same trip I visited my great friends Adam and Jackie in Ann Arbor, and then in April Jackie's mother Carol, a wonderful person who had lived with MS for decades, passed away. So that Typhoon show resulted in me getting to see Carol one last time, and I'm grateful for that. There's another interesting parallel there. In January 2015 Cara and I visited Adam and Jackie (and their two young boys and Carol), and then Cara passed away in April 2015, and I became especially glad we had made that trip, just as I became especially glad I made the January 2018 trip after the April 2018 passing of Carol.
The show this week was my eleventh time seeing Okkervil River in concert. It was my fourth time since Cara's death. Each of the three previous post-Cara's death concerts, I realized, had been unusual in some way, distinctly different from a "normal" Okkervil River show. The show in 2015 was for the tenth anniversary of the album Black Sheep Boy and featured (rather than a normal setlist) that album and the accompanying EP Black Sheep Boy Appendix played in their entireties. The show in 2016 was in support of the album Away, and after it I blogged about what a totally different experience that show was. The setlist largely consisted of songs from Away, which is a very different album from any other by the band, and on top of that, "every single non-Away song in the main set was a very heavily reworked version of the original song." And the show in 2017 featured a stripped down, three person, acoustic version of the band, playing an all requests setlist (and that show included probably the most emotional moment for me at any show ever when Will Sheff said "This is a very special request for Jeff McManus" and played a song I had described in my request as being linked to a special memory of my late wife).
So all three of those shows had been major divergences from what I'd think of as a "normal" Okkervil River concert. At the 2016 Away tour show, I wondered if the approach Will was taking to his music at that show would become the new norm going forward, and if perhaps I'd never again experience a "normal" Okkervil River show. I keyed in on a lyric from the last song played at that show, "Black": "It'll never be the way it was before," and I wrote these words:
Perhaps Okkervil River shows will never be the way they were before. Very certainly, my life will never be the way it was before. Before Cara got lung cancer and then died of it. But I will always carry that past with me. And the future? It can still be pretty great.
It's eerie now, looking back, that just weeks later another "It'll never be the way it was before" moment happened and at the time I wasn't even a bit concerned about it because I just didn't think it was going to happen. I'm referring, of course, to Donald Trump's election to the presidency. I realize that I keep going back to Trump even in posts that are mainly about non-political topics, but it's hard to overstate just how much the ongoing crisis in this country has affected me and my view of the world. And I'm a privileged white guy who hasn't even been directly affected by it in any significant way. There are so many people who unfortunately can't say that. It's a collective trauma that's happening to all of us and even if we do turn things back around, there are going to be scars that will remain for as long as this country exists. And there's a part of me that fears our country, as we know it, won't exist anymore in the not so distant future. Trump clearly wants to be a dictator, and although he isn't one at this point in time, our Republican elected officials have so far collectively shown basically no willingness to meaningfully stand up to his corruption and abuses. So what if he just refuses to leave office, and the Republicans just go along with it? I don't see that as the most likely outcome, but I can't discount the possibility. So this is probably another appropriate time to say: make sure everyone you know gets out and votes in November.
This blog entry that is centered around two concerts at which I had fantastic times sure has some unhappy little asides in it!
Anyway, it turned out that my idea that Okkervil River shows might never be the way they were before did not actually come to pass. This show, finally, for the first time for me in almost five years, was an Okkervil River show the way it was before. The band played a set full of songs both from excellent new album In the Rainbow Rain and from most of the other albums in their catalog, and while there were some interesting variations thrown in on the older songs they were generally much more faithful interpretations of the original versions, and the band had so much energy, and for 90 minutes it really did feel like old times again and it was so great and I had so much fun and I kind of just wanted that show to never end! Seriously, it was magical!
Will Sheff is the sole songwriter for Okkervil River and he's actually been for a while now the only original member still in the band; he's gone through a lot of lineup changes over the years, and while the shows have always been fantastic, at times they've felt more like a group of musicians performing Will Sheff's music rather than a performance by a band, if that makes sense. But the current lineup is just clicking in an incredible way and at times I felt like I was transported back to, say, the Pepper Jack Cafe in Hamilton, Ontario on Cara's birthday in 2007. And it's really special how music can do that. Life as a whole is never going to be "the way it was before," but it's nice, for a little while, to be able to recapture that feeling. I think the fact that it had been so long since I had seen a "normal" Okkervil River show made this one all the more special. The last previous "normal" show was also the last time I saw Okkervil River with Cara - at the Beachland in 2013 just about a month after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. At that show she sat right in front of the stage in a wheelchair and she reveled in the fact that she had enough lung capacity to sing along with those familiar songs. After the show she was handed from the stage a setlist from the show, written on a paper plate, and that plate remains on display in my living room. At the show the other day I was able to obtain another such souvenir.
I drove home from Detroit after the show and, although I did not get home until about 3 am, I was so amped up and giddy from the show that I had not the least bit of trouble staying awake - I didn't even feel the need to stop for a caffeinated beverage, as I typically would on such a late night trip. And then, just as I was pulling into the garage, what band's music came onto the college radio station I had playing?
Yep, Okkervil River. Naturally I sat in my car and listened to (and sang along with) the whole song ("The Latest Toughs" from 2005 masterpiece Black Sheep Boy). Another one of those funny, weird little coincidences and a perfect way to cap off a thrilling and emotional two days.
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