WEEK OF 1/3/20

The Arrivals / all 📷 :   Mick Reed

Motivational memes on social media are a disease. Especially around the end of the year. You know what I mean. Stock photos of sunsets, flowered fields, or minions, goading you to make resolutions to be "better" or "reach for your goals" in jpeg artifact blemished Times New Roman font. Some influencer or serial scammer *cough* I mean entrepreneur may tweet out something about "hustling" between Christmas and New Years, and not "slacking off" like everyone else this time of year. People who share these types of content are welcoming a parasitic philosophy into their lives. At some point, you need to stop whipping yourself for your failures. You need to stop being hard on yourself for what you didn't accomplish or who you (perceive) to have let down. And for god sakes, you definitely do not need to be working after the 24th of December. We're all only human and sometimes we need to act like it. 

 One of the many poignant ideas touched on during my interview with Dave Merriman of The Arrivals ahead of their set at Reggies on December 28 (which you can read here), was the extent to which the forces of industry will work their way into your brain and poison your identity. Turn you against yourself. To see yourself as a machine that needs to be fixed, rather than a human being, with thoughts, feelings, and needs. Machines only need fuel and maintenance, and when they are no longer useful, they are discarded. Human beings need sustenance, rest, friendship, and community, and human beings are never replaceable. At this point, I'd be lying this hit home as I had allowed myself to be caught up in the rat race this year. Working on Christmas Eve, sending emails Christmas Day, and putting in 10 hour days through to New Years Day. I'm not going to do that ever again, and I have The Arrivals to thank for this sudden clarity of mind. 

 When I reached the venue on Saturday, I was coming from home after spending an hour with my partner (and before that more than eight hours at the office). I was pretty frayed from a day of rolling through routine paperwork, and my nerves were crying out for a splash of keg guts. I ordered a taplash of Old Style and went to go lean against the wall by the stage's southside. The doors had just opened, but the room was filling up fast. I sipped my beer and concentrated on relaxing my breathing to hopefully get in a better mood while the opener Nightcap set up. They introduced themselves as being from Blue Island, which was an absolute first in all of the years I've been going to shows in Chicago. Blue Island is a south suburb town, and one of the communities still largely dependent on the area's waning manufacturing base. I have some family from the north suburbs and the way they talk about Blue Island, you'd think it was located in Iraq circa 2004. Virtually a no man's land, where you'd go to get mugged or torch a car for the insurance. However, that’s how they talk about every part of the Chicago metro area that isn't Naperville, so I've mostly learned to ignore them. Still, the pride of place the opening band had in their home town and exuded through their set was both indelible and infectious. Nightcap set was short but memorable for its take on poppy, folk-influenced melodic hardcore, and I was really feeling the earnestness they radiated. 

As Nightcap wrapped up and left the stage (with one more shout out to Blue Island, of course), I barely had enough time to amble over to the bar and back to the stage before Canadian Rifle unceremoniously unleashed the opening riff. Punk shows wait for no hop-head, my friend. Canadian Rifle is the kind of homely, humble, and hairy pop-punk that I loved in college. Steadfast rock ‘n roll, with a hail-mary, heartfelt quality to it. Every hook feels like the wind up for another sucker punch in the form of a hard-learned truth about life. Every song is played like the band was literally on fire, and the only way to save their lives is to get to the next chorus. A decade ago, on any given Saturday night, I would have caught a band like Canadian Rifle playing some suburban watering-hole while getting blitzed on cheap beer and leaning on a pool table for support. Seeing Canadian Rifle play that night really took me back to a simpler time in my life, as I think it did for most of the people there. 

 After Canadian Rifle's set, I decided to engage in my other favorite past time,(other than getting drunk at punk shows, that is) people watching. Who I was expecting to see was the same hodgepodge cohort of art students and former-art students, now baristas, that I usually have the pleasure of studying, Nat Geo-style, at punk shows. However, these people looked normal. Totally normal. They were mostly wearing button downs and sweaters without logos or band names on them. And weirdest of all, they were mostly talking to each other. I hardly saw anyone on their phones. It occurred to me that most of the people here knew each other, or at least were in each other's social orbit. This wasn't just a punk show. This was some kind of a block party mixed with a class reunion, where only the people you'd want to see again showed up. It seemed like half of the south side had turned up by the time Sass Dragons began breathing their brand of cotton candy-flavored fire over our heads. It was getting hot in there, and I was definitely regretting having layered up before leaving the house. Usually, this is an adaptive strategy in Chicago, but not when you find yourself in a human-meat heated sauna. At festivals, they'll hand out water when around midday. I could have used a little Nestle Pure Life-TM at that point in the night, and maybe a small towel to mop up some of the extra moisture coming off of my body as well. 

 Back to the show, last time I checked in with Sass Dragons they were a Milwaukee band. This was around the time that they released Bonkaroo! That was back in 2008. Since then they've apparently relocated to Chicago, but have kept the same free-style, nerd-core angst that endeared me to them more than a decade ago. Between jangly buzz saw riffs, weaving grooves, and lyrics about getting to work late and shaving your cat, they engaged half the crowd in a series of in-jokes and threatened to call the cops on the other half. At one point, their lead singer and guitarist put the set on hold to take a phone call, which was pretty amusing and gave me an opportunity to appreciate how loud and rowdy the crowd around me had gotten. My observation that the show was as much a block party as an electronic music recital was gaining increasing validity at this point, and I wasn't sure if I was actually going to be able to hear the rest of Sass Dragon's set over the din of conversation that swirling around me. Thankfully, the excitement of the crowd was only matched by the band, and after the phone break, Sass Dragons cleaned up like a jaguar chasing a wild peccary; and by that, I mean, they absolutely killed it. 

 The Arrivals popped up on stage in record time following the end of Sass Dragon's set. It's one of the things I love about punk shows is that there is zero rigamarole. When you're ready to go, you plug in and play. No pretense. No preamble. This is what you'd expect from a band as straightforward, headstrong, and sure-footed. They're a respected band for a reason. They write and play great songs, and they don't fuck around too much. They're also notorious for not practicing and barely doing sound checks (which happens when you work full time and live in different cities). If you didn't know this fact though, it wouldn't have been evident from their performance. The Arrivals had an extremely confident air about them that night, and they sounded excellent! 

 Sometimes in a live setting, the sublet textures and quirks of songs you've listened to a thousand times on record don't necessarily survive the transition. This was not the case during the Arrivals set. The waving groove rushing flow of "I'm Sorry for Saying I'm Sorry" hit me in a wave of concentrated affirmation, the urgent rolling rinse of "Two Years" poured out from the stage in a blanket of curative sincerity, "Frontline" had all the charm of Sham 69 kicking off a football (you yanks call it soccer) watch party at the pub down the street, and the lonely swagger and grit of "Ballad of Lon Stokes" were amply delivered in all their salty sapor. Throughout the show, the band would pause to thank the crowd profusely for coming out to see them and exchange warm hugs between themselves. It honestly made me tear up a little to see people be so genuinely happy to be in a particular place, at a particular time, and caused me to reflect on what I was thankful for in my life. They closed out the set with possibly their biggest hit "Simple Pleasures In America," prompting the crowd to shout out the chorus line "everybody gets a little piece of the pie" over and over again, as a kind of celebratory encore as echo. 

 Seeing a band play because they want to, and not because they have bills to pay, is a pleasure that too few music fans can engage in these days. As is playing for the sheer joy of communicating with an audience, becoming a scarce luxury, which too few artists can afford. If I can impart one piece of advice at the end of this article, it’s that work can find its way of tearing your soul apart, and that you need to be on guard against this constant pressure to perform. You're not alone in working yourself to death either. Everyone is, but we're all conditioned not to see the plight of the person that labors next to us. Working for someone else can drain the life out of you; but working for a community, working for each other, this has a regenerative quality. The Arrivals show this Holiday season reminded me of the importance of stepping away from the grindstone, of unscrewing myself from the machinery of industry, and assisting my neighbor in doing the same. And then maybe, everybody gets a little piece of the pie. 

  -Mick Reed