Scribbling February Vignettes by Benjie Salazar

This month began with a storm weekend and the remnants of Blue Raspberry from Katie Kirby and there is Wait, listen on my headphones, car speakers that first day near Motor Avenue, and she is singing of her first queer love, of her first night. The bass echoes and shakes my body, and the world is burning, and queerness is alive and well and you can’t stop listening to 89 Days by Packs. Every time it gets to the 2nd verse you start it over again and the sun is hanging again over the sea and the clouds become endless for a day or two after the water dissipates. Melt the Honey reminds you of summer and it feels like a dream state and it gets down to Take Care and her voice feels like it falters in the reminders of pain and ever-reaching desire that feels like a vacuum of all that encompasses your experience.

It is Wednesday and I get off work early and the clouds are still hanging over head, I get some gas on Santa Monica Boulevard, warm Thai food in the front seat, checking traffic, anxious about missing Gracie Grey, buying tickets on Dice for Permanent Records Roadhouse for Emily Yacina. Eating in the bedroom, putting on the double singles, Trick of the light and Nothing Lasts, hearing the keys and fast tempo drum patterns move, the front door closes to your apartment, your upstairs friend texts you to come eat Crepes, you think you are the last person to ever arrive at the concert. The road is just a couple miles from Footsies and this pool bar El Recreo I’ve been to with Fields where it is ALWAYS karaoke night and they are all latino old-singer songwriters and it is the kind of Mexican bar where one guy has the microphone all night and is belting his entire heart and soul into the youtube karaoke up on the wall screen and he orders another drink concoction in between songs. I feel like I find parking a mile away and they are shooting a movie in the light drizzle rain and there is a taco stand at the end of the street in front of an old white house and you remember how Fields takes photos of the moon at night on his iphone, adjusting the aperture and you can smell the dew and the wetness of the air and your breaths are deeper and more full; there is a sign for the roadhouse in red. The door is small and open and I show my dice ticket at the door and Fields is standing near the bar, everyone is standing near the bar because the hall, walkway, to the stage is narrow and he has a beer up to his chin and there are people in beanies and warm buttoned jackets sitting on the head of the red booths on the right side and Gracie Grey is up on stage with a guitar and she is short because it looks like no one is singing, or I am just short and everyone in this room is above-average height.

Everyone has got these curious eyes, moving about the crowd with their arms on the bar hanger, putting their beers in-between their legs, hugging their friends as they find one another. One girl moves her way in front of me, whispering that there is a lot of room up front, moving her head towards the front of the crowd as she makes eye contact with me and I smile and tell her thank you and there is a tiny hallway right past the bar that has a door open to the outdoors. Gracie, up on stage, has the soul of an injured sparrow, or a hummingbird, full of wonder and lightness and yet she has plucked feathers and can’t fly as high anymore and her guitar hits are strong and there are people talking everywhere around us and Fields grabs a water cup for me.

In-between sets we wait in line for the one bathroom door, this guy tells me how he lives way far east of Los Angeles and just comes here to Permanent Records when there is a show he knows vaguely of, because what is better than being in a concert setting, at a venue, the lights are different colors, everyone is saying excuse me and sorry. Fields and I stand outside and talk about taking photos of concerts and us playing pool in extraordinary fashion as we lose to a pair of doubles we really shouldn’t have lost to as we laugh and there is a couple holding a white door open at the bottom of the concrete hill we are standing on. There is a little backhouse, it is square and white, and you can see people inside moving and conversing and there is someone sitting on a chair or stool at the front counter which is tiny and has stickers and pins and CDs scattered everywhere.

We walk around the rows and rows of LPs and I pull out the zipper cover of Sticky Fingers, and there is a Stranglers album and I remember all those post-punkers from the 80s which changed my life and there is Animal Collective and Dolly Parton, and there is Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, Samba from that phone call in Los Angeles and she was in Miami and it was fall, back when I used to go to a Canyon with my friends and we’d drink too much wine underground or what felt like being underground.

By the next week, Nourished by Time is bellowing from the car speakers, Vampire Weekend follows, Flora by Hey, Nothing and you think of the movement of blue grass indie, like Rachel Baiman, and there is such a birth of music in the Carolina’s and everyone is so young. You remember this essay you began writing months ago on the shift of emo-adjacent bands in Philly and on the east coast and your theory always goes back to social, cultural change of the mid 2010’s when sexual liberation turned more into personal liberation and identity. No longer was the category of hardcore and emo scenes reserved for indie boys who wear beanies and whine about girls in their math class that make them have an existential crisis in 11 th grade. Well of course, these bands still survive, but what it means to build and add onto existing tradition of art and music with the scene now compromising of a lot of the radical spaces and tradition where punk culture originated from. I am no history scholar by any accounts, but there are certain associations with Midwest emo and hardcore, long-haired, piercing, small town, middle-class, working class, blue collar jobs, forgotten America, mill-towns, refineries, one bar, suburbs, road trips, and all sentimentalism. But now, everyone is gay and trans and they are inter-disciplinary, they experiment in genres traditionally that don’t comprise of their demographic and spaces where punks rule, in all their inclusive feats. Guitar Fight for Fooley Cooley for example, in their abrasive and jarring hardcore sound, or Home is Where with their unorthodox emo song compositions and hardcore sounds and building tracks and projects. I am convinced every emo project and member is gay in some capacity, your sound is much too weird for it not to be the case.

It’s a Friday and I’m standing in a room full of bodies at the Constellation Room waiting for Allegra Krieger to come on although I’m not entirely sure if she has already come on, parking is 15 dollars for half a mile walk away in a designated empty lot for an office space that is most definitely run by the Irvine Company, as is everything built in this vicinity of Costa Mesa, Orange County, it leaves a bad taste in my throat. There is another event going on inside this weird warehouse, with a bouncer at the top of a staircase past the open curtains where all these bodies are clumped together, a bar in the back corner, it’s pretty small, smaller than I remember seeing Model/Actriz on the same stage last July. Allegra comes on stage and has awkward banter, saying how she walked twenty-five minutes for a coffee on Harbor road we are off of and that people were looking at her weird because no one walks over here, and she was probably talking to herself. I think I know of the Denny’s she’s talking about just past the highway underpass where some friends of mine live and where I got a coffee once or the bathroom or something I can’t remember. She sings like a poet, she kind of talks with this awing throatiness, like a 70s singer-songwriter, her chord progressions are simple. She sings about smoking behind a pickup truck as the sun is leaving in Long Beach at this bar she used to work at and falling into someone and being carried off to bed. Then she’s driving across middle America and New York, a deli, the end of the world, for what I will do on the last days, who I will see, the grass, the hum of the trees, I can envision it all so clearly in my head as I stand there with a dumb smile on my face and she looks about the crowd and it is only her and a guitar.

Katy Kirby comes on with their band, a keyboard, a guitarist by the name of Logan, a bassist by the name of Margo and Lain and I can’t remember the drummers name, but he starts off with ghost hits or sticks, I don’t know the exact terminology. She’s funny, like really funny, her wit could withstand the entirety of their set even if all their songs were awful, though luckily that is opposite from the case. Juniper plays, then Hand on Hand, a favorite of mine. She preludes the track with the recent divorce of her parents asking people in the crowd to raise their hands of divorced families and she playfully talks of how needed it was, and the track builds with isolated vocal passages and the bass is deep, the keys sound like a throat. Cubic Zirconia sounds like a mid-summer dream and the keys jangle with the guitars and all I want to do is jump around and so I do in the middle of the crowd. There is a party upstairs where that bouncer was standing, and Katy says into the mic to not get upset if she breaks into a turn of the century pop song in the middle of their set, it’s a medical issue, not something that can be helped she says. I hate how there is not a door to the constellation room and you can hear everyone screaming and yelping passing by who all look underage which Katy jokes to the sound guy as I laugh a hearty laugh in the middle of the crowd in my maroon pants and Merrell shoes.

Dusk is arrived, and it’s gone, light is bleeding away, seeping like a drain from the sky above Half Moon, Davenport, Pacifica, I can’t tell any of them apart because there is traffic on the 17 and the 1 Pacific Coast Highway is the fastest way to San Francisco. My friend JD is in the seat next to me and I play Florry, The Holey Bible because I haven’t been able to cease from listening to the entirety of the album and especially Cowgirl Giving in its harmonica extravaganza and unapologetic country abrasions like long twine. All around the album are group harmonies and off kilter vocals where either some are off key, or everyone is, and the drums feel like an arid terrain and the strings feel like the city. JD talks about how even though San Francisco is only an hour away, it feels like a completely different world and at that moment, the 280 ramp curves around looking into South San Francisco, and we park, and it is Rickshaw Stop. The women stamping our wrists at the front asks who I am here to see, and I say Being Dead and she says well I am just on time with an exciting look in her eyes and I run to the front of the staggered crowd. There are these two people that can’t be taller than 5’3 in the very front moving their bodies vibrantly to the rock music playing on the PA system before the set and I can already tell they are the life of the crowd and will be for the remainder of my time here. There are three members of Being Dead that come on stage, one of them goes by the name Falcon Bitch and the other one goes by Gumbo something and Falcon Bitch is wearing a green accented rugby as she puts on an electric guitar and Gumbo goes to the drum kit and The Great American Picnic chord progression begins like a horse race, not that I’ve ever seen a horse race but what I’d imagine the adrenaline must feel like on that beast of an animal, with hooves of steel and the speed of a motorized vehicle and their vocals go back and forth into these warped freak folk sounds. I want to stay in Rickshaw forever, at that moment of the first song, Falcon Bitch has this perpetual smile on her face as she sings and her blue eyes are wide looking off into the distance as if we aren’t standing in a fairly small sized venue and the upstairs balcony is closed and narrow, I feel like I can touch anyone in the space in just a matter of seconds. I can only see maybe seven of eight people in the crowd because I am in the front clump of bodies but everyone has space to move, and there are two middle-aged men in front of me and this one with short gray hair begins shaking wildly, rapturously, as if possessed as Being Dead are in the middle of Treeland and there is an interlude in which they name random objects to give back to trees or themselves or just random produce they like or desire I’m honestly still not sure. Afterwards JD tells me, “they were really weird, but insanely talented”. I still remember the look on his face at the end of Last Living Buffalo when Falcon Bitch and Gumball break into a harrowing scream “YOU KILLED THEM”, clanging the drum symbals and guitar strings as earlier Gumball says how he is on his 6 th set of strings from tour and I had never seen anyone in my life strum a guitar so rapidly, with such precision, while signing technically complex measures and chord changes and I’m dancing and dancing and then it’s over. We stumble back into the crowd and I waltz over to the merch table where I pick up a CD of When Horses Would Run and this person at the Secret Secret merch table asks if I listen to CDs. I say that I listen to them in my car but I want a boombox and she says I should get a copy of their Secret Secret EP, Hush and then says “would you believe me if I told you that this album art is actually from a talented artist one of my bandmates came across and it just so happens to have our band name on it”. She has these curious wide blue eyes and says her name is Maria and I tell her I picked up CDs at this record store in Austin some months ago I had never listened to so I could have the surprise, novelty of an album and she asks me what I listened to and I said Car Wheels On A Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams and her mouth gapes open with shared excitement saying she loves that album and we laugh and share pleasantries, small walks with JD, shared 27s, talks of growing, the dangerous highway of the 17 from San Jose down to the mountains of Santa Cruz and I have only gotten more terrified of the Redwood dark and curving roads.

Two days later I park in the Inner Sunset as the Golden Gate Bridge is in the distance over the low clouds and I grab a house key from an old friend who shows which key is for which lock in the front door. Dusk begins to arrive as I finish The Human Stain by Philip Roth in a sandwich shop owned by a lady who says she has been on this corner for thirty-three years when I ask her and there is a rope swing across the street and I am eating the fattest hot chicken sandwich of my life, it feels like a hoagie in my mouth, I open a ginger ale, I am on the edge of my seat and share a phone call with an old friend who tells me she sat in on an interview with a professor who has a relentless charm and way of conversation that reminds her of me. She says that he made friends with someone at the lunch restaurant they were eating at, and he loved beat poetry, he knew a little bit about everything she said, and that we would have gotten along so well, she was gunning for him in the interview process though he didn’t make it because the administration is skewed. I see the Sutro tower belting in the distance, and I’m talking about the way the light is hitting, dusk is swallowing, couples are walking, men on their bicycles with boquets in their baskets, and scarves around their necks.

August Hall has a line to the outside, everyone in their fur-lined jackets, Carhartt’s, dickies, workwear pants, doc martens, leather boots, fleece beanies, long skirts, and trucker jackets and bombers. I park on Taylor avenue on the edge of Knob Hill, on the steepest hill I’ve ever been on, overlooking all of east San Francisco, the swimming cold air, my body still warm from the sweat, the beating of my heart and movement of my blood. August Hall has these towering ceilings, with green curtains on the sides of the balcony edge with these paintings of really important looking bureaucrats in those oval frames you see presidents painted in, though I don’t think they are presidents, at least not from down here and there are some elegant looking women too. Maybe the place was some kind of gathering place where they would throw extravagant balls and New Year’s Parties and now, we are all humans standing with alcohol in our cups, or Ginger Ale in my case. I have a knitted sweater over my arms and I’m looking for Gretchen in the crowd as Fog Lake finishes his acoustic solo set and this girl turns her head to the left in front of me, with a shag cut and light brown hair and bright teeth and smile lines, it’s Gretchen. I exclaim and she hugs, embracing with all the excitement in the world saying it is so good to see me and standing back as if to realize this moment, that we are standing together in this great big old hall, looking up at stage to hear people from another part of the country play lap pedal and the keyboard and sing softly into the mic from things that are important to them and things they want to share. Gretchen says she has been on this human arc recently as we laugh about looking about the crowd and this guy faints in-between sets and his head bangs on the ground as people help him return back to the hall, to the people, to the bodies and noises echoing off the walls.

The steel guitarist has this long brown hair all around his face, and his head hair looks like someone from Washington in the late 2000s in the best most endearing way I can try to convey, like Robin Pecknold, or a squirrel crossing the road. Every time he plays absolutely any note or slides with that steel finger, Gretchen and I begin interpretive dancing and act like we’ve just been struck by an energy field. The longer the show goes on, the looser Loving becomes, they are becoming so loose I am going to begin levitating, I’ve actually already done so, I’ve grown taller, we exchange with whispers which are more like gesture ephemera in each other’s ears, changing by the tuning, the bodies in front of us, the height of the ceiling, the hits of the keys. Only She Knows sounds like jazz and the steel guitarist becomes louder, more distorted, the keys begin beaming into my ear sockets. Visions plays and I remember I used to fall asleep to the track every night one October and the ending sequence is pedal steel, in all its wonders, in southern warmth and winter houses. We are all close together, listening to a folk indie band in San Francisco and Gretchen has these deep wide pupils in the middle of her blue Iris’s and I can’t stop smiling, I close my eyes at points and walk out in a daze, feeling very human, she says. The San Francisco night swallows me completely and I drift off to sleep. The moon is stuck at the top corner of the window and there are all these sentiments and promises moved by tongues between bodies, and floating down the coast, tubing in summer heat, drinking on the river front, dancing how we dance. We dance the same, the way we move, the swell of the hills barreling into my legs, pointed upwards into the infinite light gas.