Lost Sun Dance

Spirit Caravan is perhaps the oldest music I have ever heard. Wino sounds like he is singing to me from the dawn of time, wailing away on his guitar as cells begin to divide. It's wonderful and ridiculous. Johnny described Stab City to me with that word, right before I saw them play for the first time.

It's winter in Flagstaff (February 7th- the poster is still on my wall) and snowy and Ash (it's still on his wall, too) is grounded. He tries to first convince Robin it's OK, it won't be a crazy scene (he's grounded for hitchhiking into town to see TheSupersuckers , and bringing his twelve year old brother along for the ride) because it's a reggae show. With much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, I discover that it's more than a reggae show- it's a REGGAE MELTDOWN!


Talks are talk, words are spoken, and it is determined that as long as I chaperone, Ash may attend the meltdown, even though it isn't a reggae show. SO we roll. It's really, really cold. There's about a thousand kids in the living room of The Soul Kitchen, which is this house, that Rachel and Logan live in...other too, can't remember who. But we're all hanging in the ice in the front yard, when a big Ford van pulls up, and out stumbles Stab City. To Ash's amazement, these are actually people I know! I'm amazed, too. But I know Greg and John Casebeer (via Chutney and Matt Sayer, the guys I worked with at PRO) from when I lived in Flag before. So I'm talking to Johnny for the first time in about eight years (I moved back to Flagstaff six weeks previously), and I ask him what his band is like and he says:

"Were really loud. And pretty ridiculous."

I miss Stab City. They were the reverse of that name. They were like Black Sabbath fronted by the two most beautiful kids- even more beautiful than Ozzy. It's hard to believe, unless you were there. But it's true. And amidst the the howling, pounding noise, what I call The Big Loud, was the coolest most amazing people-pile in the history of small town music scenes. Everyone trying to occupy the same space. In no sense was it 'moshing'...this was pure weird sweaty howling love. Ridiculous and fine.

There is a feeling- whether it's bruise, or just serious muscle soreness- that makes you know you really are a happy human animal, at least in the physical. The mental gets all fucked up, tore down, tangled up. The emotional roller coater is one of those old wooden ones. The Cyclone on Coney Island maybe. Where if you lean too far you get killed or worse. But there is a transcendence that happens in action- music like waves, bodies like water, pushed beyond the thin skin that contains us. In the fog and rain this morning I was much bigger than I can usually see my self.

I got hurt in some small or large way at every Stab City show I ever saw. This always made me happy. Slammed hard by some Native girl, Audra's head back into my nose in the perfect bear-hug counter, a guitar to the body or head courtesy of Ray or Case...I loved it all. It was like wiping out on you skateboard or bike while trying some impossible (but it sure seemed possible, perfect, inevitable) line, that feeling of wow, that REALLY happened. Thirty five minutes of bliss at the Reggae Meltdown, walls of steam from the body heat meeting the outside air every time the door opened on a towering cloud, the realization that there is no way to stop the deck you are on, speed wobbles be damned, and just riding it out.