NINETEEN FOREVER
Scene: April 2020, about a month into the Covid Lockdown.
My wife Patrice, our two cats, and I were living in a tiny one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in Sunnyvale, California. We were scrubbing down our groceries, keeping the non-perishables in the “holding area” (a few cardboard boxes on the living room floor) to quarantine them before putting them in the cupboards. As you do. El oh el. We were all making the rules up as we went.
It was a gloomy spring in the Bay Area. I remember the traffic update signs over a suddenly empty Mathilda Avenue being switched from estimated travel times to the different highways to a simple, stark, unchanging “SHELTER IN PLACE”. Across the street was a complex of Apple office buildings, now deserted, and Patrice and I would go for eerie, quiet walks among them, scowling through our masks at the few living souls we’d encounter who’d entered our (laughably large, in retrospect) bubble of personal space. We were not fucking around in early-Lockdown California; the first untraceable Covid case in the country originated in Santa Clara, just a few miles from where we were living. Things were tense, and nobody in CA was taking any chances. Your state’s mileage may have varied.
Patrice worked for Williams-Sonoma. When her office job suddenly converted to remote, she turned our little bedroom into her office. I took over our breakfast nook, the kitchen table becoming my desk for compiling and recording The Jewel Case, a 3-hour music show I created and hosted for WYSO, the NPR affiliate in Yellow Springs, Ohio at the time. I would drag songs into GarageBand, crossfading them, adding my voiceovers on a third track, and emailing zip files to the station for broadcast on Thursday night. (Side note: it’s an odd feeling, listening to your own radio show, as opposed to doing it live.)
My “office”, Sunnyvale, CA, circa 2020. ‘Bout time to throw out those bananas…
It was, obviously, a horrifying period. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you. Dystopia. Uncertainty. A complete lack of unified leadership on the federal level. A friend of mine kept a computer monitor devoted to tracking the ever-increasing tally of Covid deaths. Patrice and I had the added stress of being 2500 isolated miles away from virtually everyone we knew and loved, watching helplessly as our our native Ohio seemed (from our hypervigilant vantage point, at least) to be treating common-sense health and public safety policies as half-joking suggestions.
Shit was dark.
And yet…
And yet…
If I’m really being honest, there’s a part of me that looks back on that period with…well, ”fondness” isn’t the right word; I know far too many folks who experienced devastating trauma and tragedy. But if I can separate my personal corner of it from the horrors of what the world as a whole was going through, there’s an almost nostalgic flavor to the way I think of those days. We were fortunate that Patrice still had her job. Money was still coming in (a lot of people weren’t so lucky). The notorious Bay Area traffic was down to a trickle (One could get from Sunnyvale to San Fransisco in well under an hour), and the air got quieter and clearer. And -crucially- the introvert in me really enjoyed the lack of social obligation. I’ve always gravitated to solitary pursuits and, when I wasn’t working on my radio show or watching Chernobyl on Netflix (GREAT choice of escapism there, Tod), I was finally getting time to learn my way around GarageBand, writing songs for my next chapter as a solo musician.
At the time, I had just moved west and left behind Shrug, my band of brothers with whom I’d had a 26-year run in Dayton, Ohio. I had also been playing with the Motel Beds, John Dubuc and the Guilty Pleasures, and literally dozens of other past projects, stretching back into the early 90s. And, while I had regularly sprinkled a lot of acoustic solo sets into my schedule, I had always been a band guy. I’ve heard many different musicians refer to bands, especially young bands, as gangs. I could relate. I was not an athlete, so I didn’t have the experience of a life of being on teams; I got my version of that in the scruffier, less organized, more dysfunctional rituals of a bunch of friends in smelly rooms and vans, pouring all of my confusion, anger, joy, and ambition into making a racket for a roomful of likeminded believers. It’s good work if you can get it.
And so it came to pass that, in those early uncertain days of Covid, I sat at my little kitchen table-turned-”studio”, pondering a course for my new solo career, remembering past glories and indignities, and pondering if I’d ever get to do any of that stuff again. Words started coming:
Busting out of the cornfields and factory towns
Twice as good as you’d think and just as bad as it sounds
May I present to you the four musketeers
A little bit too pie-eyed and wet behind the ears
A little older than their guitars
And quite a bit younger than their years
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
Place your bets and put your money down
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
These kids are always gonna be around
They pooled their pizza tips, a Prehistori-conoline Ford
Coughin’ down the highway and preachin’ on three truths and a chord
Three drink tickets and a percentage of the door
Opening for someone you never heard of before
Doesn’t matter if you’re out of gas
and crashing on some local kid’s floor
The boys are back in town
Spread the word around
They were hard as nails and sharp as a knife
Then the drummer found himself a job and a wife
The other three are hooked now, man
They’re in this for life- what a life
What a life
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
Place your bets and put your money down
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
These kids are always gonna be around
The music started as a kind of shuffle, not light years from the stuff we used to do in the Motel Beds but, as it went on, it began to take on more and more of a Thin Lizzy vibe. Normally when this situation presents itself I try to steer the song in another direction. But this one caught me in a nostalgic mood, and I decided to lean into the Lizziness, with guitar harmonies, my best approximation of Phil Lynott’s delivery, and a couple small cases of outright petty lyrical larceny.
It’s very crude (bear in mind, I was early in my Garageband journey), but a lot of fun.
You can hear it by clicking here, if you want. I’d like that.
