out in the open
"To be in the room with them firing on all cylinders was to feel like taking on the world was not only possible, but a duty one could enthusiastically embrace."
- Joe Gross
Although there's no shortage of worthy contenders, if forced to name a single favourite song, I'd have to choose Fugazi's "Sweet and Low." An elegant meditation on tension and release, the tune's deceptively simple structure supports an intricate and nimble melodic interplay, its compositional austerity launching a resolute emotional declaration. It gestures calmly towards a ferocity that never quite arrives, and it makes a few patient minutes feel like they could last hours. It's just a rock song, after all, but it contains multitudes, and it's been a faithful and steadfast companion of mine for nearly twenty-five years now.
I was nine when In on the Kill Taker came out in 1993, so it wasn't until several years later that I picked up a copy for myself on the advice of a few of my elders in the Comox Valley DIY scene. I liked the album just fine, but it wasn't for yet a few more years, until I saw Fugazi live for the first and only time in 2001, that I really became an acolyte (as is commonly the case among fans of the band). A friend and I were en route to Montreal that summer, and had decided to make a detour south off of Highway 1 to catch the show in Kelowna, of all places, and "Sweet and Low" closed out their thrilling hour-and-a-half set.
In my memory it's a revelation, unexpectedly and effortlessly groovy, all delicate precision giving way to thundering catharsis. The song would rattle around inside my head for the rest of the trip: a breeze at our backs as we made our way across the prairies and a balm for mosquitoes bites as we slept by the side of the highway outside of Marathon, a hazy whisp of melody suspended above early evenings at Parc Lafontaine (back when the fountain was still functional) and pacing my steps on long walks around the city that would, a few years later, become my home. Back then songs like this weren't just something to listen to, but something to draw strength from, something to believe in, and they made it easier as well to believe in the dreams they would animate within our hopelessly naive adolescent brains.
Of course, belief is the enemy of knowledge, romance the enemy of reason, and the meticulously-kept record shows the performance that night in Kelowna wasn't among the band's finer moments: it's a bit sloppy and slightly out of tune, the players sounding understandably exhausted as the show lurched towards a close. What I imagined as a mecca of anarchism and post-rock turned out to be as conducive to black-hole depression and social inertia and friendship-disintegrating conflict as anywhere else. But my love for Montreal endures nonetheless, and "Sweet and Low" still makes me feel as though there's a beauty in the world that can't be captured by language.
A couple of weeks ago – not long after my 42nd birthday – Fugazi released Albini Sessions, an alternate version of In on the Kill Taker they had recorded with the great Steve Albini (RIP) in Chicago in 1992. Given Albini's storied ability to capture a band's live sound with exacting fidelity and Fugazi's reputation as one of one of the most ferocious live acts in the country, the pairing had seemed the stuff of legend. After the sessions, however, all parties agreed the ultimate results were subpar, and they scrapped them, the band returning to DC to rerecord what would become the proper album back at Inner Ear Studios. After three decades of gathering dust, the Albini recordings are now being released as a benefit for Letters Charity, founded by Albini and his partner, Heather Whinna.
Listened to in comparison to the 1993 release of In on the Kill Taker, these recordings are indeed weaker – overall they feel a bit thin, constituent parts not quite adding up to a whole – but it's a glorious listen nonetheless. There's academic value in comparing study sketches to a finished work, to be sure, but beyond the technical insights that may be gleaned, to my ears there's a kind of presence that shines through on "Sweet and Low" – or, perhaps more accurately, one that emerges in the space between this version of the song and the one that's burnt into my memory. There's an immediacy that saturates it, a fragile and imperfect humanity that appears as though in relief and reminds me of what my own hands might yet be capable of.
As you get older, you learn that the big momentous event is the exception, the punctuation mark on meaning that's generated through the slow and methodical work which precedes it. The ambition to accomplish great things eases into the desire to simply live with yourself: a hope that you'll make the amends you need to, that you'll be able to get a decent sleep at night and get up the next day to keep doing the work. I know I still expect art to mean too much, to do too much, but I'll never stop being grateful for what it helped me to believe in, even if only for a moment's glimpse.
Anyhow, let's all try to be humble, but let's not regret our dreams, okay?
xo, graham
PS. That Fugazi show in Kelowna was opened by a two-piece indie rock outfit called The Metic, from somewhere in the Okanagan. I've been trying to track down one of their albums for a minute now – a CD packaged in a hand-glued, olive green cardboard sleeve, if memory serves – so if you happen to have a line on that let me know and I'll bake you some cookies.