Impeccable timing
I don’t know what it is about the universe, O Pioneers!!!, and me but it seems like just when I need Eric Solomon the most he appears before me with a track that makes everything all right.
I was starting to lose my zest for punk rock on some level when their first LP came out. Hearing “The Weather Underground” and “Remember When It Meant Something” pretty much put me back into 1995 when I was discovering the Fat Wreck roster for the first time. “Summers In Necro Norway With Spider Ryan” came at a time when I badly needed to re-evaluate my career decisions and figure out where the whole journalism thing was going to take me. The Neon Creeps LP renewed my faith in the album format.
More recently I’ve been mired in a deeply-disturbing emotional hellscape that has been torturing my brain all day, every day for the last three months. The convergence of work-related stress and my complete inability to deal with and process the emotions that come with getting dumped after a five year relationship, of being emotionally betrayed, left me in ruins as recently as last week. I was in my newsroom’s satellite office at the provincial legislature one morning when I felt like I was literally going to lose my mind. I had been on the verge of vomiting due to the convergence of a remarkable amount of emotional pain and crushing deadlines and assignments and I couldn’t handle it. I started weeping. Then I got violently angry, something I have literally never felt before. With nothing around to smash I resorted to tearing a (small) phone book in half with my bare hands. And then tearing the pieces into smaller pieces, until I started seeing straight again. It didn’t really help that much. I’m still not sure how I made it through that day without driving off a bridge or something. I guess it helps that we really don’t have any bridges here.
Anyway: mental breakdown. I spent a weekend in bed feeling as miserable as I ever have. Then early Sunday morning I found this song via the Vinyl Collective message board. I can’t find the post on the board I found it in, but its part of the Vinyl Vlog podcast’s new Save Vinyl comp. Really cool little album, all the more so because it has this song leading it off.
Solomon’s caterwauling hits a note-perfect peak on “Put On A RRRRecord,” espousing a belief that is so core to every real music fan; anyone who has killed an afternoon flipping through every stack in their local record shop, anyone who has more CDs and LPs than dollars in their bank account at any given moment, anyone that has bought a new album instead of putting gas in their car or food in their fridge. But even music obsessives need to be reminded to put a record on once in a while that doesn’t make you want to weep or kill yourself.
Because its the simple things that can make the most difference when your emotions have gotten away from you. Hearing Eric demand that I put on my favourite record and stop thinking about my sorry little problems for 40 minutes made it easier to do just that. And listening to that record (Caution by Hot Water Music, incidentally) made it a little easier to not think about how miserable I was the next time I left the house. It may have only lasted for 15 minutes after I left the house yesterday, but it worked. I looped that track in my earphones, my car stereo, and in my mind all night. It was the central theme of Neon Creeps as well; yeah, you’ve got problems but you can’t let them rule you. Losing focus on those problems, even for a moment, can restore clarity to the rest of your life. It takes away the desperate loneliness and the panic and the hopelessness and reminds you what its like to feel good again.
So this is me saying a huge thank you to Eric and the rest of whoever’s playing in O Pioneers!!! these days. I know it can be tough to scrape out a living in a small band, but even if the money isn’t there please don’t think for a second that you aren’t making an impact with your songs. I know I’m not the only one who has felt it.
Buy their latest album! Or their old albums! Or a cassette! Or the iTunes! Throw the dude some business if you need some fine silk-screening done. His crew is great. I have t-shirts and album covers they made to glow in the dark.
