All things are possible

I know we're moving toward a world in which there will be no undocumented moments, ever, anywhere, but I'm still analog enough in my bones to be a little blown away by the way concerts I attended in my (often distant) past have resurfaced one by one on the Internet to be played again before my confused senses.

No surprise that, when I returned home from a rainy Radiohead show at Nissan Pavilion a couple years back, I could dial up youtube clips and audio files already the next day. I'm getting used to this. But what especially excites and unnerves me is the appearance online of events that took place in a world without the Web. It's strange to listen now to an April 1992 U2 concert in Austin and know that I am out there, sitting and breathing and listening inside the arena whose walls the music is bouncing off of (along with my girlfriend of a few months, whom I later married, plus a number of friends whom I must have been already pretty estranged from because I haven't talked to any of them since).

Also slightly stunning for me to listen now to the Clash playing the Majestic Theater in San Antonio in May of 1983. I'm routinely disappointed in my younger self, but there must have been some small pocket of terrible hipness in me because the standard fare in my hometown was REO Speedwagon and Styx, and here I was taking in "Straight to Hell" and "Tommy Gun." I'm also impressed to see, as I consult one of the numerous gig logs available online (like the one linked above), that later the same month the band went to the US Festival—immediately after which Strummer and Simonon ganged up and fired Mick Jones, in effect ending the group. So I was there at the near-tail-end and didn't even know it.

My latest find is a recording of my only Pavement concert—at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., in July of 1999. When the group rolled into these parts, my MFA colleagues had just graduated and dispersed, my wife was out of town, and my other friends—most of whom I'd met through my toddler daughter—had no interest in Pavement. I'm afraid what I'm getting at here is, I didn't have anyone to go to the show with. And yet, I could not stay away. Couple days before the concert I called the club, and the girl I spoke to said yeah they had one ticket left and did I want it. To this day it's the only concert I've ever gone to alone—and I won't lie to you, that does compromise your fun—but thank god I went.

Because nothing these days can remain hidden, I naturally found FLAC files of this show online, which I dutifully converted to WAV files, which I in turn converted to AAC files and installed on my iPod. (That sentence, by the way, would have been incomprehensible in 1999). Experiencing that night for the first time in eleven years, I'm drawn to the stage patter and changes in lyrics at least as much as I am to the performances themselves (although, musically, it's surprisingly strong). Stephen Malkmus, with absurd blandness, introduced their opener as "a Pavement song." He made a grotesque little switch to the lyric of "You Are The Light"—

Watch out for the gypsy children in electric dresses—they're insane/

I hear they live in crematoriums and smoke your remains

—so that, instead of smoking, the gypsy kids shoot your remains. And, after he changed up the lyric to "Folk Jam," singing, "Irish folk tales scare the crap out of me," he said to bandmate Bob Nastanovich, "Bob, I said crap instead of shit for your parents."

The weird thing is that I remember all these little moments, quite clearly, although you would think that my memory banks would have dropped some of this stuff after the passage of eleven years. I mean, in order to navigate the remainder of my days, do I really need to know that Bob Nastanovich's mom and dad were in the house that night? The most mysterious memories are not those that we consciously carry around with us (although those are plenty mysterious), but those that have to be woken up—the ones that were lying there all along and just needed a nudge to fall back onto the radar. Mr. and Mrs. Nastanovich have been hidden away in my brain, unbeknownst to me, since that night eleven years ago. And now, I fear, I will never get rid of them.

Audio files to come.