Winter 1996
They'd asked me to come out to Missoula the previous autumn, but after the breakup, it seemed wise to give myself time before coming back to town. They understood. They were my friends, and we'd thrown a lot of parties together. Now it was January, and they'd offered to buy me a plane ticket if I'd come out. All I had to do was pack up my records and do my thing at the party. I missed them and I missed Missoula, so I was grateful to them for picking up the tab. DJing was never about the money.
A pair of them picked me up at the airport. I was almost pathetically happy to see them; this was the first contact I'd had with Missoula since I'd left the previous August. Our scene was a small, tight one, and these were people who had gotten involved with it because they liked me and what I was doing. I was grateful for their support and friendship, especially when so much else that connected me to Missoula had dissolved.
The party was the following night at the American Legion Hall, and we discussed logistics and gossiped as we ate chain diner food at Perkins. More of our friends showed up at the diner, including a couple people I'd only known glancingly while I lived there. The conversation was quick, sharp, acerbic: we were all city kids who had come to Missoula because we liked the slower pace of life in Missoula; throwing raves was our way of speeding things up.
They drove me back to their house, where there were more people and more conversations. One of the residents was studying science at his parents' behest, but he really wanted to be a cook; he insisted on making something to share with me, and improvised with pasta and finely chopped onions. It was simple and incredibly good, in the way all of his cooking was, and he talked to me, in his sidelong, shy way, as he worked. A few of us stayed up late, talking and playing video games, until everyone finally drifted off and I passed out on the couch.
The next morning dawned clear and brutally cold. As we walked out to the car to go to breakfast, one of my friends said that even without windchill it had been 30 degrees below zero the night before. My nostrils had frozen solid immediately upon stepping outside, and the skin across my face was a taut mask. It wasn't hard to believe my friend. I could see faint sundogs when I looked towards the sun, two faint haloes preceding and following the distant spot of brightness. I felt proud to have lived in such an unforgiving environment, and wondered what my new friends in San Francisco would make of it.
Breakfast was more of the same: a steady stream of low-key, biting wit, casual planning, and chance encounters with friends. Nothing happened in any particular hurry. Afterwards came the only real work of the day, setting up speakers, taping down cords, checking the sound system, covering the walls in black sheets of PVC. It was a familiar routine, and helping out allowed me to talk to more old friends I hadn't seen yet. I was an out of town guest, now, so I wasn't really expected to do much, but I was too attached to the rituals involved with getting ready for a party to let it go. One of the last things I did was set up the borrowed DAT recorder, so I could get a high-quality recording of the evening's sets.
The afternoon and evening were consumed by more pre-party rituals: sorting records, mentally roughing out set lists, discussing the order of the DJs. Because I was the guest, I was given the penultimate, peak-hour slot, and one of my friends let me borrow one of his most prized records, a white label that was as close to the perfect record that either of us had heard. I looked at him wide-eyed as he handed it to me, somewhat confused as to whether he was loaning it to me or giving it to me, but astonished and embarrassed by the gesture either way. Nobody would have ever done that for me in San Francisco, which prided itself so heavily on the egalitarian spirit of its scene.
The party was slow to get going, as all Missoula parties were. The first DJ worked to a mostly empty room, playing a frankly bizarre mixture of heavy dancefloor techno and freaky, twitchy music that would have been tricky to dance to at the best of times. I thought it was perfect, even if his mixing was pretty rough-hewn. By the time the second DJ, the friend who had loaned me his record, went on, the place was beginning to fill up, and the music was loud enough that I was mostly reduced to smiling and hugging friends rather than talking.
By the time it was time for me to take the decks, the air was thick with sweat and heat. I was dressed for the outside weather, so I stripped down as far as I could, to a thin white T-shirt, my heavy wool pants, and socks. When my friend handed the headphones over to me, an enormous cheer went up from the crowd: enthusiasm for my friend, a welcome for me, happiness to just be there. It didn't matter. I was overpowered by emotion and nerves, and my hands were shaking so badly that I had trouble getting them on the faders.
The set itself followed in a blur. Put a record down, match the beats, wait for the cue point, mix the new record in, cut the old record out, fade back and forth, drop the EQs, backspin and fade, pull the old record off; repeat. I was playing for an audience of friends who'd had over a year to get used to my eccentric tastes and quirky mixing style; everyone was having fun, and the crowd was exuberant and noisy. Nobody seemed to notice or care when I made a mistake, not even the two or three members of the audience who stood in front of the DJ stand intently watching me mix, nodding their heads to the beat. Every so often, one of my friends would worm up through the gyrating crowd and point at the currently playing record and give me a huge, enthusiastic grin. My friend's record got the same enormous reaction it always did. It seemed as if almost no time had passed when the next DJ came up and tapped me on the shoulder.
I was completely soaked through when I stepped down from the stage. All I really wanted to do was sit down and drink some water. As I walked to the back of the dancefloor, two gorgeous young women came up to me, hugged me, and gave me radiant smiles. "We're so glad you came back!" one of them said, "That was amazing!" I was amazed too. I was sure I'd never seen either of them before.
Later, I sat alone in the corner, tilted back in one of the Legion Hall's uncomfortable, upholstered chairs, my hair stuck flat to my forehead with sweat, half-moons of sweat under my armpits, my bare feet gripping the edge of the table in front of me. I was tired and coming down. I was taking a long pull off a bottle of water when she walked by with her new boyfriend. We only made eye contact for a moment. She'd let her hair grow out, something she'd never done while we were together. It looked good, and I had a sudden impulse to motion her over and tell her I liked her new look. Her boyfriend didn't even notice me, though, and she walked away without a backwards glance.
It was starting to get light out by the time we finally chased the last stragglers out of the hall, and cleanup was like a painfully slow reversed film of setting up. People were coming off their highs, we were all exhausted, and some idiots had tagged the bathroom again. We were all ready for sleep by the time we got back to the house.
As we were all waking up, sometime after noon, one of my friends put a CD on the stereo. We all talked very slowly, putting together our sentences with care. We were deliberating over our brunches and listening to the CD, which was playing a song which had unexpectedly changed from a pounding, monotonous rhythm to a pure, ethereal, heartbreaking wash of sound. "What is this?" I burst out. My friend laughed. "I don't know! It's one of yours!"
A pair of them picked me up at the airport. I was almost pathetically happy to see them; this was the first contact I'd had with Missoula since I'd left the previous August. Our scene was a small, tight one, and these were people who had gotten involved with it because they liked me and what I was doing. I was grateful for their support and friendship, especially when so much else that connected me to Missoula had dissolved.
The party was the following night at the American Legion Hall, and we discussed logistics and gossiped as we ate chain diner food at Perkins. More of our friends showed up at the diner, including a couple people I'd only known glancingly while I lived there. The conversation was quick, sharp, acerbic: we were all city kids who had come to Missoula because we liked the slower pace of life in Missoula; throwing raves was our way of speeding things up.
They drove me back to their house, where there were more people and more conversations. One of the residents was studying science at his parents' behest, but he really wanted to be a cook; he insisted on making something to share with me, and improvised with pasta and finely chopped onions. It was simple and incredibly good, in the way all of his cooking was, and he talked to me, in his sidelong, shy way, as he worked. A few of us stayed up late, talking and playing video games, until everyone finally drifted off and I passed out on the couch.
The next morning dawned clear and brutally cold. As we walked out to the car to go to breakfast, one of my friends said that even without windchill it had been 30 degrees below zero the night before. My nostrils had frozen solid immediately upon stepping outside, and the skin across my face was a taut mask. It wasn't hard to believe my friend. I could see faint sundogs when I looked towards the sun, two faint haloes preceding and following the distant spot of brightness. I felt proud to have lived in such an unforgiving environment, and wondered what my new friends in San Francisco would make of it.
Breakfast was more of the same: a steady stream of low-key, biting wit, casual planning, and chance encounters with friends. Nothing happened in any particular hurry. Afterwards came the only real work of the day, setting up speakers, taping down cords, checking the sound system, covering the walls in black sheets of PVC. It was a familiar routine, and helping out allowed me to talk to more old friends I hadn't seen yet. I was an out of town guest, now, so I wasn't really expected to do much, but I was too attached to the rituals involved with getting ready for a party to let it go. One of the last things I did was set up the borrowed DAT recorder, so I could get a high-quality recording of the evening's sets.
The afternoon and evening were consumed by more pre-party rituals: sorting records, mentally roughing out set lists, discussing the order of the DJs. Because I was the guest, I was given the penultimate, peak-hour slot, and one of my friends let me borrow one of his most prized records, a white label that was as close to the perfect record that either of us had heard. I looked at him wide-eyed as he handed it to me, somewhat confused as to whether he was loaning it to me or giving it to me, but astonished and embarrassed by the gesture either way. Nobody would have ever done that for me in San Francisco, which prided itself so heavily on the egalitarian spirit of its scene.
The party was slow to get going, as all Missoula parties were. The first DJ worked to a mostly empty room, playing a frankly bizarre mixture of heavy dancefloor techno and freaky, twitchy music that would have been tricky to dance to at the best of times. I thought it was perfect, even if his mixing was pretty rough-hewn. By the time the second DJ, the friend who had loaned me his record, went on, the place was beginning to fill up, and the music was loud enough that I was mostly reduced to smiling and hugging friends rather than talking.
By the time it was time for me to take the decks, the air was thick with sweat and heat. I was dressed for the outside weather, so I stripped down as far as I could, to a thin white T-shirt, my heavy wool pants, and socks. When my friend handed the headphones over to me, an enormous cheer went up from the crowd: enthusiasm for my friend, a welcome for me, happiness to just be there. It didn't matter. I was overpowered by emotion and nerves, and my hands were shaking so badly that I had trouble getting them on the faders.
The set itself followed in a blur. Put a record down, match the beats, wait for the cue point, mix the new record in, cut the old record out, fade back and forth, drop the EQs, backspin and fade, pull the old record off; repeat. I was playing for an audience of friends who'd had over a year to get used to my eccentric tastes and quirky mixing style; everyone was having fun, and the crowd was exuberant and noisy. Nobody seemed to notice or care when I made a mistake, not even the two or three members of the audience who stood in front of the DJ stand intently watching me mix, nodding their heads to the beat. Every so often, one of my friends would worm up through the gyrating crowd and point at the currently playing record and give me a huge, enthusiastic grin. My friend's record got the same enormous reaction it always did. It seemed as if almost no time had passed when the next DJ came up and tapped me on the shoulder.
I was completely soaked through when I stepped down from the stage. All I really wanted to do was sit down and drink some water. As I walked to the back of the dancefloor, two gorgeous young women came up to me, hugged me, and gave me radiant smiles. "We're so glad you came back!" one of them said, "That was amazing!" I was amazed too. I was sure I'd never seen either of them before.
Later, I sat alone in the corner, tilted back in one of the Legion Hall's uncomfortable, upholstered chairs, my hair stuck flat to my forehead with sweat, half-moons of sweat under my armpits, my bare feet gripping the edge of the table in front of me. I was tired and coming down. I was taking a long pull off a bottle of water when she walked by with her new boyfriend. We only made eye contact for a moment. She'd let her hair grow out, something she'd never done while we were together. It looked good, and I had a sudden impulse to motion her over and tell her I liked her new look. Her boyfriend didn't even notice me, though, and she walked away without a backwards glance.
It was starting to get light out by the time we finally chased the last stragglers out of the hall, and cleanup was like a painfully slow reversed film of setting up. People were coming off their highs, we were all exhausted, and some idiots had tagged the bathroom again. We were all ready for sleep by the time we got back to the house.
As we were all waking up, sometime after noon, one of my friends put a CD on the stereo. We all talked very slowly, putting together our sentences with care. We were deliberating over our brunches and listening to the CD, which was playing a song which had unexpectedly changed from a pounding, monotonous rhythm to a pure, ethereal, heartbreaking wash of sound. "What is this?" I burst out. My friend laughed. "I don't know! It's one of yours!"
posted by Forrest L Norvell at 土曜日, 9月 04, 2004
3 Comments:
What was the perfect record?
I don't know! I spent years searching for it and never even found out what country it came from. It was a white label with only TT 001 written in Sharpie on the label.
Man what an amazing story. You are a great writer Forrest, enjoyed many great conversations with you and hope our paths will cross again some day. All the best!
Bart Cheever
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