That wasn't really a question.
I am wondering if I should bother with Modest Mouse this time around. I wish I had caught them some time between 1995 and 2003.
I saw them twice: at the old Jailhouse, on Montroyal, when they toured with Califone, and a few years later, at the Cabaret on St Laurent. I'm surprised that you missed the Cabaret show. If I recall correctly, you were already into them at that point.
I can't believe they played Jailhouse. @#&! With Califone. #@$%
I graduated high school in 1995. When I entered CEGEP (college, sorta) I had seen big shows like Pink Floyd, Lollapalooza 1994 (which I went to for The Breeders, L7, Beastie Boys and Smashing Pumpkins, but was introduced to Flaming Lips, Nick Cave and the Boredoms), Rolling Stones. That was it.
Well, except for being dragged to Another Roadside Attraction by a friend who swore it would be a perfectly good substitute for Lollapalloza 1995, which had bypassed Montreal, but I try my best to
block out this memory. I could not tolerate the Tragically Hip and the entire fratty scene perturbed me. Bleugh.
Anyway, the first shows I attended once I got to CEGEP was Fugazi, Love Battery and Radiohead/Remy Zero. I was taking stabs at the darkness, but I had no idea where to start. I did become keenly aware that modestly-sized "big" shows at medium-sized venues (Fugazi and Radiohead) left me feeling atomized and alienated, and that I wanted to see more bands/shows like Love Battery.
By 1996 I had become acquainted with Chris P., who would introduce me to the world of indie and garage. I would see Superdrag (opening for Echobelly!) and New Bomb Turks/Gas Huffer while in NYC, but most the music I was listening to was still of the buzz bin alternative stripe. I did manage to catch The Fastbacks the first and only time they played Montreal, and Hovercraft's two performances here remains some of the most indelible music memories I possess, but I was still being talked into going to shows like Beck/Cibo Matto, which I was only somewhat interested in. The Throwing Muses/Dirty Three show in September of that year serves as a marker for my slight transition from alt rock to indie/post rock. The next month I met W_____ (though W____ introduced me to little music that I ever enjoyed outside of Siouxsie and the Banshees, which I still love).
1997-1998 - We would see Man or Astro-man?, the Grifters, and Mudhoney together, but mostly I was going to shows with Chris, who, at the time, was moving
away from indie/post rock, and into the world of garage. Consequently, most of the shows I see around this time are garagey. However, Chris does continue to make mix tapes for me, and I hear Modest Mouse's most popular song at the time, "Doin' The Cockroach", but I did not think all that much of it. To this day I find it worse than a lot of stuff on their last two albums. I almost always skip it. I vaguely recall hearing other tracks by Modest Mouse, but I couldn't tell you when and where. At some point I heard "This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About...", but I have no idea where in time this occurred.
1999 - Around this time, I
joined the Grifters iMusic BBS and met surferrosad and Tripp. A month later we would bus down to Memphis to see the Grifters play Barristers. Unfortunately for me, I was already withdrawing from the world (I had left CEGEP with a single class unfinished and rejected the idea of university, and was dropping jobs left and right). I was thoroughly misanthropic and, though I was unaware at the time, the alcoholism had already taken root.
My memories of the shows I attended in 1999 are clouded by an seething hatred for the swarms that surrounded me, and I seem to recall W___ having to talk me out of picking fights with scenesters and people I considered "poseurs" (particularly these three shows: Compulsive Gamblers, No Neck Blues Band/Shalabi Effect, Guided by Voices). Curiously, my memories of the Man or Astro-man? show that year are entirely positive. It is impossible to feel grim with MOAM. November 1999 I manage to drag myself to see Kristin Hersh open for that guy from Dead Can Dance. Agoraphobia and a hatred for mankind overcomes me and we leave before Brendan Perry plays. I couldn't stand him, but W____ probably wanted to see him, but I was a selfish asshole drunkard.
I manage to see a single concert in the year 2000: Dirty Three/Storm and Strees/Shannon Wright. That was in April. In June I am rushed to hospital after shitting and puking blood for a week and a half. I am told that I have a liver of a middle aged alcoholic and that if I do not quit drinking soon, that I will die.
I quit drinking then and there and depart the hospital without a stitch of guidance or medication. Three days later (the very day that
Moon and Antartica is released) I suffer an alcoholic seizure on a public bus and am again returned to the hospital. I start drinking again. The alcohol is now like oxygen - an oxygen whose pursuit now dominates every hour of my existence. I hear "The Moon and Antarctica" days later and I am soon obsssed with lyrics that seem to be describing E X A C T LY how I am feeling. I barely leave the house to work and fail to attend the Cabaret performance in September 19, 2000. Four days after that show I am on the floor of the video store I work at begging police officers to kill me and put me out of my misery.
I may have missed them, but I do know the albums outside and in. Even much of the
'corporate sellout album' ("Good News for People who Love Bad News") figures in as the soundtrack to my eventual recovery.
Meh, perhaps I will go see them.
Damn. Thanks for posting that.
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