The Trouble With Nostalgia

I had an interesting decision to make last night. There were two concerts competing for my attention. I had to choose between a) paying 20 bucks to see the Lemonheads or b) accepting free tickets to a radio station’s Christmas concert featuring Jackyl. I was greatly tempted by the latter as free is always good and I couldn’t believe that the members of Jackyl were still alive much less touring. I just assumed that they were all killed in some freak onstage chainsaw accident. But, I knew that I had only one choice to make. It was time to put on the flannel and see the Lemonheads.

Now I’ll admit that I am not that big of a fan of the band. In fact, I only know three songs and they are the exact same three songs that everyone else knows: Into Your Arms, It’s a Shame About Ray, and the cover of Mrs. Robinson. Still, this was one of those uber-present bands of my college years. Every magazine had an article about Evan Dando. It wasn’t that he was the most important artist of the day; he just happened to be really photogenic. In fact, all I can remember about him is that he seemed to date every musician in Boston and seemed to be a screwup on many levels.

But I had to go. How else was I going to relive my youth?

I had a strange feeling even looking around the crowd. Sure, some people there made sense. There are few places where wearing a Juliana Hatfield shirt looks normal and a Lemonheads show is one of them. But other people were much too young. I can’t imagine anyone under thirty wanting to go see this band. Is there now some degree of post-modern ironic coolness to the early 90’s? Do the art kids today wish they were in school with me like those idiots I went to school with who thought that the 60’s were awesome? That’s my first problem with nostalgia. You never want to experience someone younger than you feeling nostalgic for your own life.

Things didn’t improve when I mistook Evan Dando for a guitar tech. Honestly, I could have run into him at the grocery store earlier and would never have recognized him. Now it’s not fair for me to say “wow, has he aged” because it’s been fourteen years since the glory days of 1993. Compare what I am today to the pictures of me back then and I’m not sure if I’d come out any better. I’m fifty pounds heavier with graying hair and acne that will go away once I finish puberty, which is probably when I turn sixty. But still, he didn’t look like a rock star. He looked like some guy who was happy to have a gig on a Sunday night.

What really got me though was the music. I didn’t have any technical problems with it. Sound was great, band was tight and people were bouncing up and down. It was more a matter of the songs not making sense any more. Take the song “Into Your Arms”, which I posted the video for last week. That is the ultimate post-adolescent love song. It’s what you put on a mix tape when you’re a sophomore in college (in fact, I’m pretty sure that I did.) It’s about how you can feel that nothing in the world can bother you as long as you have someone by your side. When I listen to the song it doesn’t touch me as being eternally true, it just seems to be the way foolish kids think. It’s made worse by having it sung by a guy in his forties.

See, you don’t view love the same way at 34 as you do at 20. In college it is this wonderful experience that you truly believe has never happened to anyone else but you. It solves every problem and overrides any and all possible concerns. But time makes you view love as being so much more complicated than that. You realize that it isn’t simple and it isn’t a cure all and sometimes no matter how much you care about the other person it just doesn’t work out. I’m pretty much a hopeless romantic and even I feel this way. So while Into Your Arms is still a great song and it makes me think about the past it has no meaning to me in the present. It’s almost non-sensical now. And that leads into what I consider to be the real problem with nostalgia.

Now it is clear that I love the music of my college years, especially given that I scour YouTube for videos every week. I’ll fight to the death about how it was a period of great bands and meaningful music. However even I have to admit that my feelings toward the music have less to do with the bands and more to do with the time in my life. When I think about Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now” I’m not liking the song because of some great musical epiphany. I like the song because Mike Murray and I rocked out to it during a high school assembly. I’m not nostalgic for music; I just use music to remember people. That’s the problem with nostalgia. It makes you pine for the wrong things. I didn’t see the Lemonheads to see the band. I went to see the band in the hope that all of my friends from college would suddenly arrive and we could have fun again.

For a few people reading this there is an obvious parallel to our nostalgia for the Backer. While it is still my favorite bar ever always remember that it isn’t the bar itself that we are nostalgic for. The Backer is just a bunch of stools, a few beer tabs, a sticky floor and a popcorn machine, which probably took more years off of my life than the alcohol ever did. We don’t miss the place. We miss the people in the place. We miss the staff and each other and knowing that you could just walk in and meet someone you knew. It was a moment in your life where you were surrounded by the coolest and smartest and nicest people you have ever known. Just remember that when you talk about nostalgia you tend to focus on things: places or events or songs. That’s not what you really miss. You really miss the people.