Ambition Now

In a culture that sometimes mistakes ambition for arrogance, our own self-worth sometimes takes the hit. How many moments of greatness will we miss because of it?

Two versions of a poster for the first reunion shows in 2006. (We printed the one on the right.) Art by Jesse LeDoux.

I.

The following story will sound completely stupid to many of you, and that’s the reason I’m telling it.

Most everyone by now knows the story of how Texas is the Reason broke up in 1997; that’s established folklore at this point. What’s lesser known is that the band, even after we more or less “made up,” talked about staying broken up like it was a matter of principle. It was a romantic idea, which like most of our romantic ideas, was probably cribbed from a Washington D.C. band at some point. But it felt like the right idea at the time. We belonged to a time and a place, we thought. That time had passed.

But then a funny thing happened in 2006. The four of us found ourselves all living in New York City again, for the first time since we broke up. And then the four of us found ourselves at a birthday party for our drummer, Chris Daly. And then, at that party, the four of us took a picture together and thought, “We still look like a band.” Somehow, by the time I got home that night, the wheels were already in motion for what we decided would become a reunion to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of our one and only album, Do You Know Who You Are?

Our booking agent from the ‘90s had retired from the industry, so we called in the Promise Ring’s agent, Tim Edwards at Flower Booking, to help. After talking it through, the band had chosen to take a leap of faith: We wanted to put a hold on the Bowery Ballroom for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. (It was a “thank you” show, after all.) One night only, on November 25.

“The legal capacity for Bowery is 600 people,” Tim replied.

“I know,” I told him, in all seriousness. “It’s a stretch, but I think we can fill it by the time of the show.”

“No,” he deadpanned. “I mean, that’s stupid. You should at least be playing Webster Hall.”

I told Tim that he was, to put it lightly, “fucking crazy.” Webster Hall had a 1,500-person capacity, and even at our biggest, Texas is the Reason had never been able to fill a room that size. We were putting our necks out there even thinking that anyone would care to see us again in the first place; the idea that we’d play to a half-empty venue was out of the question.

“I need you to trust me,” Tim said. “At least do Irving Plaza. Capacity is 1,100 people. I promise you can do it.”

We hesitantly agreed because, after all, Tim was the professional in the room. I rationalized that if we were only playing one show, then maybe people would travel in from around the country—or around the world, even. There had to be at least 1,100 people around the world who cared about our band! But yes, I thought. We’d need the whole world to fill that room. I sat by my phone when tickets went on sale at 9 a.m. that morning in September with a miserable, but concrete feeling this show was going to be a failure.

Three minutes later, Tim called.

“We’re sold out,” he said. “Now hang on. I didn’t tell you this because I didn’t want to freak you out, but I knew this was going to happen so I held November 26 for you, too. We can put that on sale in a few days if you give me the green light.”

My brain fell out of my head upon hearing this.

“I feel like we just robbed a bank and you’re asking me to return to the scene of the crime,” I told him. “We’re going to get caught out there as frauds if we try this again.”

The second night went on sale, and to the delight of my immediate anxiety, it did take a little bit longer to sell out this time—almost thirteen minutes. Irrespective of my fear and shame and reluctance to show a trace of ambition, everything happened in spite of me.

Blake Schwarzenbach in Middle America, several years after Jawbreaker inadvertently turned ABC No Rio into a fire trap. Photo by Brian Maryansky.

II.

This is not an essay about major labels or big business. This is not an essay about fame or adoration. This is not an essay about what it means when bands start to grow in scale or how scaling up affects the community. This is an essay about hardcore and how we see ourselves.

Almost everyone I know who has heard the story I told you can’t understand it. I see their point now, but at the time I was clearly carrying around a lot of odd baggage: There was a concern that nobody still cared about our band. (Obviously, not true.) There was a self-limiting belief that, even if people did care, playing a larger scale venue would be negatively viewed as immodest, or worse, arrogant. (Clearly, it wasn’t.) And there was a fear of public humiliation—the extent of which we would have certainly deserved for being so presumptuous to think that enough people still cared to play a venue that size. (Again, ridiculous.)

Some of this is just human nature, of course. We all want approval from our tribe. We hate embarrassment. We generally want to err on the side of humility. These are not bad things, and these things still play a part in how I navigate the world. But I also wonder how much of this particular experience is rooted in the notion that there are certain things, as hardcore kids, that we shouldn’t even want—and “being big,” for some people, is one of them. In other words, “being small” is a virtue.

I started thinking deeper about all of this when I reconnected with Popeye Vogelsang—former singer for melodic hardcore greats Farside and current singer for the truly excellent Calling Hours—for our first interview in Anti-Matter since 1995. To be fair, Popeye has always been humble to a fault, and our original interview certainly made that clear. Even in retrospect, as he told me, his general approach to Farside was, in his own words, “safe.”

“In my mind, during Farside, I never entertained any thoughts of us becoming a full-time band or becoming huge,” he explained, for a conversation that will be published in full this Thursday. “I enjoyed the degree of popularity that we had, but I think that if we would have signed to a major label or gone on more of these tours, the possibility of us setting ourselves up for more failures would have been much greater than if we just said, ‘Why don’t we stay in this smaller pond?’ If you say something out to the world, like, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and then it doesn’t happen, it just makes the failure all the more huge.”

There were certainly moments when Texas is the Reason toed that “small pond” line. I am specifically reminded of that time in 1996 when we told our booking agent that we were going to reject an offer to play the legendary First Avenue in Minneapolis in order to play a basement show with our friend Fang for a cut of the door money. Our agent was absolutely dumbfounded. I can’t speak for the rest of the band, but as much as I’d like to believe we snubbed First Avenue for a basement out of a show of DIY solidarity, I understand now that it’s more likely I was operating from a scared position. “Getting bigger” frightened me, and making preemptive decisions like this one were designed both to protect us from that prospect and limit our exposure to failure.

But what exactly was it that I was pushing back on? The irony of holding onto self-limiting beliefs in hardcore is that hardcore literally empowered me to believe in myself in the first place. I would have never picked up a guitar if my aim was to play like Eric Clapton, but learning how to play like Al Barile from SS Decontrol seemed possible. And once I learned, I wanted to share what I learned, because that’s how empowerment works. Should I have stopped trying to become a better guitarist at some point? Should I have put a limit on how many people were allowed to buy the records I’ve played on before I stopped playing altogether? Should Texas have done the thing that Jawbreaker did when they played downstairs at ABC No Rio to a crowd so large that at least 150 people (including myself) were only (sort of) able to hear them play while standing upstairs and staring blankly at each other? At what point is it OK to just grow?

“There were a lot of opportunities that I passed on during the Farside era,” Popeye told another interviewer in 2014, “and even though I don’t regret the decisions I made at the time, I now realize the universe probably wouldn’t have collapsed if I had simply said ‘fuck it’ and taken more of those chances.”

Maybe this is more of the energy we need. Because while we know that bigger isn’t necessarily better, why must we always assume that it’s worse?

III.

Think about your friend with the fledgling band. They just spent the better part of the year writing and recording an album and they are extremely proud of it. Getting people to hear their music is the only thing that’s keeping them from what they really want—to play more shows, to maybe go on tour, to make even better records in the future. Their dream isn’t to sign to a major label or open for Blink-182. Their dream is to inspire other kids in the scene the way they were inspired, or maybe even to change the scene in a positive way like some of their favorite bands did.

Now imagine scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and seeing your friend’s post about the record. “Hey,” it reads, with no discernible enthusiasm. “I did a thing. We think it’s pretty cool, and we’d love it if you’d listen. Or not.”

You are nodding your head right now because you’ve read some version of this post before. The words “or not” are particularly infuriating, because you’ve seen this post on your timeline and you’ve said to yourself: “What the fuck? Why are you giving me an out? Tell me that it’s as important to you as I know that it is. Tell me that you love it as much as you really do!” You don’t understand why anyone would sell themselves so short. But I get it.

There is a subtle undercurrent in our community that looks upon ambition with suspicion. I have felt it my entire life, and I’ve tried my best to continue to do things anyway, even when I’ve tied my own hands behind my back with self-doubt masquerading as humility or fear of failure disguised as detachment. The reality has always been that you can give yourself permission to fail. But more importantly, you can also give yourself permission to do something great—big or small. Hardcore did not empower me to do nothing.

There’s one more thing I remember from those shows in 2006. A couple of weeks later, when video of the shows started circulating around the internet, I came across a commenter on one site who said something to the effect of, “I hate the way Norman looks so fucking happy and smug.”

Those shows were two of the greatest nights of my life, and I almost didn’t let them happen because I was worried of what people like that might think.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Popeye Vogelsang of Calling Hours and Farside.

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