Making It Out Alive

On the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, I think about a night we turned towards creation as a survival strategy.

New End Original, surviving 9/11. The Middle East, Boston, MA. September 2001. Photo by Adam Tanner.

I.

Yesterday was the anniversary of 9/11. We all know that. We all have our own stories of where we were when the planes hit. But it still hurts a little extra for me to think that New End Original—the band I was in and on tour with that day, whose debut album for Jade Tree was due ten days later—will always be tethered with that moment. It feels cursed.

New End played in St. Louis on the night of September 10, 2001, and by all accounts it was an uneventful start to the tour. Our shows by that point were reasonably well-attended for a band with only a three-song single out—perhaps because of our “pedigree.” But like everyone else, we toured in a van and ate cheap food and slept on people’s floors wherever we could. There was certainly no sense that our lives would change dramatically anytime soon.

We were asleep on the morning of September 11, sprawled across someone’s living room, when all of our phones began ringing at the same time. No one ever set their phones to silent back then, so the room became enveloped by a cacophony of ringtones. One by one, we all woke up, crawling out of our sleeping bags and up off the floor. One by one, we all said, “Hello?” One by one, we all scrambled to find the remote.

I don’t remember the rest of the morning that well. The most I can tell you is that I sat on a stranger’s sofa, watching those images over and over, stunned. It took several hours before I could even get past the denial stage. It was well past lunch before anyone had even mustered up the most obvious questions: “Should we even be on tour right now? Is there even a tour to be on?”

Bands are often put in untenable situations, but this one felt particularly awful. On the one hand, we had just witnessed a national tragedy; we all experienced a collective trauma. The prevailing wisdom would have been to go home, to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, and to take the time to process what had just happened. But as a band, the other hand pushed us to continue: We had already signed a van rental agreement, we were thousands of dollars in debt for merchandise we couldn’t pay for without sales, and a most of us were in personal debt from starting the band in the first place. Some shows were being canceled by the venues, with our New York show at Bowery Ballroom being the most prominent (and obvious) one. But most weren’t. We felt conflicted and horrible and, honestly—perhaps even rightfully so—not in the mood to play music for people at that time. There didn’t seem to be a perfect way forward.

We were scheduled to play a show on the evening of September 11 in Champaign, Illinois. That show was canceled, of course, but after talking about it, we made the odd decision to drive to the venue anyway. Frankly, we had nowhere else to go. But we thought there might be people there, and we wanted to know if there weren’t other people who might be thinking about going to the venue in search of a human connection, too. We wondered if such a brutal act of division in the morning could create a local community response by nightfall. Which, sure enough, it did. As soon as we pulled up front, we saw a small group of people—hardcore kids, indie rockers, older “post-hardcore” folks—sitting on the sidewalks and consoling each other. Not surprisingly, they were confused to see us there, climbing out of the van. But it wasn’t long before we all shared the immediate recognition that if there were ever a time when the barrier between band and audience had been shattered, it was here and it was now.

We all moved into the only nearby bar that was open, where we asked if we could play a few New End songs on an acoustic guitar in the back. The owners welcomed us in and encouraged the moment. In less than a day, all of our songs seemed to take on entirely new meanings, and all of the people there—ourselves included—felt a little more healed when it was over. Any conflict we felt about finishing the tour dissolved at that point, in the same way that all of the differences between everyone in that room also dissolved. We all just needed a place to commune.

II.

Twenty-two years later, I still think about the tragedy of 9/11. But I’m also thinking about how we respond to moments like these, and how it feels like our base instinct in the face of mortality is often to seek out collaborative and constructive opportunities to engage with. Which is to say that we see survival as being inextricably linked to human connection and creativity.

In a conversation about the themes that pervade Paint It Black’s new record, Famine, singer Dan Yemin and I continually returned to an idea of survival as the driving force in both personal and political thought—and more specifically, the myriad of ways that we express our survival instincts. That point particularly crystallized for Dan after he suffered a stroke shortly before 9/11, in April 2001. When I asked whether or not it was a coincidence that he started singing after the stroke, he conceded that it was not.

“I had been really discouraged about making music at the end of the ‘90s,” he told me for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday. “I was trying really hard to make things work only to have them kind of fall apart. But nothing makes you treasure life and the time you have like—and this sounds dramatic—coming face to face with death at a young age. I still felt very much like a young person. But it was like, what am I doing? I’ve been working 60 hours a week. I know I’m trying to pay off student loans, but there’s also a lot more that I’m missing with this head-first dive into adult responsibility. When faced with destruction—your own or the destruction around you—what else can you do but create?”

That Dan managed to create a musical vehicle that carries an extraordinary balance of political critique through such a deeply personal lens is also most likely not a coincidence. Because that’s the thing: When global conflicts pour onto the personal page, we realize that survival is not simply a lifelong objective, but a daily grind. When I think about the way I felt on 9/11, I am also thinking about the way I tried to make it to 9/12 without losing my mind. Was it “right” to be singing songs in a bar that night? Or were the people in that room in the middle of a collective effort to survive?

III.

In 1990, at the turn of the decade, Temperance Records put out a memorable compilation 7-inch called Rebuilding that featured Turning Point, Burn, No Escape, and Gorilla Biscuits. At the time, I didn’t think anything of the name. In retrospect, though, I think many of us understood that we were coming up on the end of an era. The ‘80s were over. Youth of Today broke up and the Youth Crew members all seemed to be exploring new ideas. Straightedge was—temporarily, at least—somewhat passé. The violence at our shows was getting us kicked out of the venues that had been welcoming hardcore kids for years. There was even a rise of newer “micro-scenes,” for lack of a better word, popping up all over the country, from ABC No Rio to Epicenter. The hardcore scene—or scenes, in some cases—felt as disconnected as it had ever been, and on some level, we lived with it because we had the faint idea that we were actually rebuilding something. We didn’t know exactly what we were creating at the time, but we knew it needed to feel like hardcore, whatever that meant in the early ‘90s. None of the bands on that compilation truly sound like any of the others, and I now suspect that was the point.

Thinking about that bar in Champaign, Illinois, on the evening of September 11, 2001, I remember it now as a site of rebuilding. There was no gatekeeping on that sidewalk, no judgment or scene snobbery. Everyone was invited into the conversation, into the bar, and into the show. There was no division, nor was there any attempt to divide. There was only sharing our stories, feeling a little more human every time someone else said something that rang familiar or true, and appreciating the ways in which we all felt the same things differently. When New End “played that show” in the bar, everyone there played a part in reconstructing those songs into whatever we needed to hear that night. It was an act of love and an act of creation. Because this is what we do when it feels like everything we love is being destroyed: We make new things.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Dan Yemin of Paint It Black.

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