Something To Forget
Twenty-eight years ago this week my old band found ourselves at the beginning of a years-long dispute with Hot Water Music. Twenty-eight years later, no one is even really sure what happened.
I.
This wasn’t really planned, but by the time you read this, the show I’m about to tell you about will have just recently “celebrated” its 28th anniversary. I’ve searched the internet to find literally anything that might corroborate anyone’s versions of events, but in a somewhat improbable turn, I’ve been unable to find a single trace of its existence—which means that the only proof we have that any of this happened are the memories of the people who were there. And as it turns out, no one seems to remember the details in the exact same way. No one ever does. Which means that on March 15, 1996, any number of the following events may or may not have occurred.
As far as I remember it, our story begins early that morning when the members of Texas is the Reason packed our van in New York City to leave on what would become a sixteen-hour drive to Gainesville, Florida. A short East Coast tour with Gameface and Frodus was about to get underway, and Tim Owen—who was also co-running Jade Tree at the time—offered to help with booking it. Starting the run in Gainesville was strategic: Tim had recently met the members of a band called Hot Water Music and had become a major fan. He told us that their band had played, and sold out, the Hardback Café on their own multiple times already, so by adding them to the bill, we were assured an incredible first show. It all sounded great to us.
Upon arrival in Gainesville, we were told that the show wouldn’t start until at least midnight—meaning that our band could wind up going on as late as 3 a.m. Having just finished a day-long drive, we were all pretty physically and mentally decimated. The idea of going on in the middle of the night seemed impossible to us, so we approached our new friends in Hot Water Music with a favor to ask: We wanted to know if they would consider “headlining” the show, since this was their hometown and we knew they’d already done it successfully before. “Honestly,” we told them, “even getting an extra hour of sleep would mean so much to us right now.” They agreed without hesitation. “We get it!” they said. We were relieved and so grateful.
The rest of the night, unfortunately, gets fuzzy. I can confirm that Chuck Ragan, one of Hot Water Music’s two frontmen, went on to get drunk fairly early on and that he and a friend bowled into Gameface’s drum kit in the parking lot before their set, and I remember those drums hitting the concrete in a way that made everyone feel incredibly uncomfortable. (“That was burned and seared into my memory,” says Hot Water Music bassist Jason Black, in an interview that will be published in full on Thursday.) I can also confirm that it was a good show, that a lot of people came, and that the audience actually seemed excited to stay until 4 a.m. to see every single band. Aside from that, my recollections are vaguely shaped: I think I remember loading out after we played and then seeing our own frontman, Garrett Klahn, flip off someone in Hot Water Music while they were playing. I remember him then walking out to the van and saying, “Those guys are talking shit about us on stage!” And while I can’t recall what they supposedly said, I do remember feeling indignant about it in the way that I used to feel whenever anyone called us “rock stars”—which was something that, admittedly, made me hypersensitive at the time. The last thing I remember for sure is pulling out of the parking lot and saying, “Fuck that band.”
This was the beginning of a very real feud between Hot Water Music and Texas is the Reason—a feud that has been apparently lost to time by almost everyone besides the average 21-year-old members of these two bands. Amazingly, it did not end there.
II.
The social internet as we know it now did not exist in 1996. There was no Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or even MySpace or Friendster. At best, if you were “online” at all, you were either inside of an America Online chat room or you were logged into one of countless Usenet newsgroups or Bulletin Board Systems. In our scene, the most popular BBS was alt.music.hardcore. (Somewhat inexplicably, 7 Seconds also released a compilation album named after the newsgroup in 1995.) To be fair, alt.music.hardcore wasn’t a total cesspool. The optimism of the early internet—and our enthusiasm for the potential of unfettered global communication and human connection—was still palpable, and most of us were just excited to make new friends. But it would be disingenuous to say that alt.music.hardcore wasn’t also a platform for shit-talking. So when we got home from tour and a friend told me about a missive that someone in Hot Water Music had allegedly posted to the group about that night in Gainesville, I had some idea of what to expect.
To this day, I don’t know who actually posted it. I barely remember what it said. But the idea that this situation had moved from a physical space into the digital domain somehow made it all the more real in 1996. For the next couple of years, both bands were asked to comment on the “feud” in interviews and elsewhere; after some time, it felt like we were just fighting about fighting. Things finally escalated to a point where, once, after Hot Water Music was added to a show on the Texas is the Reason/Promise Ring U.S. tour, our band literally refused to play the show unless the promoter kicked them off the bill. The promoter refused, and true to our word, we canceled. What makes this story laughable, in retrospect, is that the longer we clashed, the more we all forgot about what actually happened on March 15, 1996.
“I have flashes of it,” Jason Black tells me in our interview, which is also the very first time we’ve talked to each other since that night in Gainesville. “At some point, Chuck was definitely drunk and he fell backwards into Gameface’s kick drum… I remember that. And I remember that when we were playing, it was like, ‘OK, we have to stop’—after three songs. I’m not going to single anyone out because it was probably everyone at that point, but we were just awful because everyone was so wasted. But I’ve been thinking about it since we set this interview up and I’ve been thinking about us as individuals back then and wondering about other contexts. Like, George [Rebelo] has always been pretty mellow and definitely not a loudmouth. Chuck was… I don’t even know if he knew where he was, at least based on my memory. But Chris [Wollard] and I were loudmouths, so it was very possible that one of us said something totally offensive. But for real, I don’t actually know!”
Which is to say that our bands have spent 28 years carrying the weight of something that is either too minor to remember or too stupid to be angry about. Our feud, in that sense, is the perfect “Welcome to the Internet” story.
III.
When I first started to think about this incident again, I thought I’d be able to point to other feuds as if this kind of thing were some sort of hardcore tradition. I asked friends—like Alex Russin from Cold World and Rob Fish from 108 and Ressurection—if they could add some other names to the list, but we realized that the best-known hardcore “feuds” were actually closer to what we might call beefs. “Beefs,” we agreed, are more visceral than feuds, and more often than not, they end in violence: Think Danny “Ezec” Diablo from Crown of Thornz versus Dwid Hellion from Integrity or the Cro-Mags versus the Cro-Mags. That was not this.
“Feuds,” then, are for the rest of us—petty, largely inconsequential, and often ridiculous. The semi-intellectual clash between Born Against and Sick of it All in the early ‘90s counts in this regard, and both bands have expressed regret over letting it play out on a hardcore radio show for everyone to hear. So, too, does the romantic dispute between Brand New and Taking Back Sunday, which spilled over onto the lyric sheets for songs by each band and felt like an ongoing concern for ages.
The years-long feud between Texas is the Reason and Hot Water Music is only remarkable because the haziness of its origins (and unreliability of our memories) didn’t stop some of us from holding a stubborn grudge—or at least wondering if the other side was still holding that grudge—for almost three decades. My decision to open a conversation with the band in Anti-Matter this week could be seen as a way to “bury the hatchet,” but for me, it was more of an opportunity to say, “We both know this is stupid”—and we did. There hadn’t been any hard feelings between our bands for a very long time, so if anything, the real story is in the mutual respect that we ultimately developed for each other over the years. This is the fruit of maturity.
Ultimately, I regret the way this situation played itself out. I regret the grudge I personally held and the way I somehow avoided ever having to see anyone in Hot Water Music again since 1996. But I also can’t help but love the way Jason Black and I met each other for our interview as if we were old friends who had simply been through a different kind of ringer together. Indeed, that’s one way to look at it: Surviving your youthful foolishness is also a form of connection. And the fact that we’re both still here to talk about it after so many years is a testament to how similar we probably are in the first place. If only we could remember what we were fighting about.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Jason Black of Hot Water Music.
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"Surviving your youthful foolishness is also a form of connection."
Well said and love the mending that happens when we stay connected enough to hardcore/alternate scenes to do so... even many years later.