Bloomington, Bloomington

Everyone Comes Back Again

L-R Jeb Banner, founder of MFT; James Combs of Arson Garden; and JPS

This is really a “part 2” of my post on Musical Family Tree, and this will probably make more sense if you read that post first.

When my high school sweetheart and longtime bandmate Freda Love and I were still in high school in Bloomington, Indiana, we started trying to write songs together. She would come up with a melody and some lyrics, and I’d match it with chords and add structure. We didn’t write any good songs until Blake Babies, and I ended up writing more with Juliana Hatfield than Freda; but we had some good results with this method. Sanctify by Blake Babies and 7 Times by Antenna are examples of this sort of collaboration.

Our first effort, probably senior year, was built around a fragment Freda came up with that went “Bloomington, Bloomington…everyone comes back again.” We wrote the entire song, verses and a bridge. Then Freda’s mom came home and we sang it for her. She said something akin to, “Well, that’s OK I suppose…guess you’d better keep trying.” We scrapped it and never talked about it again. Sigh.

It’s probably debatable whether that reflected good parenting, but she was absolutely right. It wasn’t a great song…like all songwriters, we had to figure out how the fundamentals. But the idea was right on point. We noticed that people left with great fanfare and ambition, only to return weeks or months later to settle back into the easy life of a University town. We planned to leave and never come back, that’s what we told everyone when we left. We wouldn’t make any excuses - we were going to make it in the big world of rock n roll. We were going to make our mark! So what did we do? We left…then 5 years later we came back to Bloomington.

I moved to Boston in the fall of 1985 to go to Berklee, and Freda joined me after first semester. We more or less accomplished what we set out to do: We put a band together and got ourselves an indie record deal and booking agent, then we started making records and touring much of the time. Boston wasn’t the easiest home base: it was expensive, the economy was in the shitter, and the culture generally wasn’t a great fit for nice Midwestern kids like us. Late in my time in Boston, I started having dreams practically every night about Bloomington. I felt the pull. We gave up our Boston leases and ended a three month 1990 U.S. tour in Bloomington. I stuck around for the next 5 years.

Was it a good decision to come back again? I seriously doubt it. I have no regrets at all because if I hadn’t come back, I wouldn’t have met Heather and I wouldn’t have my family. For that reason, it was a fantastic decision. For every other reason, probably not so much. When Blake Babies broke up in 1992, I still had a record deal and a new band, Antenna. I didn’t, however, have the same momentum I had in 1990. I spent a fair amount of time in the studio and on tour, but I also spent a lot of time living my life in Bloomington, newly single, hedonistic, and fairly unproductive much of the time. I had some fun to be sure, but it was an anxious and unsettled time for me.

It was, however, a really good time to be in Bloomington, a good time to have a good time. I loved the local Bloomington music scene in the early 90s. None of the acts broke out nationally to speak of, but they could have. Local original bands packed the clubs with both college kids and scenesters. We had great venues, community and college radio, two different weekly arts papers, support from the local newspaper, great recording studios, cheap rent, and supportive record stores. That’s everything you needed to have a great local scene in the 90s.

The only thing that distinguished Bloomington from revered scenes of the late 80s and 90s such as Athens, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Chapel Hill (and Boston for that matter) was success. Each of those scenes produced high profile acts. We had everything else, including acts that could easily have “made it” had things broken differently. You could feel it in the clubs - it was real. It kept me around against my own best interests.

Last weekend I returned to Bloomington for a couple reasons, the main one being to perform on the bill of MFT Fest (I’ll get to the other reason shortly). MFT Fest was a festival to celebrate the 20th anniversary or Musical Family Tree, an Indiana music archive founded by my friend Jeb Banner that chronicled the music underground with a focus on the 90s heyday. It was a wonderful event, perfectly conceived and organized. I’m so deeply grateful to Jeb and the organizers for the gift of this festival.

Jeb declared a sellout after selling only 300 tickets for the Friday event, which took place in two venues, The Back Door and the Blockhouse, upstairs and downstairs in the same building next door to the iconic 90s venue Second Story. The venues share a large patio and deck, and the city closed off the alley the venue fronts for food trucks and more room to hang. Each stage felt like an expertly programmed event - a bill that could have happened back in the day. The outdoor space felt like an expertly planned house party on a beautiful, crisp fall evening. Jeb released an additional 50 tickets for the Saturday event, which made it feel a bit less like a house party and more like a proper music festival.

This isn’t meant to be a review of the concert; I’m not going to deep dive into the music. Anyone there knows it was special. None of the bands are popular outside a tight circle. I can report that every act I saw put in the work, brought their A-game, and connected beautifully with the receptive audience. It was nostalgic but also visceral. If you’re curious, you can listen here and here to the livestream at the Backdoor (the venue I played on the first day). My own performance wasn’t my best, but I fed on a very positive energy in the room. I’m deeply grateful to my friends in Griffy and formerly of the 90s band El Niño who backed me up. Listen to the Griffy album if you have a chance - it’s worth your time.

The music of that time and place may not be currently popular, but it is fondly remembered. The music brought our community together, and provided the glue, or maybe the magnet to bring us all back together. We came together in loud, sweaty, beer-soaked clubs and at drunk and stoned after-hours hangs. The only way to celebrate and revisit a community like that is on its own terms, with loud electric guitars blasting from the speakers. We were all as one in the music, then and now. Of course, that’s not completely true. But it’s a nice, romantic idea.

The truth is we were just like every music scene I’ve ever known, probably every one that ever existed. We were tribal, split into factions of bands, sub-scenes, and sub-genres, deeply territorial. We all came together in the Second Story nightclub on Saturday night to hear the band of the moment, while some band dude at the bar bragged loudly that he could do it better. Most of the audience made music of their own, and many believed they could do it better than whoever happened to be onstage. It wasn’t about elevating musicians as heroes.

The MFT Fest audience contained many of my very best friends, people I wish I’d had many more hours to spend with than the passing conversations in the alley. I saw friends I’ve known since kindergarten, friends I traveled the world with and with whom I made records I’m proud of to this day. I had people I barely remember tell me how much my music or my friendship meant to them, and I said those things to people who barely remember me.

Then again, I also encountered a number of folks who seemed to hold onto ancient grudges, who refused to shake my hand or look me in the eye. I haven’t experienced that sort of energy in decades, and it took me aback. I remembered all these folks, but for the life of me I can’t say whether we ever had a beef. I doubt it, because I tend to remember those things. For example, I remember the guy in a band who threatened to kill me multiple times when I dated his ex-girlfriend - that was truly terrifying. But last time I saw him, at a mutual friend’s wedding in the early 2000s, I gave him a hug and wished him well as he told me it was nice to see me. I remember the guy who, in a fit of rage, threw a pitcher of beer on me while I was onstage in a packed club. I remember the guy who deliberately smashed my guitar to pieces and never apologized. I greeted those folks last weekend as the dear friends they are to me….because those things happened 30 years ago and now they’re just funny stories to tell. It feels like another lifetime. Why would I hold a grudge?

But music scenes are weird like that, such a fraught emotional landscape. On the rare times I think of that time of my life, I think of it as my time of my greatest failure and frustration, when I succumbed to bad habits and negative self-talk. I think how lucky I am that Heather coaxed me out of town and out of a rut. On the Bloomington scene, however, I suppose I kept a fairly high profile. I didn’t consider myself successful, but maybe others did. I made albums, I toured, I occasionally showed up on television or in glossy magazines. Maybe I played it up, acted like an asshole from time to time. Maybe my insecurity translated as hubris, and people have reasons to hold a grudge. Several people recently sent me a link to a recent podcast where an acquaintance from the Bloomington music scene analyzed the reasons he viscerally dislikes me. He acknowledged that it wasn’t personal, that I represented something to him that made him feel shitty about himself. It seemed to take him by surprise, 30 years later. He took the time on his own platform to think about it and publicly declare that it was him, not me; but somehow he still refused to shake my hand or meet my gaze last weekend. I represent something abstract, and my actual humanity has always been beside the point.

It’s just so disorienting - and frankly upsetting - for me to think that I represent something negative to people who don’t know me at all. I didn’t understand it at the time, and I don’t understand it now. For one thing, it makes me grateful that my deepest wish at the time - to be a much more famous and successful musician - never came true. I suppose I was too sensitive for the tiny amount of fame I had, let alone being an actual public figure. It makes me grateful that I can have a present day life in music that doesn’t make people who don’t know me dislike me for no good reason. I live in a place where literally thousands of people are better and more successful at music than I am. I can be an anonymous hobbyist and find all the joy in music I ever hoped for - mostly on the sidelines for musicians who actually live the sort of public life I thought I wanted. Now I know: better them than me. Once people achieve real fame, in my experience, they wish they could go back to being invisible.

That’s a bit of a tangent, so I’ll get back to the point, or rather a point: Bloomington, Bloomington, everyone comes back again. Myself included. I recently left a large coast-to-coast law firm that I joined as a partner when I left Rounder Records back in 2022. I’m so grateful for the opportunity, but it wasn’t a great fit. I had to find my way back to what I’m meant to do, working with artists and artist-friendly music companies. I’ve reached a time when what I need is freedom to invent my professional life from whole cloth. When it came time to move my practice to something that would provide such freedom, I decided to partner with my friend Robert Meitus, a fantastic and well respected entertainment lawyer who shares my values and goals…and hangs his hat in Bloomington. As of last week, my law practice, my business, resides in Bloomington. I have a sexy office on East Kirkwood and a bunch of smart colleagues who are as excited as I am to build something. That massive vortex of limestone has drawn me in once again…not as a resident, but with a tangible presence and more of a reason to come back more often. Best of all, it makes my mom happy. Life is strange and beautiful.

I write these essays largely to celebrate the things that are meaningful to me: art, community, connection, and collaboration. I am deeply grateful to Jeb, his MFT team, and all the musicians and supporters for coming together to celebrate all these things that mean so much to me.