Bad Liver and a Broken Heart

I'm old. I'm not gonna lie. I aged out of the bar scene a few years ago by any reasonable measure, yet it somehow always draws me back in. In that way I can sympathize (on an obviously lesser, more pitiful scale) with the athletes, actors and others who refuse to give up the spotlight, hoping for one more run of glory, one more rush of adrenaline when the eyes of the world focus squarely in their direction. Being in bars is kind of looking at a past life, when I was new to everything and all was new to me. Every turned corner brought excitement, new possibility and an introduction to the great equalizer, disappointment. When you're young, disappointment is a piercing shiv to the gut, the cruelest imaginable twist to the purest of plans. Broken hearts, broken dreams. The stuff that make up life when it's new. When you're young, you recover quickly from such cruelties. Years later, however, these things just make you feel tired and, well, old.

But there's always hope.

And the hope always looks similar because the hope is fresh-faced, exuberant and idealistic. The bastards of young, indeed. The sip from this fountain of youth, as well as the sip from a decent beer, are what brought me out of hiding, hoping to find something to catch me up in the swirl of my ancient youth.

What I found was The Stranger Waves. A three piece from Chicago, they pounded a couple certainties through my head: 1 - yes, I'm old 2 - rock and roll still has the power to instill an infusion of energy unparalleled to almost anything else. It stirs a re-kindling of emotional cues from our lives, for what is a love of music if not a back beat, and at times a sharp relief, a primary focus, for the events we embark upon? Why do we spend hours figuring out the songs to play at our weddings? How many times has every single song that played after a heartbreak been solely written for one's own situation? The themes of music are universal but individually interpreted, the best of which can be enjoyed on many levels, from a pure pop aesthetic to a primal, immediate response which we might not even understand.

So it was with the Stranger Waves. Jangly guitars, reverberating vocals and harmonies, a vicious, unrelenting percussion all held together a Buddy-Holly-on-amphetamines sound recorded at 33 1/3 but played at 45. Undeniably catchy, unmistakably talented and furiously eager to serve up a memorable string of songs, they banged out a set that left me in a strange spot - basking in the glow of a remembered glory, of a needle full of sound building to a few minutes of ecstatic revelry in support of a trio of guys barely more than half my age. It was a high worth the effort of making the scene, even after mine has long gone.

Check them out if you can.



www.myspace.com/thestrangerwaves