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| Banner by Christopher Williams |
I've been trying to get a handle on my thoughts and feelings about how PRF Virtual Thundersnow went down and went over with our PRF family. By any metric, it was a hit: we put together a great mish-mash of musical performances and videos made by our friends, with lots of random nonsense sprinkled into the mix (Japanese rabbit cartoons? Local Escanaba news features about Dobber's Pasties? Sure, let's go nuts), and everything was received warmly, with heart emojis and friendly laughter. On Saturday the Twitch channel for Thundersnow registered almost 600 individual viewers (even assuming on the low end that everyone at some point streamed from multiple sources, that still exceeds the 150-to-200-person average of your standard in-person Thundersnow). New friends were made as several bands and artists made their PRF debuts. It was a good time.
But also, it wasn't Thundersnow. As the next morning reared its head and Dixie and i sloughed off our blankets in anticipation of yet another cookie-cutter pandemic work week, the reminders of that were clear. No Monday morning brunch trip to the Swedish Pantry. No stop at Dobber's to fill up a cooler with pasties to take home to Milwaukee. No three-and-a-half-hour road trip back home. Just the grey promise of cubicle walls. We really should have taken a day to decompress.
Don't get me wrong -- the weekend was lovely, and it was great to see everyone's faces, even if they were in a weekend-long Zoom meeting or on the Twitch feed. But it also served as a stark reminder that it's been almost a year since the last time i hugged someone that wasn't my wife.
If memory serves, it was Jay Tiller at the Shellac show at Turner Hall, March 12, 2020, two days before they axed the rest of their tour and the planet shut down. We were there with a number of friends, all chatting with each other nervously, not sure if we should even be at a show, what with all the reports. It was the mid-point of the longest month in historical record, where every day some new horror about the coronavirus was bubbling into the news feed, sometimes contradicting what we knew the previous day, sometimes adding to our new truth, always making things worse. Every 24 hour cycle was a fresh carnival ride, and none of us knew how many tickets it was going to cost. And absolutely none of us knew how we were supposed to be acting. Josh was recognized by a fan of the web series he works on, and was gracious but involuntarily recoiled when said fan asked to stand near him for a picture. I remember inwardly cringing as a random plosive sent spittle hurling from my mouth toward another friend during conversation. And immediately after Jay said "Bah, i'm hugging tonight, whatever" and grabbed me for an embrace, we both immediately wondered if we should have done that.
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| Body Futures at Thundersnow 2020, by Zach Hench |
The month before? Psh. 150 or so of us were tearing it up at the eighth annual PRF Thundersnow in Gladstone, MI at the Terrace Bay Hotel. For those of you who haven't been: every year, around mid-February, a crew of weirdo music enthusiasts descend on the hotel and take it over, booking every suite and filling the ballroom with our weirdo music for a full weekend. (I wrote about this weirdo crew and the PRFBBQ about seven years ago. If you don't know the PRF, pause here, go back to that piece, think "well that sounds fucking rad," and then come back here.) And yeah, it gets weird. Maybe there's a midnight pool party where a hardcore band plays 10 songs in 12 minutes and then covers all 23 minutes of "Echoes" by Pink Floyd. Maybe a DJ crew sets up in the fish cleaning room, where the rest of the winter ice fisherman gut their catch of the day before packing it in ice to take home to their loved ones, and convert it into an all-night discotheque, pulverizing the fish odor with sweat, booze, and steam. And then the next morning Matt Talbott of Hum sets up in the middle of the ballroom and keeps everyone spellbound with a quiet, haunting set of space echo and acoustic guitar. It's a time.
And lemme tell ya, ain't nobody worried about germs at Thundersnow. We sweat on each other. We sit in the sauna together. We pass flasks and bottles. And we hug. Dear god, do we hug.
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| 2018 family photo |
Don't get me wrong -- Thundersnow is a petri dish. Almost every year someone gets sick with "Thunderflu" because they took a swig from the wrong bottle of ginger brandy. But we don't care. Or at least, we didn't. Cuz we're a community. A family. Some say we're a cult, but i've watched enough shows this year about the abuses in real cults to not want to make that joke anymore out of respect to their very real victims. Nah, we're just overly cuddly (and hairy -- sorry, hot tub) music nerds. And we converge on a remote hotel on a frozen lake once a year to have the world's noisiest family reunion (aside from the Summer PRF BBQ, which is a whole 'nother deal entirely). Except, of course, not this year.
Dixie and i haven't played with our bands in a year. The last show i played with IfIHadAHiFi was February 29, 2020. The last Body Futures show? last year's Thundersnow. Our basement practice room is too small for proper social distancing in These Challenging Times. We haven't seen most of our friends in a year, and basically none of our families. Work, home, bed, repeat. We live the life of a beige normcore couple that watches three-camera sitcoms and avoids political news because work was hard and can we just shut off our brains and watch our stories and not paint our walls? We'll just have to paint them white again when one of us dies and we have to sell the house. And speaking of work, it's been a year since i came back from Thundersnow to find out that the music store i had worked at for the previous eight years was going under. Cool.
By last summer, our lives were hollowed out. Everything we knew of our existence -- our music, our friends, my job -- had been scooped out of our souls with melon ballers and schlooped into the trash. OK, sure, i got a new job, and it's actually way better in a lot of ways, but i have no idea how it even fits into my work-life balance when everything that made me alive is on hold. Seriously, what is this existence even? Working at a distance with new people i barely know and not even asking for time off to play out of town? What the hell just happened?
Thank your deity of choice--God, Tarim, whatever--for the internet. Our friends Jesse and Emily started hosting a Friday night Twitch/Zoom DJ night/dance party from their dining room table and swore to do it every Friday night until things were back to normal. (Yep, they're still doing it.) And on top of that, as soon as it was apparent that it wasn't going to be safe to converge in Chicago for the summer PRFBBQ, they put together a virtual playlist of videos and old BBQ footage for the PRF family to chat and laugh about. Next thing you know, our buddy Neal was putting together a virtual version of our autumn campout in October, complete with some live streamed performances from a couple of PRF bands that were lucky enough to be able to practice safely. So we resigned ourselves to a Virtual Thundersnow in February. No hugs, no pool...sigh...no fish cleaning room. But there would be music, and camaraderie, and hopefully lots of jokes and laughs. The next best thing, right?
We put out the call: send us your shit. Able to get together safely with your bandmates? Film a set. If not, send us something previously existing, we don't care. Don't get into a practice room together with no masks if you don't have to. Let's just put a weekend together that gives us some laughs and fuzzy feelings while we can't be together in person.
Turns out, a good amount of us really miss live music. People came through, sending us video after video, new and old, full sets and stray four-minute videos for one song. Pleasant surprise of the weekend? Definitely the submissions we got from far away. Maniac Dujuor of Italy sent us a lovely unplugged set, and Kobe, Japan's O'Summer Vacation sent us a blistering, dizzying whirlwind of noise-tinged spazz-punk that was one of the best surprises of the weekend. (And Dixie, in her infinite scheduling wisdom, placed their sets at times where they could tune in, watch, and hang out in the chat. And yeah, both bands hung out and watched the other stuff on the bill with them, chatting and enjoying the virtual camaraderie, because that's what you do at a PRF thing.) Friends closer to home that never got a chance to partake in a Thundersnow before, like Appleton's Rat Portage, put themselves in front of a camera to play live for the first time. As always, the atmosphere was supportive and posi.
We even rolled the dice and tried something new, soliciting pre-recorded karaoke videos from our buddies, since various types of singalong have always been a part of Thundersnow weekend, be it live band karaoke, Kaleb Asplund's Karaoke Underground, or just good ol' fashioned Paula Abdul and Toto karaoke videos on YouTube. The results were nothing short of hilarious. Did someone belt out Faith No More's "Epic" in the Motley-Crue-back-patch-adorned denim jacket of their high school years? Yes, yes i did.
Look, it was all friggin' great. Rick Valentin, aka Thoughts Detecting Machines, provided a "PRF WORLD PREMIERE" video for his new tune "Long Long Time" off the timely This Was the Year That Wasn't, and he and Rose declared that it was like we were all starring in our own edition of Night Flight. Our pal Russell, normally a heavy-riffing screamer, stepped outside his comfort zone and premiered a brutalist video for his electro/noise project Bell & Circuit. My old friends in h.Chinaski let us play the footage from their reunion set at that show HiFi played last February. Our friend Mary-Eleanor played a sweet 'n' sour set of heartstring-tugging piano ballads. Rob from Waxeater sent us a video of his friggin' stand-up comedy. I could go on, but listing everything would mean i would forget someone, and that wouldn't be fair, would it? Because as Rick and Rose said on their podcast, Radio Zero, this version of Night Flight was one where, instead of hoping you'd stumble upon a gem every tenth video, everything was killer.
I feel like i need to be very clear about something: this community of people has given me real life. Aside from appreciation and validation for the music i play,--which is, like, the fifth-best thing they've done for me at most--they've helped ground me in reality. A truth about me that is annoyingly obvious to anyone who's known me during my adult life: i've spent a lot of time in my day being an obnoxious self-promoter, doing all the obnoxious social media self-hype in the interests of getting my bands' music in front of as many people as possible without paying for additional market penetration. But when, over a ten-year span or so, you begin to realize that, as a certain Body Futures sticker points out, your favorite music is made by your friends, well, banging your head against the wall of wide-ranging acceptance ends up not fucking mattering. Real talk: i know a good half-dozen drummers that can play circles around Dave Grohl, and do so on the off hours from their boring office jobs. (No, i'm not one of them.) I've shared the stage with ladies and gents who have reduced me to a puddle with their voice. Police Teeth's Real Size Monster Series album speaks to me on a level deeper than some Brainiac albums, even 12 years after its release. And some of these people even like what my bands do too? What? That's fucking wild.
I am surrounded by abject musical brilliance, and the one thing that it has taught me that matters more than anything else, is that community is everything. Be it family, friends, bandmates, fellow musicians, artists, whatever -- life is too short and stupid to spend it alone with your head up your own ass.
Being separated from every community that matters to us in the last year has rendered Dixie and me in greyscale. I wish i could write that Thundersnow this year brought the color back into our lives, but that would be a lie. But it did up the color saturation by, oh, let's say 25%.
This morning i woke up to start another stupid work week in the time of COVID. It feels sometimes like there's nothing to look forward to except pushing the boulder up the hill one more stupid time. The gas tank's running on fumes, y'all. But also, people are still talking about what a great time Virtual Thundersnow was, and knowing that we were able to feed some of the souls that have fed us over the last decade-plus was like tossing a desperation fiver into the gas tank. I may not be full, but i have enough to get back home, and for now that'll have to do.
So yeah, thanks for a terrific weekend, everyone. It was nice hanging out, even it was hanging out via satellite. We'll actually hug each other again soon, right?
WATCH SOME OF THE THUNDERSNOW 2021 PERFORMANCES:
Terminus Victor:
https://youtu.be/Qph7genfdfg
O'Summer Vacation:
https://youtu.be/c5YmNC3ikwE
Drainflies:
https://youtu.be/qx-gZJWYS5I
Retreaters:
https://youtu.be/zYrSIv0CYus
Stick Horse:
https://youtu.be/IrMh3syHy-0
Bell & Circuit:
https://youtu.be/pHnFxl2Lijs
There's more. Just search "Thundersnow 2021" on YouTube and you'll find a lot of it.
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