My buddy nick screamed in this metalcore band called Constellations because he couldn’t really play an instrument and didn’t want to learn, but he wanted to get laid at least close to as much as our other buddy Nick who wasn’t in a band at all, but who had dark hair and boyish good looks, and a devil may care ambiance that all the girls we hung around found irresistible. Constellations wasn’t that good of a band and Nick wasn’t that good of a frontman but the band still got gigs because during the slow season, The Basement would let any band that can fill the place play a set and an argument can be made that when it comes to impressing a potential date, being some scene kid who knows the band might be better than actually being the scene kid in the band, because if you embarrass yourself, at least it won’t be on a stage with everyone watching. Plus, all of our pals got drink tickets but only about half of them could drink, and so, in half-full venues full of our friends, we could live like brief and generous kings. Constellations cut an EP called Alpha right before the summer of 2008, and all of the songs sounded the same, but we still played it in our cars like it was hot shit because when would we ever get to hear one of our own dripping out of our car speakers. Constellations never sold out a show, but they did get to play The Basement in summer once, toward the end of the band’s run in 2009, before Nick got kicked out of the band for not being a good enough screamer to justify the mental headaches he caused the so-called creative process. And at that summer show, they played their song “Model T Drive By,” which was maybe the only song that felt like it had real potential, or at least the one song that didn’t sound like everything else. When the breakdown came, Johnny, who played guitar for the band, jumped directly into the thrashing of the pit, guitar still plugged in. Nick had, somehow, obtained a drumstick from some other band’s setup, and was using it to orchestrate the violence in the pit, almost pulling the bodies from one side to the other like they were attached to a string at the drumstick’s tip. For a moment, you could only hear Johnny’s furious guitar playing, but you couldn’t see him through the wave of arms and elbows swinging in every direction, enclosing him. The dude behind the bar at The Basement, who drank heavily on the job and never made a sound during these shows except to let out the occasional skeptical or frustrated sigh, looked up from his second beer of the night, took stock of this brief and incredible madness, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Now this is a fucking hardcore show.”
Constellations broke up a month later. Nick didn’t get laid nearly as much as he thought he would. I found unused drink tickets in my pockets for months.
II. Twenty One Pilots Are Innocent (After Lester Bangs)
This is the truth! You are only from here if you’re from here! Sure, the suburbs count, but only if you’re winning! Twenty One Pilots are from the suburbs! Not the suburbs like the ones my pals would skate through to score cheap weed! Tyler and Josh have never actually flown a plane! But there’s only so many band names I guess! Twenty One Pilots are good Christian kids! They make music that you don’t have to love God to like! Finally, a Christian band that speaks to me! Well I guess! Relient K wasn’t bad! At least they had the decency to write something more than hooks! Relient K is also from Ohio! It’s called the Bible Belt for a reason! Being religiously ambiguous sells more records! Twenty One Pilots are at the top of the charts again! Some dirge about all their friends being heathens! Which friends! Tell me the clear truth! I know some of their old friends and they all seem all right to me! What’s a heathen anyway! We’re all innocent until our friends write songs about us! Was there at the Newport back in ’11 when Regional At Best dropped and all the record labels packed the house! Felt like the whole city made it! Well I mean I guess it felt that way! If you count the suburbs and surrounding areas! Before that at Independents’ Day they put on a real show! Dragged a whole piano in an alley! Tyler jumped on top! No one in the alley could move! He parted the crowd with just a single finger! It was biblical probably! I walked home that night thinking they’d be the biggest band in the city! I walked home thinking they’d be here forever and never make it out!
III. The Sadness of Proximity
When Twenty One Pilots won their first Grammy award, winning in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category, beating out far more deserving songs (Rihanna’s “Work,” for example), they accepted the award with their pants down. Literally, on stage, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun pulled down their pants, going into a drawn out story from their younger days about watching the Grammy Awards without pants and dreaming of being there. It was charming, if you’re into the type of charm the band has become known for: a Midwestern emotional affectation that both wins over parents and emotionally starved youth.
There’s something magical about all of your friends being in shitty bands with no intention of really making it. Columbus is like any other midsize-but-close-to-big city. It overflows with talented people who don’t always know where to place their talent, and sometimes there are far less talented people who just have access to a stage and enough people to watch them. In the era right before Twenty One Pilots exploded, it didn’t seem like any single band would ever approach the heights they eventually would, and so most everyone I knew rolled around in some trashy hardcore outfit, trying to make the nights a little more fun. The bands barely practiced, played shows to whoever could afford the five buck cover, and sometimes took whatever change they made from the show and got everyone pizza. These people all had day jobs. Some would work waiting tables for two weeks just to afford the amp to plug a guitar into so that the band could stay together for another show or two.
I’m not making a value judgement on one versus the other, when it comes to success and simply survival. I’m saying that I celebrated Twenty One Pilots on that Grammy stage with their pants down, even though their song wasn’t the best song in the category, and even though they saddled the speech with a corniness that only their Midwestern brethren could recognize underneath all of the attempted charm. I always hoped for Columbus, Ohio, to have a band make it big, and Twenty One Pilots sit as one of the biggest bands in the world. So I feel guilty when I say that I wish it could be someone other than them. Someone who didn’t feel so intensely manufactured, or line-toeing. Someone who knew their way around more than just a catchy hook. I’m proud of them because I watched them from their early days, and I’m hard on them because I watched them from their early days.
The closest I’ll get to knowing real rockstars were my friends in summer, before record labels came to town looking to pluck the next big thing. Constellations was a shit band, but they were a shit band that was a labor of love for a few kids I cared about deeply, in a scene full of kids that I cared about deeply, just trying to afford whatever it would take to make it into a studio and put a few tracks together. A week after Twenty One Pilots won their Grammy, I found Alpha, the first Constellations EP. It was in an old CD book, wasting away with the rest of the dead technology of its time. I put it on in my car on a long drive back to Columbus. When the first song hit, I remember the smile on Nick’s face as he burst into our friend’s apartment with the CDs for the first time. How we all listened to every track three times over. How we told ourselves that we loved it. How it didn’t matter whether or not we did.