Welcome to the Jangle*

I wrote on my FB page, ‘should I make the trip to Seattle to see Teenage Fanclub  tonight? It’s 75 miles each way,” and Luiz wrote back from sunny Lisbon: “I’d do it on my bike. In the snow.” Happily it wasn’t snowing when I took off up the Five that night around 7:30, though it had been pouring most of the day, and I’m skittish about driving in the rain.

Just past Lakewood, there is an enormous emporium on your right called “Bass Pro Shops.” It’s the length and breadth of a CostCo and has a sign the size of the Emerald Queen Casino; I think the complex it sits on includes a bowling alley, a seafood restaurant and a shooting range. I might be wrong about the latter, but it generally gives the impression that going shopping there will be the time of your life. Judging from its logo, which involves a large fish, it sells every type of fishing rod and lure known to man, as well as, inevitably, guns. This makes sense since practically everyone here has some kind of a boat and also a bit of a death wish. But whenever I see it, I prefer to pretend  that it actually provides basses to bass players, and that it’s size is indicative of the enormous need here in the Seattle and South Sound area for people to have a wide array of choices in bass guitars.

This idea fits in with my fantasy notion of Seattle the mecca for my people, that is, as a place where literally everyone on the streets owns a copy of Big Star 3rd and deeply understands it’s beauty, and I must say, attending a Teenage Fanclub show is not going to disabuse anyone of that concept. From where I sat two hours later, my view of the band was totally enhanced by a guy standing center front in a homemade football jersey with the number 13 emblazoned on the back. (In joke. “Thirteen” is the title of a TF album and also an iconic Big Star song, but it was doubly funny since football jerseys in Seattle are supposed to say ‘12’ – it’s some kind of magic fan number for the Seahawks.) Rationally, I know that Seattle has its share of Bon Jovi fans and gun nuts. But in my mind it is a place of super intense fandom, the likes of which you will encounter nowhere else.

TFC Neptune Theater 3/24/17 Note 13 jersey in front.

That effect is only heightened by the rightness of the venues here. The Neptune is a converted movie theater in the U District, right by the UW campus. It reminds me of an old theater in my home town, the Varsity, where we used to go see midnight movies – “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones” and “Gimme Shelter” – with its cruddy loud carpet and low-hanging balcony seats. But the Neptune has something that makes it much more rock ‘n’ roll than the Varsity, and it’s not just the bar that’s been installed in the back of the orchestra section or the old fashioned décor, replete with fake stained glass windows of Poseidon and mermaids that looks like it’s going to crumble into dust in front of your eyes. It’s not really speakable, that thing that it has, it’s more like a sense you get when you walk in that you are about to enter a state of mind.

When I entered the Neptune for the first time on Friday, the opener, Britta Phillips, was already on stage. I took one look and went, “oh HI, it’s Luna,” because it was so Luna-like, in my opinion: that’s what it looked like, minus a member or two, and that’s what it sounded like in timbre and tempo if not in actual song choice. But that's cool, I like Luna's timbre and tempo and it's never not a good time to hear echoes of the Rainy Day. And then came the Fannies, as they used to be affectionately called by the UK press. (“Fanny” is a worse word in England than it is in America, where it merely sounds like something your grandma might say she’d paddle if you stole a cookie, but being a Teenage Fanny is definitely a good thing.) And the crowd pressed forward, hushed; expectant: it looked, I thought, like a group that loved this band with a passion but had somehow never seen them. I don’t know how a young person gets to hear of Teenage Fanclub these days, but the audience was not entirely elderly. Maybe Nirvana is still working its weird magic from beyond the grave, whispering into the ears of the children the names of their most beloved bands, and then forcing them to buy the vinyl. Or maybe it’s just the final result of the long-tail theory, and if you gather all those plot points together they aren’t as negligible as you’d think.

So, when you hear Teenage Fanclub, what do you think of? Do you think of 1991? I do. But it turns out that the Fanclub’s sound is more durable than that. You can go see them and be pelted back to that fantastic summer, or you could just as easily belong to the magic circle where, forever after, they will remind you instead of 2017 and that one great night in March when we were all so happy because the Republican administration finally had to eat shit in front of us all. Or, if you’re me, they can do both, amalgamating past and future in an aural shake and bake of the Byrds and Black Sabbath; of Husker Du and the Everly Brothers, or the Mammas and the Pappas minus all the Mammas. They are and always will be the zenith of  jangly guitars, hooky melodies, and creamy-sweet harmonies, not ringing but actually tolling like a massively mid-tempo church bell, with a beautiful mix of voices that sound like they swallowed a magical  potion made of Beach Boys DNA and are now expelling it in a gaseous cloud directly into our faces. That sound is so beautiful it is practically visible, so rich and creamy that at one point I felt like I could see its actual waves blasting out from the mouths and their guitars and coating every one of us with a thin layer of sonic frosting.

It’s been over fifteen years since I reviewed a show and I’m not going to do it here. If you want to find out what they played you can go online; someone may even have posted the show (although from my vantage point in the balcony I was incredibly happy to see that almost no one in Seattle had their phone up for more than a snapshot: it was like entering a classroom where no one was looking at Facebook, i.e. truly unprecedented.) Suffice to say they finished with “The Concept” from Bandwagonesque, and the crowd bounced up and down and ROARED out the words as if they were Smells Like Teen Spirit - “She’s gonna get some records by the Stay-tus Quo, whoa-oh!” – and that being the case, you can only imagine what the final encore, of “Everything Flows” was like. Or maybe you'll never know which way it flows...though if you've read this far that seems unlikely.

And I’ll leave it there, that is, in your imagination, as I get in my car and drive home down the Five, first past a vista of Seattle that never fails to enchant, then down the long boring five past Tacoma, the casino, and of course the Bass Pro Shop where the reverie began five hours earlier. Thank god I wasn’t on a bicycle, and it wasn’t snowing. But I knew exactly what Luiz meant.

* Credit for this headline goes to Steve Michener of Big Dipper. 

We get older every year, but you don't change