Sunday nights are accompanied by a feeling so particular that you could bottle it and sell as a brand of spectacularly unpopular cologne. Full week ahead looming, I reluctantly place my head upon my pillow, closing my eyes and the relatively stress-free chapter of my life that the particular weekend brought me.
When my eyes open, the daylight frames my cell phone, displaying a message from Rupert, reading, “Dude Chrome Sparks’ coming today!”
BONUS WEEKEND
At their show, we had off-handedly offered to house Chrome Sparks, and invited them on our radio show, but, as you know, head-nods and “For sure, for sure”s aren’t always reliable when making plans with bands and such, especially touring ones. As soon as you disappear from their physical and psychological periphery, you disappear into thin air.
But these cats are the real deal. They came through. Quite literally, around four that afternoon, and I greeted them with some warm meals.
Wasting no time, we started playing N64 games and listening to music as our attempts to make their vacation days in Columbia as enjoyable as we could seemed pretty successful. Even the inevitable jam session filled our apartment with its warmth and spirit.
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However, this vacation was soon to develop into an entirely different monster as they suggested playing a house-show-party in Columbia. So, while they played NFL Blitz, I quickly put together a Facebook event page for a house show the very next day.
I’ll admit my doubts. A last-second house show on a Tuesday night for predominately college-aged kids could be considered a pipe dream. But in my little chrome heart of hearts I knew Chrome Sparks has the panache, moxie, chutzpah, je ne sais quoi to pull an audience.
And so Tuesday rolled around. I pushed through my classes with a marked disinterest for financial accounting while Jeremy, Jesse, and Bill took a stroll around Five Points. At our local Sid and Nancy’s, Jesse was essentially selected to purchase a pair of catastrophically lethal tiger-print leggings that elevated him to an entirely new echelon of swaggered beauty. He wore them with grace.
Once the night came and I was free of classes, my roommate Sean and I scrambled to gather the ingredients for a great house show- a PA, power strips, cables, and an overabundance of fake flowers. Decking out the apartment, the people started slowly arriving.
Now, our apartment is cozy. Which is a euphemism for fucking tiny, so as soon as I couldn’t comfortably walk across my living room due to the human bodies in there, I knew that this was going to be an issue. They hadn’t even started playing yet.
My best friends, strangers, and some die-hard SparkFreeks were sardines as Jeremy finally got behind his keyboard and looked at Bill with that spot-on head nod and began their first song- Your Planet.
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And there I was, shirtless, getting drunk, as one of my favorite electronic groups was playing their eternal hits where I eat my goddamn Cocoa Puffs.
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Everything was going swimmingly. As they played their set, space was becoming more and more of an issue. People had to really pack in to allow fresh blood come through our bustling apartment door. The inaccessibility of our second floor apartment was such an issue, we had to pull a homie up through my bedroom window, (tragically, I wasn’t sober enough to make a true appraisal of my physical capability to pull him up, and had to be hastily anchored by anyone in earshot).
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The heat was also becoming an issue, and I had a solution. Forced to crawl between Jeremy’s legs to access my kitchen, I got a massive bowl and filled it with ice and water for people to drink. Of course, when I return to the crowd, immediately someone sticks their hand in the bowl, instantly turning it into a strange wooden hand-washing basin to be passed around. They still seemed to enjoy whatever relief could be allotted them in the sweaty void of gyrations and swirling synth tones.
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When they finished their set, the show made a natural transition to a house party, and everyone gathered in our yard, chattin, drinkin, smokin, kickin it. Some fans got records signed, and good conversation accompanied the general vibrations of the post-coital feeling following an excellent electronic show.
As the night wore on, and the people left to continue their week-long drudgery, my second Sunday night feeling started sinking in. Bidding these fellas goodbye wasn’t going to be the best feel. However, the show was accompanied by visuals off of their projector, and a brilliant idea was proposed. We should end the night right- playing Mario Party 2, projected on our living room wall.
And so we played a couple of rounds. Starting with a general jovial atmosphere, tensions arose when a computer-controlled Wario nearly overtook everyone. It was a long and arduous game. (Jesse, if you’re reading this, I want to formally apologize for sending that Boo to shake you down for coins. I am neither reasonable nor clever.)
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After that, the boys and I passed out to some Check it Out! With Dr. Steve Brule and the night was done.
All I can say of these beautiful days with these beautiful men is this:
All our lives we wait for perfection to manifest into reality. However, this striving is an endless suffering, as it frames something that cannot be within this world, ever. And yet, despite our chronic dissatisfactions, we can, somedays, and on particularly clear nights, glimpse such a possibility- a perfect house-show, a perfect pair of tiger-print leggings, a perfect coif-bob, and in these moments we learn, though we may never achieve perfection, these dreams are to be as compass headings, to orient us towards greatness. So we drop beats on, bros against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
