Shatterbox Redux

I saw them back in the early ’90s in a small club called Shane’s Basement. Nobody had heard of them yet, and the cover charge was only four bucks. They were a college band—six nouveau-hippies wearing tie-dyes and hemp, jamming in fast but mellow grooves. They’d yet to release their debut album with their one hit song “Find My Way Out” on it, and the crowd at the show seemed small even for a Tuesday. A few friends talked me in to heading down to Shane’s that night, so of course drugs were involved, and lots of booze. By the time Shatterbox took the stage at 11 o’clock, my brain swam in a syrupy lake. I don’t recall conversations, dancing, women I flirted with, or much of the music. What stands out to me is how I wandered around the club, stopping to stare at blacklight posters like beacons or for-madmen-only doors before finally making it up toward the stage and standing mesmerized before the six-foot-tall Polynesian bass player as he went off on amazing funky, jazzy runs. Those chops bounced around in my head like rubber balls while the guitar riffs, wailing vocals, and sultry purrs from the backup singers faded into the background.I dreamt about those bass lines.

In years to come, especially after the band’s eponymous first album broke, I regretted not being all there for the show, not getting to hear the music as more than filler for the soundtrack to another empty party. I bought the album, loved it—cherished it, really—as if it were something holy: a grail full of good feelings and melodies rather than some god’s blood. The CD spun on my stereo through all my states of wakefulness and intoxication for years before I wore it out with scratches and nicks but never got around to buying a replacement.

I always wanted to see Shatterbox again, but the band broke up in the late ’90s. It was too late. I didn’t figure the group had enough popularity for its six-member crew to reunite. Their drive had been lost, smudged like thumbprints on a cracked jewel case.

So, I moved on to other bands with which I felt less of a connection. I took a job as a paralegal at a firm so large most of the lawyers I worked for didn’t know my name. I woke, I worked, I drank, I slept—rarely thinking of Shatterbox except when an earworm of melody slipped into my subconscious and played itself out. Never bothered to check the internet for news, so it shocked me when I heard the whole band had reunited for some sort of benefit show.

I’d just begun dating Julie Walls when the new Shatterbox album Sunrise of Happiness appeared one day at the local indie store. I bought the CD after a frantic rush to the checkout counter. As soon as I made it back to my car, I stuck the disc in and listened. It filled my ears with cluster bombs of folk, funk, jazz, and rock. The rhythms put me front-row/center at a symphony of thunderstorms. It felt so easy to lose myself in the guitar riffs. And the songs as a whole ... I related to them as if they were all written for me at that exact moment in my life, as if each were about my feelings for Julie.

New relationships bring with them senses of vibrance and urgency, pulling everything around them into their maelstrom. They make a familiar sidewalk route seem like a highway through far-off lands. You see a dandelion, and it becomes an orchid, electric-blue. A crow cackling overhead transforms itself, replaced by an eagle. Obnoxious city sounds that normally grate on you now chant little sonnets, little prayers. It’s possible even for the foul odor of sun- baked tarmac to settle in the mind as if a fond memory of a passing whiff of perfume. In that way, my early affection for Julie turned the otherwise so-so Sunrise of Happiness into a magnificent tribute for her. The songs were about hands and tears and connections, all of which I felt as if these were my words expressing my emotions. The album even had a weird ditty about a cosplaying couple, and though we’d never done anything of the sort, suddenly Julie and I were those comic-book heroes in our kitschy underwear.

Julie had that effect on me. The way she opened up and told me the most intimate details of her life from the salacious to the horrifying, the way she cried so freely on my shoulder until her damp dyed-red hair stuck to my baggy overshirt, the way she laughed as though none of it mattered and she hadn’t hurt or been hurt once—I wanted the songs to be about her, for her, and from me. I needed to offer them to her. I hoped Sunrise of Happiness would be our album, the songs our songs, and Shatterbox our band. It could’ve been something shared between us in the way only people in love can share things. But she never took to the band or its songs. She never asked me to play them for her when we travelled, or when we were intimate. If she’d had a few cocktails or puffs off a joint, she might bop her head to the music if I worked up the energy to play it on her stereo, and once we even danced to a couple songs in her living room. Yet she didn’t love those tunes in the way I loved them. Julie didn’t develop an attachment to Shatterbox. If she weren’t dating me, I doubt she would’ve heard of the group at all. She referred to Shatterbox as my “hipster jam band.”

Once, on the Sunrise of Happiness tour, the group played a club gig in Columbus, about three hours away. The tickets were thirty bucks each, which still seemed reasonable to me, and by now I felt a sort of spiritual pull to go to a show—mostly sober, I hoped.

“That hipster jam band you like?” Julie said when I suggested it.

“My favorite group,” I said.

“The one with the song in that giant-spider movie?”

I knew what she meant. “Scorpions,” I said. “Giant scorpions.”

“And all those truck commercials?”

“Can’t fault them for earning a few bucks.”

Julie shrugged, the red of her long hair almost hiding the gesture. “It’s not for me.”

“Oh,” I sighed.

“But you should go.”

“I should?”

“Definitely. You should go.”

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t go. I also didn’t go a few months later when Shatterbox passed through Cincinnati, or Louisville the following week. Not long after that, the band broke up a second time.

Likewise, Julie and I parted ways a couple years later over what I can only describe as creative differences. The split burned in me like a flaming arrowhead. I wondered if things would’ve been different if we’d gone to those shows, if she felt the songs between us the same way I did. Or maybe we’d still be together if I hadn’t been so attached to Shatterbox. Could I have saved our relationship if I’d tried to love those rebirth-of-pop-metal bands that were so dear to her? Did she detect the intricacies of our passion in their hard-edged thrumming and Robert Plant-style vocals? Did our bond necessitate one of us giving in to the other’s taste in music? Hard to say, but I still wonder about it.

Time passed, turning into years, during which three members of Shatterbox reformed the group, filling the other three spots with younger talent. They put out a couple flimsy though listenable albums, but by then their sound caused me sorrow. I tried to like the songs, buying electronic copies and playing the mp3s on my iPod. They stirred in me only a sense of the meaninglessness of existence—mine and the band’s. I didn’t have Julie to share those albums with or to find a thread I could stitch to her from them.

I missed many shows amidst this period of mourning. I tried downloading a few concerts off Live Music Archive on the web, but it wasn’t the same. I’d skipped my chances to see them when seeing them mattered, to hear them perform when it could’ve built statues from memories. It was as if the band’s songs were nothing to me now but country- western twangers about beer, stolen dogs, and other symptoms of a damaged heart.

Yet here I am, standing up front in my tie-dyed Shatterbox tee shirt, waiting for the group to take the stage. They’re playing my hometown hotspot: The Airy Bottle, a throwback bar for touring has-beens. They’ve come here. How can I refuse them this one time?

The performers are older now—grizzlier, wearied, heavier—as am I. I’m not sure which members are still in the band, or if the new members can match the fervor of the old. The six of them will play their songs, though, and I’ll listen. I have to, even if it’s a nostalgia trip through a past I’ve imagined more than lived.

The crowd continues to grow under the dim club lighting. The overhead speakers are blasting “Friend of the Devil.” Conversations buzz and whir all around me, nothing but white noise and nonsense words.

Won’t be long now. A song’s popped up in my head. It’s swelling, drowning out everything else. It’s crisp and clear and studio-perfect. When I hear the real version, all fuzzy and live, maybe I’ll weep, sigh, laugh, applaud. Or maybe I’ll transcend, my being focused to a point of light. Music can do that: convert mass to energy. I hope it does. I want to tremble with delight, to rage and explode. One time, I want to feel the music’s thunderclap and lightning zap and burn in my old, lethargic feet until they move.

Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry, including Misadventure, Ultra Deep Field, and The Prisoners, plus two novels: States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Bellingham Review, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.