Field Recordings: Maybe It's Just the Color Palette (The Ballad of Kahuna Dave)

Less finding yourself, more finding why it feels like part of yourself is somewhere you've never been

You might notice that the URL is now just www.snakesandsparklers.com. I’m trying to make this whole thing a little more legit. With that, I’m going to start organizing posts into “categories” whenever I can. I’ve done some “travel writing” with essays tying into visiting new places (like Nashville, France, Morocco, the PA Turnpike, etc.). I’m categorizing that into a series called “Field Recordings,” which will make more sense in a minute if you keep reading.

Also, before the show starts, I was asked by Shawn and Elliott over at Even Better to be a part of their first “Even Better Asks” series, where they poll a bunch of writers and writer-types like the old AV Club used to do. I felt very fortunate to be asked and to be in great company with writers whose work I enjoy, and it’s a fun read that I won’t spoil here. So do check that out.

Finally, if you’re new here, go ahead and subscribe or tell a friend.

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There’s a guy who works at a surf shop in Alki Beach in Seattle named Kahuna Dave. He only referred to himself as Kahuna Dave, and he did it with as straight of a face as if he was telling me his name was just Regular Dave. And by that I mean Dave. Regular Dave would be a weird name, too. Kahuna Dave might be what’s on his government ID if he has one, like McLovin. Kahuna Dave looks like Ken Burns with gray hair and a puka shell necklace, and is the closest thing to a real version of Paul Rudd in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” that I’ve ever met.

After a little mostly-unsolicited but nonetheless welcome history lesson about Seattle and the Alki Beach area, Kahuna Dave stepped out onto the entryway landing of the second-floor shop overlooking the Puget Sound and all of the people mulling around the waterfront, inhaled deeply, and blew the hell out of a conch shell before formally welcoming me to Seattle with his very loud “Kahuna Welcome.”

Kahuna Dave is a weird guy, yes. But, cynicism aside, when he sounded the conch horn and yelled his welcome to me as some teenagers in the shop gawked and probably hoped to vanish into thin air, I felt the welcome he was trying to convey.

I’ve always had this weird thing with the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know that “connection” would be the right word, because until very recently I had never gone there. “Fascination” or “romanticization” seems closer to the target. 

It’s the whole region, really, but Seattle in particular had the strong pull.

There are plenty of pictures of me as a kid with Seattle Mariners hats/shirts on, as Ken Griffey, Jr., was my first real favorite athlete. A lot of kids in the ‘90s and early 2000’s felt that way about Ken Griffey, Jr. He rocked. He was The Kid. He had the coolest swing. He wore his hat backwards. He had the video games. He, like many of us, spent time playing baseball with his dad, only he did it on a professional level.

The M’s had cool uniforms, too, so that helped. Teal is a really nice color.

As I got older, music strengthened that weird bond with Seattle. Yes, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were part of it, but everyone liked them – it’s not unique, despite how many people want to say that they have a special connection to Kurt Cobain that others don’t.

One of the first bands that made me feel “special” in that I was one of the only people I knew (at the time) who listened to them was Minus the Bear.

My friends and I were extraordinarily tight in middle and high school. We still are, but we were then, too. (Not to mention we all lived in the same time zone). We were damn near inseparable, and our interests overlapped for the most part. But we each had things that set us apart. One of mine was that in my teens I found that particular flavor of indie rock and got totally swept in by Minus the Bear. My friends never really got them, so they were sort of “mine.”

The first time I visited Philadelphia, the city I now have called home for 14 years, beyond going to a Phillies game or field trip, I remember being 17, standing in 30th Street Station with my big, stupid, blue Skullcandy over-ear headphones listening to “Michio’s Death Drive,” imagining myself to be much more stylish than I really was in an Old Navy sweatshirt and Pac Sun jeans, ready to try to assimilate to the trendy culture of Philadelphia as a college freshman.

Minus the Bear is from Seattle. Many of their songs make references to the city and the landscape, painting these vivid pictures of this city surrounded by all of this water and all of these evergreen trees, this intermingling of the city and the wild that felt foreign to me as an East Coaster.

If we go outside

We can take in a haze of

Roche Harbor light

And drink a bottle of red wine

Forgetting to tell time

Sounds nice, right?

I don’t even really care about boats (or wine). I like the beach. I don’t like rain. I like the woods, but I’m not a rugged outdoorsman. I don’t like Starbucks. I like flannel shirts. 

So I really don’t know why I wanted to go there so badly, what fascinated me so much about this place, what placed it at the top of my to-do list in the continental U.S., but I needed to go. It’s just been one of those things I connected to and forgot to unhook from.

And finally a work trip lined up that I could.

With a pitstop (aka work event) just across the Washington state line in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, I finagled that obligation into a Seattle trip to get to the bottom of why I wanted to be there so badly.

When Michele asked what I wanted to do in particular in Seattle, I couldn’t say. The closest I could get was just saying that I wanted to be there. In short, I just kind of wanted to take in the vibe and it would sort itself out from there, at least I hoped.

And it did, to a certain extent. Upon getting into Coeur d’Alene, the landscape full of trees, hills, water, and alternating gray and blue skies felt like I hoped it would – which is to say, nice but in a way that I still couldn’t pinpoint.

When I actually got to Seattle, it was dark out. The skyline was impressive, but it didn’t have that “I’m here” feeling yet. I got it a bit the next morning waking up in my surprisingly sunny Airbnb, walking to get coffee through the tree-lined streets full of weird old Volkswagens, spotting the Needle peeking over the crest of the hill, and driving into the woods together hike.

While I think it’s fine to form a connection with a place just because, I started thinking more consciously about what it was about this place that drew me in, and worried a little that I’d end up with something like a Paris Syndrome if it didn’t live up to my own amorphous hype. I walked and drove around town with songs in my head from bands from the area, and while I tried my best to get to the bottom of why it felt good and made me happy, I didn’t have a good answer beyond “I just like it.”

Honestly, the best answer I have is that maybe I really like blue, green and gray as a color scheme.

That might be it.

Maybe that’s what drew me to the Mariners, and I liked the idea of a whole landscape and city matching that. Plus, Seattle’s far, so it felt more mysterious.

And people spend a lot of money to make their houses smell like wet evergreen trees.

In Coeur d’Alene, a stray patch of sun gave me an excuse to go for a run around the lake and into the woods and take in that color palette in real life, and that felt good enough in the moment.

Ever since I got sick, and then eventually better, I’ve had moments I can describe as “Damn, it rocks to be alive” moments. We all have them. I’m not here to claim ownership over gratitude and appreciating the present. But, for me personally, those feelings after getting a pretty serious illness hit differently than they did when I wasn’t as aware of the stakes.

The runs also hit different. That’s bad wording. I don’t mean diarrhea. Although, after a bout of colorectal cancer, radiation treatment, and invasive surgery, the runs do hit different than they did pre-cancer. But I mean physically running.

When the pandemic hit, running was all I had. I’d go to bed looking forward to my run the next morning with my destination in mind, slowly going for longer runs, faster times, and doing it at a time where I needed a reminder that I lived in a city larger than the one-bedroom apartment I was holed up in. I got real running shoes and realized shin splints weren’t just an inevitability of running. I got better shorts and shirts and hats and all of the other accessories that tricked my brain and body into feeling like I could run better.

And then running got difficult for a while. Then I didn’t do it at all for a while. We all know that story.

(You can yada-yada cancer, and I am doing just that.)

Then I got better and started up again.

I like running on these work trips when I can. Usually they’re in the early mornings when jetlag gives me a few extra hours before I have to start work. Being corny as hell, one of my favorite things to do is listen to bands from the area that I’m running in.

The Killers in Vegas. Jimmy Eat World in Phoenix. Green Day/Rancid in the Bay Area. 

And, of course, in Nashville I listened to their finest musical export, Diarrhea Planet.

Built to Spill is from Idaho. But, just a few hours into being in the area, with unexpected sunlight reflecting off the lake and turning up the saturation on the pines in late afternoon golden hour, I knew what I wanted to listen to for my run. I threw on “Highly Refined Pirates” – the first Minus the Bear full length – flipped on Strava, and practically grinned the whole way through the first mile or so, just overjoyed by the scenery that I’d wanted to see in person for so long – again, not sure why entirely – listening to one of the bands that created this mythology of the region for me, and, really, just happy to be there.

All of these lyrics about driving around the lake or drinking on yachts just felt so on the nose for the moment, even though I wasn’t even in Seattle yet. Toward the end of the run, though, with the sun setting, legs burning in the best way, I changed the music to the new Restorations album.

Restorations had accidentally made what I consider to be the best pandemic song – that is, the song that I listened to the most during the lockdown and resonated the hardest with. 

“Tiny Prayers” perfectly articulated the shut-in anxiety of the pandemic years before it actually happened. Many songs have come out of the pandemic, but none were there in the moment like this. It’s like they called it.

Tiny prayers to the coffee cups scattered all across my house 

My only measure of time

I don’t know what I expected from a new Restorations album. They’re a band that’s been around for long enough that returns can diminish. This isn’t a slam on them. It’s just a simple fact that consistently great output is almost unheard of in any artistic medium. Burn out vs. fade away, etc.

The latest Restorations album rocks, though. It’s so good. It amped me up on a level where I was ready to declare it possibly their best, which I tend to do when I’m relieved that a band I love put out a good late-stage record. I texted my friend when the new Gaslight Anthem album came out last year and said it was their best since “The ‘59 Sound,” and was promptly reminded that “Handwritten” exists and is, in fact, better.

While a lot of Restorations songs sonically centered around ideas like “get loud” and “shred,” the opening song on the new album, “Field Recordings,” has an almost hypnotic steadiness to it all, rarely truly raising its voice. Its minimal chorus repeating:

We’re still making sense of the year 

That it all disappeared

I’ll spend the rest of my life making sense of one very specific year of my life. I think a lot about where I am now versus then, where I’d be if some things didn’t line up the way they did. Strangely enough, I think about how I don’t know if I’d change anything, given the fact that I like who I am and the perspective I have on things as a result of that year. Selfishly, it provided some good writing inspiration that has 100% boosted my career and I won’t pretend that it didn’t. And I hope more than anything it was the worst year of my life, because if it was, then the rest is gravy. In that case, I absolutely wouldn’t change anything.

Running toward the sun setting over hills covered by pine trees, reflecting off the impossibly blue water, immersed in a landscape I’d always dreamed of but never knew why, running more miles than I thought I was going to because I got a little lost, I sped up. I smiled. I had one of those “Holy shit, being alive is incredible moments” as the lines of the “Field Recordings” outro repeated.

Hey – Did you give it all away?

No, not me

No, me neither

I won’t pretend to know what Restorations vocalist Jon Loudon is truly singing about here. But in the moment, much like I needed him to be singing about being trapped at home during the pandemic, I needed him to remind me of the years that things disappeared for me (like my rectum, heh), and the fact that we (I) didn’t give it all away, and I was still here, able to cross the country and do the things I wanted to do. And I don’t mean just died, but even emotionally retreated or gave up on aspects of life that made/make me happy.

Yada yada, Cancer Boy grateful to be alive, etc., appeals for easy emotional points. More at 11.

But I thought about how it took a band from the city that I now call home and knew so well to root me in that moment where I was so far from home and looking for meaning. Philly once had so many things that I didn’t even have a chance to mythologize and romanticize yet because I didn’t know they were there waiting for me yet. It was like when you visit a new country and start to think about living there, but after a few days all you want is a cheeseburger or a really good slice of pizza from back home.

This desire to experience something is stuck in you so deeply, and when you do, the thing that makes it perfect is something from home.

After a little less than a week in Seattle, I still don’t know why I wanted to go there. Truthfully, for maybe the first day or two, I wasn’t sure that I was having fun. I put so much pressure on myself to make sure that it lived up to the expectations that I built up that I spent a lot of time on my phone looking for the next thing to do, zooming in on maps and googling “Best X in [neighborhood],” rather than fully enjoying what I was currently doing. I was so afraid of a metaphorical awkward silence or lull that I wasn’t listening to what was actually going on. I had just watched “Frances Ha” days prior, and was afraid of bumming around and trying to go see “Puss in Boots” in the theater instead of enjoying my short time in a cool place.

Eventually, the day in Alki is what tipped the scales in contentment’s favor. I won’t say that it was Kahuna Dave’s little show, although maybe it was silly enough to sort of snap me out of it. More likely it might’ve been just sitting in a chair drinking an OK beer watching waves, boats, birds and people drift by, just like I’ve done a million times on the East Coast, that reminded me that I was on vacation and able to relax a little, and enjoy the white caps of the Olympic Mountains overlooking the deep blue of the Puget Sound and greens of all of the islands in front of me.

I think in hindsight I was less going to Seattle to find myself there, but to find why part of myself felt like it was there and needed to be found.

And, like how a band from Seattle set the soundtrack for me finding myself in the city I now live in and take for granted, it’s funny that a band from that place cemented a profound moment so far away, where all I wanted to do was immerse myself in the there of it all. It made me think about the lyric from (Seattle’s) Death Cab that I’ve referenced in a past essay, about feeling like a tourist in the city you grew up in.

I wrote that essay about Harrisburg, and how the place that at one time I knew better than anywhere suddenly felt foreign. But maybe the new connection to that line that I can draw is to return to Philadelphia, the place I now know better than anywhere, and look at it with the energy I had brought to Seattle, the energy I had that day in the train station – recognizing that something was there for me, but I didn’t know what yet. But I’d get there eventually. A positive spin on feeling like a stranger in a familiar place.

Obviously, I found it, since I’m still here in Philly. And I think it’s pretty cool that there’s more to find, or maybe relate to the things that I’ve already found before.

The night I left, I sort of mentally contextualized myself on the map, reminding myself where I was in space. It’s cool to remember and appreciate where you are on the landmass, at least I think so. I took a last look at those mountains over the water to the West, lit up in the pink sunset, romantic like so many of those song lyrics I committed to memory.

And I felt something resembling accomplishment. Maybe even closure. I was at least exhausted from all the walking and hiking.

But man, maybe I do just like nice color schemes.

Thank goodness Philly’s skyline is blue and that it’s been raining nonstop since I got home.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Sweet Pill.