Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Being Early to Shows

Note: Getting to shows early, I realized, isn’t really about beating the crowd but about entering the space before it hardens into an event—when the room is still provisional, the bartender relaxed, the band half-mythical figures moving casually through soundcheck, and the whole night feels less like a performance and more like something forming in real time; you notice the lighting before it matters, the empty floor that will later surge, the stray conversations, the merch table still untouched, and sometimes—if you’re lucky—the musicians themselves, unguarded and human, which subtly rewires the experience so that when the set finally begins you’re not just watching a show but inhabiting a continuum that started hours earlier, a private prelude that rewards patience, sharpens memory, and turns what could have been just another concert into a small, self-contained narrative of anticipation, proximity, and the quiet pleasure of being there before everything becomes official.

Epigraph
“There’s a thin line between a guy with a backstage pass /
and a guy walking around with his gut hanging out like a jackass.”
— Sun Kil Moon, “Ben’s My Friend”

I’ve always been fascinated by the green room. First of all, why green? They can’t all be green. Second, there’s the whole rider situation. The rider is where things get really interesting. I think it was Van Halen who had in their rider that all the brown M&Ms had to be removed from a bowl. This sounds totally bizarre, but the point was attention to detail. If the venue screws up the M&Ms, they might screw up something much more important, like stage rigging or pyrotechnics. The M&Ms were just a test.

Other riders go in different directions. Iggy Pop reportedly asked for things like a Bob Hope impersonator and other surreal odds and ends, more like performance art than hospitality. Meanwhile Beyoncé is famous for highly controlled riders: temperature, lighting, water, environment, everything calibrated. One approach is chaos, the other total control. Both happen in the green room, which most of us never see.

My first concert was Dire Straits in Pullman, Washington, in a big arena. I was nowhere near the green room, of course. Most of us aren’t. So the real question becomes: what happens before the show, if you’re not backstage?

One answer came when I saw They Might Be Giants in Spokane with my friend Kelly Rudd. Kelly told me his cousin was in the opening band. They got paid twenty bucks for the show. The whole band. Twenty dollars. Totally unbelievable. Outta fucking control. TMBG were already a pretty big indie band, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” had been a hit, and I liked “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” quite a bit. But after hearing that story I never quite looked at them the same way. The green room fantasy took a hit. Backstage wasn’t glamorous. It was twenty bucks and a handshake.

Another time I went to see Cat Power at the old Club Quattro in Osaka. I got there early, of course, and there was an opener dressed like a fairy with fuzzy, messed-up hair who sat down at the piano and proceeded to play dirge after dirge for what felt like an hour. Solo piano can be great, but this was brutal. I honestly thought I might have to cap myself. At some point I checked my ticket just to make sure this wasn’t actually Chan Marshall. It wasn’t. Thank god.

Then Chan came on and instead of playing from the stage like other artists do, she wandered through the crowd with a wireless mic, half-rapping, half-singing, talking, improvising. It wasn’t really a concert. It was more like some kind of performance art happening. Totally outta control. If I’d come late I would have missed the whole bizarre prelude. Being early meant enduring the dirges but also getting the full weirdness of the night.

Another early-arriver adventure came when I saw Deerhunter at the Hostess Club Weekender. These shows started early and stacked openers all day long. I once saw Mogwai at one of these and had to leave after fifteen minutes because I was hungry, tired, faded, and they were boring the living shit out of me. It happens.

The Deerhunter show in Osaka was even more outta control. The headliner was scheduled for 7 PM, but there were something like six openers. One of them was Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD, a legendary figure, but he droned on so long that by the time Deerhunter came on they only had about forty minutes. Bradford Cox introduced him with dripping sarcasm, emphasizing “LABEL BOSS,” clearly taking the piss because the band’s time had been cut. I ended up having to see them again months later in Nagoya to get the full set. That’s the risk of being early: sometimes the openers eat the show.

The flip side came when I saw The Hold Steady at the Brooklyn Bowl in December 2018. I arrived two hours early, ate a hamburger, and smoked up outside. That’s where I met Austin, a total Steadyhead. He knew everything: lineups, labels, deep cuts, all of it. We talked music, smoked, and waited. When doors opened we grabbed territory near the stage with the other early-arrivers, a semi-cliquey group of diehards.

Later, when Austin wanted to get back to the front for the encore, he told me to follow him. He moved through the crowd at a half jog and the people parted in front of him like he was Barry Sanders hitting holes. Seconds later we were hugging the stage. I knew then I was in the presence of greatness. I also knew he was my friend. I didn’t get the VIP meet and greet, but getting there early gave me something better.

My one true VIP experience came when I saw The Afghan Whigs in Amsterdam in 2017 at the Paradiso Amsterdam, a beautiful converted church. I arrived three hours early, met Greg Dulli and the band, took photos, bought merch, and watched soundcheck with maybe fifteen people. They played “Going to Town” acoustically, which was a revelation. Later they crushed the full electric set, ending with “Faded.” I paid fifty bucks for that meet and greet and it was completely worth it. Being early paid off directly.

Getting to shows early, then, is not really about the green room at all. The green room is a kind of fantasy—green walls, bowls of M&Ms, riders with impossible demands. Most of us never see it, and even when we do, it turns out to be smaller and more ordinary than imagined. And probably not even green. The real action happens in that strange in-between space before the show: the smoking area, the empty floor, the long wait while the openers drift on and off.

If you arrive early, you get all of it. You get the terrible fairy-piano dirges and the label boss who drones on too long. You get the moment of doubt when you check your ticket and wonder if this could possibly be the headliner. You get the rail territory battles and the cliquey early crew. You get the conversations with strangers who turn into temporary friends, like Austin, who parts the crowd like a halfback and gets you back to the stage in seconds. You get the soundcheck if you’re lucky, the acoustic revelation, the quiet before the storm.

Most of all, you get time. And time at a show is a funny thing. Once the lights go down, everything compresses. The band plays, the songs blur together, and before you know it the encore hits and everyone spills out into the night. But if you were there early, the show feels bigger. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You saw the room empty and then full. You watched the night assemble itself.

So while some people drift in late, grab a drink, and wait for the headliner, I’ve always preferred the long route. Get there early. Kill time. Smoke a cigarette. Talk to whoever’s around. Endure the openers, good or bad. Maybe you meet someone. Maybe you don’t. Maybe the band walks through the room. Maybe nothing happens at all. But every once in a while, if you’re lucky, something does. And that, in the end, is why I like to be early to shows.

Dedication:

For music lovers everywhere. You are my tribe baby.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On My Dad’s Ridiculous Climbing Strategies

Note: This is a new piece about my dad, Ross Thomas (RO), and his truly unbelievable climbing strategies. The central episode took place in Stehekin, Washington, many years ago, when RO led my brothers and me on an attempt to reach Castle Rock that quickly devolved into heat, dense forest, no water, and general mayhem. There is also a later coda involving a climbing gym in Portland that is, in its own way, even more outta control. This piece is comic in nature, but also affectionate. My dad is a great man, a brave man, and a very game climber. He is just not, in this one specific domain, a planner.

Send lawyers, guns and money — the shit has hit the fan
— Warren Zevon, refracted

RO, is a great man and a terrible climbing strategist. He is brave, energetic, physically game, and in most areas of life basically well organized. He was a good high school English teacher, a very good administrator, and for many years an excellent and meticulous girls’ basketball coach. He is not, in other words, some kind of general life-space incompetent. Quite the opposite. Which is what makes his climbing strategies so difficult to understand.

They are ridiculous. They are unbelievable. They are officially, historically, and totally outta control.

I say this with love.

The central case study here took place in the mid-2000s, let’s say 2005, when our family was staying in Stehekin, Washington, out on Lake Chelan. If you have never been to Stehekin, it is a beautiful and slightly improbable place, the kind of place that already feels like the beginning of a story. Lake Chelan is huge, and you get out there by ferry, which means from the jump there is a sense that you are committing to something. People camp there or stay in cabins. We were in a cabin. My mom Claudia (CL), stayed behind. RO, meanwhile, had a plan.

The plan was that RO and his sons — Mike (MI), Pat (PA), and me — would hike up toward Castle Rock.

Now, one thing about family expeditions is that “the plan” is often not really a collective possession. It belongs to one person. The rest of the group is more or less there to follow along. In this case, the plan belonged entirely to RO. MI and PA and I were, broadly speaking, along for the ride.

As I remember it, we started from Stehekin and walked about three miles just to get to the trailhead, then hiked a few more hours uptrail to where we stopped and camped the first night. It was already a decent undertaking just to get there, but this was, in a sense, merely the prelude. The true RO strategy had not yet fully revealed itself.

At around dusk, after we got to camp and set up the tent and got ourselves sorted for dinner, RO decided he was going to scout the route for the next day. This seemed reasonable enough. It is in fact the sort of thing a prudent leader might do. Only instead of scouting further up the trail, or perhaps generally uphill toward the place we were trying to go, RO for some reason headed downriver.

Why did he do this? We did not know. It was back downhill. It seemed unrelated to the objective. Even at the time it had the feel of one of those decisions that makes perfect sense only to the person making it.

Ross Thomas: The trail kind of petered out eventually and didn’t really lead to Castle Rock anyway.

Fair enough. I want RO’s side of the record included here. But even granting this, and I do grant it, going downriver in the late evening did not strike the rest of us as a strong opening move.

Sure enough, RO fell in the river and got completely soaked.

This was the first of many mistakes he would make on the trip.

He came back to camp late and dripping wet, having apparently developed an immediate a bizarre attachment to that river. The water was cold. The evening was cool. He changed clothes, we had dinner, and we went to bed. At this point, there was still some chance that the next day might somehow become normal.

It did not.

The next morning we got up early, had breakfast, and prepared to head out. My assumption — based on reason, precedent, and the literal existence of trails — was that we would continue on the trail. Instead, RO decided that we were going to bushwhack straight uphill through an extremely dense forest in the blazing heat.

This struck me as a bad plan.

It was a bad plan.

The forest was thick enough that you could not really move with any rhythm. We were not hiking so much as negotiating, arguing, and physically contesting with the landscape. Every movement took extra energy. Progress was incredibly slow. The heat was serious. And the main problem, which quickly became the only problem, was that there was no water. Not a stream. Not a trickle. Not a suspicious puddle. Nothing.

Now, RO for reasons that remain mysterious to me is not a big water drinker. He prefers beer and tea. Under ordinary conditions this is merely a personality trait. On a hot uphill bushwhack through dense forest it becomes a strategic liability.

Naturally, we asked where the water was.

Ross Thomas: I had read in a Fred Beckey book that there was a way to get up to Castle Rock, although I think Beckey had only heard about it and never actually done it himself.

This is, in its way, a perfect Ross Thomas detail. Fred Beckey, the legendary climber, had perhaps heard there was some route, though he had not personally taken it. This was enough for RO. A rumor in a book by a famous climber became an operating plan.

As for the water situation, RO told us — and I remember this vividly — that there might be some in about five miles.

Five miles!!!

We were already fighting for our lives up there, and this crazy man was calmly informing us that in only another five miles there might, possibly, perhaps, be water.

He’s totally outta control.

At some point, after what I recall as roughly three miles of this lunacy, we basically mutinied. Or perhaps mutiny is too strong; let’s call it collective realism. We told RO the obvious, which was that this was not going to work. The route was no good. The heat was too much. There was no water. We had to turn back.

And so we did.

Now the descent was interesting because it brought out our distinct styles. RO, MI, and PA were making their way down carefully, gingerly, responsibly. I, on the other hand, was absolutely flying. Swinging from tree to tree like some kind of deranged monkey, just ripping downhill through the forest. This part RO loves to tell to this day, and I admit it was one of my better athletic showings. I was not going to die of thirst in that forest and I was not going to descend politely either.

Eventually we made it back to camp. Or rather, most of us made it back to camp together. RO, in one of those small but meaningful complications that tend to gather around him in climbing situations, got separated from us and somehow ended up down by the river again.

And yes, he fell in again.

He really must have loved that river.

So now here he comes back to camp once more, drenched, and by this point we are all in total agreement that the trip is over. We are done. It is time to 86 the hell out of there.

So we break camp and head down toward the lake shore. But this presents a new problem. We still have a significant walk to get home — something like another two miles down to the shore and then, as I remember it, another three miles around the lake. And by now it is dusk. So this is not really viable either. We are hot, tired, and in no mood for an elegant final act.

At this point RO does what he often does in these situations, which is simply assume that reality will provide.

He found a guy with a motorboat and asked if he would take us back to Stehekin.

The guy said sure. Fifty bucks.

RO then informed him that he did not actually have fifty dollars on him, but could get it from his wife once we got back to the cabin.

Somehow, by what can only be described as grace, audacity, or a temporary breakdown in the boatman’s judgment, this worked. We got in the boat, got home safely, and made it back in time for dinner.

That was Stehekin.

CODA

You might think the lesson here would have been: bring water, stick to trails, do not base wilderness plans on rumor, avoid rivers if possible, and maybe do not lead your sons into dense forests in the hot sun in search of a semi-mythical route described secondhand by Fred Beckey.

You would be mistaken.

Many years later, when RO was Principal of Valley Catholic High School, he got really into climbing at a gym in Portland. It is a cool place, run by a father and son, and it has beginner, intermediate, and advanced climbs. He took me and MI and PA there, and later my son Hugh as well. Hugh loved it. He scampered up the walls like he had been waiting for exactly this sort of thing his whole life. I like climbing too, though my arms get tired pretty quickly and I tend to fade. MI and PA are both good climbers. RO, to his credit, also has strong stamina.

So one day my wife and Hugh and I were there with him. We’d been climbing for a few hours. I was on the mats, faded, taking a break. Hugh was still going. RO was showing him some moves. Then RO started up one of the big walls — one of the long climbs, the kind where you need the harness.

Only he had forgotten to put the harness on.

Hugh saw this before anyone else did and yelled out:

RO, get down now!

And RO did.

For the next year, RO loved telling the story of how Hugh had saved his life. Quite right too. It is a great story. My son saved my dad from one of my dad’s own ridiculous climbing strategies. The circle was complete.

But then, about a year later, shortly before RO retired from the principal job in 2018, he was back at the gym by himself. This time the only other people there were the owner and his son. And somehow — incredibly, impossibly, yet also in a way entirely consistently with the established Ross Thomas climbing tradition — he forgot the harness again, started up the big wall, and fell.

He crashed all the way down onto the mat.

The mat saved his life, no question. But his feet and knees and legs got absolutely busted up. He was in a wheelchair for months. It was so bad that he had to move temporarily out of the country house in the woods where he lives with CL and into a little bungalow on the Valley Catholic campus owned by the nuns that founded and still run the school. He could barely work. To this day his feet remain a total mess. He has trouble driving and has to drive with his shoes off and wearing some sort of thick sock or something.

At one point we wondered whether he might sue the gym owner for negligence. But RO wanted no part of that. He said it was his own fault, not the owner’s.

Fair enough.

And then, after many months, he mostly recovered. Which means this story has, if not exactly a happy ending, at least a decent one. Better still, as soon as he was recovered he went right back to the gym and started climbing again!

This is what I mean.

His climbing strategies are ridiculous. They are unbelievable. They are officially, historically, and totally outta control. He does not plan for basic things such as the route, the water, or how exactly one might avoid miles of dense forest. He does not always remember the harness. He seems, in climbing situations, to operate according to a distinct internal logic unavailable to the rest of us.

And yet outside of climbing, this makes almost no sense. He is, as I said, a basically well-organized guy. He planned lessons. He coached meticulously. He ran a school. In most areas of life he is not slapdash at all. Which makes the climbing thing not just reckless but anomalous. It is a localized mystery. A glitch in an otherwise coherent system. I do not understand it and at this point I do not expect to.

What I do know is this: to this day I avoid climbing with him because in this one particular area I do not trust his judgment at all.

I love the man. But when it comes to climbing, he is not to be trusted.

Dedication:

For my dad. I love you baby but you are totally outta control.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On it, Pete

Note: Some stories get better in the telling. This one doesn’t need to. It arrives fully formed—one line, perfectly placed—and has stayed that way ever since. I’ve told it for years and it still lands exactly the same. No embellishment required.

It’s September, 1989.

Two new teachers had just arrived at St. George’s School in Spokane, WA. These are Paul Hogan and Pete Aiken. Paul would go on to have a long and distinguished career, eventually becoming Principal of Jesuit High School in Portland—a major job, the kind that makes a life. I have no idea where Pete is today.

That night, my dad Ross invited them over to the house for dinner. It was one of those late-summer evenings that still carried a little warmth but hinted at the coming turn. Ross was out back at the grill, working over the barbecue with a beer in hand. The adults clustered nearby, talking, drinking, getting to know the new arrivals. There was that particular tone of adult conversation—half-professional, half-social, everyone just slightly aware of roles and impressions.

Out in the yard, it was just the three of us: Pat, Mike, and me. We were playing catch with a tennis ball. Nothing serious. Just throwing it around, loose, casual, the way kids do when the game isn’t really the point. At some point, either Mike or I made a bad throw. It sailed wide of Pat—too far, too high—and rolled past him.

A completely ordinary moment. The kind of thing that happens a hundred times in a backyard, in a summer, in a childhood.

Pat was six. He didn’t chase the ball. He didn’t complain. He didn’t turn to us. Instead, he turned—calmly, deliberately—and looked over at Pete Aiken, one of the brand-new teachers, a guest in our home, a man he had just met. And in a tone of quiet assurance, as if assigning responsibility in a meeting, he just said:

“On it, Pete.”

That was it. No smile. No wink. No awareness of what had just happened. The ball was recovered. The game went on. The adults kept talking. The evening continued. But something had shifted, just slightly, just enough.

Because in that moment, a six-year-old child had somehow crossed the boundary between worlds—between kids and adults, between play and work—and issued a line that did not belong to him, but fit him perfectly.

I don’t remember what happened next. I only remember that line. And I remember that we have been laughing about it ever since.

The On It Pete Blues (Pete’s POV)

I was new to the city, new shirt, new street,

Standing in a backyard trying hard to be discreet,

Ross on the grill and the talk running deep,

Just another first night—then I heard, “On it, Pete.”

I hadn’t been briefed, hadn’t learned the terrain,

Didn’t know the house or the shape of the game,

Just a beer in my hand, trying not to overreach,

Then a six-year-old turned and delegated to Pete.

Now I’ve worked in schools, I’ve handled my share,

Rooms full of noise, moments needing repair,

But nothing quite like that clean little feat—

Being calmly assigned by a kid in bare feet.

No panic, no pause, no doubt in his beat,

Just a glance and a nod—“On it, Pete.”

And the ball got found, and the night rolled on,

But I knew right then something strange had gone on—

In a yard full of voices, one line cut through the heat:

I wasn’t just visiting.

I was on it.

Pete.

Dedication:

For my brother Pat. And for Pete. Just get on it already baby.

Note: If you liked this story you may also like the stories below, which also cover my time at St. George’s High School.

Scenes from St. George’s, Part I: Erosions, First Love, Headmasters
Scenes from St. George’s VII: Senior Year II and Coda (with cameos by Bill Gates, Soft-Water, and Twin Peaks)
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Theory of Condensation

Note: This story is drawn from memory and from an ongoing oral history conducted via group text with the surviving members of the expedition. As with many events that took place more than thirty years ago, certain details remain contested, most notably the identity of the fourth passenger and the exact geographic location of the cigar-ash pasta incident. Mason Anderson, when consulted, quickly clarified that he was not present, as he was living with an uncle in Key West that summer, thereby removing himself entirely from responsibility for the expedition.

Kelly, whose scientific theory regarding condensation remains central to the story, has not yet submitted his official rebuttal, though one is expected shortly. Should further testimony arrive—especially if it sheds light on the fate of the firearm hidden somewhere near the California border—I will append a brief postscript.

In the meantime, the above account represents the best reconstruction available.

Epigraph:

Bullshit baffles brains. 

We graduated from St. George’s in June of 1992 and, like many newly minted high-school graduates, we had what we considered a very solid plan. We were going to drive from Spokane into the Selkirk Mountains in Idaho and spend several days trekking around in the wilderness like the rugged outdoorsmen we assumed we were.

The crew consisted of myself, Kelly, and Richard Barkley, along with a fourth member whose identity I am currently attempting to reconstruct through the miracles of modern group text. Mason Anderson, when contacted for this oral history, quickly clarified that he had nothing to do with the expedition whatsoever, as he was living with an uncle in Key West that summer and therefore cannot be blamed for any of the events that followed.

I had just gotten my driver’s license—rather late by American teenage standards—and was eager to demonstrate that I was now a fully functioning member of the motoring public. Richard had the car, Kelly had the confidence, and somewhere along the way we acquired a gun which I believe belonged to Will Rafferty, a year behind us at school.

Right away you may notice that this was not shaping up to be the most carefully planned expedition in the annals of Pacific Northwest mountaineering.

The Tarp

One of the first disagreements arose over equipment. I had suggested, quite reasonably I thought, that we bring a tent. Kelly rejected this idea outright.

A tarp, he assured us, would suffice.

Now, the Selkirks are a beautiful range, but they are not known for their gentle weather. Sure enough, as soon as we reached the foothills it began to rain. Not a polite drizzle either, but the kind of steady mountain rain that makes you realize nature has the upper hand.

Nevertheless we pressed on and eventually found a place to bivouac for the night.

We rigged Kelly’s tarp as best we could, laid out the sleeping bags, and attempted to cook something on the camp stove while water ran in small rivers through the campsite. At a certain point, after watching the tarp sag ominously under the weight of the rain, I reached what seemed to me the obvious conclusion.

“Dudes,” I said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m sleeping in the car.”

Kelly immediately objected. What followed was one of the great scientific claims of our generation.

“That’s a bad idea,” he said. “You’ll get more wet in the car because of the condensation.”

Now I’m no meteorologist, but even at eighteen this struck me as extremely unlikely. Outside the rain was falling steadily. Inside the car was, well, a car.

Nevertheless Kelly was confident in his theory. I was confident in my skepticism. We agreed to disagree.

Kelly, Richard, and at least one other member of the expedition slept under the tarp. I reclined the passenger seat of the car and slept quite comfortably.

In the morning, everything under the tarp was soaked.

To this day Kelly maintains that the condensation principle was sound.

The Pasta

Having discovered that trekking in the Selkirks during a mountain downpour was not especially enjoyable, we decided to improvise. The road trip continued deeper into Idaho, or perhaps Montana, where we eventually stopped beside a river to camp for the night.

This time tents were involved, which was already a step forward.

Kelly assumed responsibility for dinner and set about cooking pasta on the camp stove. Things seemed to be going well until he produced a cigar, lit it, and began tapping the ash—quite generously, I might add—into the simmering red sauce.

I objected immediately.

“Knock it off,” I said.

Kelly waved away my concerns.

“No, no,” he said. “Italian guy Joe does this. He says it’s the secret to a great sauce.”

I have never met Italian guy Joe, but I remain confident that he does not exist.

Kelly continued tapping ash into the pot. At that point I made the executive decision not to eat the pasta.

Kelly and I, despite being great friends, were at philosophical loggerheads for the first two days of the trip.

The Gun

At some point we decided to drive into California. This raised a new issue, namely that we were traveling with a gun.

I had been against the gun from the start. Kelly, however, had insisted that it was necessary. Necessary for what exactly was never entirely clear, but the gun had come along anyway.

Approaching the California border, we held a brief council and concluded that crossing state lines with a borrowed firearm might not be the wisest course of action.

The solution we arrived at was simple.

We would hide the gun in some bushes and retrieve it on the way back.

I pointed out that once a gun was hidden in random roadside bushes somewhere near the California border, the odds of ever finding it again were approximately zero.

Kelly disagreed.

We hid the gun.

We crossed into California without incident.

Later, as it turned out, we headed east anyway and never went back for it. Somewhere in a patch of roadside shrubbery, the gun presumably remains to this day.

Wyoming

Eventually the road carried us into Wyoming. We drove up onto a plateau above a large spread owned by the Mann family, who were something like Spokane and St. George’s royalty. My family and the Innes family had visited the place in previous summers to fish and wander around.

We had no invitation.

For a moment there was some discussion of whether we might simply camp there anyway, but cooler heads prevailed. As we were debating the matter, a caretaker appeared and asked what we were doing.

We explained that we were friends of the Manns and asked if it would be alright if we camped for the night.

He was entirely copacetic.

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

And just like that, after tarp disasters, pasta controversies, and the abandonment of a firearm somewhere in California shrubbery, we finally spent a perfectly pleasant night camping.

The Drive Home

The next day we drove back to Spokane, which I remember as being about fourteen hours straight.

It was Richard’s car. He asked me at one point if I wanted to take the wheel for a while, but I had only recently gotten my license and didn’t feel especially confident about highway driving yet. I declined and slept in the back seat while Richard drove most of the way and Kelly took a few turns.

Eventually we rolled back into Spokane.

We had not trekked the Selkirk Mountains.

We had lost a gun somewhere near California.

And we had proven absolutely nothing about condensation.

But we did come home with stories for life

Dedication:

For legal professionals everywhere.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Shotgun in Seth’s Ford Explorer

Note: This piece takes place in Spokane, Washington in the fall of 1991, during our senior year at St. George’s School. CDs were still a relatively new luxury item for teenagers, Zip’s runs counted as real excursions across town, and a hunter green Explorer in the school parking lot could serve as the center of an entire small social world.

Epigraph:

Out with the posse on a night run
Girls on the corner, so let’s have some fun
Donald asked one if she was game
Back Alley Sally was her name
She moved on the car and moved fast
On the window pressed her ass
All at once we heard a crash
Donald’s dick had broke the glass

Ice T

Seth drove a green Ford Explorer, which meant two things: he was always the driver, and John Innes almost always called shotgun.

Ours was a class of twenty-eight boys at St. George’s School, which meant the social landscape was less a battlefield than a small archipelago of cliques. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone more or less supported everyone else. Still, there were natural groupings. Seth, Innes, and I spent a good deal of time together, with Kelly sometimes orbiting the car and Richard Barkley frequently around as well.

The Explorer usually lived in the SGS parking lot behind the lower school. During the day it sat there waiting for the moment seniors could leave campus, which we could do whenever we wanted. When that moment came, Seth’s Jeep became a kind of small republic on wheels.

There were rules, or something close to rules. Seth drove. Innes called shotgun. He cared about it the most and therefore usually got it. Occasionally Barkley or I would challenge him, which would inevitably produce an argument about whether the call had been made properly or whether the timing had been unfair. The exact legal framework of shotgun was never fully settled, but the outcomes were usually predictable.

Inside the Explorer there were CDs everywhere. Not in a messy way—Seth kept the car pretty well—but there were dozens of them, probably stored in one of those large CD wallets that seemed to exist in every car in the early nineties. Seth would sometimes come back from Hastings with six or eight discs at a time. I remember watching those purchases with something close to disbelief. I could rarely afford a CD myself, so when I did manage to acquire something like Tindersticks or Billy Bragg’s Spy vs. Spy, it was a very big deal.

The music rotation in the Explorer was remarkably tolerant. Seth tended to favor Judas Priest and Metallica, while Innes leaned toward Ice-T. Joe Tyllia loved Cat Stevens and so Cat Stevens appeared frequently. I personally preferred Dire Straits at the time, which never quite made the regular rotation, so I generally waited for Warren Zevon or Cat Stevens to come back around. Nobody vetoed anyone else’s music. Whatever disc was in play generally stayed there.

The Explorer had a few regular destinations. State B basketball games were one. Another was Zip’s on the north side of town. Seniors could leave campus whenever they liked, and sometimes that meant simply deciding that a run across Spokane for burgers was necessary. Seth’s house was another stop, as was Hastings, where the CD acquisitions occurred.

Occasionally the driving extended further into the South Hill at night. Sometimes we would pass near Manito Park, though I remember doing those wandering drives more often with a slightly different crew—Dyche, Jonah, Karin, and Lisa. Once that group went to a show by They Might Be Giants, and afterward Kelly reported that the band had stiffed the opening act and paid them only ten dollars. Kelly knew this because his cousin was in the opening band.

The one time I ever took shotgun from John Innes without calling it came on the ride home from the state cross-country meet during our senior year. Our team had finished second by a single point, which felt at the time like the most unfair outcome imaginable. James Johnson had been our first runner, Cam Turner second, and I was third.

When we piled into the Explorer for the three-hour drive back to Spokane, I simply grabbed the seat. No call. No discussion. Just took it. And for that ride home I ran the decks.

For a while Seth’s Explorer was simply part of the landscape of our lives. It sat behind the lower school during the day, appeared at the Coleman house west of the South Hill at night, and carried us between games, fast-food runs, music stores, and wherever else we decided to go.

Then, like most small countries of teenage life, it quietly disappeared

Dedication: For my homies.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Cultural Field Around St.Georges School and Spokane, WA

Epigraph:

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, “Still a Cage”

I. — Launch vs. Escape

I didn’t understand Spokane’s sexual landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was secretly wild and not so secretly wild, a place where desire slipped between the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and everyone knew more than they admitted. St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving toward other things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s real wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. It was erotic energy humming under a conservative façade, the kind that starts as a pulse under the collar and ends in the kind of self-destruction people call “mistakes” years later. The city pretended to be a grid of churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, and Rotary breakfasts, but the truth lived in back booths, river pullouts, dim bars off Division, and the long shadows of marriages that weren’t working. People were hungry. Not for sin—Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that—but for escape, for intensity, for feeling anything sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a diet. And because the city couldn’t admit that hunger, it acted it out sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, private shame masked as judgment, the moral guardians always the ones who ran the hottest at night. And threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and then vanished for weeks, living with the kind of unashamed freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I only caught the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult investigator returning later, it became obvious: the cage wasn’t made of rules, it was made of denial. And denial is the most erotic fuel a city can generate.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it pretended to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge. I didn’t learn about Spokane from St. George’s; I learned about leaving from St. George’s. The city taught the rest. And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that used to feel like separate worlds, and I can see the seams of the place with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The old stories fall apart under scrutiny, but the architecture remains. The church parking lots. The dim bars. The hills where people walked off their secrets. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to investigate it. And once you see the truth of a place, you can’t unsee the way it shaped you—even after you’ve run as far as you can from the cage you didn’t know you were inside.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the big, cinematic pieces people imagine. It’s the little house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies — the kind of small domestic details that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t a fantasy; it was texture. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up. And those drives with my dad to Foothills — Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then it was still just Foothill Park — the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That’s the part that gets me now: how effortlessly belonging felt there. You didn’t have to explain yourself, or hide anything, or decode a system of silences. You just drove up into the hills and the world opened without consequence. Spokane had its wildness, but California had a kind of spaciousness that felt like permission. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. It’s not that I necessarily want to move back — it’s that a part of me never really left. California became the template for what openness feels like, the first geography that suggested freedom wasn’t an escape but a way of being.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college — me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, taking the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself. In the picture, Ian’s in front, already carrying that air of someone who had strong, fully-formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half-becoming himself. That version of me had no understanding of cages. He just assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line hits the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time — I heard it as geography. That’s Spokane for me: a place I ran from without realizing I was running, a system I slipped out of long before I understood the bars. It wasn’t trauma; it wasn’t exile. It was something quieter and stranger — a recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit. California taught me what openness felt like. Japan gave me the life I wanted. But Spokane shaped the part of me that investigates, the part that reads cities like case files, the part that knows desire and denial can live under the same roof for decades without ever breaking stride. When I hear “Still a Cage,” it’s not about being trapped. It’s about understanding, finally, the architecture of the place you outgrew — and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But the line only lands when you come back years later, driving those old streets like an investigator, realizing the cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you see the silence for what it was, the lock falls open, and you know for sure you’re never going back.

Epigraph

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, Still a Cage

I.

I didn’t understand Spokane’s emotional landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was a place where desire moved quietly through the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and where people knew more than they said aloud.

St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving towardother things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. Not theatrical or decadent, but quiet and unresolved, an erotic energy humming beneath a conservative façade. The city presented itself as orderly: churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, Rotary breakfasts. But the real emotional life lived in the margins—in dim bars off Division, in river pullouts, in the long shadows of marriages that had settled into routine.

People weren’t hungry for scandal. Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that. They were hungry for intensity, for escape, for moments that felt sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a daily diet. And because that hunger couldn’t be named directly, it surfaced sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, judgment masking private confusion, moral certainty coexisting with private longing.

Threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and vanished for weeks, living with a freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I caught only the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult returning later, the pattern became clearer: the cage wasn’t made of rules. It was made of denial. And denial, more than rebellion, is what gives a place its quiet erotic charge.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it seemed to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the broader ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge.

I didn’t learn Spokane from St. George’s; I learned leaving from St. George’s. The school offered direction without interpretation, preparation without excavation. The city supplied the rest.

And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that once felt like separate worlds, and the seams of the place become visible with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The stories shift, but the architecture remains. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to see it.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the cinematic version people imagine. It’s the small house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies—the quiet domestic textures that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t fantasy; it was atmosphere. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up.

And those drives with my dad to Foothills—Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then simply Foothill Park—the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That detail lands differently now: belonging there felt effortless. You didn’t have to decode silences or manage contradictions. You simply moved through the hills and the world opened without consequence.

Spokane had its wildness, but California offered spaciousness, a geography that suggested freedom didn’t need to be disguised. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. Not because I want to return permanently, but because a part of me never fully left. California became the first place that suggested openness wasn’t escape but orientation.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college—me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, riding the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself.

In the picture, Ian stands in front, already carrying that air of someone with strong, fully formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half becoming himself. That version of me had no concept of cages. He simply assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line lands the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time. I heard it as geography.

That’s Spokane for me: a place I left without fully understanding why, a system I slipped out of long before I could see its contours. It wasn’t trauma or exile. It was something quieter—the recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit.

California taught me openness. Japan gave me the life I wanted. Spokane shaped the investigator—the part of me that reads cities like case files, that sees how desire and denial can coexist for decades without ever openly colliding.

When I hear “Still a Cage,” it isn’t about entrapment. It’s about understanding the architecture of a place you outgrew and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But clarity arrives only later, when distance converts memory into interpretation.

The cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you recognize the silence for what it was, the lock falls open. Not with anger or triumph, but with quiet certainty. You understand that leaving was less an escape than a translation—and that some places shape you most profoundly precisely because you cannot return to them.

Dedication

For Brookie

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Michael Knott’s Record “A Rocket and a Bomb”: A Full Analysis

“Mr. God, is there a Mrs. God?

Michael Knott

Origin Story

I found Rocket and a Bomb the way you sometimes meet the most important things in your life: by accident, with no money, in a used bin on Division in Spokane, during a summer when nothing was happening and I had no idea who I was supposed to become.

It was 1994, the summer before junior year. I wasn’t working — not out of rebellion or laziness, but because I somehow never got pushed into getting a job. My parents were juggling one car between them, sometimes borrowing a second from St. George’s, and when that second car was free, I took it and drifted through Spokane.

I had a circuit — three places I visited almost every day, like a loop I barely knew I was running.

1. A random coffee shop off Division
They knew me as the quiet kid who ordered the same thing, sat alone, and had a half-crush on the barista for reasons I couldn’t articulate even then. I wasn’t flirting. I was just alive in her direction. It gave the day a shape.

2. A used bookstore in North Spokane
Le Carré, Christie, metaphysics, philosophy, sci-fi, old paperbacks with cracked spines. Books were two to five dollars, and the older woman behind the counter would chat with me as if I were a real adult. I was still in my 150-books-a-year phase. It felt like productivity disguised as escape — or maybe escape disguised as productivity.

3. A used CD store up Division
All used, because I was broke. Rows of mid-’90s detritus: dozens of copies of August and Everything After, inexplicable imports, promo discs dumped by radio stations. I’d flip through crates like a prospector searching for gold in a river everyone else had given up on.

And one day I found something.

I pulled a CD I’d never heard of: Rocket and a Bomb by Michael Knott. The cover art — drawn by Knott — was strange and specific. The title was perfect. And for reasons I couldn’t explain, the whole thing felt special. Buried treasure. A private signal.

It was used. It was cheap. It felt like it had been waiting for me. I took it home, slid it into my boombox, and played it straight through. And something opened. Not revelation. Not identity. Not insight. Pure recognition.

The recognition that someone, somewhere, had lived inside a hallway-world that felt eerily close to my own. That someone understood the drift, the observation, the stasis, the human weirdness. This essay is about that record.

Jan the Weatherman

“Jan the Weatherman” was the first sign that Rocket and a Bomb wasn’t just another used-bin curiosity. The song opens with a portrait so sharp it bypasses metaphor entirely:

“Jan, Jan the weatherman
Lives across the hall in an old beer can.”

It’s not symbolic. It’s not poetic. It’s literal. It’s Knott standing in a hallway in Hollywood, looking across at a neighbor, and writing down exactly what he sees. No interpretation. No commentary.

Then the details:

— A stick and a pan.
— Sandwiches from questionable sources.
— A kid sister who could use a tan.
— Jan wanting to “join the band.”

Absurd and intimate at the same time.

I played the whole record constantly that Spokane summer. One afternoon, I was in the kitchen with my younger brother Pat, listening to “Jan the Weatherman” on the boombox. Pat — not a music obsessive — liked it immediately. At the same time, I was trying to get him to read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. In the first story, characters are named by colors: Mr. White, Mr. Black, Mrs. Blue.

While we were talking about that, the rotary phone rang.

One of us answered.

A man on the other end asked:

“May I speak to Mr. White?”

Pat froze, then fell backward onto the couch like he had been shot. It was uncanny. A Knott moment invading our Spokane kitchen. A micro-portrait becoming real.

John Barrymore Jr.

If Jan is the doorway, “John Barrymore Jr.” is the moment you step inside the building and realize what kind of place you’re in.

The title alone shocks you:
Yes, it is that Barrymore — the son of the actor, the father of Drew, apparently. A man who once lived inside Hollywood mythology now wanders Knott’s hallway wearing golf shoes with the spikes still inside.

Knott gives the greatest couplet in the neighbor cosmos:

“John Barrymore, Jr.
A weird guy
Wearing golf shoes down the hall
With the spikes still inside.”

It’s funny, and not funny at all. Funny because the image is ridiculous. Not funny because this is what happens when a life collapses out of frame. Knott doesn’t say “tragic,” or “fallen,” or “addict.” He doesn’t inflate or sanitize him.

Just:

“A weird guy.”

That’s compassion. That’s honesty. That’s Knott’s entire ethic. Barrymore isn’t elevated. He isn’t judged. He isn’t explained. He’s just a neighbor — one of the many ghosts drifting through the building.

Bubbles

“Bubbles” is where the neighbor songs turn dangerous.

Bubbles is a junkie. A rich man takes him into the hills in a limo. Bubbles gets beaten. He sleeps in the park. Knott reports the whole incident without emotion, elevation, or commentary. There is no moral, no sermon, no interpretation.

And the crucial detail — one of the most important on the album: Knott does not take Bubbles in.

No savior complex.
No rescue fantasy.
No sentimental lie.

His compassion is observational, not interventionist. He sees clearly, cares sincerely, and knows the limits of his own ability.

And then — astonishingly — the song becomes a banger. The ending is practically joyous. The dissonance is intentional.

Bubbles is still sleeping in the park. And the world keeps going. This is Knott’s ethics:
attention without illusion.

Kitty

“Kitty” is the rumor song — the sharpest, most volatile one in the neighbor sequence. And it gives you almost nothing:

A pot. A missing husband. A whisper that Kitty cooked him.

That’s it.

Knott doesn’t shape the rumor. He doesn’t validate it. He doesn’t sanitize it. He doesn’t enlarge it. He repeats what people say in buildings like these when they shouldn’t be saying anything.

It’s uncomfortable because it’s overt. A little too cooked, literally and figuratively. But it belongs. Because every hallway has a rumor threshold.

Skinny Skins

“Skinny Skins” has always been my favorite neighbor portrait — the one that shows Knott’s true position in the ecosystem.

The sketch begins with flat humor:

“When he turns sideways, he disappears.”

A man thin enough to be mistaken for absence. The kind of description you only make about someone you see daily, someone who exists in your peripheral vision.

Then:

“When he beats that drum, it hurts my ears.”

It’s affectionate exasperation — the exhaustion of living near someone inconsistent but familiar.

Then the key line:

“A fifth of gin will let him win.”

Meaning: the only way he can function is by numbing himself.

And then the reveal:

“I owe him money.”

This is the moment the whole neighbor cosmos locks into place. Knott is not an observer. He is inside the system. He owes. He receives. He participates.

The cello underneath everything — bowed, heavy, grounding — prevents the song from tipping into caricature. It gives the portrait gravity. It insists this man is real.

Then the hammer:

“If that’s him knocking, don’t let him in.
Let him in.”

That contradiction is the most human thing on the album.

You don’t want him in. You let him in. Because that’s what life is like in buildings full of people who can’t quite get it together but are still yours.

Skinny Skins is the final neighbor not because he is the strangest, but because he is the closest. He is the person Knott cannot shut out.

Jail

“Jail” is the first moment Knott points the camera inward. The entire song revolves around one line:

“I’m gonna meet the judge —
She don’t care.”

That’s the whole spiritual and emotional architecture of the album in eight words. The world is indifferent. You are accountable anyway.

He follows it with:

“What am I supposed to learn?
I haven’t learned it yet.”

Not rebellion. Not enlightenment.

Just the recognition that nothing about this system — legal, moral, spiritual — is designed to teach you anything.

And then there’s the public defender scratching a hundred-dollar bill with his ear — a line so strange and specific it has to be real. “Jail” is where the hallway turns into a mirror.

Serious

“Serious” used to be one of my favorites on the record, and it still holds a crucial position. It’s the first time Knott lets the internal crisis show without metaphor or disguise.

The plea:

“Someone get me a gun,
someone get me a shotgun.”

Delivered not theatrically, but flatly — almost bored. Like someone reporting the content of a mind in disrepair.

But the real center is:

“I wanna end it if I can’t learn to supply.”

Not love. Not hope. Not purpose. Supply.

He’s afraid he cannot be counted on. That he cannot provide what others need. That he cannot hold up his end of any relational economy. This isn’t melodrama. It’s inadequacy.

“Serious” is the sound of someone realizing he may not be equipped for the life he’s in.

Make Me Feel Good

“Make Me Feel Good” is the quietest of the confession tracks, but one of the most psychologically precise.

“When you’re down
No one wants you around.”

Not bitter. Not angry. Just a flat report of how people behave around the depressed or unstable. And then the devastating line:

“When you scream
It’s easier to be seen
But it’s harder to be missed.”

You get attention — but not presence. Visibility without care. Recognition without support. It’s the social physics of emotional collapse. This song is the exhale before the real reckoning.

Train

“Train” is the confession song that belonged to me long before I understood why.

Two lines define it:

“Maybe I won’t be on the list.”
“Maybe I’ll just drink like a sieve.”

Separate, they’re sharp. Together, they’re devastating.

“Maybe I won’t be on the list” isn’t a theological fear — it’s existential. It’s the fear of irrelevance, of invisibility, of not being counted. It’s the Spokane summer feeling I lived inside:

Not a crisis. Not ambition. Just suspension.

And “Maybe I’ll just drink like a sieve” is the fallback — the low door one walks through when the higher door doesn’t feel real.

That was the emotional geometry of that Spokane summer:

No job. No movement. Late-night Law & Order. Random drives. A sense of being off any meaningful list. The quiet pull toward dissolution, but not enough recklessness to act on it.

“Train” didn’t teach me anything. It acknowledged something inside me long before I could name it.

The Summer in Spokane

It wasn’t a crisis summer. It was a suspended summer.

Days drifting through bookstores and CD crates. Nights washed in the glow of crime procedurals. A sense of time passing without accumulating.

My father shoved me once — the only time — out of frustration that I was doing nothing, going nowhere, stuck in an unlit room with reruns. It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t trauma. It was pressure hitting stasis.

I told him never again. He never did, and we never talked about it.

Rocket and a Bomb became the shape of that summer. Not just a soundtrack.
A mirror.

Rocket and a Bomb

Then comes the title track — the cathedral of the album. The central contradiction:

“A good job and some bus fare
And a rocket and a bomb.”

He wants nothing. He wants everything. He wants stability. He wants detonation. This is one of the most honest lines in American songwriting.

And then the pivot that makes Knott impossible to classify:

“Mr. God, is there a Mrs. God?
Could she help me find a job…?”

It’s not blasphemy. It’s not a joke. It’s bleak sincerity.

Knott said in an interview he “knows Jesus,” and that doesn’t make him good, bad, saved, or functional. It just means he recognizes the presence. It doesn’t help.

This is not Christian rock. This is hallway theology — the kind where god is less a deity than a neighbor, and maybe his wife is the one responsible for the job-search department.

Knott kept re-recording this song because it wasn’t a hit. It was his self-portrait. And for a drifting kid in Spokane, it was the first real articulation of the contradiction I didn’t know had a name:

I want a simple life. And I want to blow it up.

Closing: Buried Treasure

I found Rocket and a Bomb for five dollars in a used bin. I didn’t know the name. I didn’t know the scene. I didn’t know the man. But I knew the feeling before I knew the language.

What stayed with me all these years wasn’t the stories, or the craft, or the persona. It was the attention without illusion. The way Knott saw people in hallways — and the way I felt like I was in one myself.

This album didn’t guide me. It didn’t rescue me. It didn’t fix me. It recognized me.

It saw the drift, the fear, the contradiction, the waiting. It saw the life before the life. It saw the hallway I didn’t yet have a vocabulary for.

It was buried treasure — not because it was rare, but because I was.

Dedication

To Michael Knott, Libra sun —
whose songs moved with the restless, twin-voiced brilliance of a Gemini mind, and whose hallway portraits taught me how to see without illusion.

From a Libra rising who recognized the air in your work — the balance forever chased, the contradiction forever held, the drift that becomes a doorway.



Posted on by Matt Thomas · 2 Comments

My Brother Mike’s Bad Book

Subtitle: A Mariners game, a rowdy night, and the moment my brother defined himself with four perfect words

Several years ago I attended a Seattle Mariners baseball game with my bother Mike. The Mariners were playing the Toronto Blue Jays, and we went out for a few drinks before the game right next to the stadium. I was amazed by just how many Blue Jays fans there were in town for the game. They were all over the place.

Now, although I grew up in a baseball family, as I got older I kind of lost interest. The games are just too long and there are too many of them. However, going to a game in person is pretty cool. Mike is still a hardcore Mariner fan, which I respect. On this night the Mariner’s star pitcher Felix Hernandez was pitching, and the Mariners won the game. However, the result is far from the most memorable aspect of that night.

Our seats were pretty good, right next to, but not actually in, the “K Zone” where the Hernandez heads were. Over the course of the first few innings, Mike downed several more beers and he got a little rowdy, as he sometimes does. Mike, in Freudian terms, has more than a little “id” in him. As I mentioned, there were a lot of Blue Jays fans in town and Mike, as a good Seattleite, took this as a challenge. As the game went on he began calling out, loudly, various Canadian cities.

“Calgary suuuucks…Winnipeg suuuucks…Lethbridge suuuucks.” Like that.

I found this all pretty amusing, if a little unorthodox. It wasn’t how I would chose to enjoy the game, but this was Mike’s style. As the Mariners built a lead Mike’s chants started to escalate, and some Blue Jays fans began to take offense. Probably this was the point. These dudes were looking at Mike, pointing, saying things. There was no real risk of a fight; however Mike was mixing it up no doubt.

Around the 5th inning or so another dude in a Shawn Kemp jersey started making noise of his own. (Shawn Kemp was a star player for the Seattle SuperSonics back in the day before some asshole stole the franchise and moved them to Oklahoma City. Fuck that guy.) At first this was all fine, because anyone in a Sonics jersey was OK with Mike. However the Sonics fan started getting a little out of line and dropping the f***** slur.

“Look at this fucking f*****. Fuck this f*****,” stuff like that.

As far as I could tell there was no reason that this guy had to target an individual in this fashion. The difference, as I saw it, between his action and Mike’s was that Mike was basically operating in good humor and calling out all the Blue Jays fans present in the spirit of friendly competition, while the Sonics fan was picking on an individual, and using a slur. Although the exact nuances of the difference are perhaps debatable, the dude was definitely out of line.

Mike noticed this guy and didn’t like what he saw. He began saying so, and someone not in our group took notice. This other guy, in regards to the Sonics fan, said something to the effect of “he’s ok in my book.” Mike didn’t miss a beat at he uttered the classic line, one I will never forget.

“That’s a bad book,” he said.

That’s all he said; he didn’t challenge the guy to a fight or anything, didn’t even directly address him. The Sonics fan was getting so abusive that someone called security, and he was escorted out.

“That’s a bad book,” reminds me of my friend from high school Cameron Turner who liked to say of something he didn’t approve “that’s sick, and wrong.” Both of these are super memorable phrases, and highly redolent of the person behind them. Mike was a little lit. Mike was razzing Blue Jays fans as a collective. Mike was attracting attention. At the same time he felt that there was no need for gratuitous gay slurs. And he was right.

One of my favorite phrases in the world is “that’s some bad action.” Mike was speaking in the same vein with “that’s a bad book.” I’ve never been prouder of anyone in my life than when Mike called this guy out.

I fuckin’ love my brother Mike.

Postscript: Just a little while ago Mike and his fiancee had a baby, Felix. Named, of course, after the pitcher. So that’s pretty cool. I just hope he doesn’t grow up to be a Blue Jays fan.