Bad Habits At Bad Times

Once upon a jam session, I drank too many miniature bottles of Jack Daniels while working a register at a liquor store in Muskegon. I was barely eighteen and having some life issues at the time, such as how to have a life at all. The problem with getting drunk on whiskey at work is that when your parents pop in to say high you're sweating the stuff out of your very pores. But they didn't chastise me there and then. They waited until David Martin, Joseph Scott and I were practicing for the first and last time in the basement of my boyhood home. Only after my friends were there to add the extra pinch of embarrassment did the folks kick Joe and Dave out and tell me I had no business working at a liquor store in the first place. Always game to be a layabout, I now had an excuse to do nothing and I jumped on it. But I've often wondered what might have been had our playing that night not been cut short by yet another of my inappropriate jags. It never does any good to wonder about such things, but if this story proves anything, it is that I have a problem with indulging in bad ideas at bad times, and these thoughts about potential that I sabotaged are only another bad habit I am trying to break. - Dylan

Farther and Closer At Once.

The night was overcast and bitter, though it was only late October as I drove down to Holland to see Sufjan Stevens. I met David Martin there, in that fall of 2003, when the chamber pop star was still small enough to play Lemonjello's, a nook of a cafe downtown. I ordered a loose leaf Yerba Mate, and this cup of tea ended up taking up a bit too much of my attention. The small floor was packed with sitting fans and I kept my focus of not spilling my beverage, only letting it scald the edges of my thumb and forefinger. Still, I was able to catch enough of the solo acoustic performance to know that this guy could write a song. He had the same guitar as my father, a shiny deep Guild with a pale, pale finish. And then came the banjo, and with it the sense that this was a new kind of pop, that half the crowd of hardcore folk fans would be pricing banjos on eBay as soon as they got home, that the future of our genre would be cluttered with imitators who aped this artist or innovators who went beyond him. David and I bought CDs afterward. Sufjan was the opening act but we didn't stay for the star. We were both far from our respective homes and had to get home and stayed together only long enough to smoke a cigarette and eye Mr. Stevens awkwardly from across the tiny parking lot. I often make conversation with bands and artists, but this time I drew a blank and left him alone. Thrilling, the drive home was thrilling, beyond expectations, because I spent it listening to "Michigan." Here was something new and beautiful and I thought, David is having this same experience right now, driving home and listening, and I felt close to him even as we drove farther apart. - Dylan

Trading Worsts

I hit my first burst of songwriting in the summer of 2001. It was a blissful time. I would trade our worst problems then for our worst problems now in half a heartbeat. Two chambers pound. We had no idea how everything would change come September, and girls were all I had to worry about. I was living in Ann Arbor, on a break between semesters and working at a low-end gift shop on Main Street. I wrote a couple dozen songs in the months between when classes ended and when they began again. About half sprung out while I was at a writer's retreat in New England. I will never forget sitting in an Adirondack chair on the porch of the mess hall, smoking cigarettes next to a girl who was smoking a cigar. I turned to her that late afternoon and said, "I should write something that goes, 'If you have sex with me, I'll write a song about you.'" She laughed hard and encouraged me and I penned the words in about forty seconds and have had to live with that song ever since. Life was stable and fun and I was young enough to believe that I had a shot and that I might even hit. It was before the fall of the fall, before I wore out those songs at show after show, and everything was as fresh and ripe as only the summer can be. I am still living there now. - Dylan

The Plates and the Kids

The meeting that launched Jumberlack was rather mundane. Ken and I sat in a booth at Rendezvous in Grand Haven. He wanted a milkshake, which they don't have for some reason. Perhaps it makes things easier on the staff. Anyhow, we discussed Saddle Creek and the Omaha phenomenon of this decade's early portion. This was some three years ago, shortly after I'd returned from New York still full of myself and ambition to really make something happen in Muskegon. I ordered coffee at that diner and probably drank ten or eleven cups while Ken ate a sundae with a disappointed twist to his mouth. Surrounded by chattering teenagers, our market in the flesh, we spoke of making some kind of scene happen in Muskegon or Grand Rapids or both and both of us naively believed we could accomplish such a feat. Though I can't say that we have done as much, I would like to think that, through our quality control and our unerring vision, we have brought out music into light it might otherwise have never seen. Nothing came of our back and forth for a few months, but for that moment, in the clink and clank of the plates and the kids, it was nice to think that we could do the impossible and make money in the music industry these days. - Dylan

Doing the Business of Heroes

I am sometimes struck by a band. Recluse hit me between the eyes last summer. I knew the guys from my years in the city, or at least I knew two-thirds of them. A few days into my trip back to New York, I sat on the sidewalk outside Don Hill's, a dodgy venue known to be rough around the edges, the kind of place where mediocrity or worse is almost a requirement to play and where the only people in the crowd are friends of the band playing and are likely to leave as soon as their friend's set ends. There, on that sidewalk, several red bulls deep into a wicked caffeine crash, I sat with laptop on my knees. The trusty little thing was blasting "Highway 61 Revisted" as loud as a twelve-inch Powerbook can blast anything, and I was hoping the music would keep me from nodding out on the sidewalk and awakening with my wallet pocketed by some inconsiderate and poor musician. I made it, with a little help from the true Dylan, made it to listen to the set of the three piece and was blown to the back corners of the crowd, where I furiously and successfully figured out how to record those rock heroes with the tinny microphone in my laptop and make the thing sound okay. So I wandered from corner to corner, computer yawning at the sticky ceiling, until I found the spot to get them, the best acoustics, which happened to be in the door to the men's bathroom. There I stood for the rest of the set, and I only had to move once to let a man do his business as I stood there doing mine. - Dylan