This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven
I waited for you winterlong
You seemed to be where I belong
It’s all illusion anyway.
After time has passed your way,
Things we thought of yesterday,
Come back now, come back now,
-- Neil Young, via the Pixies
Seattle is known for its dark and rainy winters (and rightly so), but summer here is a magical time: blue skies, calm breezes, cool nights and days that seem to go on forever. At the end of summer, Seattlites throw themselves a party called “Bumbershoot.” It’s a four-day music festival that takes place at the civic complex at the base of the Space Needle, and features a huge variety of performance and visual arts for a single (no longer so reasonable) admission charge.
The biggest acts play in the Memorial Stadium, an outdoor sports venue at the base of two large hills that ascend from downtown Seattle to the north and east. The city forms a kind of massive natural amphitheatre, and on a calm summer night, those (like me) on the sides of the hills facing downtown can hear the performance pretty well – especially the headline bands with the clearest and loudest sound.
On Monday night, the main act to close Bumbershoot 2004 was the Pixies – an acclaimed 80s-era underground band in the midst of a highly-anticipated reunion tour. I was big into this kind of music in the 80s and early 90s, and though the Pixies were not central to my pantheon of crucial acts, I always viewed them with some affection. Music like theirs, along with that of the Replacements, Husker Du, Sonic Youth and Big Black, were the soundtrack to my important years, including the most important one to me, 1989.
Fifteen years ago this week, I moved to Seattle from the East Coast. I had never been here before, knew little about the city, and the only people I knew here were some distant cousins I had seen once or twice during my childhood. I was 22 years old, head swelled with oven-fresh ideas right out of college, with no idea what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. All I knew is that I had to get away from New York, which was at that time a violent, filthy and alienating place, deeply hostile to those lacking decisive material ambition. In Seattle, I found the streets crowded with people similarly-situated: 22 year-old refugees from all over the country looking for a little space to make up their mind.
We didn’t yet know we were “Generation X” or that our critical mass here by Puget Sound would, in two years, trigger a whole slew of era-defining moments from “grunge” music to Starbucks culture to the rise of the dot-com economy. Back then, we were just looking for something to do and groping toward a sense of common identity and community in the midst of an undiscovered place.
The first big show I saw in Seattle was the Pixies and Bob Mould (then very recently ex-Husker Du) at the Moore Theatre in October, 1989. The place was packed, and though I had seen the Pixies play several times before in New York, they seemed to reach escape velocity of intensity and violent energy at that show. Over the years, I’ve met many people who were there that night. Members of many soon-to-be-famous Seattle bands (notably Nirvana) have cited it as a watershed in their thinking of what they should aim for in terms of music, style and attitude. For an unlikely large portion of my demographic cohort, that night was a defining moment in their cultural experience, and the first vague awakenings that something special was going on.
It’s funny how the past ten years seem to run together in a miasmic haze of work, travel, countless social functions and the comings and goings of friends, but those early years stand out stark and plain, their details etched like the architectural ornaments of ageless monuments against a sky of deep and perpetual blue. The sights, smells and especially sounds from those times can snap the past into a moment of clear focus and revive, fleetingly, the sense of limitless possibility and community that possessed even the least of us.
My love for this city, like all young love, has cooled and mellowed with age. I take its charms and comforts for granted; I notice its faults and compare it unfavorably with the vibrancy and excitement it afforded in times past. My faithless eye strays, and lately I have even taken to cheating with a past love, New York. I waver, weighing the pleasures of the present against the promise of the future, wondering if I am chasing some real joy or just the illusion of youth, bound only to disappoint.
Last night, standing on the balcony, I listened to snatches of joyous, half-remembered moments drift in and out on as the strains of the Pixies’ set rose up from downtown and hovered over the city. The sun had gone behind the mountains and the fiery sky was cooling fast. A long and beautiful summer was finally nearing its end.
9:43:39 AM 
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