Even though SERMONS! is an extremely personal peeling back of my musical brain, I’ve always wanted it, and Musik Klub, to be an exchange and not a club of one. Pipe up if you feel like it: either with a comment below, or an email, or whatever. Or don’t! NO PRESSURE.
I’m going to tell you a tale. It’s not pretty although it happened in a place of amazing natural beauty. Amazing, dark, natural beauty.
I have strong ties to Alaska. My mom’s family took residence there after the Korean War because my grandfather, an army engineer, was hired to work on the highway system being built around the state. They were there for the Great Alaskan Earthquake on Good Friday of 1964 that lasted over four minutes and was measured at 9.2. It still stands as the most powerful earthquake recorded in modern North America.
Spend time in Alaska, not just a vacation to its post card spots like Juneau or Ketchikan, and you can feel it. Its darkness. It surrounds you, like the mammoth mountains so numerous you could name one after every living resident and only account for a fraction of their peaks.
I spent several summers there growing up and it forms who I am. There are a few different tragedies to recall, like my Inupiat cousin that fell into Russian River and within minutes of slipping into its notorious freezing, rapid current, drowned - most likely from quick hypothermia.
But there is one experience that has always haunted me and it involves a murder.
He was in his early 20s. A friend of my young aunt & uncle. He taught me how to pop wheelies on my bike. He was a bit slow and I recall the guys that hung out in my uncle’s garage picking on him a bit. They were always there, standing around drinking beer and smoking dope and supervising my uncle as he rebuilt a 1970 Mustang Mach I. I loved that garage, there was a sense of manhood there that I was eager to be part of but shy and unsure, with its oil and grease and Playboy centerfolds tacked to the walls. I have a Polaroid of myself with a Husky puppy I was looking after (he was later put down for attacking a child), and in the background is the garage, with the Mustang covered in a blue tarp, its skeleton underneath like a foreshadow of what they’d later find of their friend.
It took him two summers to rebuild that car, at least in my memory. I remember when he was finished; it was a week or so after I’d arrived for that summer. We jumped in and slowly and carefully moved down the gravel road to the paved intersection where he opened it up and I felt its power. We drove a few blocks to an elementary school where his friends were playing basketball. The sky was Alaskan Grey. We hopped the curb, picking up speed on the slope downward and drove right into the middle of the court, sending everyone scattering. Then my uncle let ‘er rip, and we did several doughnuts; I lost count but it seems like four or five because when you’re twelve years old and in your first American muscle car and your dangerous uncle is doing 360s and grinning like someone you’re not sure you trust, it may as well be one hundred.
The friend who was later murdered, the guy who taught me how to do wheelies, was there.
This story is the reason the movie River’s Edge is so personal to me. My aunt & uncle were barely out of high school. I first heard Def Leppard’s On Though The Night in the trailer they lived in, on that gravel road. We walked through a lot of wet woods. Cars were important. The soundtrack was always Ozzy, Boston, Foreigner, Def Leppard, Heart. No one seemed to have any ambition to do anything other than what they were already doing.
But there’s no escaping Alaska.
The friend disappeared one night after going to a well known bar with a rowdy reputation. I’d always remembered that he was beaten to death in the bar parking lot after getting into it with someone inside. That made sense to me, my uncle once got in a fight at the same place. It began in the bar and finished in the parking lot when a hatchet was plunged three times into the trunk of that 1970 Mustang Mach I. I saw the wounds with my very eyes.
But recently, I found out that my memory had blurred many strange details of Alaskan trauma together. He knew his killers. And so did everyone else in this small group. They tried to point it out to police, but the investigators didn’t care enough, just another young Alaskan skid whose skeleton was found in the woods.
His shoes were found across town from his bones. His clothes, in another location from his shoes. He was last seen at a busy intersection near the bar, as recalled by the very guys everyone suspected of killing him. They told police they passed him by, but all circumstantial evidence points to them pulling over, offering him a ride home, then stabbing him, stripping his body and dumping it in the woods then scattering his clothing around Anchorage. But circumstantial evidence doesn’t stand up in court, so no one was ever charged, and these men got away with murder.
He suffered such indignity because he was suspected of stealing a car stereo, and because a girlfriend of one of the guys was seen talking to him. That’s the real heartbreak. He was a sweet, simple guy, and most assuredly was innocent of anything this other young man’s fragile toxic ego was imagining to have taken place and that he convinced two friends our friend deserved cold brutal justice for. Those last living hours must have been so frightening.
His body wasn’t found for almost a year after he’d disappeared. I was told the police work was so shoddy that the father found his collarbone after revisiting the scene weeks later. To add to their pain, the eldest son was killed not long after in a car accident. More tragedies followed, the portrait of a cursed family.
I’m pretty sure this Alaska, this darkness (because I have other murderous Alaskan stories) will never leave my blood. My bond to Vancouver is as a surrogate for my youth in so many ways, except I’m now my aunt & uncle and their friends. I like the darkness of the woods. I like the wet grey city. I like sitting with my friends and ignoring ambition, forgetting everything in order to continue the rituals that keep the darkness from swallowing everyone up.
Like what I’m doing here? Let me know by suggesting it to someone else that may like it. Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have to much to do to waste time on bad music.
Ignoring ambition. That's maybe the most accurate description of Vancouver I've heard in awhile.