Everything All At Once, Now, Forever

Loop - Be Here Now

First off, yes, this song is almost ten minutes long. Maybe that’s what you need right now, a song to take you out of time and like the title commands, to be in the very moment.

I used to wince when I was asked what my favourite band was. How can anyone narrow it down when there’s so much, so very very much, good music in the world?

But eventually, I came to a place where I could announce my beloved, with the quiet confidence of someone who has spent entirely too much time uselessly arguing his position in imaginary scenarios like he was defending his dissertation.

But since I’m not getting a PhD in Rockology™, I feel less protective of my reputation now and will firmly declare my undying love for Loop. Maybe for the upcoming paid Sunday edition, I’ll go deeper into Loop.

As for today I’ll paint you a picture of being young in Texas, and the serenity of the road.

I first heard Loop the same day I first heard Hawkwind. And it was on a road trip north about three and a half hours, from Austin to Denton. I was in the backseat of a Honda Civic, with three friends that I didn’t know well: a girl I was crushing very hard for, her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend, who was manning the wheel. We were in a five or six car caravan making our way to a three day festival called Melodica, and it was very intimate and special; essentially the small Austin Space Rock scene and the Dallas / Denton folks. Probably fifty people? Tortoise played. As did Sonic Boom. We all spent the weekend together in aural, messy bliss.

Nobody knew what to expect driving up, no one thought the folks behind it were actually pulling it off. This allowed me an amazing freedom, and I was a cup welcoming my fill. We smoked a joint, I sat in the back seat, silent, smiling and staring out the window as the familiar blur of flat yellow grassy Texas smeared by at 70 mph. I felt lovely.

I miss driving and listening to mixtapes.

I was hearing so many new sounds on that drive. When I moved to Austin at eighteen, I was pretty sure I had the best taste in music around. Turns out, I didn’t. And I soon met people who were playing me amazing things I’d never known existed, and the timing was right and the feelings were good, and I’ll always have the warm quixotic nostalgia for that brief period where everything felt so right. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

And I was in the moment, every single moment.

The Loop song I heard that day was really aggressive, unlike the one I’m sharing below. And that was the perfect song to hook me. And when I got back to Austin, I popped into the record store (Sound Exchange, if you’re curious) and LO AND BEHOLD, someone had traded in their Loop collection. It was weird, it was meant to be. I bought it all.

Because they had already broken up by the time I became obsessed with them, they were this mythical creature to me. I only knew of vague arty pictures of them from the record sleeves and I mostly held them close as my private, cult secret. When they suddenly reappeared fifteen years later and announced a one-off tour, I was like a giddy teenager again, until I realized that circumstances weren’t going to allow me to be near city they were playing in. I resigned myself to being close, but never going to see them. And then, like the magical serendipity I had at the record store almost two decades earlier, they announced a single Canadian show, at a very small venue in my town the week of my fortieth birthday.

So I got to finally see my favourite band of all time, up close and personal. I got to talk to them, casually. There were only about fifty people there, all like me: guys who’d waited twenty years for this very moment they never thought would be real. Soundheads, one and all.

I bought a shirt but it caught on fire when I carelessly threw it on a table as I accepted a challenge at the pool table later in the night; I was still so giddy about the night I didn’t notice when I tossed the shirt (and an amazing blue leather coat) that it had landed on top of a candle…until we all started to smell it burn.

Like what what’s going on here? Bombs away in the comments!

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 too much to do to waste time on bad music.