Dear Michael,
Somehow, it has been ten goddamn years since you died. I vividly remember sitting in a small back porch office while visiting Toronto in July of 2005, going through my webmail in reverse chronological order. There was a mailing list for fellow music folks I subscribed to then, and as I hastily deleted messages I soon realized something awful had happened to a beloved member of our peer group. I couldn’t tell what went down at first, but the horrible news and who was involved was eventually apparent.
I think about you practically every day, and listen to your band nearly as often. Sometimes I’ll be immersed in a song – be it running around the lake by my house, driving to pick up my kid or emptying the dishwasher, and suddenly I’ll hear nothing but your cacophonous drums. I’m pulled out of the recording into the present and the reality of the situation crushes me again.
I’m not alone in the above regards and I’m not alone in this one either: Even though I was Silkworm’s booking agent for a couple of years and even though I brought your band to the Empty Bottle numerous times when I was working there, I would be lying if I said I knew you all that well. Were you still alive we’d likely be “social networking friends,” but to act like we had some sort of deep or unique connection during your life would be disingenuous.
Yet I continue to feel the same closeness and profound loss that so many other casual acquaintances you touched do through the music and writing you left us with.
When you died, I had distanced myself from my time in Chicago. There wasn’t any particular reason that I recall, but I have a penchant for creating hard stops in my life. I returned to New Jersey towards the end of 2000 after nine years away and as I dug in and made fewer and fewer trips to the Midwest I lost contact with a lot of people I’d been once close to.
You pulled me back.
Starting 10 years ago I re-connected with a lot of people who loved you. I met folks in person and on-line I only knew previously as mailing addresses. I call many of these individuals my brothers without hesitation, and despite your absence, you still brought us together.
This summer I went to the PRF BBQ in Chicago, my fourth annual trip for this impossible weekend-long celebration of the things that matter: bands (almost sixty of them!), delicious food (people constantly cooking, meats constantly smoking and roasting), and camaraderie (my face still hurts from laughing).
I don’t know how I failed to realize it sooner, but it struck me on this most recent return home that you would have been the undisputed king of this beautiful thing.
I saved a number of emails from July of 2005, several of which were written from the fog of the first days after you were killed. One of them came from a guy named Joe. He wrote: “Silkworm were the band I was going to grow old with.”
Silkworm is still the band may of us are going to grow old with, myself included.
I’m sad you’re not there to grow old with us.
Jon Solomon