The Storm Is on the Television

American Pragmatists
Fairfield University
December 12, 1992

My first memory of the trip is being on a pay phone in the lobby of East Hill dormitory, perched above Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. On the other end of the line was my brother Andy in Philadelphia and things were not looking good. It was Friday, early afternoon, and it had been raining all day with little sign of an end. A vicious nor’easter would go on to submerge the West Side Highway, the FDR Drive, and houses up the East Coast.

“Rob and Pam don’t want to do it,” he said, or something to that effect. Considering the weather, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it anymore either.

Not always the types to look too far into the future, we were stuck in the undesirable situation of needing to re-evaluate plans concocted weeks ago. At Fairfield University, Ted had moved into a house on campus with friends and started a band in the basement. We knew nothing about them except that they were called American Pragmatists and that there couldn’t be anything more fun than getting Andy’s band Kimbashing up there so they could play a show together. They had booked a performance at the theater on campus for that night.

Even had things worked smoothly the plan was geographically ludicrous. After an exam I was scheduled to take the train to our parents’ house in Edison, New Jersey to borrow their Dodge Ram Charger, then drive to Philly, pick up Andy, Rob, Pam, Ed, and their gear, and then get back on the Turnpike and drive back north to Connecticut. Considering the weather and traffic reports coming out of 1010 WINS radio (always sufficient to make you want to dive under the bed and hide) this was probably not going to be in the offing.

In the end, I decided there was no choice but to give it a try, riding the 1/9 anxiously downtown to Penn Station, transferring to New Jersey Transit and watching with fascination at the rising waters on the Meadowlands, lapping up within a couple of feet of the tracks. Later that afternoon the flood climbed even higher and trains were stranded in the chemical swamp for hours until it could subside. I disembarked at Metropark, picked up the truck, and made it to Philadelphia early in the evening. Before I even reached Philly we learned that the show had been cancelled anyway because the school was closed, but alternate plans had been made. There would be a party at Ted’s house the next night.

In the end, Kimbashing pulled out because of the change in schedule, but Andy, his roommate Pete, and I set out on Saturday. I recall stopping at a traffic light along Route 1 near Princeton and noticing the lakes that had formed on the corporate parks, threatening to flow onto the highway. I think we listened to cassettes on a boom box all the way up because there was no tape deck in the truck. Otherwise, the drive was surprisingly uneventful.

We arrived at Fairfield late in the afternoon. The precipitation had turned to ice there. It splintered beneath our feet as we searched the nondescript townhouses for our destination. As we rang the bell, we could hear a rumble from inside. When one of Ted’s roommates opened the door, we realized it was a band rehearsing in the basement. “Who’s that?” we asked our greeter. “It’s the Pragmatists,” he replied. Down the stairs we went.

I don’t know how to explain the effect of that droning B power chord on my post-adolescent brain, played in unison on Tom and Lys’s electric guitars, driven through tube amps, laid in a bed of Pat’s bass, given velocity through the eighth-note pinging of Ted’s wooden stick on a ride cymbal.  Surely there is a neuro-physical explanation for why the overtones from the held F sharp and high B immediately moved me and make my skin crawl every time I hear them. All I knew, and all at once, was that friends of mine had written one of the most powerful songs I’d ever heard.

B to A, F sharp to G, over and over and over again until Tom (I don’t think we’d met yet) stepped to the microphone, singing out in a country-tinged drawl that belied the poetry in his postpunk tribute to Gone With the Wind:

I remember she had this amazing vocabulary.
Oh, she spoke in loves of bread.
When she cut me she was smiling,
and I remember, I remember, I remember
I remember what she said:

“Oh, look around you with your eyes in your fists.
Don’t look at this, these houses are strong
And they’re built to resist.
Oh, look around you with your eyes in your fists.
Don’t look at this, these houses are strong
And they’re built to resist.”
Oh, Atlanta!

Myself, I don’t remember much about the rest of the night or the trip home. I’m not even sure anymore that this is exactly how the trip happened. But it’s almost 20 years later, and the sound of the electrifying welcome we received at the end of a long and wearying journey is all the memory I need.