Valentine’s Day is almost never romantic. And if it is romantic, it’s never as romantic as a romantic comedy, like, say, the John Cusack movie Serendipity, which I swear I saw at the theater with my high school girlfriend, but it came out in 2001 and we broke up in 1998. I love that movie, even though I don’t think I’ve seen it since then. John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet—how? Who knows, who cares, doesn’t matter—and fall in love immediately. They’re in New York City, it’s winter. “What do you want to do?” Beckinsale asks, and then they’re ice skating at Wollman Rink. It’s tender. It’s calm. It’s simple. For a few minutes there’s nothing to do but live in love.
I went to that rink, once, on February 14th, 1999. I was 18 years old, on a first date with someone I’d been in love with since kindergarten. Later that same day, I saw a concert by what would become my favorite band, God Street Wine, at a venue called—and I’m not making this up—“Valentine’s.”
To get to Wollman Rink, we rode from Bard College (where she was a freshman) in a 1995 Dodge 18-passenger van, white, with plain vinyl bench seats. Fifteen Bard students, a driver, and me. Have you ever ridden in the back of a van, on the Taconic State Parkway, with fifteen Bard students? Nothing romantic about it.
The actual skating was different. The hot song at the time was Cher’s “Believe,” and every time I hear that autotune I think of holding hands on the ice, giggling, trying not to fall. DJ played it three times while we were there. Another huge hit that month was Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time.” My Bard Student admonished me for dancing to a song about a “pubescent female who begs her lover to strike her repeatedly.” Bard Student actually said that. That’s the kind of thing you learn at Bard College, to speak in Italics.
In Serendipity, shortly after ice skating (barely a two-minute scene), Cusack and Beckinsale part ways. This is like twenty minutes into the movie. He asks for her number, and instead of giving it to him like a normal person, she writes it in a book, a novel, which she then promises to sell to a used bookshop. If, she reasons, he one day happens upon it, and she’s still at that number, then they were destined to be together. I have pulled this trick myself—sent missives into the world, tucked into forgotten books on forgotten shelves.
How I transitioned from Wollman Rink in Central Park to Valentine’s in Albany, I do not recall. Somehow I picked up my tape deck along the way, a full-size stereo component dual cassette deck, a Sony TC-WR653S, like this one:
and a pair of blank 90-minute blank Maxell XLII cassettes. People used to bring tape decks to jam band shows, record the show, listen to it again later. I wasn’t one of those people, but I thought maybe I wanted to be, and I had just received a fancy tape deck from Uncle Bob, so I brought it, and captured a fantastic recording. Like, it was an astoundingly good recording. Most of the time audience recordings are terrible, just unlistenable to the non-mega-fan. It was the first and only time I brought my tape deck to a show, but it was the first of at least 25 God Street Wine shows I’ve seen (and counting—I’m headed to at least two in March 2025), plus dozens more side projects and offshoots. And if that seems like an impressive number of concerts—which, it is—most people see a favorite band once, maybe four times—consider that the average GSW fan has seen hundreds of shows (read that last sentence in the voice of Bard Student).
What does it mean to fall in love with a band? You listen to the music all the time, sure. We buy all the records, sometimes multiple formats (vinyl, cassette, CD, vinyl again). We might see three or more shows in one week, take days off work, travel hundreds of miles. And then we collect live recordings of these concerts, revisit them like normal people and vacation photos. And we remember the best shows better than we recall our own weddings. But there’s more than all that. But, there’s something deeper.
(GSW fans know a lot about weddings. We were single when the band first broke up in 1999, divorced when they returned in 2010, and now our third wives are reading Miranda July.)
One of the best things about being in love with a person who’s also in love with you is intimacy. To put it frankly, you get to see them naked. A band is never naked. Even performers who strip are still performing, which makes them merely nude, not naked. To be naked, the curtain must close and the performance must cease. We use the term “intimate performance,” but that’s an oxymoron. Performance is a barrier between artist and audience.
All the best parts of Serendipity happen in the first twenty minutes. Cusack and Beckinsale spend the majority of the movie’s runtime apart. That’s how it is with your favorite band. Most of your time loving them is spent not with them, and when you are with them, they’re on stage. On the rare occasion that you do spend time with your favorite band off stage, it’s ridiculously awkward.
In 1996, MTV sponsored what they called the “Metallica Motherload Contest,” in which some lucky fan won an afternoon hangout with Metallica, and a private concert at a local venue. Metallica arrives in the back of an 18-wheeler (why? Why not a car, or a van, like a normal band?) to a small-town crowd of a few hundred. They meet the winning fan, a kindly mulleted person, and he asks them what they feel like doing. Drummer Lars Ulrich replies, “um, you want to play some basketball?”
“Play basketball? With Metallica?” said Bard Student.
It’s as awkward as you imagine. If you can’t imagine, you don’t have to.
How’d I get into Valentine’s? Maybe the doorman didn’t check IDs? Maybe because I had a giant tape deck he thought I was with the band? I kept those tapes for years, listened to them over and over. I could recite the audience banter. The tapes are now missing. God Street Wine has hundreds of recordings on Archive.org (a repository for, among other things, 90s-era jam band recordings), but 2/14/99 isn’t one of them. Where have those recordings gone?
1996 was a rough time to be an older Metallica fan. They cut their hair short, started appearing regularly on MTV, and, worst of all, started playing songs that grooved—a collective bad look for a thrash metal band. Somewhere around that time Kirk Hammett started playing a guitar painted to look like a Ouija board. ESP Guitars started selling replicas that cost more than two thousand dollars. There’s a used one for sale on Craigslist a few miles from my house. I have to assume that the seller is major Metallica fan. Why else would you buy that guitar? You’re going to perform with that? You’re going to write new music with that instrument?
The best part of the Metallica Motherload contest is the end when the band sets up in a local bar for a short set. There’s no stage. They’re just on the floor with the locals, like any crappy cover band. Winos, it’s like GSW at the Rhinecliff Hotel (which is really close to Bard College), complete with a single lightbulb swinging overhead on a rusty chain. But because it’s 1996, you don’t see what must have been deep emotion on any of the local men’s faces. What must it have been like for a group of rural metalheads to have Metallica in their hometown dive?
In spring of 2020, during the height of the pandemic, I took four guitar lessons via Zoom with GSW guitar player Aaron Maxwell. In the first five seconds of the first session, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t use my guitar for the lesson, couldn’t even have it visible in my Zoom shot. Why? Because my guitar was a Paul Reed Smith SE Custom 24 in Vintage Sunburst finish, nearly identical (looking, on a crappy Zoom camera) to the main guitar of GSW’s other guitar player, Lo Faber. If Aaron saw my guitar, then he’d know the truth, that I was a fraud, not a serious musician, a mere fan, a cosplayer with a cheap knock-off paying a hundred dollars an hour for rock and roll fantasy camp, and over Zoom, no less. That instant of realization was a moment of deep shame.
…but, why?
I bought that guitar on purpose, because it looks like Lo’s guitar, because I so admire his playing. I bet my neighbor with the Ouija guitar did the same thing, because he admires Kirk Hammett. That kind of fandom could be sycophantic, but here it’s more likely that we’ve paid close attention. And that’s what any artist really wants: close attention to the work, the skill.
(No one pays closer attention than a tribute artist. Check out this short video of a group of six Adele impersonators who’ve been tricked into auditioning for what they think is a TV special. The trick is that the real Adele is among them, disguised in heavy makeup. The five impersonators each sing, and each is good in their own way.
They can all sing, and it’s obvious that they know Adele’s songs and mannerisms well. At the end of the segment, the impersonators sit in the second row of the empty theater where the “audition” has been taking place. After a dramatic false start, the real Adele begins to sing “Make You Feel My Love.” Of course she’s amazing, blows them all away, but that’s not the point. They all recognize her, in heavy makeup and costume, before she’s through the second lyric. There’s an instant where we can see one impersonator realize what she’s seeing. Her whole face shifts and she clutches the hand of the woman next to her, someone she’s only just met. In that instant they all realize that they’ve been laid bare, that their love is on display, fully clothed they are naked before her, and for a few minutes there’s nothing to do but bask in the raw voice that is their whole world.
I’ve watched this video dozens of times. It’s maybe the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen, and I barely typed out this paragraph without choking up, just at the memory.)
Serendipity was released on October 5th, 2001, which means it was shot in the previous winter of that year, or earlier, in 2000. It must have been disorienting for audiences to see that version of New York City mere weeks after 9/11, if anyone saw it at all.
I was in Tribeca on September 4th, 2001, to see God Street Wine at the Wetlands, a music club that used to be about 15 blocks north of the World Trade Center.
When you fall in love with an artist, as opposed to a work of art, two things happen. First, it becomes difficult to critique the work they produce. You become a bit like Boxer in Animal Farm—a very strong yet rather dim supporter of every move your love may make. “Napoleon is always right,” Boxer said, again and again. And when they do something that seems significantly different from what made you fall in love in the first place, you notice, and maybe you say something, but at the end of the day you fall in line. “I shall work harder,” Boxer says, and you buy the new Metallica album, no matter what their hair looks like.
The second thing that happens is that, should your love fall from grace, your heart will break, and it is the same kind of heartbreak when you learn of a lover’s foreign intrigue. When a lover breaks your heart, you burn all their letters. When a writer breaks your heart (off the page, that is), you sell all their books. Last week, when I visited my favorite used bookshop, I saw more Alice Munro titles than ever before, and more copies of Sandman than I knew existed.
Alice Munro was, perhaps, one of the greatest short story writers of all time. She died last year. A few weeks after her death, it came to light that Munro’s partner had been abusing her daughter, that Munro knew, and yet the abuse continued. One reason this news was such a hard knock to the literary fiction community is that we just don’t expect that kind of reveal about women. To find out that Neil Gaiman is kind of a creep is, honestly, not that shocking. Like, I feel like I already knew that. But Munro feels different.
And but also I have no intention of moving her books off my shelf. If anything, I’m completing my collection. I’ve been thinking for weeks that part of why I’m not terribly affected by the revelation is that I have no idea what Munro looks like. I’m staring at five of her books while typing this sentence, and I’m sure that at least one of them has a photo on the back cover, and I’m fighting the urge to stand up and see. Meanwhile, many of us know exactly what Gaiman looks like. I saw him speak once. Where? You guessed it: Bard College.
GSW hasn’t (yet) broken my heart, but I do have trouble critiquing their work. It’s honestly difficult for me to find fault with any of it. But there is one song that is truly awful. It’s a relatively new tune called “Kristi Shot a Puppy.” Here’s a lyric sample:
Kristi shot a puppy, yes she shot a puppy dead
Kristi shot a puppy in its little puppy head
The song has all the hallmarks of a classic GSW song: Lo and Aaron’s voices, chugga-chug-chug-chug rhythm guitar, B3 organ, politically charged lyrics, and even a woman’s name in the title. And yet it sounds like the Adele impersonators. Like someone doing a parody of God Street Wine. Or, no, worse—it sounds like someone asked an AI to make a song about Kristi Noem bragging about killing a dog, in the style of GSW.
It's so bad I’m not even linking it for you.
I know that not every song can have the timelessness of a lyric like “madmen still rule in the desert sands” from 1992’s “Hellfire,” but is Kristi Noem’s canine murder really a relevant topic? Who is she, even? Some fly-by-night South Dakota governor?
What’s that…? No longer the…? Now she’s…
The puppy shooter is Secretary of Homeland fucking Security!?
On second thought, maybe the deepfake uncanny valley can’t-be-real-but-it-is-real-ness of the song is the whole point, is totally on brand, is pitch perfect.
At the end of Serendipity Cusack finds the book he’s been looking for. In fact it’s a gift from his fiancé (Bridget Moynahan) on the night before their wedding. She says something like “you look at that book every time we visit a used bookstore, but you never buy it, so I figured...” None of my secret messages have found their way home, and for this I’m grateful, because to be honest, I’ve forgotten or scorned all the addressees. (Except for you, Imogene—my heart leaps and melts when you sometimes modulate up to the five.) It’s been ten years since Cusack and Beckinsale have seen each other. How do they even remember what the other one looks like? Yeah, maybe they were in love out on that ice, but after ten years, that love is for characters they’ve created, fantasies, notions.
I do hope my 2/14/99 tapes might one day reappear. Almost every song on them is better performed elsewhere, but those were my versions. A first kiss is almost never the best kiss, but there’s nothing like that electricity.
(Speaking of electricity, guys, “Electrocute” is better slow. Sometimes it runs away with itself at like 130+bpm. It really grooves hard at 90, 95.)
I’m still in touch with Bard Student, friend of my youth. I phoned her yesterday. She answered the call frantic, out of breath.
“Hello? What is it? Are you okay?
“Wow, you can still do that.”
“…is this a joke?
And then it dawns on me that we are now both it’s-not-my-birthday-so-you-must-be-calling-with-bad-news years old.
“I do remember that trip, yes,” she says, after we both calm down, but she fails to recall holding hands to Cher, or the Britney Spears admonishment. Did I invent these details?
“And,” she says, “it was definitely not a date.”
No?
“You were green after ten minutes in the van. I don’t remember you skating at all. There was nothing romantic about it.”
Huh.
“You know that meme of Nicholas Cage and Pedro Pascal?”
I don’t. She texts it:
“That’s you.”
Which one is me?
“You have to ask?”
“Come on, come on, turn the radio on
It's Friday night, and it won't be long
Gotta do my hair, put my make-up on
It's Friday night, and it won't be long
'Til I hit the dance floor, hit the dance floor
I got all I need
No, I ain't got cash, I ain't got cash
But I got you, baby”
— Greg Kurstin / Sia Furler
I love this post so much, Michael. Thank you for it. And not just because it is about my band. The part I loved was actually the Adele impersonators hearing Adele. You describe it so beautifully, I got a lump in my throat just reading that part. I actually clicked the link and have it open in another tab right now, but I'm not even sure I want to watch it, in case it falls short of your description.
I'm sorry "Kristi" didn't work for you. Politics and music is tricky, obviously. I wish more musicians, more talented than me, would be more political, in these troubled times. But it's hard to do on several levels. On the other hand, I'm glad you went with a PRS similar to mine. It's a terrific guitar and I love that I influenced you to get one. And I agree about the slow tempo on "Electrocute." It's so much funkier. Believe it or not I was just brushing up on that tune this morning, practicing for our upcoming shows, and thinking that we got to do it slow!
All the best and stay in touch. Lo