Heaven Knows
A short-ish post about a friend I knew for a short period of time who vanished.
Today’s post is about a guy I used to know. My last few posts have been really long so I’ll keep this one short and sweet, like my favourite punk song, “Short Attention Span” by The Fizzy Bangers.
Fans of Fat Wreck Chords might recognize it as the lead-off track on the wildly successful compilation album Short Music For Short People, a CD consisting of 101 punk bands playing songs that lasted 60 seconds or less. It’s better as an idea than an experience. Trust me on that one. The best song is the first one. Then you have to sit through 100 more. And I loved punk and pop punk back then!
From 2002 to 2004 I played guitar and sang backup vocals in a pop punk band whose name I won’t mention, lest you find some deeply hidden mp3 on some ancient MySpace page and humiliate me by posting it somewhere.
Our bass player, who I’ll call Richard out of respect for him and his privacy, was by far the nicest guy in the band. He was easy going and affable and he never tried to steer the musical direction which is - no offense to bassists who can write songs - usually a bad idea. There’s even a joke about it.
Q: What did the bass player say right before he got kicked out of his band?
A: Hey guys, I wrote some songs I think we should play!
Our drummer and Richard didn’t drink. Our singer-guitarist and I did. A lot. Our drummer didn’t do drugs of any kind. Richard liked drugs but I never saw him ingest anything more serious than cannabis. Y’see kids, we called it “weed” in the early-2000s. I don’t know why or when it stopped being called that. I just know that it’s not called “weed” anymore the same way I know we didn’t call it “pot” in the early-2000s.
Anyway, the four of us didn’t agree on much. We fought often. But there was one thing we all agreed on: Rise Against. We loved Rise Against. Love might even be too weak a word. We adored Rise Against. Their second album Revolutions Per Minute was our sonic lodestar. We wanted to be Rise Against.
All four of us went to see Rise Against open for Anti-Flag, who we hated. They just felt phony to us. Kids have a sixth sense for that shit. It’s pretty much the entire point of Catcher In the Rye. Last I heard, Anti-Flag singer Justin Sane (a ridiculously silly stage name) has had so many rape allegations lodged against him that he sold his house in Pittsburgh and fled the United States to avoid ending up sharing a cell with Danny Masterson.
But Rise Against were fantastic live. And we had no idea singer Tim McIlrath could play guitar because in their videos he was always just a standalone singer. We all bought Rise Against t-shirts that night and left before Anti-Flag hit the stage. For weeks after that show we tried to write songs that sounded like Rise Against but we were only 16 and 17 years old. We could not write songs as good or lyrics as interesting. Our drummer finally got fed up and told us to stop trying to sound like something we weren’t. That we sounded a lot closer to Allister than Rise Against. We thought about what he said for a few days. And realized he was right. So we covered them. Both Allister and Rise Against.
We played Rise Against’s “Heaven Knows” at shows and we’d close with Allister’s “Somewhere On Fullerton.” In between we would play the seven or eight originals we had. (None of which were worth a damn.) We couldn’t play “Heaven Knows” as well as Rise Against but it was a reasonable facsimile.
“Heaven Knows” was more than just a kickass punk tune. The lyrics were actually pretty poetic. For a punk song, the words were an order of magnitude better than most punk songs of that era, which were either about alienation (remember the Guttermouth song “Can I Borrow Some Ambition?” Or Gob’s “What To Do”?) or suburban boredom (Green Day’s “Longview” or Allister’s “Somewhere On Fullerton” from an album called Last Stop Suburbia which, as I’ve already admitted, we closed every show with).
Here are the lyrics to the first verse and chorus of “Heaven Knows.”
The day I learn to fly I'm never coming down
On perfect wings I'll rise through the layers of the clouds
And from there I see the neon grids of cities
And six billion people that keep their fires lit
I threw a party in my name
But the hours crawled by and no one came
By 2003 our band was doing pretty well, playing about two shows per month. Our biggest show out of town that summer was in Belleville opening for a local nu metal band called Rumsfield who were supposed to be the Next Big Thing. They even had a video on MuchMusic for a song called “This Fix (Runaway)”. They never ended up getting big. “This Fix” was the only thing I ever heard from them. I didn’t think much of it.
Our biggest local show was in Mississauga (I count it as local because Mississauga was ten minutes by car from Brampton). We opened for a band called Live On Release who had a minor pop punk hit on MuchMusic called “I’m Afraid of Britney Spears.” You might remember it.
Things were going well. Until they stopped.
One day in the autumn of 2003 Richard didn’t show up to practice. We called his cellphone (they were new at the time) but he didn’t answer. We called his house. His mother answered and told us, in a panicked voice, that Richard was missing. He’d vanished. He was there…until he simply wasn’t. It had happened the day before, whatever “it” was. He must have just walked out of the house but nobody saw him leave. He hadn’t packed anything as far as his mother could tell.
We did what we could but I could tell Richard’s mother resented us for being a corrupting factor in her son's life. Before he’d joined our band he’d gotten straight B’s and was “a nice boy.” Now he went straight to his room when he came home and listened to music late into the night.
We went out to look for him in my van, knowing that our presence in his house was not particularly welcome. We checked all the skateparks and hangouts we could think of. We drove to Georgetown and asked people if they’d seen Richard with a printout his mother reluctantly gave us. We drove to Orangeville. No luck. Caledon. Nope. Bolton. Nuh uh. We even checked the airport, walking around and asking people "have you seen this guy?” until security made us leave. Nobody knew where Richard was. His family was baffled and worried sick. None of his friends had seen or heard from him. The police took statements from us. We wondered if Richard might be dead.
We continued to glue posters on lamp posts and bus stop shelters and we posted an unofficial BOLO on the popular message board ontariomusic.ca, which was frequented by roughly 1000 users at the time. All 1000 users were either in bands or fans of bands from the 416 and 905 regions. You had to sign in with a username so everybody knew who everybody else was. It was a remarkably civil online forum compared to the toxicity of what you see on Twitter/X today, but I’m digressing. Nobody on the board had seen or heard from Richard.
A week went by. Then another. With each passing day, we knew that the likelihood of Richard being found alive shrank smaller and smaller. Then, a few days into the third week, Richard’s mother got a call from the mental health wing of Thunder Bay Regional Health Centre. “We have your son,” the nurse said. Richard’s mother nearly fainted.
Thunder Bay? What the fuck was Richard doing up there? How’d he get there? And why?
I’m still fuzzy on the details. His family flew up to collect him and bring him home. Ecstatic, we drove over to see him but Richard’s mother wouldn’t let us. She slammed the door right in our faces. As we stood there on the porch, wondering what to do, the door flew open. Maybe she changed her mi-
It was Richard’s father. Holding a bat.
We felt it best to leave at that point, so we were reduced to concocting a scenario in which our singer, who had the most outgoing and boisterous personality in the band, would “run into” Richard’s sister “by chance”, because we knew Richard’s sister did not hate us. Without letting on he was in the band, our singer would pump the sister for as much information as he could get.
The plan worked, to a degree. Richard’s sister loved her brother and she wasn’t going to just tell a stranger she just met every single thing about him. We felt shitty about the subterfuge but Richard’s parents were stonewalling us and we couldn’t exactly call the cops and ask for an explanation. We weren’t family.
What our singer learned was that Richard had experienced some kind of profoundly intense mental breakdown. Whether drug induced or not, we never found out, but Richard’s sister believed it was. “Certain types of people,” she explained, “like epileptics…if they take psychedelics…sometimes they don’t come back.”
That was literally what the doctor in Thunder Bay said to Richard’s mother, father and sister. Sometimes they don’t come back.
I never saw Richard again. None of us did. I still don’t know if he was physically disabled and therefore housebound, or if some mental condition prevented him from leaving his house or if he had a religious conversion and decided we were bad people. He’d graduated high school so it wasn’t like we could wait for him at his locker and demand an explanation. We were left guessing. Certain types of treatment-resistant depression can definitely knock a person on their ass and leave them there, supine and helpless, for years. And I can say from experience that the aftereffects of a bad trip can linger for months. Even years.
Four or five days after Richard returned home from Thunder Bay and the smoke had cleared, I logged on to MSN Messenger and saw that his username had changed. MSN Messenger was like Facebook Messenger before Facebook. You could see who was online and who wasn’t and chat with people in private, two-way chat boxes. People were forever changing their names on MSN Messenger. I had a girlfriend who went through every line of Placebo’s “Every Me and Every You.” It was the highest compliment she knew how to give a song. She literally said to me once “I’ve gotten so many MSN names from this song,” nodding dreamily along with its propulsive beat. For a year or so in 2003, my MSN name was “Tangy Zizzle,” which is the title of a Kyuss song I liked. Not everybody played the silly MSN name game. Many people just used their given names. Richard was such a person. The entire time he was in our band, his MSN name was simply “Richard.” But when I logged on that day, knowing Richard was home but not exactly “back” yet, if you get what I mean, I saw what he’d changed his MSN name to and it hit me like a punch to the solar plexus.
The day I learn to fly I’m never coming down!
Did he get high and lose his mind? What the hell happened to him? Richard’s sister found out about the whole thing and cried and told him to just leave her and her family alone. So we did. Over the years I’ve checked online for any sign of Richard but I’ve never found one. No personal MySpace page. No Facebook account. Not on Twitter, Instagram, or Tik Tok.
I still don’t like to listen to “Heaven Knows.” It’s a great song, but I just don’t like it, if that makes sense. By the time I could hear it again without feeling too overcome with emotion, pop punk was way behind me in the rearview mirror of my musical life. It was 2008 by the time I could listen to Rise Against and Allister without lunging for the volume knob or the power button. Those old songs suddenly hurt less. Green Day and Rancid and Guttermouth and NOFX and Gob and Rise Against and Allister were the old gods. My new gods were The Constantines, The Weakerthans, Spoon, Wolf Parade, and the mighty Guided by Voices.
I don’t compartmentalize music like that anymore. I love chillwave and dance music. Washed Out and Coyote Clean Up. Like a Game of Thrones character, I worship the old gods and the new. (I’d be a wildling beyond the wall for sure. I don’t bend the knee for any motherfucker.)
That Allister song we used to cover, we covered at Richard’s suggestion. I can listen to that song and I’m transported right back to summer 2003. Just like “Gonna Leave You” by Queens of the Stone Age brings me back to another indelible night in my life. Or how Jimmy Eat World’s “The Sweetness” reminds me of the best party ever.
“Caught In A Whirl” by Baby Woodrose was the swirling, echo-laden soundtrack to a great night, one of the great nights of my life, driving across the Saskatchewan prairies at 3 a.m. while a lightning storm pulsed overhead, turning the sky an unearthly shade of pink. I treasure that memory. Just I treasure the memory of playing that Allister song with Richard and the other guys. Richard was a good singer but he didn’t like to do it. He was shy. But he always sang that chorus. Every time we played it, whether at a show or just a rehearsal, he’d step right up to the microphone, sharing it with our singer and me because we could only afford the one Shure SM58, a blissful goofy grin on his face. Being the de facto back up singer, I’d have to fight for space, positioning myself just right to get my mouth close enough to the microphone to be heard. But it didn’t matter if I was heard or not. I always sang the shit out of that chorus. Off-key or not. Who cared? I still love it today, 21 years later.
I get choked up thinking about all this shit. Go ahead and laugh at me. Chuckle all you want. I know I’m getting emotional about a fucking pop punk band playing a pop punk song. Laugh all you want, if you want. I used to laugh at people who got emotional listening to cheeseball artists like Meatloaf or Journey or Extreme. It was schlock rock to me. But who the hell was I to laugh at people for being moved by music? I didn’t know what strong personal associations and memories a certain song evoked for them. I hadn’t lived their lives. I’d only lived my own, and barely at that. I’d just turned seventeen. I couldn’t know what tragic or heartbreaking associations lay ahead for me when I heard certain songs, what the music might one day bring forth out of the fog of the past.
I close my eyes and I can see those times so close to me I can nearly touch them. Then my hand reaches for it all and closes on air.
Nostalgia is not as sweet as we tend to think it is. Nostalgic memories have sharp edges. They can cut you up. Inside and outside. I remember Richard’s goofy smile. And that beautiful line in “Heaven Knows” about “the neon grids of cities.” Or how our drummer tuned his snare drum so tightly it sounded like a popcorn machine.
Whenever I hear that Allister song now I’m seventeen again, back in the band I used to be in, flailing away, all of us swaying in time to the music…discrete bodies moving like a single pulsing organism…our drummer behind us keeping the beat…just one of three gangly awkward sweaty teenagers singing into a microphone.
Please don’t go away. I want this feeling to stay with me forever.