Jicksta.com

It’s time to dust off this old blog. Jay needs some place to put this! After exactly one year of no activity, this blog is finally getting some action.

So, months in advance I ecstatically buy tickets to an Eisley concert coming to Houston. Time passes and the day finally comes. This was May 4^th — right on the tail end of my high school career.

School lets out at 2:35 p.m. and I rush home to map directions to the Meridian, the concert’s venue. Initially, my partners in awesomeness attending the concert were my roommate Grant and friends Emma, Joanna and Denise, but Denise and Grant both decide against it last minute, leaving two tickets up in the air. Dayna, another friend from school, mentioned that Grant would potentially sell his ticket to her since she is an Eisley fan, had been to a concert the previous year in the same venue, and after all, is the individual responsible for getting me into the band.

So I call Dayna after school and ask her if she still wants to go. She tentatively accepts after giving it some thought and discussing it with the matriarchal powers. I pick her up as soon as she is ready and we hit the road.

The drive is the quintessential Houston escapade: several wrong exits, feelings of complete disorientation, quaint drives through ghetto slums. Perhaps thirty minutes after our intended arrival time we find the place. A rather run down vacant lot resides across the street from the venue, but no sign designates that humans are expected to park their cars among its weeds, sand pits, and shattered asphalt. We do it anyway, parking somewhat parallel to a curved white streak, the only one of its kind, which can be interpreted as a parking line if your eyes are squinted enough and the tilt of your head is just right.

Leaving the car, we double-check no stray money remains in plain view and triple-check that all doors are completely locked. As I cross the street I look over my shoulder, half expecting the car to be already towed, ticketed or stolen. Nope, still there! The humid Texas summer air quickly becomes our next concern as we consider the appalling thought of waiting three and a half hours under the sun for the doors to open.

Traces of life are entirely absent at the Meridian. Garage doors and the looming ancient warehouse feel of the place imply we’d somehow chosen the wrong Meridian in Houston — surely Eisley wouldn’t have chosen to play in an abandoned shell of building last tended to decades ago.

But a few knocks on a set of double doors reached by a steep flight of metal mesh stairs evoke the appearance of a large man through a second-story window wearing a flowery shirt angrily gesticulating we go around. Expressing gratitude to the disgruntled insider, we walk down the flight of stairs, circle the building, and walk up another. Ah, bonjour open door!

The small foyer is as humid as the air it’s exposed to. Two tables, one covered in bundled fliers for other bands and one with a cash register sit unattended. As we stare at each other, uncertain and half-laughing at the silliness of it all, an big elevator door opens — the industrial kind with doors receding into the floor and ceiling like a mouth — and a man pushing a cart loaded with beer emerges and quickly disappears behind a set of double doors behind which we briefly see a display of Eisley t-shirts and posters. A few continually uncertain minutes elapse and a middle-aged woman cheerfully pops out from behind the same doors, stops to assess our presence, and starts the first dialog we’d had with anyone since we got there.

She introduces herself as Kim and the three of us engage in small-talk. She and Dayna speak about last year’s concert at the Meridian and its miserable lack of air conditioning. She assures us this year the Meridian’s air conditioning is working properly — almost too properly. Speaking to her I can’t help but think how strange it is that this woman, someone clearly with the tour, wasn’t telling us kids to beat it.

But she bids us a happy concert and leaves out the doors to the stairs leading back to the street. We’ve stood unmoving for over ten minutes and the uncertainty starts making us feel somewhat nervous. Then our impulsive, mischievous teenage sides come out:

“Hey, when that guy with the beer went through though those doors, there was a stand with t-shirts on it?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Well, since we’re the only people here not with the concert, we could probably go through and stand there — if anyone asks, we can say we’re looking at the stuff. ” “Haha, you want to?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

So we put on our game faces and stride through the double doors, into the lovely air conditioning, and stand in front of the wares trying to create the facade of belonging. No one catches on! Save a few glances of doubtfulness, we received none of authority or animosity. We talk it out for five minutes and then feel we’ve been standing too long. Let’s go sit on those couches!

So we walk in further and crawl on a large conspicuous red loveseat in direct view of a strange Russian cartoon from the sixties or seventies being projected on the wall in front of us. Simultaneously people-watching and cartoon-watching, we sit for a few minutes and relax. Man, we made it!

Then a member of the band I now know to be Sherri walks by us. Woah! The unexpected appearance evokes poorly concealed ear-to-ear smiles from both of us. She checks up on a few guys working menial tasks and disappears as quickly as she came.

Having just experienced the apex of our day thus far — seeing Sherri perambulate — we look for new sources of excitement. Our interest turns to watching the cartoon with increasing fascination.

I notice the dancing animated sailors and ballerinas’ close synchronization with the loud general-selection music playing over the venue’s overhead speaker system and pointed it out to Dayna. Watching more intently, we laugh hysterically as the drama of the cartoon unfolds perfectly with pivotal points in the music. The average, modern music and idiosyncratic, artistic cartoon couldn’t have been matched better.

Then we hear it.

Eisley! In another room somewhere! Drowning out the other music with their sudden practicing! The adrenaline rushes into us and a few minutes of antsy sitting become enough reason to force us off our butts and on the hunt for this beautiful sound. Following through a small hallway down which Sherri disappeared previously, we walk into an unexpectedly large room full of people setting up things, bartenders wiping down bars, and a stage. A stage… Ahem… with Eisley playing on it!

We seat ourselves on a couple of stools at a small table and radiate exhilaration. Here we were, hours before the event was scheduled to start, watching Eisley practice, discuss the show, quarrel, check microphones, and exchange flippant jabs at each other. Of this entire night, this image of seeing their personal sides raw and unrehearsed on the stage still lingers most visibly in my mind.

After an hour or so Eisley moves off the stage to the V.I.P. so the opening band can practice. Dayna and I sit in the wonderful atmosphere and converse. This is another fantastically memorable moment of the night because Dayna has always been (and still is) quite an enigmatic source of intrigue to me.

As the minutes float by workers slowly emerge to finalize the decorations in the stage room. Dayna suggests I ask to lend a hand so I approach a young woman about my age putting up Eisley posters. She informs me the last of the posters had been put up, but followed me back to where we’d been sitting and joins us. Much like the woman before, she introduces herself as Stacy and small-talk succeeds. She reminisces with us of a time when her little brother once went up to a hulking bouncer at a show and bravely asked him “What’s it like being so big?” She jokes that she’ll never get used to having big bouncers around her. At least she has a yellow wristband to prevent her from getting bounced!

After five minutes or so Stacy walks away and we remark what a nice girl she was. If only we knew who she was.

Following Stacy’s departure our attention shifts to a middle-aged man, half balding, on-stage helping Sherri tune her guitar. Sitting indian-style with the blonde girl in her early twenties, his patience and knowledge both reflect from his peaceful countenance as he both assists and encourages her. Knowing the band is closely familial, we correctly inferred this man was her father and the father of the other members of the band, excluding Garron, the bassist cousin.

When finished he walks off the stage onto the floor just as the woman we’d met in the foyer emerges out of the hallway and walks past us giving us a wink. He grabs her hand and lovingly spins her into a loving hug. Tightly held together, the couple watches the girls in the room with a seemingly profound sense of pride. We then realize this woman whom we’d met earlier was the mother of the four siblings in the band.

This sight too offers a glimpse far beyond what “back-stage” access like this yields. Seeing the band members’ parents in this way shows us that behind Eisley are loving parents — people with devout love for each other and their children both. The success story of Eisley is best reflected in the familial success of their home.

When finished setting up, the decent opening band began practicing and our attention shifted back to talking between ourselves. The remainder of the time until the show began was spent much in this way.

A periodic countdown until seven o’clock, the time at which the doors were to open, shouted by a man seemingly in charge makes us increasingly more anxious. Joanna and Emma show up just minutes before the doors open and I am actually on the phone with them when people are first allowed in, giving us a heads up to make it to the stage first before people started tearing in for the cherished front and center spots — which we shamelessly took. Still having an extra ticket, they give it to a kid they recognized from our school. Dayna and I each still had our tickets since no one even considered people coming as early as we did. Later we find out Joanna and Emma had to pay for parking as well — another thing of which our earliness had conveniently spared us.

An hour of standing in front of the stage elapses as eight o’clock approaches. The four of us joke and laugh the whole time, effectively passing it pretty quickly. When the time comes to start, we find the two opening bands better than expected. Their performances were watched with an underlying degree of impatience to get to the real show.

And boy did we get it.

Eisley’s performance was the perfect climax to the perfect night. As much as I’d loved them before, those feelings multiplied every minute. I spared them no shouting or applause — in reference to the crowd that night on their MySpace blog they even remarked “You guys are pretty crazy.”

What’s more, the girl whom I’d asked to assist setting up and conversed with was none other than Stacy DuPree, a lead singer of the band! In the picture below from Eisley’s MySpace account I drew an arrow to my otherwise anonymous head in the crowd. To my left is Dayna.

But time passes and, as the Germans say,

«Alles Gute hat sein Ende»

Time got the best of us and forced the two happiest teenagers alive out onto the Houston freeways with thoughts racing. The drive home yielded no wrong turns, no problems whatsoever. We drove home not in a car, but rather glided home on air.