Belly – Feed the Tree

Today I got a notification from Bandsintown that Belly had added some more dates on their recently announced tour. When the word got out that they had reunited and would play a few shows, I remembered seeing a ticket for Belly at the old 9:30 Club the last time I looked through my old stubs. For the life of me I couldn’t remember the show though. I did spend a ton of time at the 9:30 Club back on F Street and I’m sure I saw a lot of bands I don’t remember but I felt like I should remember this show more. I tried looking on Setlist.fm but that didn’t help. I pulled out the envelope where I have the stubs and looked again.

Upon closer inspection I realized this wasn’t a stub, it was the whole, unripped ticket. It was also still smooth and flat, not showing the tell-tale signs of a stub that had been shoved in my pocket and suffered the effects of one of Washington D.C.’s sweatiest and smelliest establishments. I stood there turning the ticket over in my hands trying to remember if they had cancelled or I had blown it off, though neither felt likely. Then it hit me. The date. This show was about a week after one of my three housemates had been shot in the head, after parking her car on our street. At first it seemed like a random drive-by but just before the Belly show, another woman was shot about a block away. Things were incredibly stressful and the only consistent part of the attacks in the pattern that police pieced together was that the gunman went after people walking alone. I typically went to these shows by myself and there was no way I was up for it. We had my housemate’s dad staying with us while she recovered (she did recover, thankfully, though she lost an eye from the gun shot) and we would come home from work in groups, go inside and stay there until morning. I liked Belly, but not enough to risk being the next victim of a madman.

I’ve just finished a novel, Every Anxious Wave*, in which time travel to concerts of the early 1990s plays a big part. In the past year or so, there seem to be a lot of bands that broke up in the 90s getting back together and going on tour. My interest in going to any of those shows was directly related to whether or not I’d seen them back in the day. If I had (the Replacements, Ride) then I preferred to have those old shows stand as the definitive memory of what their live concerts were like. Things are different now. It could still be great but it is different, there’s no way around it.

But I missed the Belly show. I could look at this new tour as a do-over. So far all the venues are a little too far away, and they’ve been selling out ridiculously fast, but I’ll keep an eye on it. Maybe reunion shows are as close to time travel as we’ll get.

*I have more thoughts on the topic after reading this book but they’re still scattered so perhaps that’s a post of its own.