Friday, April 15, 2016

Oh, I bought the domain.

I don't really know why. I don't think about it very much. I don't think anyone cares, either. But I've put together some very simple sites for the things I am doing, so it seems like it's an okay thing to put something together for something I did.

First thing you have to know:  This died. Five Year Jacket was a band that started in Chad's basement sometime in the early nineties and ran over ten years into the 2000s. I wasn't there for the last year or so, and I don't really know much about it except that I went to two gigs after I was gone and cried at both. It would seem that the only member who was there start to finish was Chad, even though he went to France for almost a year at one point and we kept playing without him. Pat bookended the thing, he started it with me and I was playing with him in high school. He introduced me to Chad. He and Chad were there at the end with Matt. Matt . . . I can't wait to write about Matt.

I guess I'll tell my part of it all. I'm Kevin. I wrote a bunch of the songs and sang most of them. We were a lot of things in the time we existed. Some of those are bad memories for me, but I guess I'll tell those, too.

I had planned to write one single history of the thing, but as I sit here and start this I don't think that's possible. I walked away from it thinking I was leaving a band and found out a long time later that we weren't just a band. I mean, we were a band, but we never saw much real success and almost no money, so we never were a band that can be remembered for that, or even the songs - proud as I am of some of those.  We failed hugely and the music part isn't our legacy.

So this isn't going to be a story about music. At least not as some gestalt. I plan to post all of the songs and what I know about those. The whole albums, the stories, the regrets and the little triumphs. But mostly I'm gonna tell you about the name over and over again.

We named it Five Year Jacket after a song. I don't remember how many times I told that story and how many times I lied about it, but Pat wrote a song that I don't remember being very good. My memory is pretty faulty, so it may have been incredible, though we never used it. If I recall the song tried to get a piece of a story about an actual jacket. I had some friends in high school. Some pretty damn good ones. I can tell you more about Steve and Chris and Todd and Jay later, but we were pretty tight. Some body bought a Jacket before I met everyone. It was a leather biker jacket with a skull and 'Ministry' airbrushed on the back - one of the ones you got from The Alley. Nothing much, I guess, but everyone wore it at one point or another. Sometimes it got sold when someone needed cash and then sold back or just loaned back. I tried to tell Pat about it one night in Jay's basement and I'm pretty dramatic so I made the story about friendship and brotherhood and all that. About taking care of one another.

And I don't really know. Maybe it was.

So Pat wrote the song and we never used it but we took it as our name and sometimes it was about that stuff. More than I would have admitted when I left a lot of things about Five Year Jacket had to do with taking care of each other.

So here's a bad history. It's going to be done in infinite parts and it's going to be about music and a stupid band for sure, but I hope it's also about friendship and brotherhood and taking care of each other. We grew up together and we worked out some of our demons together. No matter how any of us feel today we really loved each other once.

Be calm with me. I'm rusty as a writer. There's a lot to tell and a lot of stories and I hope a lot of the people I hope to read this that I wanna fit in here.

Any way, Non sum qualis eram, y'all. But I'm gonna try to rise to the story.

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