Depression, Anxiety, and Home Music

The Birmingham of my mind

My wife reminded me yesterday that anxiety is based on thinking about the future and depression is based on reflecting on the past. I am certainly anxious about some future things — November 2024 comes to mind — but I am more successful ridding myself of anxious, OCD thoughts than I am wrenching myself out of sinking into the quicksand of my past.

I don’t help myself by getting fixated on books like Andre Millard’s Magic City Nights: Birmingham’s Rock ’n’ Roll Years (Wesleyan U. Press 2017). While it did inform me about two songs my grandmother wrote, which then were recorded by Abby Lee and the Jesters in 1959, it also led me down paths of my own weird choosing.

I left Birmingham/home for good around 1980. At that point, what I remember about the city’s Rock “n” Roll vibe is that on the radio dial there were two main options: K-99, which played album rock, and I-95, which played hit rock. I’m not here to explain the difference; you know it when you hear it, or heard it. As for clubs, I was mainly going to dance bars back then, though I did venture to Brothers Music Hall for random shows like David Allan Coe and Hank Williams, Jr, and this was actually way before my era of loving Outlaw Country. My college friends who took me there were ahead of the times — or behind, depending on how you feel about OC.

Reading Millard’s book made me nostalgic, cause he covers the 50s-70s well, and those were the times I lived for music (well not the 50s since I was only four when that decade ended): The radio stations, the big concerts via WVOK’s Shower of Stars, and independent record stores everywhere along with record departments in big retail outlets. Sometimes I long for K-Mart.

There were even garage bands I recognized, though never saw live, like The Rockin’ Rebellions, whose concerts at the Oporto Armory I’d hear advertised on WSGN. I can tap my memory bank easily and it was fun riding this wave of my past.

And then the book veered into the 1980s and abruptly lost me.

So, my question: is it possible to feel depressed about a time that I didn’t exactly live through? Or rather, is it possible to catch the blues about the music and life that went on in my home place after I left?

My old friends back home through the decades would tell me about new concert halls, bars, and outdoor venues in Birmingham that made me want to be there — places like Five Points Music Hall and Bottletree. Birmingham also had a City Stages event for a couple of decades that brought in local, regional, and national acts and for a time was the envy of the South. I never attended City Stages, though my friends and even my mother talked so much about it and suggested I come back.

Why didn’t I?

City Stages died in part because of nearby festivals like Bonnaroo (nearby in the sense that Bonnaroo prevented its acts from performing within a certain mile proximity, and a farm in rural Tennessee seemed more desirable than the busy city streets of a city known for its tendency to bomb what it didn’t like). I might lament this act of murder had I ever gone to either festival. That I still lament it to the degree I do says more about me — as if I have an amputated limb that still aches, rain or shine.

But I did see and still remember certain bands like Hotel who almost hit it big with both a single, “You’ll Love Again,” and a couple of LPs. They played at the old Cobblestone (formerly the Crazy Horse Saloon) on Morris Avenue — a street that formed “Underground Birmingham” for a time in the 70s. There were other bands I either heard or heard of like Homestead Act and Locust Fork. I keep wondering if I did see Locust Fork live, because one of their singers, Nida Threatt, is familiar to me. Maybe she attended the same college I did (The University of Montevallo, more on which in a minute), but I totally forgot about her and her band until I found a Locust Fork LP at my local record store here in Greenville, SC, just a few weeks ago.

It was at The University of Montevallo (see? I attended from fall 1974 through spring 1979) that I barely missed the legendary (for Birmingham) band, Dogwood who named themselves after an even smaller neighborhood near campus. Too bad Bonnaroo didn’t see this rural part of central Alabama.

But it was also while attending Montevallo that I saw a band, whose name I’ll never remember, playing at a roadhouse that used to be called many things but was renamed The Kollege Klub during my years. Those double-Ks make me wince today, but at least there were only two of them. The band I saw there on so many nights played covers (killer versions of “Badge” and “In the Presence of the Lord”) and maybe a few originals. Its leader, a guy named Robert Churchill who played drums and guitar over the years, was also a Montevallo student.

And so while I hadn’t forgotten him, I was still surprised to see his name pop up in Millard’s book. Apparently, Churchill went on to form a band named Telluride that also had modest success in Birmingham, after I left town. I had heard of the band and knew that they were big around the city, but I didn’t know I actually had an association with it. It all seems familiar and distant, and just yesterday, the Telluride 10-inch record I ordered online arrived. That I haven’t played it yet mystifies me.

Birmingham is a city scarred by the past it made when it decided to embrace and promote racism. Today, it’s locked in a state that seems ready to secede from the union again. But that isn’t the entire story, and it certainly isn’t Birmingham’s music story.

One of the tenets of Millard’s book is the lamentation that no rock and roll band from Birmingham ever made it big, nationally. In fact, the city’s biggest stars were the ones who won “American Idol,” Ruben Studdard and Taylor Hicks, with Bo Bice placing second to Carrie Underwood.

And yet, since Magic City Nights was released, Birmingham has seen two bands get fairly big: Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires and St. Paul and the Broken Bones. Pitchfork reviewed the former and Sirius XMU plays the latter. New on the scene is The Blips who get aired on Little Steven’s Underground Garage regularly, and each time they do, the host announces that they’re from Birmingham, Alabama. Not bad, and I know their lead guitarist, which still makes me kind of long to be back in my home area.

Perhaps the biggest rock, or Alt-rock act from Birmingham is Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee. She and her sister played around town for years as The Ackleys, and my heart tells me I should have known about her sooner than I did. But how and why?

The hardest thing about all of this is losing connection. When I read about my former home, I miss it in ways I can’t explain and in a form that will haunt me forever. I know the streets, the neighborhoods, the history, but reading these pages makes me understand that not only did life down there go on without me, but that talking to old friends who are still living there, I feel like I’m with them and so far away at the same time.

Maybe that has more to do with missing a place, with missing my parents. Maybe it’s that I see us all, riding through those streets and knowing a certain kind of life there but not knowing it anymore.

I see my friends walking into a club to hear some band and it feels like I’m walking in with them. Do they feel my presence? Am I a ghost whose aura they sometimes sense, sometimes lean in to share a joke or a thought or a beer with?

But I never went in with them to these new places and likely I never will. So do I miss the past — the one I lived in and moved on from? Does home ever stop being home even if I know nothing much about it any more? Even if, when I think about it, what I see are the ghosts and shadows of a former infatuated life?

Why do I keep reading these books? Why will I or won’t I listen to my Telluride LP?

Why does my former home depress me so?

What is the matter with me?

Thanks to The Riff for publishing.