Fandom, Dead Bands, & Reunion Tours

A couple of years ago, I joined a fan forum.

I had never joined a fan forum before. In truth, I had never done anything properly “fannish” before at all. Like most people, I have been a fan of things—bands, writers, poets, products. I live in a Mac household; I own multiple copies of Leaves of Grass and every R.E.M. album, even the iffy ones. And I admit that in my adolescent years I nursed a tight little obsessive streak for talent and/or pretty.

In the fourth or fifth grade, my best friend Angela and I hand-wrote what must have been hundreds—if not thousands—of entries for a Sam Goody “Win a trip to see the Monkees!” contest. Around the band’s 20th anniversary, MTV had started showing Monkees reruns a couple of times a day, and I would wake up early to sneak downstairs and catch the morning episode before school. Micky Dolenz sure was goofy. And kinda cute. So when this contest came along, Angela and I launched an offensive.

As often as we could convince our mothers to drop us off at the mall, we plopped ourselves on the thin, beige carpet of the Sam Goody, writing and shivering and smearing purple ink on the fleshy edges of our right hands. We stole whole pads of entry forms to fill out in our bedrooms. We prayed really hard. According to our 10-year-old math, we had submitted more than enough entries to guarantee victory. We had worked hard. We had beaten the system.

When Sam Goody never called, we were convinced that the contest was rigged or that those lazy, humorless clerks at the mall had never submitted our entries out of jealousy of our conviction. There was no other explanation. We had passion and the law of averages on our side. We deserved to win. We were their #1 fans.

By the eighth grade my fannish leanings had grown more timely. Less well-groomed. Louder. Guns N’ Roses had become the obsession du jour, and my circle of friends and I would spend hours watching videos, reading metal magazines, and hiding in dark corners of basements engaged in earnest sleepover colloquys over just how far one would open the door if Slash or Duff McKagan came a-knockin’. We dressed as them for Halloween. We talked to Slash on the radio and became momentary envies at school the next day. I still know the words to “Rocket Queen.”

But despite the occasional raging hormones, I had never belonged to a Fandom in any formal, capital-letter sense. I had never thought much about it, really. I had only ever belonged to one fan club, and that was in 2003 to get a shot at advanced tickets that I failed to take advantage of in time. I was a fan of a lot of things, but I had never really identified as a part of a larger whole.

But one day a couple of years ago, I decided to join an artist’s fan forum. The Police had announced that they were reuniting for one last 30th anniversary hurrah, an opportunity that no child of the 80s could possibly miss. I had never been a Police fan in the Monkees/Guns N’ Roses sense, but I had spent my whole life listening to them. They were such a casual given that I hadn’t much thought of them as a band to be researched or pursued or obsessed over. For me the Police has always just been.

But the Police hadn’t “been” for decades. The band was not just defunct; it was notoriously so. They didn’t suffer from a mere case of Dead Band Member Syndrome; the Police suffered from conflict. Drama. Three decades of rumor and distance and mythology. This reunion was the Holy Grail. Sure, the Eagles famously hated each other and had reformed a couple of times, but they lacked that essential dramatic element that propelled their story from folktale to epic poetry: Sting. The Police was a break-up for the ages.

And judging from my early track record, I seem to have a thing for dead band reunions.

So when the chance to catch this impossible reunion of an almost mythic band arose, my best friend and I jumped on it, forking over way too much to scalpers for the one show that we were going to attend. And in the process of doing ticket research, I rediscovered a website that I hadn’t looked at in a long time, the official website of the Police’s drummer, Stewart Copeland. Micky Dolenz had launched my fascination with cute, goofy drummers, and although I wasn’t up on all of Stewart Copeland’s solo efforts, I was a fan of a number of his soundtracks. His Rhythmatist album in particular had gotten me through some rough days surrounding my mother’s death a couple of years prior. And drums are just cool.

The people on his forum seemed friendly, and Stewart himself even posted once in a while, which was fascinating and not just a little exciting. So I figured that, if nothing else, I would make one undoubtedly embarrassing post to thank the man for that music that had helped me stay sane in a bad situation. I didn’t have to use my real name; I could post under a pseudonym. And while he wouldn’t respond—which was really a blessing—he might by some chance read my thanks. After that, I could post or not or forget the site entirely.

All I needed was a username.

*****

Continuation: Foresight; or, How not to choose a username

Tagged as: dead bands, fandom, guns n' roses, SC.net, Stewart Copeland, the monkees, The Police