“Soft Pyramids”

Q and Not U – “Soft Pyramids”

(from the album Different Damage: Dischord Records, 2002)

The Q and Not U album Different Damage is braided into the most microscopic fibers of my adolescence. And although in the context of their discography one would be tempted to call it their most “mature” record (the opening track, “Soft Pyramids,” is a mid-tempo groove with a prominently featured melodica solo), there is something deliciously teenage about every one of the memories I associate with it. My best friend and I listening to it on the way to the junior prom, taking off our seatbelts and putting the car in park at a red light so we could dance like a pair of smasmodic doofuses — me raccoon-eyed and wearing, of all things, a vintage wedding dress — and, when the light changed, abruptly buckling up and heading in the direction of the Cherry Hill Hilton. My best friend — with whom, I should mention, I had the kind of monstrously tempestuous relationship that often results when a seventeen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy try to be best friends — having the gall to see Q and Not U without me, a decision that resulted in me declaring a Livejournal war of embarrassingly personal proportions. (I should also mention that the whole episode, incidentally, stemmed from residual anger about my decision to ask somebody else to the senior prom.) And in the background of this pageant of teenage calamity, the tracks off Different Damage played on loop, like twelve furious little thunderstorms, shifting from moments of delicate calm to spurts immaculately controlled violence, which, I think, was a little bit how my life felt at that time.

In the fall of 2005, I moved to Washington DC to go to college. I’d never been there before, but like every high school kid who knew her way around a safety pin, the DC scene loomed large in my own personal mythology. DC was not just a scene, but the scene — in a single, fabled word: Dischord. And although the truly exciting shit was ancient history a few years after I was born, the early-to-mid-2000s represented a moment when the ghosts of Dischord past commingled with something new and exhiliratingly alive. In 2003, Black Eyes put out their spazzy, anthematic self-titled debut, which remains one of my favorite punk records of the decade. That same year, Q and Not U released the blistering “X-Polynation” single, which gave us hope that their third record just might be the best thing they’d ever done. But suddenly, and exactly when I was getting ready to start at American University — its campus just blocks from the Dischord House! –, this mythical scene crumbled in a way so sudden and unexpected that it felt suspiciously similar to the teenage melodrama all around me. First, Black Eyes broke up, leaving the world with just one brilliant LP and a posthumous release that — despite moments of glory, like the vicious intensity of “False Positive” — feels unfinished and stands as a rather depressing monument to thwarted potential. And then as if that weren’t bad enough, in the summer of 2005 the truly unthinkable happened: Q and Not U announced they were splitting up too.

The final Q and Not U show happened in DC on September 23, 2005. Tickets sold out before I moved to the city; I was inconsolable. I hated the fact that their final show would be taking place a few miles from where I was living, but I wouldn’t be there. And even worse, the cardinal virtue of teen angst was clanging undeniably true: there was no one with whom I could share my misery. The people I’d spent the first month of college hanging out with were nice, but we had very little in common. (I cannot help think of cousin Jasper’s collegiate advice to Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited: “You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first.”) So, the night of the show I went down to the Black Cat by myself, less anticipating scoring a scalped ticket than desiring to be around people who genuinely loved something that I loved too.

I got there too late. The opener was about to go on and even all the scalpers had done their business and gone inside. The whole block was lonely and empty, not what I’d expected at all. Then, milling around the ticket window, I heard a man say something that I have never again heard at a box office the night of a show: “Can I return this ticket?” It was like that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when little Charlie Bucket sees the glimmer of the gold, the moment right before he can believe it’s true. Before the woman even said, “No,” I was fumbling for my wallet and asking the man how much he wanted for it. “These tickets are totally sold out,” the woman at the box office said rather brusquely. “You’d better give him at least double the list price. At least.” I had $10. The man eagerly took it and gave me the ticket. Before I was even through the door, my shaky fingers were dialing my best friend back home in New Jersey, the only person in the world I knew who would understand the scope of this tiny miracle.

“Soft Pyramids” was the last song Q and Not U ever played. It was never my favorite Different Damage track, but by the time Chris Richards hit the “please pick a color for your checklist” line in the bridge — and for a number of reasons bigger than the song itself — I decided it was the single best live performance of a song I’d ever seen in my life. Though I love all three of their records, a quick Youtube search confirms the objective truth that Q and Not U was a dish best served live, and sweaty. After they had walked off the stage, this guy in front of me turned around and, with a look of exasperation and exhaustion, said loudly to no one in particular, “I loved that band.” Then he walked away. Everyone else soon began to file out of the Black Cat, and I stood there, drenched in sweat, alone in a new city where I knew no one and — if one believes something so large and stormy can meet such a conclusive finale — at the end of my adolescence. I can think of very few moments in my life when I have been happier.

Here is a terrific and inexplicably sepia-toned video of Q and Not U performing “Soft Pyramids” in Halifax in 2003.