Cool People, by Matt Shirley

Somewhere along the way, whether it was because my chromosomes lined up in a certain manner or because my mom didn’t hold me enough as a child, I became wired to not like a lot of people.  This intolerance for the annoying and the stupid and the uninteresting and the hippie hasn’t always been quite so passionate, however.  Like all of us, I thought my middle school friends were the coolest until I went to high school, and I thought my high school friends were the best until I went to college.  In an odd life paradox, the more people I met, the more I realized I don’t like most people.  But this isn’t because I was exposed to societal dregs as I grew older, it’s because I was exposed to some individuals who are truly interesting, and funny, and cool.  And everyone else seems a lot less cool in comparison.

A weekend or two ago, I was nervous.  I was set to spend an evening with my older brother, entertaining and getting entertained by two traveling musicians, neither of whom I had ever met.  Paul, the brother in question, had formed a relationship (assumedly—because of the height difference explained later—not based on 69-ing) with Sebastian, the drummer of a band called Bad Veins.  In an unrelated set of events, Paul (and I to some extent) had also become Twitter pals with a fellow named Riley, the drummer of the band Thrice, which, conveniently, was headlining the same tour that included the guys from Bad Veins.  Said tour was set to come through Kansas City to play a rock and roll show (I call them concerts but nobody else does) at the Midland Theater and said musicians were set to hang out with me and my brother along the way.  Hence, nervousness.

I wasn’t nervous because I wanted to impress them with my knowledge of their music (which was nonexistent) or my drumming skills (which are AMAZING). I was nervous because I thought they’d turn out to be dickheads.  Such is the case with…well…people.  They don’t often live up to expectations.  Unless those expectations are of dickheadedness.

As our two new acquaintances entered my brother’s SUV and we set off to the nearest not-so-authentic-but-way-tastier barbecue place, I clammed up.  A little of the same nervousness previously described mixed with a new nervousness revolving around the fact that I don’t typically have a lot in common with under 6’ drummers of rock bands.  It wasn’t until we finally took our seats, and I made my first joke about the tall-guy-short-guy double date we were on that I loosened and started contributing to the conversation.

During dinner, I was struck by how…normal the two musicians were.  Fears of one-dimension-ality were dispelled as we delved into topics ranging from sports to girlfriends to feces.

The drummers soon had to return to their workplace, so once we successfully retrieved my cousin, who would be accompanying us to the concert, we set sail for the Midland once again.  After lamenting the fact that we didn’t have any beers to shotgun, we retrieved our tickets and entered the behemoth of a theater in hopes of catching the end of the opener’s set.  We didn’t.  But we did secure some Bud Lights, the only beers we would end up paying for that evening.

Because after a few gulps, Paul got a message from Riley, telling us that we should come backstage to watch the Bad Veins from eight feet away, rather than from 50.  We, of course, complied, and set up shop on the side of the stage, feeling completely out of place, but way cooler than everyone else in the audience.  This was probably about as close to rock stardom as three non-musical Kansas boys would ever come.

I can honestly say that I am no more familiar with the music of Bad Veins than I was before the show, as the side stage is not the best place for acoustics, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the performance.  After Sebastian and Co. were finished, my little group proceeded to Thrice’s dressing room, where we drank some light beers and awkwardly took up a lot of space.

This trend continued—we’d watch some music for a while, hang out with bands for a while, drink beers for a while, until eventually it was pretty evident that everyone there was…gasp…pretty fucking cool.

Eventually, Thrice took the stage, and we returned to our positions on the side to watch them play, and to pass judgment on all the poor suckers still 50 feet away in the audience.  We witnessed some inter-band backstage shenanigans, an out-of-place attractive roadie, and the camaraderie that forms as bands tour together.  It was nice, all of this.  Nice not only to witness as an outsider, but to be a part of as well, no matter how tiny our impact turned out to be.

When Thrice was finished, our little troupe of misfit compadres explored the bowels of the theater as we made crude jokes and got yelled at for contemplating a game of Soggy Poster (like Soggy Biscuit only with a poster of a female country singer) in the downstairs hallway.  As we screwed around there, and in the dressing rooms, and on stage, I reminisced about how nice it was to experience all this—the free beer, the backstage passes, the commingling with musical, somewhat famous types.  It was surreal, and something everyone in that theater would have liked to do.  But, the next day, when describing why the evening was such a success, I realized that it wasn’t these things that made it memorable.  Free beer and backstage passes are relatively easy to come by; it’s much more difficult to have interesting experiences with genuinely cool people.