2003: Guster, Keep It Together
By Ben Purkert
We were sipping straight vodka from peach Snapple bottles. Or maybe not straight, maybe some mixer swirled in, anything to add tint and throw any passing adult off the scent. When a scowling NJ Transit train conductor stepped toward us, we quietly thrilled at the prospect of getting caught. His disinterest came as a disappointment. He robotically collected our tickets while clutching what seemed a standard-issue hole puncher, just like the ones we had at school. But who cared about school? It was summer. And besides, we’d graduated. In a few weeks, we’d be off at college.
After our train pulled into Penn Station, we buzzed cheerily out onto the sweltering platform, then zipped a few midtown blocks to Radio City Music Hall amidst a throng of fellow teenagers. Waiting for the curtain to rise, the whole audience seemed giddy with disbelief. Radio City? Like actual Radio City? With the plush velvet seats, the gold Art Deco ceiling, the lingering echoes of musical legends past and present? We grinned the grins of idiots. What was Guster—our stupid little Guster—doing here?
My friends and I had already seen Guster perform earlier that summer, and that venue seemed more fitting. It was June 2003, just after the release of their new album Keep It Together, and the band was playing a free pop-up concert in a parking lot behind Scotti’s Record Shop in Morristown. If initially I questioned the value of carrying a cell phone, I now instantly understood its power, how a single text message could turn my car around and bolt it on Route 24 from Essex County to Morris in mere minutes. I arrived just as lead guitarist Adam Gardner began belting out the chorus of “Barrel of a Gun.” My friends and I hugged our way to the stage.
Adam was a decade older than me, but it felt like less. After all, we shared a lot in common: socially awkward, Jewish, and a native of suburban New Jersey. Sure, he’d attended my rival high school, though that seemed a trivial difference. School rivalries were dumb anyway. Nothing worth taking seriously.
Guster never took anything seriously, which my 18-year-old self adored about them. Other bands like DMB and Phish inspired humorless zealotry; followers would take an evangelist’s tone when expounding on the creative genius of Boyd Tinsley or Trey Anastasio. But Guster? Less genius, more goof. In the studio-recorded version of “Airport Song,” you can hear what sounds like a ping-pong game taking place in the background. It’s as if, mid-track, a couple of bandmates had grown tired of performing and reached for their paddles instead. I remember the novelty of listening to it on my Discman, the crisp little ball bouncing back and forth across my skull, volleyed delightfully from one ear to the other.
There were also the laughs. On “Melanie,” a hidden track on Guster’s second album, Goldfly, lead vocalist Ryan Miller moans an undone language of heartbreak (“Would you be / What you define / Being a crutch like this / Or grief like mine”), only to crack up in the middle, seemingly mocking his own sentimentality. This was peak Guster: part Romanticism, part Dada. “This microphone,” he whispers, “smells like pastrami.”
I can’t talk about Guster without mentioning its heartbeat, drummer Brian Rosenworcel. Rather than use a typical drum kit, Rosenworcel—or as some called him, Thundergod—would rain fury down with his bare hands, a heavy torrent of slaps and smacks that left his palms bloody and raw. If Guster had been a different sort of band, his bodily sacrifice might’ve seemed metal or hard punk. But rage and angst weren’t their brand. If anything, Rosenworcel resembled Jackass host Johnny Knoxville, smiling big whilst shattered.
I won’t say I was disappointed, just surprised, when I heard that Thundergod had traded in his bare hands for a proper set of sticks when recording Keep It Together. And indeed, it was a wise career move: the album has a markedly crisper and catchier sound. Take the hit single “Amsterdam.” It moves with a tempo that’s not found in the band’s early work, and it raced up the Billboard Charts as a consequence. Before long, MTV was airing Guster videos between Britney and NSYNC. Pure pop, hold the pastrami.
And it wasn’t only the sound that changed. The lyrics too had been cleaned up, polished to the point of—can I say it?—banality. From the album’s title track:
Keep it together
Can we keep it together
We’re singing a new song now
And everything starts today
Given my devotion, I strained to find meaning. I told myself that there was a meta quality to these lines, that the band was grappling seriously with the subject of its own evolution. How, in other words, to ‘keep it together’ while ‘singing a new song’? How to stay true to one’s roots while starting over?
As my friends and I listened to Guster rock out in Radio City that day, we too were staring down similar questions, even if we didn’t realize it. Soon we would disperse to college campuses. We would keep in touch with varied frequency. We would get together only occasionally, and when we did, we’d note changes in each other and ourselves, sizing up the distance between who we were and who we’d been.
I bought a ticket to see Guster as soon as I arrived at college. It seemed like fate: the band was playing a big show at the FleetBoston Pavilion, just a few T stops away from my dorm. I’d hoped that I might coax one of my roommates to join me in partaking in Gustermania, but it wasn’t to be; I stepped into the Pavilion alone.
It was a fine concert, I guess. But what I most remember about that night was my own confusion. Why did the crowd seem so much older? Where were other teenagers like me? Then it clicked. Guster had gotten its start at Tufts in the early ’90’s. While I might have felt a connection with the lead guitarist over a shared New Jersey childhood, Boston fans had literally grown up with the band; they’d been loyally attending shows in backyards and garages and dive bars, all long before my bar mitzvah. I wondered if Guster’s new sound sat well with them. Maybe they were just happy that their hometown band had made it big.
I’d been warned about Boston’s public transportation, so I wanted to leave before the T shut down operations for the night. I was about to pack up, when something stopped me in my tracks: the opening chords of “Airport Song” began ringing out, and all around me, middle-aged couples were erupting in joyful cries. This was the Guster they knew and loved. This was what they—we—had come to hear.
People began feverishly reaching into their pockets, digging out something they’d stowed away for this moment. I wasn’t sure initially, but then it became clear. Ping-pong balls. Hundreds, possibly thousands. The crowd held them low in closed fists. Then, in an instant, it was time.
As soon as Thundergod started his solo, it was like magic: everyone hurled their stash wildly into the air. Purple and yellow and green, the balls gleamed fanatically in the laser light above our heads. Eventually gravity took hold, as we knew it would, and there was a downpour of neon. It only lasted a few seconds, but it felt longer—the thunder in our ears, the rain at our feet.
Ben Purkert's poems appear in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Kenyon Review. He's an editor at Guernica and teaches creative writing at Rutgers. He's currently at work on a novel. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter.