On September 10, 2001, I actually went to all my classes, seeing as it was still within the first three weeks of the fall semester of my junior year at Denison University, and the novelty of my schedule hadn’t yet worn off.

There were six of us living in the four-bedroom in Sawyer Hall. The roommates and I had already thoroughly broken in the third-floor suite with what I remember as a great party that featured several packed rooms, a line to get in that stretched down the stairwell, and the beginning of the grossest, stickiest carpeted floor in the known universe.

The more I think about it, though, the more I realize two things:

1.) That was the party when someone stole one of my favorite posters (a Warhol/Marilyn repro) and one of my original framed photographs. I mean, really, who does that?* I had put a lot of time and energy into decorating my room that year – a room I shared with Aru, who remains one of my dearest friends – and I was rather proud of it.

2.) That was also the party when I realized that I rather hated hosting large, ridiculous, semi-anonymous parties in the place where I studied and slept.

*Aside: we found out exactly who did that, and the goods were recovered during covert ops. Both hang in the Man Den today.

So: That evening, 9/10/2001, it was with Aru, Owen (another roommate and continued dear friend), and at least 4 other people (whose identities have been lost in my memory) that I would travel 2 hours and 15 minutes north to Cleveland and the Agora Ballroom for a rock-and-roll show.

For us, this was no ordinary concert. A smallish, punk rock venue for a band whose most recent release rang with great relevance to us in all of our 20-year-oldness. The band was the somewhat-known Jimmy Eat World. The album, entitled Bleed American, dropped in late July or early August and we had had it in heavy rotation while working on campus or driving from our hometowns to school and back.

We were on street team mailing lists. We had posters. We sought out obscure B-sides and splits to see what didn’t make the final cut of the album. To us, there wasn’t a weak song on the record, and all it did was add to the canon that Jimmy Eat World created for us when we discovered their previous release, Clarity.

I could go on and on and on about how sonically stellar Clarity is, and how engaging the heart-on-your-sleeve pop-rock lyricism of it and Bleed American are, but this isn’t a record review. Buy the albums and put them on while you’re cleaning your house or jogging and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

After classes and labs and practices were adjourned, 6 of us set out from Granville in two or three cars. I wore a DELTAFORCE23 shirt to the show, in honor of an indie pop-punk band from my home of Rochester, New York. While I was about to walk into the club, someone stopped me, having seen the shirt and recognizing the band. They said they were just in ROC and had seen Deltaforce play a show (mostly because they were friends with one of the band members). Someone in their party needed a ticket, and since I bought 8 but was only using 6, I gave them my extras.  Share the love, I thought.

As fans crowded into the ballroom of the Agora (legendary in Cleveland’s storied rock scene), I knew it was going to be a sweaty, high energy affair. We strategically found a spot on the riser above the main floor, stage level, stage left.

The opening band was a group I was familiar with only in name – Hey Mercedes – but a group I would quickly become an enthusiast of. Their song “Our Weekend Starts on Wednesday” off Every Night Fireworks became a regular during my radio show all the years following.

I leaned against a column for much of their set, next to a gentleman with dark hair and medium build who watched Hey Mercedes closely, occasionally sipping his Heineken. Their lead singer thanked everyone for showing up early, and let the crowd know they were gonna do two more songs before Jimmy Eat World came out to rock our faces off.

“This band’s pretty good – I like their sound,” I said to the fellow next to me.

“Yeah, I’m really into them. I’m really glad we got them to come on tour with us,” he responded. “I gotta go. Thanks for coming out tonight – I hope you enjoy the show.”

The fellow turned out to be Jimmy Eat World lead singer & guitarist (and band namesake) Jim Adkins.

So, that was pretty cool.

From the moment he and the rest of the band stepped on stage, they rewarded the fans for their devotion by playing nearly all of the new album, most of Clarity, and a few selections off their first major offering, the often overlooked Static Prevails. Despite the newness of Bleed American, the crowd knew every lyric to every song. The band was tight in their arrangements and powerful in their delivery.

We hung on every note like it was the last thing we’d hear in the universe.

My friends and I were emotionally charged, adrenaline-fueled, and physically exhausted after the show. Our voices were hoarse from singing, shouting. We invested everything we had in their performance, in being the best audience we could be.

Through our energy and effort, we wanted to show our gratitude to the band for expressing in song the thoughts we had but didn’t know we had until we heard the music.

We got back to campus around 3 in the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I pulled the tapestry down that provided some barrier against the outside world, and promptly fell asleep in my bottom bunk.

7 hours later, Owen came through my bedroom on the way to the television in the common room.

He said to me, “Wake up – the World Trade Center is gone.”

I spent the rest of the day watching news coverage and combing the internet, trying to make sense of what we had all witnessed. My first concern was for the people I knew to be working in Manhattan that morning. I sent an email to the professor of my only class that day, telling her I might not be in that afternoon. She responded by telling the entire class that we would be meeting as scheduled, but the agenda would be a little different.

In the days that followed, I wrote a lot. It started with my AIM away message – the lyrics from U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” – and went on from there. I wrote about how this would define our generation, would galvanize us, would unify the country after the division of the 2000 election and the goat rodeo that was Bush v. Gore; how our grandparents had D-Day and Hiroshima, how our parents had JFK and Vietnam; how until this point we had nothing but entitlement and soft hands and first-class problems and that this – this – would finally give us that clarity of purpose we were searching for.

Hindsight is 20/20.

I see September 10, 2001 now as one of the best and saddest days of my life. To borrow from Don McLean, it was “the day the music died.” For me, that Jimmy Eat World show was the culmination of youth – 20.5 years of raw emotion and idealism and optimism all rolled into one evening. The world was ours for the taking, and this was the soundtrack.

I have always loved the writing of Hunter S. Thompson. One of his most famous passages comes from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and it resonates with me whenever I think of 9/11, and I think it always will:

“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

For me, that steep hill is in Granville, Ohio.

Music is very much about context – the time and place you first hear it, or the circumstances you remember it by, the memories it conjures, the emotions attached.

9 years later, I look to the East, and with the right kind of ears I can almost hear a familiar song.

Postscript:

In a move that at the time made a lot of sense to anyone not named Adam Pratt, Jimmy Eat World elected to remove the title Bleed American, and re-release it as a self-titled album. There was some concern that the original title lacked sensitivity* to the destruction of the twin towers and the deaths of some 3,000 occupants.

*Aside: A brilliant B-side from Bleed American? “No Sensitivity” – look it up, download it. Play it when someone breaks up with you and you’re mad about it.