The Wounds

Stricken For Catherine

Recollecting Stricken For Catherine  

The first thing that comes to mind when recollecting the Stricken For Catherine years is our first rehearsal space in Dover, NH.  It was in one of those red-brick New England factory buildings, once a paper mill probably—now crumbling, converted into a sprawling complex for loud, barely post-adolescent bands to play in.  The Queers, NH’s most prized 90’s pop-punk band practiced across the hall.  Ratty punk boys and skin-head hard-core types roamed about in the halls.  We had a decent sized room on the third floor, with big, dusty, industrial-sized windows looking down onto a turbulent Cocheco river, which cramped with ice in the colder months.  The walls were cheap wood-paneling covered with foam we toar off to make impromptu earplugs.  Mike’s drums and Markus’s mammoth bass cab were set against one wall.  On the opposite wall, Joe’s and my Marshall half-stacks.  Along the adjoining wall, a PA system and two monitor speakers pushed into the center of the room.  In the midst of all this, a contortion of cords and cables, like snakes in a pirate ship’s hull. 

At the time the four of us—Joe Grillo, Markus Belanger, Mike Ushiniski, and myself—were in our early twenties, with Markus being a few years older.  This was before politics, before ideology, before cynicism, had fully settled in.  As much as a political addict I am these days, I don’t even remember Clinton vs Dole.  Did that election even happen?  I have zero recollection.  I was floating in another dimension: one comprised only of music, tribal solidarity, and punk DIY ethos.  Around the edges of this dimension was a more complicated fabric: the stirrings of feeling, little strings reaching out into a collapsing world; and also, perhaps more profoundly, the gravitational pull of something inside I couldn’t name.  

Joe, Mike, and I had relocated from a suburb of Worcester, MA to Dover to attend University of New Hampshire.  We carried with us a certain esprit de corps, the result of having been baptized together in Worcester’s unexpectedly rich and fecund music scene.  We came of age in our second home, the WAG (Worcester Artists Group), where one week we might see Come, another week, Fugazi, another week Dinosaur Jr., another week the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and another week GG Allan spin-off the Cedar Street Sluts, etc.  This is where we cut our teeth in our highschool bands and learned, up-close, what the energy of live rock music was about.  

But I digress.  

In NH, we worked shitty jobs (except for Markus, who was a high-school teacher); but life really began when work ended and we grabbed a few six packs of Honey Brown beer and headed to our sweat-stinking-yet-holy practice space, where we would lose and remake ourselves within songs conjured out of musty air, with the help of some anger, some heart-ache, some fantasy, some ambition, and a lot of elbow grease.  I should say, that regardless of the competition and conflict inevitable among a group of boys at such an age, we also benefited as a band from the love (sometimes, the tough type of love) we felt for each other, which, listening back to our music, is apparent in the way we play off of and respond to each other's lines.  Even moments of extreme dissonance reflect the awe and respect we held for each other’s creativity.  

The thing about SFC is that we played really fucking well.  We weren’t polished musicians (okay, maybe Markus and Mike kind of were), but we took our instruments and our songwriting seriously.  It was never slap-dash; it was never easy.  We slaved away at those songs, measure by measure, lick by lick, section by section, in a way that would have resonated with the ghosts of that old factory building.  We were, in fact, building something, something not unlike a house, or perhaps a ship.   We had to have a vision first (the outline of a song), and then material (each individual instrumental contribution), then a mathematical plan (the weaving together of sections and meters and counterpoints of a song), and finally assembly (practice, practice, practice!).  We built our ship five days a week in that unventilated room, devoted to our craft, knowing that the product of our labor was a type of salvation.  Our music would save us, somehow, miraculously, from some terror, which may have been the terror of boredom or apathy or uselessness, or perhaps something worse.  It absolutely would save us.  We knew this.  And so we labored on. 

And when not playing music we played Magic: The Gathering; we smoked hand-rolled cigarettes; we wandered along lonesome railroad tracks in the Dover woods; we threw messy, drunken, sexually-tense parties; we read Maus, Eastern philosophy, Maximum Rocknroll, and Punk Planet.  We listened to Rodan, Sunny Day Real Estate, Slint, Tortoise, The Cure, Miltown, Cast Iron Hike, Stevie Wonder, John Coltrane, Bjork, Tori Amos, Soundgarden, Henryk Górecki, Drive Like Jehu, Depeche Mode, Kate Bush, and Jawbox.  We moved from New Hampshire to Boston, got a deal with Espo Records.  We found ourselves in the midst of Boston’s post-hardcore metal renaissance.  We recorded two albums: On the Dark and Letters Not Sent.  

On the Dark is sort of a dream vision.  The five songs are not really songs, in the traditional sense, but more like movements.  Joe and I would bring in chords and melodies and lyrics, and then, with Mike and Markus, piece together compositions that eschewed typical structure, taking multiple diversions, sidetracks, circlings-back.  I don’t know that we knew what we were doing, but we did know, collectively—probably only collectively, as in a sum that is greater than its parts—what worked and what didn’t.  We knew how to connect musical ideas within a framework of meaning that presented a story (or perhaps quest is a better word), because these songs really were musical narratives of adventures into a psychological landscape we couldn’t fathom to describe literally.  

Joe’s lyrics, and my own, are about struggle, a type of struggle perhaps only encountered in one’s early twenties.  On the Dark is a coming-of-age record, a chronicle of the initial stage of what Jung called individuation.  And yet, despite the struggle there is also reward (“the tightness in trying”, as Joe so exquisitely puts it); and together the struggle and reward are not reduced to estrangement, but rather a feeling of being at home in the midst of homesickness.  

Perhaps I’m saying more than I should about a rock record, but I do see On the Dark, to this day, as shadow-ridden and yet stridently hopeful.  Listen to the basic scaffolding laid down by Mike and Markus.  The deep structure of the songs allows Joe and me, with our guitars and vocals, to venture into tenuous places, leaping from musical precipice to musical precipice.  We never leapt with fear of falling, because the songs have such strong foundations—we could rely on that.  Nameless is the perfect ending for the album, because, in a sense, the narrative of the songs is one of letting go of who you thought you were, both musically and personally.  

If On the Dark is about learning to let go, Letters not Sent is about moving on.  This album is more sophisticated and more schizophrenic.  Joe had taken to writing sharp, tightly-woven, brightly-melodic songs, like Instead of a Crucifix and Cornered.  They were shorter songs, bitter-sweet, filled with addictive hooks and tremulous vocals.  These poppier songs allowed me to play around with snaking, off-kilter lead guitar lines.  

On the other hand, I was bringing in epic pieces like Succumb and Reflection, songs that built slowly and eerily toward frenetic, volatile crescendos.  Mike and Markus helped a lot with the song writing too, especially when it came to my stuff.  Reflection, as I recall, was just a heavy metal song to begin with, until the other guys dug into it, spread it out, and added ambiance and space and dynamics.  Perhaps my favorite song on the album is Smock, a Markus composition that Joe and I added vocals and lyrics to.  This song reminds me of living underground, underwater, in some earth-cove where sunlight fingers play.  Letters Not Sent beautifully juxtaposes light and dark, violence and calm, sharp edges and soft waters.  It’s a grand, melancholy, raging record that anticipates the end of an era (and a band).  

I miss these guys and the times we shared in our womb-like practice space in the old mill building on the Cocheco river in Dover, NH.  We were a band of brothers, and we were so young, so filled with inchoate longings, so in the midst of transformation from one state into another.  We poured our hearts and sweat and dreams into these songs—but the songs were bigger than us.  They were writing us, as much as we were writing them.  

Todd Scherer Drogy, 1.17.23, Dorchester, MA