On January 9th, 1999, I was 18 and living in Cannon Beach, going to Ecola Bible School, wearing thrift-store clothes that I thought were funny because somebody had graduated in them in 1985, and listening to a lot of ska. A lot of ska. Five Iron Frenzy, The O.C. Supertones, The Insyderz, Squad Five-O, The Dingees, The W’s (BECAUSE YOU ARE THE DEVIL AND THE DEVIL IS BAD!) and enough adjacent stuff to fill out the edges. I remember going to a roller-skating rink where The W’s opened for Five Iron Frenzy, which is maybe the most 1998 sentence anyone has ever written. We skated. They ska’d. It was great. I loved that music, but I’d been living in it for a few years and, without really knowing it yet, I was ready for something new. Fortunately, my friend Elton already knew where the new thing was hiding.

Elton was dating Natalie, and I was dating Amy, who lived way the hell north in Stanwood while I lived way the hell south in Cannon Beach, so somebody came up with the very sensible idea of making a double date out of a concert in Bellingham. “Sensible” is relative here. Cannon Beach to Bellingham is basically a five-hour drive if you behave yourself, and we apparently did not entirely behave ourselves because I remember the three of us, Elton, Natalie and me, leaving Friday night in Natalie’s Honda Civic hatchback, getting to Seattle in the middle of the night and doing a loop through downtown for some reason before getting back on the freeway. I had a little whistle and was blowing it out the window. I don’t know why I had that little whistle. I don’t know why I was blowing it out the window. I was 18. Eventually we made it to Stanwood and stayed at Natalie’s parents’ house, which also meant I got to see Amy, and that alone would have made the ridiculous drive worth it to me. We were doing long distance before long distance meant FaceTime and texting all day. We lived hours apart. Time together was precious.

The next day is mostly missing. This is where my memory starts behaving like my memory. I remember going to the mall because Amy’s older brother worked at Excalibur, which was a sword-and-knife store that existed in a mall because it was the 90s and apparently nobody had any questions. He had recently managed to slice a chunk out of his side while putting away a sword, and I remember the wound looking exactly like somebody wearing lipstick had kissed his love handle. I can see that. Of course I can see that. What we ate that day? No idea. What we did for several hours? Gone. But Sword Kiss Love Handle survived. He had a twin brother, Amy was the youngest of the three, and I have a fuzzy memory that we may have gone over to his house before the show. That is about all I’ve got. And just to head off the obvious assumption about a group of young people spending the weekend near a college town: we were four good Bible-school Christian kids. There was no partying. The missing hours are not drug-induced. They are just missing.

The concert was at Fairhaven Auditorium at WWU, upstairs in a room that felt like it had been built for small stage productions. I remember the floor sloping upward toward the back, and at least near the front there weren’t chairs because we were sitting on the floor close to the stage. The room was packed with kids who seemed incredibly grown up and cool to me. That part matters. It wasn’t really the way they dressed, because I already had the thrift-store thing going and didn’t feel terribly out of place visually. They were cool because they knew to be there. They knew these bands. They knew this room. Somehow they had access to information I didn’t have. I remember looking around and thinking, in whatever wordless eighteen-year-old way I thought it, How do I become somebody who knows about the cool shows and the good music? There was a tribe here, and I wanted in. Apparently my response to discovering a new culture has always been anthropology: study the customs, learn the language, identify the sacred objects, try not to embarrass yourself.

Then Seldom played, and I was floored. I think Damien Jurado was next, and I was floored. Pedro the Lion played, and I was floored. Death Cab for Cutie closed, and I. Was. Floored. I remember almost nothing about the actual performances, which is another excellent demonstration of how my brain chooses what to keep. I cannot give you a set list. I don’t remember what Damien said. I don’t remember what Seldom looked like. The one stage image I still have is Ben Gibbard and Chris Walla playing their guitars almost like guns at the amplifiers. I can see that movement. Mostly, though, what survived isn’t information about the show. What survived is the feeling. I knew, sitting there in that room, while it was happening, that something was changing. This isn’t twenty-seven-years-later Adam assigning cosmic importance to an otherwise ordinary Saturday night. I felt it then. I wanted more of whatever this was, badly. It was quieter and sadder and more intimate than a lot of the music I had been living inside. It seemed older somehow. More complicated. Maybe some of that was just because the people around me seemed older and more complicated. It didn’t matter. Ska suddenly felt a little infantile to me, and I more or less stopped listening to it immediately. This new thing was a fucking gold mine and somebody had just handed me a pickaxe.

Afterward I remember going outside and looking at the merch. I remember buying music. This is also where my brain begins lying to me, or the historical record begins lying to me, or both of us are telling different kinds of truth. I can physically remember Damien’s CD in a jewel case. Pedro’s was a jewel case too. I remember Death Cab’s Something About Airplanes being in cardboard with a little cutout that showed the rowboat on the CD inside. Seldom is the strange one. Present-day me remembers Places I Haven’t Seen as one of the records that came home from that show, and my iTunes metadata dates my copy to 1999, except the official release history says 2001. Maybe I bought a demo. Maybe they had a self-released version. Maybe I’m blending something I bought later into the night. Apparently in 2015 I also remembered buying a different Pedro record than the one I remember buying now, which is helpful. Thank you, Past Adam. The correct answer is: I don’t know. I bought some combination of this music that night and then bought more of it afterward, and my brain has spent the intervening decades remixing the merch table. We’ll leave it open. Seldom was fucking great either way. I followed them through the EP and the LP, and as I’m writing this sentence twenty-seven years later, I’m listening to them again. Very meta. Not like Facebook though.

What I remember much more clearly is what happened to the music after we bought it. We listened to those records all the way back to Stanwood. We listened to them again all the way from Stanwood back to Ecola the next morning. Then we played them in the dorms. Then we started spreading them around campus like missionaries who had returned from Bellingham carrying a new gospel. Some people loved it. Some didn’t. The people who loved it became our people. Josh Richardson, my roommate, got really into it. Mindy. Stephanie. Michelle. Natalie was spreading the good news among the women. Later that year there was a talent show and I remember Josh playing one of the songs from this new collection of music, although I don’t remember which song or even which band. I’m pretty sure Elton played Damien Jurado’s “Yuma, AZ,” unless Josh did that too. Again: it was the 90s. I remember the shape of the thing much better than I remember who was standing where inside it.

Elton was my guide through a lot of this. We were isolated on the Oregon coast, and he already loved this music. I’m sure he played some of it for me before that night because we hung out constantly, but I don’t actually remember him doing that, so I’m not going to magically turn the reasonable assumption into a recovered memory. What I remember is that after Bellingham I looked to him for more. Then I moved back inland, MP3s and Napster opened everything up, and I went absolutely wild. Modest Mouse is one example. I knew the name because everybody in this new world seemed to know the name, so I went looking for them to find out why. I didn’t even like them at first. Apparently I downloaded the wrong songs, or at least the wrong songs for me, because I kept trying other ones, then other albums, until eventually I understood what everybody else was hearing. A couple of years later I was going to Portland alone to see them at the Crystal Ballroom, only to walk out because Isaac Brock seemed so fucked up that he could barely sing. Joining the tribe did not require me to pretend every show was good.

The funny thing is that we don’t actually have to rely on my memory to see what happened next, because twenty-year-old me left receipts all over the early internet. A year and a half or two years after Bellingham I’m writing Adam At Last, and I am deep in it. I’m reading Kerouac and Kesey and Steinbeck. I’m spending my money on records and shows and sometimes debating which of the two I can afford. I have vinyl and CDs alphabetized. I’m downloading too many MP3s while also complaining that records are more aesthetically pleasing than “dumb ol’ mp3s.” I’m making mixtapes for people and developing theories about the difference between a tape meant to introduce someone to bands and a tape made specifically out of songs you think that person will love. I’m reading interviews with Damien Jurado and going to his shows and critiquing whether the live sound matches what he said in the interview. I’m staying up until four in the morning listening to new music. I’m learning the unwritten rules of the rock scene and actually writing them down because apparently I really was conducting field research on my new tribe. Don’t wear the band’s shirt to the band’s show. Don’t buy reissued vinyl. Don’t mosh to the opening band. I broke all of these rules at one point or another. While Death Cab and Pedro are playing another show, I’m dreaming up some kind of traveling Andy Warhol-inspired festival with indie bands and movies and writers and everything else I now think is cool. And, most importantly, I write that after spending my whole life having no idea what I want to be, I have finally figured it out: I want to be a sound engineer. The school I’ve chosen is in Seattle.

That kid in Fairhaven didn’t change the way he dressed much. I already loved vintage clothes. Still do. What changed was that I learned the map. That was what I’d envied about all those cool older kids in the room: they knew. By 2001, I was becoming one of the people who knew. I knew which records led to other records, which bands led to other bands, where to buy them, how to hear them, where the shows were, which little rules everybody somehow understood even though nobody had written them down. Music started shaping where I went, how I spent my money, what I read, what I wanted to do for work and eventually where I wanted to live. I don’t want to claim that one concert caused everything that followed. Life is messier and more interesting than that. But I can look at the writing I left behind and see that the eighteen-year-old sitting on that floor wondering how to become part of this world was, not very long afterward, doing exactly that.

I look at him now and I don’t feel embarrassed by how badly he wanted in. I feel joy. I feel pride. I see a kid who is about to take an amazing journey and has absolutely no fucking idea what is coming. Sitting here tonight, thinking about that room and Elton and those records, I started crying. Then I started grinning. Then I laughed while I was still crying, which is awkward but seems appropriate. That kid doesn’t know about Seattle yet, not really. He doesn’t know about the people he’ll meet, the work he’ll do, the things he’ll make, the people he’ll love, the people he’ll lose, the kids he’ll have, the shows he’ll see, or that twenty-seven years later he’ll build an enormous ridiculous archive partly so he can find his way back into this exact room and look at himself sitting there. He only knows that he wants more.

Cloud Cult has a line in “Transistor Radio”: “Where I am and where I’ve been is the show.”

Turns out I went to Bellingham to see one show and accidentally caught the beginning of another.

Thank you, good sir Elton. Thank you from the deepest, most bottomest parts of my heart. Thank you to the Elton who knew where the good music was hiding in 1999, and to the Elton who might someday read this little story and discover what that night became for me.

You got me into the room.

I took it from there.