I type to you from the comfort of my brand new dorm room. I’ll get into the real nitty gritty of why exactly I had to switch rooms when it’s further behind me, but I’m glad to be here. I moved in on Saturday, which involved three trips across the Stopher-Johnson bridge and resulted in veg-out levels of exhaustion. It was a worthwhile exhaustion nonetheless.

Instead of a house warming party, I did what I often do on weekend nights and indulged in music written by old men. But instead of expressing my wackjob musical taste in headphone-induced isolation, I did it in a room of other people. 15-60-75, The Numbers Band, have been playing the area for fifty three years, and this was the first time they played in Kent after I got here where I wasn’t gallivanting home on break. Besides, it was at the Kent Stage, which I’ve never been to, and it’s a much more relevant-to-me first show there than, say, Ace Frehley or Crash Test Dummies.

Knowing the Numbers’ first album, I was well aware of the group’s sound – an angsty and passionate strain of the blues-meets-jazz-meets something else entirely, with the right lick of dissonance that pinpoints their origin smack dab in the middle of the Rust Belt. There isn’t much to do in Akron, so I guess the primary solution is to make music or do drugs (or both). It’s so Pere Ubu, so “Navvy” at times, how it leaps and squelches and swells up in a big ball of noise assaulting your frail ears. I know there’s some interview where David Thomas is like, “Jimmy Bell is the ONLY GOOD SOUNDING ALBUM EVER RECORDED.” Which is a large overstatement, but it is a really good sounding album.

Their live sound reflects that to this day. The noise was crisp and loud. Every member was talented and tight. It was pretty damn stunning. Bob Kidney is a great band leader, and a hilarious one at that. Lots of great banter. A few guests came up for songs peppered throughout the night, like Chris Butler of the Waitresses and Tin Huey (seen wielding possibly the coolest bass I’ve seen since the Steinberger below)! Everyone sitting around me was older, and the woman beside me was asking me how the heck I knew who they were. (She was impressed.) Lots of name drops in the fragments of conversations that poked my head during intermission. It felt like a good ol’ time, one of many, with lots of invisible lines darting across the room like yarn strings on a bulletin board. Aside from being the youngest person in the room, I might’ve been the only person in the room who was seeing the Numbers for the first time.

It’s surreal acknowledging that there’s been this tiny scene here that’s been happening since practically the sixties but has not expanded far past its zip code, resulting in all the cool old people from back in the day being connected to everybody else and living within an approximate 50 mile radius of each other. It’s kind of fascinating, honestly, being in a vortex so rooted in its geography and persistent obscurity. My perspective as a current student definitely helps feed some fascination in it for me. In my cultural anthropology class, we’ve discussed the processes of field work – participant observation, cultural relativism, historical particularism. In Music as a World Phenomenon, I’ve read many mentions of the contributions of ethnomusicologists documenting music traditions across the globe. Does the shadow of the Goodyear Blimp fall differently than that of the steel sky birds worshiped by some remote island communities? Are all those “Punk 45” compilations less important than the “world music” CDs that hipster David Byrne fans buy to prove that they’re not only into African sounds when white guys do them? It really does feel like I’ve encountered some hidden anomaly that has somehow withstood JB’s becoming shit-kickin’ country/get crunk Brewhouse, gentrification, and things getting caught on fire. In a documentary we were shown in anthropology class, a group of linguistic historians arrived at a remote ex-Soviet village to document its language and were told, if only you’d come five years earlier, because many of that language’s most versatile speakers had died off. It’s like I’ve ended up mingling among the last great hurrah of a cultural phenom microcosm by complete accident; maybe I could’ve come at a time when the esplanade didn’t exist, but I’m here anyways with mental pen and paper. And I’m the only person of my generation who gives a crap. I’m one of the only people who gives a crap at all, really. But I guess it’s worthwhile that there’s somebody that gives a crap.

Nevertheless, 15-60-75 continue to chug away with great vigor, tucked away safe from the spotlights of the nebulous festering “classic rock” stadium blob. I do kind of love how you can see Terry Hynde, Chrissie’s brother, be extremely awesome on the saxophone for twenty dollars plus ticket fee, though. In 2023, can you beat that?

Okay, back to listening to “High Heels Are Dangerous” on repeat.