"I've got a bad disease
Up from my brain is where I bleed.
Insanity it seems
Has got me by my soul to squeeze..."
- Red Hot Chilli Peppers 'Soul To Squeeze'
I guess we can start to explore 2004. I think a good place to start is by introducing some of the people, characters if you will, that were involved in my life that year.
As I’ve mentioned previously this year was a tough one for me. I should of read the warning signs that this year was going to be different, and the first signal was from my school. I planned on being an Architect. This involved going to uni. I had chosen my lessons to give myself the right pathway to achieve this goal. Design, Physics and Higher Level Maths were the pivotal lessons. I continued with my drumming haven also elected to do Cert lll in Music Industry. When I got my timetable for semester one I notice something isn’t right. All my lessons were there except Advanced Maths. They had put me in just a regular maths class. This was a problem as the maths I would be learning would not cover some of the things I needed to learn for physics. The school couldn’t change it. Although I had done well in maths, my physics struggled a little, as I tried to keep up. This leads me to skip a lot of classes as I was discouraged. It is around this time that I was hanging with a few new friends. Their names were Andrew and Mike.
They both went to a different high school than I, although by memory Mike was dropping out. Both of them also worked with me at KFC. I believe we became friends through our mutual friend Mark, as he went to the same high school as them. By the time 2004 rolled around, we were spending all our free time together. We became close really quickly.
The trade-off though was that I drifted away from my best friends in Steve and Daniel. I don’t believe me becoming friends with them was what caused the rift, although me changing my plans to hang with them didn’t help. I believe it was more to do with the way I had treated another mutual friend of ours, coupled with the fact us three were inseparable for the previous 8 years. Every little annoying trait they and I had probably built up and the pressure valve had to be released. I didn’t hate them, I had just had enough I guess. I can’t explain it. That’s how I recall feeling. I hope they didn’t hate me during that time and I remember thinking that during that period. My stubbornness prolonged us making amends even though I did want to fix our friendship.
Mike, Andrew and I used to spend our weekends either getting drunk and going to house parties or just driving around listening to music. Typical teenage behaviour. Although Andrew liked decent music, Mike’s taste was more aligned with mine. He was more into heavier stuff while Andrew was a bit more straight forward rock. I have Mike to thank for getting me into A Perfect Circle, a band who became one of my favourites. Driving around town together listening to music are some of the most enjoyable memories I have. Mike had a blue VL and Andrew had a little red zip-around. I was younger than them both and hadn’t yet got my licence. The music playing in the card depended on whose car you were in. If you waste in Andrew’s it would be something like Jet or Linkin Park’s Re-Animation (what a fucking great album that is!) If we were in Mike’s it could’ve been Fear Factory or the aforementioned A Perfect Circle. I don’t have specific memories of driving around, just flashes of being in the car and laughing. It’s more of a feeling that I recall. I smile when I think of those times. Expect when Mike’s VL was stolen and torched with most of my CD collection in it... that sucked.
I recall one evening in late 2003 Mike invited Andrew and me to stay at his house. His mum was away so we could have a few drinks and just hang out. I had recently received my latest copy of the only magazine I ever subscribed too, Outsider. It came with a compilation CD named Outsider: the album 97-03. I brought it along with me as I was obsessively listening to it. This was one of the best compilation CDs I ever owned. It featured stalwart artists like Slipknot, Soulfly, Fear Factory with new and exciting ones such as Killswitch Engage, 8 Foot Sativa and Frankenbok. One of the new artists that stood out to me was a band called Plunja and their song ‘Less Than Zero’. It was a fairly simple song, but it was catchy as all hell. I thrashed that song and this CD for a few months.
OUTSIDER: The Album 97-03 playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Q04dP4bPjunm4B6tPuUHf?si=lc-fUUznSsO0JElAk_c13A
The night was filled with us drinking cheap pre-mixed scotch and cola cans, playing Need For Speed: Underground and listening to music. That NFSU soundtrack is one of the best video game soundtracks ever. I kept passing the controller on so I could just sit and listen to the music. I discovered Jerk through this soundtrack along with Story of the Year, Element Eighty and Blindside. At some point, very late into the night, we were drunk enough to try something stupid. Someone suggested we get a tennis ball, dose it in petrol, set it alight and juggle it.
Sounds safe...
We found our tennis ball, doused it in petrol from the lawnmower can and set it alight. I was thrown the ball first. I juggled it a few times and then passed it off. We kept juggling it for a couple of minutes, laughing every time someone would kick it a bit too close to their face. Eventually, Mike had enough and hit the ball with a sweet volley. Problem was he hit the ball into the shed. As we went in to find it, we realised it had landed in the puddle of petrol that we left on the floor from dousing the ball. The shed quite rapidly started to catch alight. We all panicked and started trying to put the flames out. We managed to eventually put the fire out, with next to no damage except the big black scorched mark on his shed floor.
Need For Speed: Underground - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0z4tjDbki8qgrYcuTjJ9Kk?si=PGfZlFVYRAag-s0pHPZChQ
All three of us grew closer as friends. We helped each other through our problems. Girlfriend problems, school problems... whatever. At least, I thought we did.
I was sitting in my kitchen when the house phone rang.
“Hey, It’s Andrew. How are you?”
“Yeah, not bad mate. What’s up?”
“I’ve got something to say so maybe sit down...”
“What’s up, dude? Everything right?”
“I’m fine, it’s Mike. He tried to kill himself last night.”
...
“Is he alive?”
I couldn’t believe I was asking someone if my friend was alive...
“He is. He’s in the hospital though.”
I was confused. I was angry. I thought we all talked our shit out? There are a million questions that enter your head and an influx of emotions when someone tells you a friend tried to commit suicide.
I can’t remember when he was let out of the hospital, but I do remember when I saw him next. It was either a Tuesday or Thursday. I know this because he decided to go out to soccer training (both he and Andrew played for an opposition team). I skipped my training to head to theirs to see him. I remember giving him a bollocking, I was so angry. He couldn’t answer any of those million questions I had and I couldn't comprehend why.
I was so confused, it’s hard to explain what I was feeling. I knew I was angry but I didn’t know why. I was sad that my close friend felt like he needed to do it. During this period I wasn’t in the best state of mind either. I was disillusioned at school. I was having troubles with my girlfriend. I wasn’t speaking to my two closest and longest-standing friends and then this. You start wondering if there is another escape apart from suicide. That’s two people I knew within the space of less than a year who had attempted or committed suicide. What you would think is a wake-up call only pushed me into a murkier headspace. As I’m sure all teenagers feel at some point, I just felt confused and didn’t know how to express or control my emotions. Is it me? Is it my friends? Is it the town? For me, it took about a year to work out that those emotions are normal and it’s something you can work through, but at the time I was nowhere near discovering that.
Out of all the music Mike, Andrew and I listened too during that time, two albums instantly take me back to this dark period.
The first is Red Hot Chilli Peppers Greatest Hits.
It was during this time I fell in love with this band. I knew a couple of songs before this, Under the Bridge, Californication, Suck my Kiss and Give it Away. Most of their songs just ooze having a good time and for the most part, that’s what we were doing. It was pretty much the perfect soundtrack for us. The hours we spent listening to this CD firmly burnt the times I spent with them into my brain. Like I mentioned above, most people think of fun-loving good times when listening to RHCP, I think of the time I nearly lost a dear a friend. I can listen to them most times without a hitch, but sometimes I need to just skip past them. As I delved into RHCP a little later on in life, I found that not all were happy within the world of Chilli Peppers either. Their history had some minor similarities to that year or so we spent together (minus the heroin). I’ve been lucky enough to see RHCP twice and both times I had a moment during their set where I had to take a deep breathe and hold in tears. Both times though it quickly turned into a smile as I remember the good times I spent with them and that my friend was one of the lucky ones.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Greatest Hits: https://open.spotify.com/album/53tvjWbVNZKd3CvpENkzOC?si=L4qj35GkTB-OenmQaxn4dw
The other is Nirvana.
Nirvana is a much harder listen for me. I was a fan of theirs before this, but I became a mega fan during this period. We used to jam their songs a lot (Mike used to play bass), and I became mildly obsessed with them. As an angsty, depressed teenager the music was made for me. I was experiencing the lows Kurt sang about (minus the heroin, again). I still struggle to listen to a few of their songs. You Know You’re Right, All Apologies and Pennyroyal Tea off that album are difficult listens as well as Something In The Way off of Nevermind. You Know You’re Right is almost the perfect rock song. Its dynamic range is incredible, I adore this song and hope to write something half as good. Nirvana takes my mind back to a dark place pretty quickly, which is also why I hold them in such high regard. They wrote these songs just over a decade before this year, and they were more relevant than the music I was listening to released that year.
My copy of Kurt Cobains Journal's and their boxset 'With The Lights Out', both of which i bought in 2004.
I would soon drift away from both Andrew and Mike, once I moved to Adelaide, but I continue to hold these memories close to me. We went through a fair amount and who knows how our lives would’ve panned out if we hadn’t of crossed paths and endured them together. I will always have these two massive albums and the memories they hold.
"I will move away from here
You won't be afraid of fear
No thought was put into this
I always knew it'd come to this
Things have never been so swell
And I have never failed to fail"
- Nirvana 'You Know You're Right'
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