One thing that is most indicative of being a Millennial is Myspace. No social media website exists in such a rich amber quite like the one with a guarantee. No matter where your journey went, whether it lasted minutes or years, you would have Tom as your first friend. It became a running joke that this random loner was forcing himself on a susceptible public. Unlike every other website where you had to put in effort to connect with its creator, there was Tom Anderson sitting right there, smiling at you with a “Welcome” message in tow. I think what feels most Millennial about this is where we joked about Tom being our friend and never talking to us, he ended up being one of the better tech geniuses of the 2000s. Whereas we’re still dealing with any fallout of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Myspace came and went as this innocuous force put into the world for our amusement. It’s the digital version of a faded polaroid whose colors are barely there. You can’t help but feel a bit teary eyed looking back.
I know I did in 2022 when my sister told me that Tom Anderson was on TikTok. Whereas I find the other creators bombastic, he seemed at peace. Myspace had long left his ownership and now exists in that ambiguous B-List celebrity anonymity. I think it speaks to how Myspace was before the more economically-driven nature of contemporary sites. This isn’t to say they weren’t promoting everything under the sun, but it felt less malicious and straightforward. You knew what you got.
One of the difficult things around Myspace now is that the documentation is scattered at best. Because I was last on in my early 20s, a certain fondness for preservation hadn’t fully set in. Ability to retrieve every document I ever wrote was a fool’s errand. Even as I struggled to figure out if my account was deleted or I simply forgot my e-mail/password combo, the reality was Myspace wasn’t what it used to be. In the early 2010s, the website suffered a notorious server crash that caused large portions of their database to be erased. I can only assume my name was among that list. By some miracle I was smart enough to e-mail the old blog posts to myself, so I have that to fall back on.
More importantly, I wrote a Myspace entry because it was indicative of my high school years. Even if it existed in fringe ways towards college, there was something fading in favor of more rudimentary (read: less interestingly designed) looks of websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I wince at how dull and inexpressive a lot of social media looks these days because I don’t feel like young people really get to experience a full display of identity anymore. They miss out on getting to appreciate the value of HTML as you learn how to redesign your background and change font colors. It was chaotic and many used it poorly, but it gave you a better sense of who you were than a simple 240-character write-up.
Before I really dig into why The Myspace Era was so special, I wanted to jump back and discuss how I discovered it.
Prior to Myspace, I didn’t have a social media account. Part of it was simply that most people in my preteen age group weren’t interacting like that. We would go to school with URL’s that we’d encourage each other to look at. It was a time where internet access was there, but it was often more restrictive, requiring some Mission Impossible-style maneuvering if you wanted to see anything rated over PG. A lot of it was because of the dial-up modem. It was also because I personally didn’t have a portable computer, so I had to share the home computer with other people. Because of this, you had to hope nobody was home or pray that a late night stumbling wouldn’t cause somebody to walk in and catch you in the act. Given that it was dial-up, you also had to wait patiently for any page to load, which could be minutes upon minutes. The effort made the reward feel more earned, and it surprised me how quickly after high school dial-up went away. Whereas it once took me several days to download a bootleg copy of Borat (2006), you’d now know something was up if it took more than 10 minutes. I tell you... technology in just a decade advanced very, very quickly.
Before I discovered Myspace, my awareness of social media was through my parents. The way it sounded to me was some archival website. Maybe it was Friendster, though the name doesn’t ring in my head. It was a place where they provided family updates. They’d have me walk over and notice how Nana was talking about how proud she was of my achievements. There would be pictures photocopied into the computer. To my mind, it felt more like something you used to connect yourself to a larger culture, akin to the ancestry/roots type programs. Something about it felt like, “you are related to x” and I’m still not sure that’s fully inaccurate given how my parents like to have more tight-knit circles.
My first experience with social media technically came in middle school. Before we had websites we'd regularly visit, we would pass around AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account names so that we could go home and talk. It was a more intimate approach than what would come, as it felt like we talked to each other less because we were friends and more because there were only 30 people in the class. On the other side of the aisle was MSN Messenger, which was my U.K. friend Alex’s preferred way of communication. He knew how to jailbreak the server so that he could send a dozen “shake” buttons so the screen was stuck in an earthquake.
I want to say I discovered Myspace sometime around 2004. We had just graduated from St. Cornelius and were awaiting the next stage of life. For most of the student body, they had chosen to continue attending Catholic school. As the other Alex would suggest, girls who went to St. Jospeh’s was “Joe’s Hoes” and the boys at St. John Bosco were “Bosco bitches.” Having reached my personal burnout with religion, I was eager to attend public school and explore a world that I felt would be more open and intellectually stimulating. It wasn’t that far of a commute. Millikan was only a few miles from St. Cornelius. Even then, our hub wasn’t going to be the hub for long. We had to find ways to stay in touch.
And so one day Albert wrote me on AIM with that life changing message: “Have you heard of Myspace?”
I couldn’t tell you what my initial reaction was but the pitch worked. Even as the middle school group was about to fracture, we had this place to stay in contact. As one can guess, it became a piece of social status to have an account. If you were at all wanting to be seen as cool, you would have an account so that you could immediately appear in Myspace’s search engine. It was my first real exposure to everyone’s personal interests and getting a better sense of the people who were my friends, even if they were not enough to share intimate details. People like Zack were so casual on there that he uploaded pictures of him smoking weed as profile picture. Something tells me that was quickly shut down.
I think part of me wasn’t taking Myspace seriously at first. Among my first messages to people was participating in the juvenile schoolyard bullying of asking Eric “Did you fuck Kyle yet?” to which he responded, “He doesn’t even go to the school I’m at.” I recognize how dumb this was, but the humor towards the end of middle school was sexually charged and had this strain of dominance through off-color remarks. I don’t know what I was achieving through that comment, but given how little Eric and I talk in the 20 years since, I think it reflected how close we ever were. Similarly, I got addicted to follower count and saw the numbers game as a challenge. When I got to 100, I told Albert about it and he responded, “At least I know all of them.”
To begin the tour, I’ll start with the main page everyone sees. Towards the top of the page was your profile picture connected to a bevy of folders that you could store a certain percentage of pictures on. Another part of the allure was that while you could have your government name be your profile name, there were chances to change it with a clever joke. Because it was the Mid-2000s, I grew up in a time when it was trendy to do punk and emo quotes. The two most prominent on the list were Green Day (circa “American Idiot”) and My Chemical Romance (circa “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge”). They were moody and melodramatic, but they gave you a strong sense of who you were.
To continue down the page, you could put a quote of indeterminate source as well as provide a regularly updated blog. To the other side was a bar for where you could store your interests. There would also be a bar installed later where you could have a Myspace-related music track play. Maybe it’s because of where I was in life, but having music be front and center was refreshing. If I found an indie band that I was falling in love with, I’d go to their page and add their track to my page. In certain cases, you could even download the tracks and burn them onto a CD. It’s like Soundcloud in a more rudimentary form. As years carried on, Myspace would attempt to get into the music industry with middling success. With that said, I once went to Holiday Havoc in 2004 and got a sampler CD from them that featured the likes of Fall Out Boy among others. They really knew their target audience.
A detail that was underrated was that those who knew how to edit the page could put a song into the background. As you opened the page, the opening chords would be heard and you could scroll as the track played (usually once). Once or twice I found people who were tech savvy able to use one of the interests sections to have lyrics scroll in time with the singer.
You could read comments upon comments from friends and anyone who cared to stop by. In my opinion, there was a real honor in it. Beyond your personal friends, having bigger accounts say something made you feel like they were interested in your support.
Of course, the real piece de resistance and the thing that Myspace has usurped every social media outlet with is “The Top 4.” The feature was so popular that I think they would experiment with different volumes of “Tops.” You’d get up to 12 (possibly 24?). For a teenager, this is where Myspace became political. Your Top 4 was reflective of the people you’d take a bullet for. They had your back and this was your way of expressing gratitude. Not only that, but the first person HAD to be the most significant, and from there had to reflect some social hierarchy. At the same time, you could follow pages for bands, celebrities, or films and thus could use that space to advertise how much you loved them. If you put too many, would it reflect poorly on your social skills? There had to be a perfect balance, and it was arguably most crucial during the Top 4 period. You think Twitter is so great with their pinned comment? Tom’s exploitation of social clout was much more dramatic and interesting on a person-to-person level.
Maybe it was being newer to social media as a concept, but part of me was naïve enough to hunt around. There was a section for message boards that quickly connected me to a wide variety of people. To start on a local level, Diego from middle school decided to make something more adult and created a page called “I love my cock and balls.” I wasn’t keen on joining it, but he personally invited me and decided to see what the action looked like. The only thing I remember about this sausage fest was that some guy I never met suggested having a big dick wasn’t all it was cracked up to be because of how much blood was needed to make it hard and would make you dizzy. That page didn’t last long.
Another underrated thing about Myspace was that it was the era of “fake” accounts that were still fun to mess around with. There was no way to verify them, so you had no idea if the people making accounts for Green Day’s Tre Cool were fans or being genuine. Another one that I enjoyed was this random Adam Sandler account where the biography section talked about his confusion over the “<3” emoticon because it looked like a butt.
The most enjoyable were the movie character accounts. Because it was 2004, this was the era of Napoleon Dynamite (2004). Most of us had a fun game where we befriended those most committed to imitating the characters. You admired the ones who knew how to personalize Napoleon’s endless catchphrases and make it sound like he was talking to you like a living, breathing person.
This was only topped by the South Park page, which had an even more fledgling series of accounts that really knew their stuff. One of the most amusing message boards I’ve ever been privy to involved everyone asking “Eric Cartman” questions that progressively got more and more humiliating to the point that he was actively insulting other users in character. At other points, I would have lengthy conversations with “Kenny” or “Kyle” that made it feel like the South Park message boards were part of their universe.
There weren’t many times where Myspace’s message boards felt toxic. They were mostly used to find like-minded individuals. The only time I really found somebody off-putting to the point that I wish we knew how to ban people was when this man kept posting negative comments that were alluding to assaulting users. I can’t remember the context, but the picture had one of those comical camera lenses that stretched his head in a way that would usually be funny, but because of his behavior struck me as obnoxious. Because of that message board, I’ve unfortunately been unable to see warped faces, especially when it involves zooming the image into a central circle, and not think of how much I dislike that guy.
Then there were my contribution to the message board community. I had a few things that I was known for. I ran one of the umpteenth Lindsay Lohan fan group. This only lead to random people commenting in my personal message box that she was a ho. I’d also launch pages for punk bands that I felt were deserving of some recognition – notably ones off Epitaph or Train Wreck Chords – in hopes of finding people. A lot of them were not successful outside of a minor group.
Then there was far and away the most successful group I created. I’m not sure if it exists today, I was a big fan of Fuse TV. Whereas MTV was moving away from music and rarely talked about stuff outside of pop, Fuse was providing the alternative mix that I was craving at the time. They were providing regular interviews with Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and all the bands that would be associated with Van’s Warped Tour. They had edgy programming like Dance Off Pants Off and gave you the sense that the counterculture was alive and thriving. Along with Indie 103.1 on the radio dial (I made a page for Joe Escalante’s show Barely Legal), it had what I took to be the youth vote.
I made a Fuse TV message board that at one point had over a thousand users. I feel like every time I logged onto the computer there were dozens of notifications of threads being created and filled with comments of people enthusiastic about the channel. Long story short, I found a portion of the market that hadn’t been tapped and was using it to a surprising level of success.
The reason that I phrase it like that is because of what happened next. Sometime 2-3 years into my time on Myspace, the real Fuse TV personally wrote me with their own complaints and grievances. They claimed that they were getting ready to start their own message board and felt that it would be best if I stopped using mine. At the time I remember reading the suggestion that I would “receive complaints” and thought that meant people would just be mad that I wasn’t the official Fuse TV. I’m sure that I didn’t use language that suggested it was a fan account and that’s maybe what they were angrier about. Long story short, I did nothing about it and nothing happened. Fuse TV continued to thrive on Myspace without me. Very few Fuse TV-related complaints were received.
This expansion of social media meant that I was discovering new people. Like most people, I scoured pages of people who sounded “cool” and found their AIM. From there, I would make sure to be online around 8 AM and try to be in touch. I’d rush to my grandparents’ house after school and spend two hours just surfing Myspace. I was addicted. I needed to have my fix. When it came to school, I would talk with other students who passed around URL’s of ways to bypass the server and view the otherwise blocked website. There was a game, and one that sounded a lot more fun than the one advertised on Myspace. It involved a ringtone that allegedly adults couldn’t hear. It was just a high pitch squeal. I’m not sure how successful it ever was.
Slowly I lost contact with my St. Cornelius peers. One of the more unfortunate moments came on a message board. It was for a St. Cornelius Class of 2004 group that attempted to keep us all in contact. Someone came up with the dumb idea to post “What’s something annoying that somebody said to you there?” It was a lightning rod for controversy, as I chose to mention that I found Mary-Kate annoying for no other reason than she seemed hyperactive. The reasoning wasn’t good. All I can say is that I recall Mary-Kate responding very offended and saying that she had my back and felt hurt. Being a teenager I don’t think I deescalated the situation well. In the off chance that we meet again, I do hope that it wasn’t a moment that scarred her, though I do feel like I had a bad habit of saying the wrong thing as a teenager. If their minds weren’t permanently changed after that, then mine was if just because of how much guilt I live with for being rude.
I was trying to find people who shared my interests. As a result, I had a handful of online friends who only existed in that form. One of my favorite people was Monique. She was a German girl that shared an interest in punk music. The story goes that because I was a fan of The Vandals, I became intrigued when I discovered that one of Dave Quackenbush’s earliest bands was from Long Beach, CA. The Falling Idols was a surf-punk band that didn’t amount to much, but had a short revival around this time. Because they were playing locally one night at Alex's Bar, we sat on AIM trying to hypothesize how I could get into the 21+ show since it wasn’t likely I’d ever see them after that.
While I never met Monique, we were technically in the same room once. She was in Southern California for The Vandals’ Christmas show, better known as Winter Formal. My group wore Santa hats so she had this picture of us near the front row bobbing up and down.
The thing that made Monique special and still someone I think about is her connection to The Falling Idols. She was friends with the guitarist who wanted to transcribe their music and post it online. I made an agreement to help her and ended up transcribing two-thirds of their catalog before we lost contact. I still have the notebook. The songs are on a disc somewhere. She also got me into this really fun German band called Mongrel. I can’t say as to whether I actually got credit for transcribing, but the guitarist said that I did a very good job.
While a lot of my stories on Myspace are likely to center around music, I want to stick to some form of chronological order. I will now touch on the other formative relationship I had on there. Compared to Monique, it didn’t last nearly as long, but shaped a lot of my life in the 20 years since.
One of the strange things about being in high school is that you begin to believe the tropes of the media you consume. Freshman year was going to be full of your first tastes of the real world. You’d fall in love, have sex, and have the one raucous party that serves as this inside joke for the rest of your life. Everything had been mythologized in such a way that you’d feel inadequate if you didn’t pick up some receipts. It didn’t have to go well. You just needed those stories so that your life fit the contract that teen movies provided. Given that I was attending the school used as the set for American Pie (1999) only five years prior, I had a lot to live up to.
I want to talk about Kristine of Hesperia, CA. Like all of these friendships, we met online. She found her way to my friend group and suddenly had my AIM ready to go. For whatever reason, we began talking. Every night at 8 PM, I’d forgo any other activity and turn to the computer. She was vague, but the affection of having a mundane conversation overwhelms you. There is this belief that because you’re in the same circle that something special is happening. Even if she wasn’t as into punk music as me, there were things that convinced me this was special. As Taylor Swift would suggest, “When you’re 15. When somebody tells you they love you, you got to believe it.” As corny as it sounded, I came to realize how true that was.
Enter my father. I know there’s the notion of believing that your parents are concerned about your well-being and only wants the best for you. I don’t doubt that he always has that somewhere in his head. However, I do think that sometimes the way he goes about things could miss protectiveness in favor of ridicule. I think sometimes he believes that shaming will convince you that something is wrong and you are too embarrassed to do anything.
As one can guess, it was hard to not know I was talking to Kristine in the evenings. For one, my father had this uncomfortable nature of spying on people and collecting just enough information to use against you. It happened under more mundane situations, but in this case he saw the banal conversation of teenage love birds and decided that the best answer wasn’t to deescalate it with, “I want you to be careful,” but instead shame me for believing that the internet could ever produce endorphins.
It didn’t help that he was using Gina as his partner in crime. Together, they had a way of teaming up on me. Basically, he had someone who would defend his theory that what was actually going on was that I was being conned by a “fat plumber.” As I printed out Kristine’s picture and placed it on my binder in a way that in hindsight felt a little too “girlfriend from Canada,” the taunts became more frequent. He had this belief that I was being taken advantage of. Never mind the endless amount of other people I was talking to about music or high school. Somehow because Kristine had this hold on me, she was now a fat plumber who manipulated my emotions.
There isn’t more to this story except to say that the trajectory of history has proven my father a bit wrong. If anything, the insecurity of his taunting has made it difficult to approach online dating with any seriousness. As he’s found his own friend group online and many of my friends have found the love of their lives that way, I’m left hesitant to even try. I don’t think my relationship with Kristine was traumatic or had anything to hold me back, but there was some weird vindictive vendetta between my dad and this idea of online friends in 2004. I get that social media was new, but it became difficult to take his lesson as anything but a reason to be disappointed in yourself. It became aggravating then that when Gina finally joined Myspace she used a picture that, for lack of better wording, wasn’t reflective of her current appearance. When I mentioned it on the website, she told me to be quiet. To be fair, she wasn’t as persistent as my father.
I think that relationship was completely naïve. I liked to write her things such as imagining her hanging out in my room during the afternoons. She was a bit morose, but we shared that teenage malaise. From what I could gather in her indirect commentary, she had a rough home life. At some point in our time knowing each other, she had a plate thrown at her. She also had stitches that accidentally came loose. One of her deals was she was too shy to want to have a phone conversation. Instead we left short messages for each other. I listened to it a few times, realizing that she was real. One day during that time, I drove through Hesperia and remember waving in the direction I thought she was in.
At some point, she admitted “I can’t do this anymore.” Depending on how you assess an online relationship that amounted to AIM talks, we hadn’t done a single thing. To provide a perfect context to the other type of people I was talking to at the time, I returned to that night’s conversation a bit heartbroken. I told him, “Sorry, my girlfriend broke up with me,” and he responded, “Sorry, I can’t do this.” There was a divide between punk and emo, and that was a punk kid who took the Anti-Flag song that mocked “I just broke up with my girlfriend” a bit too literally and saw me as weak. If we talked, we didn’t talk more for long.
There was something a bit more territorial about the punk community in 2004. I remember at one point writing an about me piece that I thought was amusing but drew the ire of one commenter. I think something that is lost nowadays is that punk was seen as the group that didn’t sell out. There was still this mysticism of being a self-made band and being true to your ethics. Basically, this guy was a gatekeeper to the point that he saw my post ending with “Cheers!” and tried to suggest that I wasn’t an alcoholic or Irish or something. In his defense, I think I was young and buying into the bullshit as well, though not nearly as successfully. I’d look at a mosh pit and be too intimidated to approach it. I wasn’t tough, but I wanted to appear that way. I had compilations with bands like The Casualties on it and only because other people around campus had patches of them did I think they were “good.” I was lying to some extent, or only in the sense that I was a fan of bands because I knew one song.
Now that I have set a lot of the groundwork for what the website was like to me, I might as well shift into what I mostly used it for. Outside of those high school friendships, it was my best way of engaging with a thriving local music scene. This isn’t to suggest that I only listened to bands from my area, but it expanded me even further than listening to KROQ and Indie or watching Fuse TV and reading Spin Magazine allowed me to see. Myspace was the biggest rummage bin where I got to stop by pages, press play, and see what stuck. Again, because so many of the pages had downloadable songs, I was able to build a catalog of artists to follow very easily.
I’ll begin by highlighting some bands that don’t necessarily have this great story to share but I played a lot during the time.
In terms of bands I mostly checked out because of their name, Flaming Boner was one I latched onto quickly. The name actually had a whole history that was summed up in a song of the same name. It’s very juvenile, but there was something about their antagonistic style that spoke to me, especially in an era where I was enjoying the comedic style of Guttermouth and The Vandals. They had songs like “I’m in Love with a Mannequin” and a passionate ballad called, ahem, “Bukkake.” They were gross, and that seemed appealing to a teenager. However, their one song that I will willingly add to any playlist from now until the day I die is “Dinosaurs.” It is this chaotic, fast-paced maybe ADHD-brained type of stupidity about how awesome dinosaurs are. The music video is stick people that are moved by hand to imitate action.
I was also a fan of Meet Me at the Pub, who I had suggested was “The next Sublime” mostly because I didn’t know many dub rock bands. With that said, “Bust Up” still is a great, energetic number that really ties to a punk rock type of aimlessness.
Moving onto bands that are a little better, I discovered a local label called Felony Records, run by a guy named Ron Felony. Two bands in particular really connected with me. False Alliance was a more politically charged, not unlike Pennywise, and I found them to have some great guitar hooks. However, I think Felony Records’ real shining gem was Chaser. Not only did I find a lot of people who liked them, but they were one of the only bands whose records I would find in person. I think they were also politically charged, but their first album “In Control” was so much fun and had this enjoyable song about trying to get their friend Mike back to Provo, UT after he was recruited for you can guess what.
One of the weirdest ways that the world aligns is that I talked quite a bit with Thom Bone of Butt Trumpet. For reasons that scream “Only in the 90s,” they were a punk band who got a major label contract and quickly disappeared following the now hard to find record “Primitive Enema.” The band’s appeal was that they had double bass and were, predictably, very crass. My sophomore English teacher knew who they were. She was in a punk band called Satan’s Cheerleaders with a drummer who did drag. They were attempting to do a revival around 2004 and had released “Primitive Enema” for free digitally on a website.
The revival came with a few caveats. One of the founding members had suffered a tragic death. Given that one of their songs details an uncomfortable rape, it was clear that it was a personal decision for Bone to try and make something of the band. In a move that showed how off the grid I liked to think I was as a teenager, I negotiated buying a vinyl from him through the mail. Because I didn’t have a checking account, I tried sending money (with coins) through the mail and it went so poorly. I eventually worked something out and got the vinyl. It was a split EP with Dive Bar Junkies in which both featured some sort of anal pleasure (you can guess what Butt Trumpet’s version was) to which my father said, “Don’t let your mother see it.” To quickly conclude, Bone was also in Betty Blowtorch, who at least exists on Spotify so I’m sure more people these days would know them.
I was also a big fan of this singer named Brainsick Nation. Part of it was that he was one of the most lo-fi singers I had heard to that point. He basically plugged in a guitar and sang in a nasally voice songs as direct as “MTV Makes Me Want to Snort Ecstasy.” In hindsight, he was a musician only a teenager could love because it was so unpolished and lacking the focus of better music, but I saw something in him that I wanted to believe would grow into something better. Because of everything, I ended up befriending him and we were both in each other’s Top 8 for a time. I have no idea if he’s still doing music, but I could imagine he’s improved.
And now I want to start shifting into bands that I feel are the most symbolic of my high school years. There are two, but one leads into another.
If I had to label one band “local legend,” it would be Up Syndrome. They were from Orange County and featured one of the most promising careers. At one point they were almost signed to Dexter Holland’s Nitro Records. Their singer, Chris Marrs Piliero worked at Chain Reaction and would go on to become an award-winning music video director, specifically for The Black Keys’ “Tighten Up.” The joke is that when he received the MTV VMA trophy, it read The Black Eyed Peas on it.
The band was a passion project of Piliero. It had gone through several forms in their short existence to the point that their final stretch featured the EP “Welcome to Phase 3.” Even with their small output, they had a lot of great music, including “Mouth” which can still be found on YouTube. Cumulatively, I don’t know necessarily that it was the most concrete body of work (Piliero sold the first album “Product of Television” at their farewell show with a warning of its awfulness), but it was easy to see what they could achieve. They had a great farewell show where at least a half-dozen former band members showed up to play a few songs. It’s also the only time that I’ve been witness to a crowd being encouraged to rush the stage during the closing song.
The first of two times I saw them was at The Knitting Factory. Because it was a venue with several stages, the lines were mixed and made it difficult to get in. Next door was the more popular show by Voodoo Glow Skulls, whose singer was seen wandering around the line before the gig. Piliero was also talking to people, though I didn’t get to track him down until after the show. One of my personal regrets is that I still don’t have the picture from that gig where I met the band because I do think it was one of the cooler pictures from that time.
At this point, I’m going to shift to the other band. While they never became as big of a deal as Up Syndrome, they became one of my all-time favorites. With all of that said, it’s a miracle that I was able to track them down following the gig because of one reason: they didn’t like promoting themselves.
When I got through The Knitting Factory line, I was walking in midway through the set for Jack Anthony. As I stood among the crowd, I remember being intrigued by their sound. They had great hooks and I dug the lyrics. The only issue is that I had no idea how to figure out who they were. Unlike the other bands (even The Silence who I, ironically, never heard about again after that day), they didn’t have a booth. All I had to go off of was this misread of the singer saying, “This is Zack…”
All I’m going to say is thank God for flyers because it was there that I finally pieced together that he wasn’t saying “Zack” but “Jack.” From there, I discovered that he was part of a band called Jack Anthony. They were from San Pedro, CA. As Jack the singer would later tell me, the reason that I didn’t find their booth was because they didn’t sell stuff at shows. The fun irony is that I became such close friends with them that the drummer would hide shirts in the kick drum and give them to us.
It would take too much space to detail everything that happened between me and them. However, I will say that because I was a big fan of their first record “Disaster,” I went to a lot of their shows. They performed several free acoustic shows in coffee shops in San Pedro. They were also known to play at San Pedro Brewery, which we only got into a few times because of my father. I’ve seen them perform with every ounce of passion poured into them, but I’ve also seen them doing outright drunk sets that were universally agreed to be bad. If anyone cares, I could actually do a whole entry on this band because I do love them.
One of the great stories involving Jack Anthony came from when they performed at The Galaxy opening for The English Beat. I met up with them before the show and bought the tickets at discount from them. We went in and the floors were sticky from beer. I was front row for their set, which went over well. Jack reached down at the end and gave me his pick. Not knowing any better, I got up on stage and decided to help break it down. As security was coming over, the guitarist looked over and covered my back. It was my first time seeing backstage at a venue, and it was the most underwhelming sight. It was mostly couches and equipment.
Because of that moment, we were given keys to the entire Galaxy. Somehow we wound up near the area where the V.I.P. boxes were. Because they had seen us with the band, they believed that we were guaranteed access to the overhead seats. I got to look down on The English Beat and appreciate what they were doing. We got room service as well.
The other story is that Jack Anthony were part of an MTV series called Garage Band Makeover. If it doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because the pilot was never picked up. Jack had given the producer my number and I answered questions about the band including what I felt they could improve upon. I had one hard fast request. They needed to play venues with better acoustics because their sound was always getting washed out. I don’t know how successful my answers were, but Jack did tell them I was their number one fan, so I think he had my back.
The second part of this story sort of explains why things didn’t take off. They decided to do recording at the guitarist’s house. As a result, a lot of “fans” were hanging around just waiting for things to happen. I got stuck with a guy and girl who were talking about Anchorman (2003). The host of Garage Band Makeover was going to be Dan from Story of the Year. The guy I was with enjoyed watching Dan walk by before yelling “UNTIL THE DAY I DIE!” as he looked around in confusion. When we finally got to record the performance, the garage door fell down like a stage and they performed “Averill Park.” It was late and everyone was eager to get things going. Because I knew Jack Anthony the band as something more homely, it was weird to see them glammed up. I’m as miffed that MTV didn’t do anything with it. I’m not sure if Jack ever got his request of getting recorded evidence so that he can prove it happened, but it was quite a moment in time.
The irony of everything is that the final part of the deal was performing at DiPiazza’s. It’s easily one of the best venues if we’re talking acoustics. Most Millikan-related bands would have a rite of passage by playing there. The irony of it all was that because this gig was the same night as Up Syndrome’s farewell performance, I missed it. They came out with a comical video where they sarcastically filmed one of the band members asking, “You just played for two people, how do you feel?” I wish I knew what happened to that video because I thought it was very funny. Jack has since told me that he would also have been at the Up Syndrome gig had it not been for it.
The interest in music eventually inspired one of the weirdest things I ever did on Myspace. I started a music page called “Def Man Promotions.” As a child I wrote stories about a superhero named Def Man who drank soda and walked on walls. It wasn’t the densest tale, but it gave me a nickname that lasted a long time. The idea was that people would write me and give me some music. Then, I’d promote it with a banner on my page and maybe do a write-up or even share the music in some way.
Part of me is convinced it was as successful as it was less because I was doing anything helpful but more because of how I designed the page. “Promotions” for example suggested that I had actual clout that I didn’t. Naivety will do a lot for you. Just asking bands to check out your page opened the doors to them sending a lot of free music. Most of the time they were unofficial EP’s shipped in paper sleeves. I wish that I could name all of the bands that actually shipped me things (I got swag!), but the only ones that come to mind are Go Kart Mozart and Trashcan Alley for some reason.
My music career wasn’t really meant to last. While I would be connected to the bands that mattered to me, my attention would slowly shift to film. Whenever I went to the movies, I would write up a review. Because of some unforeseen “authority,” people in my friend group would compare me to Roger Ebert. I think one of the moments I realized that I had some sway was when I accidentally convinced somebody to see I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) even though I considered it to be mostly awful.
This is the early moments of what could be considered my film critic career. I was a bit too shallow of what I liked and disliked. Given that I was mostly reviewing mainstream comedies by Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell, I don’t feel in my mind that I was actually saying anything meaningful. We were a generation that was too young to appreciate There Will Be Blood (2007) when it was released. I was 18 at the time and couldn’t see the artistic achievement. Even if I read Peter Travers religiously, I couldn’t quite agree on this particular one. I say this all to ask… what made me seen as the movie expert when I was watching the most basic of content?
I did have one moment that was heartwarming. Joe was a gearhead and loved working on cars. He made a tribute to Pimp My Ride where he showed off his collection and I wrote some positive feedback. He showed up to school the next day head over heels excited that I thought it was great because I knew about quality filmmaking. Joe’s a great guy. Even if I haven’t seen him in close to 20 years, his life on Facebook has me happy to see that things have worked out for him.
This was also the start of my blogging career. Along with writing a journal that included an overlong and detailed account of the concerts I went to, I was discovering authors that I felt personally connected to.
Having watched Clerks (1994) months prior, I latched onto the fact that Kevin Smith was also a writer who loved mixing personal stories with pop culture references. Every time he uploaded a new entry, I enjoyed immersing myself in his worldview and discovering that there were ways to be a nerd and write something that sounded poetic. Admittedly, that’s from a 17-year-old perspective, but I still believed that he was doing something avant garde compared to the conventional authors who seemed to write from a refined, almost journalistic standpoint. It inspired me to eventually buy “Silent Bob Speaks” and really discover how much he comes across as the common man who got to do what I dreamed of doing. Even if his later work isn’t my favorite, at the time he was inspiring.
I also became a big admirer of Diablo Cody. Juno (2007) had just come out and I found that film to be incredible. Even more than Smith, I found how she wrote about life, even the Oscar press tour, to be endearing. She had a style that I wanted to learn and capture. This was before she ran a column for Entertainment Weekly, which feels like a condensed version of what she did over the lengthy posts that provided comical observations of the everyday life. As much as I respect her right to privacy, I am sad that we don’t have her blog anymore because I do imagine she’s only gotten more nuanced and mature in tone than her days writing “Candy Girl.” Otherwise, a reason I have a strong fondness for her is because of Myspace and helping to realize that prose could be personal in ways that aren’t cut and dry. It could be fun and inventive.
I think everything from here is a bit superfluous. There are hundreds of conversations that I had on Myspace that ended up making me reconsider something about my life. Among the funniest was one that happened when I misunderstood what Rancid’s “Junkie Man” was about. For some reason I thought it was just about someone who collected odd stories that were interesting as if they were junk (you know, “one man’s trash is another’s treasure”). At some point within 24 hours, a musician told me that it was cool that I was a junkie man and really helped things to click that Rancid was talking about drugs. Because of how the internet worked then, I had to impatiently wait to change details and pray that nobody I knew noticed it.
Among the other details that I wanted to cover is that I noticed that this was a shift in how things were marketed to people. If any film feels very much like a “Myspace movie,” it was 300 (2007), which I remember the website promoting so intently that there was even a redesign log-in page that made you aware that, yes, this was 300. I believe that the film’s success was owed to how well it tapped into the youth market.
As the years carried on, I think it became clear that people were moving on. Facebook was becoming trendy. Twitter was a phenomenon. I think people were tired of Myspace’s need to be hyper-specific to the individual. It felt like a rotary of websites as opposed to an intersection of ideas. I think something was lost in the process, but I can’t say that I’m doing much to change the tide. With that said, I’ve never been as successful in terms of engagement than I was then. Part of it was that I was too young to know any better and just put so much of myself into the risky behavior. I did dumb, impulsive things because I didn’t think there would be consequences. Some of it was regretful, but I like to think I’ve evolved because of it.
That is why I’m of mixed emotions about Myspace becoming irrelevant. Even during the period where it was being bought and attempting to rebrand itself, there was a sense that it would be a joke. I think it was too tied to an innocence that other platforms lacked. Even now, Myspace felt free of controversy outside of the network crash. Maybe there was some in-fighting among a few people, but it can’t compare to Twitter on an average day. Something will always feel innocent about Myspace. After all, it was a time where you had to find music videos from websites that weren’t YouTube because YouTube didn’t exist.
I’m sure that I have forgotten a lot and some of this doesn’t really feel like a personal story, but I can’t talk about my education without Myspace. It was an intersection of so many parts of who I was at the time. I talked to so many people and felt so many emotions because of that website. To have it gone and struggling to retrieve portions of the archive are heartbreaking to me. It’s caused me to be more deliberate about collecting information anytime I put things out. It’s the one thing that I’ve learned to do on a regular basis. It’s a simpler version of the “you could die tomorrow” mentality that drives me to have some sign that I was here and this is what I did.
Then again, I was a teenager who was a bit bratty and maybe not the most sensible sometimes. Going to message boards and mass-adding people as friends provided nothing more than a numbers game. How many of those people are still in my life? It’s hard to say. At the end of the day, the people I was closest to were the ones that I could walk up to Millikan on Monday and talk to. Those were the ones who made a difference in my life. Ironically, they too faded as the platforms changed. Some stuck around to Facebook, but with each one proving their fragility, the numbers got smaller. I guess I’m grateful that the number still is big-ish, but not like it used to be for me. So much has changed on social media, and I wish that I had some paper trail sometimes to know what they changed from.
And before you ask. No. I am not doing one of these for every social media website. None of them were present during as formative of a period as this one. I can’t say that I feel this way about any other website. I think that I have come full circle from reverence to mockery back to nostalgia. Absence has made the heart grow fonder, and I think that’s the only way I realized how valuable that time absolutely was.
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