May All Your Favorite Bands Stay Together
Summer miscellany, fashion discoveries, and standing close to the things you love
I was already back in the city when I realized I still had tickets to a Monday night show in Amagansett. Dawes, one of my all-time favorite bands, playing a tiny room, and I’d just gotten home Saturday. Was I insane? But I decided a long time ago that my joy doesn’t require a good reason, so I went back out, because I knew I’d be sadder if I didn’t. Being full-hearted about the things I love is what got me this far in the first place, so I will always chase the rabbit down the hole.
The room immediately told me I’d made a unique call. I was the only person there under 60, save my assistant and a guy who’d driven in from Brooklyn. He wore the band’s t-shirt to the band’s show (haha, nerd), which told me he could probably walk you through their discography like a docent.
At one point we stepped out, thinking there was an opener and we had time to kill. There wasn’t, and he came running — actually running — to find us before the first song. A stranger, sprinting down a Hamptons street, to protect my evening. People are, in fact, good! So we sang along with the old coots and had the most wholesome night I’ve logged in years.
The night had already been showing off before we set foot in Talkhouse. We’d had dinner next door at Il Buco al Mare, and as I walked out, I walked directly into Lila Raicek — whose novel The Plunge I told you about a few issues ago. My book of the summer, still holding the title.
As you may recall, The Plunge is a book set in the East End about a woman cobbling her life back together after a canceled wedding. And here I was with its author on an East End sidewalk. This summer keeps introducing me to people I was already in conversation with.
Anyway, there were two songs in that set that were the reason I made the trip. “All Your Favorite Bands” has always been the kind of toast I imagine for the wedding I’d one day have; a benediction, I realized while standing in that room, that could just as easily take the form of a singalong about love and commitment. I had needed that, and it had come to me.
“A Little Bit of Everything” closes on the realization that the bride is exhausted by the wedding and honest about the marriage. We all know I have learned that lesson this year, and it was redelivered to me as a hymn at the Stephen Talkhouse. Some things always come due.
Afterward, we were shoehorned out of the place by a supremely grumpy bartender. On the sidewalk, the t-shirt guy was getting something out of his car, which is when I realized that what he’d driven all this way to do was, in fact, not to get autographs but present the band with a guitar.
The guitar had a story: it’s from the custom guitar workshop of Wylie Gelber, who spent fourteen years as a bassist in Dawes, a founding member, one who dropped out of high school to go on tour and played on the first eight records. He was also the band’s technician, the guy who built the pedalboards and the rigs and got everything working for soundcheck. He left the band — a beloved band, his own band! — to build a guitar workshop: Gelber & Sons.
Gelber makes them all himself, one at a time, from whatever materials strike his fancy. Gold foil pickups from long-dormant guitars, hand-cut pickguards from sheets of cellulose acetate from Italy, the switches he casts himself. The guitar specs are all bespoke, and every single one comes with a lifetime warranty and maintenance from Wylie himself. My fellow fashion dorks: think of it as instrumental couture.
And so there we were on the sidewalk waiting to chat with the lead singer, and I watched this guy get more and more nervous about pulling out this guitar. He’d driven the guitar a hundred miles, and now he couldn’t quite walk it over. I know that feeling — sometimes, the closer you get to the thing you want, the bigger and hairier it gets. So when the singer wandered near, I teed him up and said, “Hey, what’s that guitar?” And they were off.
Which is, I think, what undid me about this whole night. The lessons, people, and things that are working for me right now are all the same things I celebrate here on The Love List: something beautiful made by a real human, for a reason, with more care than the market requires.
A Gelber guitar refuses the logic of a world obsessed with optimization. It can’t be scaled or duped. Someone chose every part of it, including the parts nobody would notice. Standing on a sidewalk in Amagansett watching a grown man present one to the singer of his favorite band… I really got that, because I’ve built a career by running on the same fuel.
For me, it reinforced that good things come from simply standing in the blast radius of whatever gives you the most joy.
How’s your summer been?
