Dunkball & Towers & Bridges & Rooftops
No one announces it. No one even knows it's happening until it has happened. But dunkball1 dies.
You don't mean for it to happen. There’s no plan in place, no twilighting, no committee-driven strategic decision to stop updating the proverbial app. There’s no retirement ceremony, no jerseys in rafters. No conversation whatsoever happens.
One day you’re there, trying to find out which of the assorted courts2 might be available, making recruiting calls via phone (later text trees) trying to round up a respectable 3-on-3, shuffling through the guys you usually call then the guys you sometimes call and then occasionally the guys you’d rather not call but—hey—we need a body, sometimes actulaly playing two-on-three if the numbers still don’t shake out or everybody decides not to call that one guy3, sometimes playing two or ever three times a day at the peak. You’re tricking your friend Adam into thinking you’re playing regular basketball (which he liked) then pulling up at the Lunt’s dunkball court (which he did not) much to his unamused chagrin. People are laughing. Trash talking. Or dudes are shouting, cussing, almost fighting, actually fighting, storming off. The Dynasty Rule is in effect4. You’re keeping score with 2s and 1s (versus the traditional 3s and 2s), which makes 3-pointers (and dunks) twice as valuable as regular shots. You can offensive goaltend (grab a ball off the rim) but not defensive goaltend. You’re seeing signature moves. You’re seeing teeth-gritted angst about stupid signature moves. Dunks. Threes. Alley oops. Showtime.
Then one day you look back and you haven’t done any of that for, geez, it’s gotta be years now.
You didn’t know it, but it's over. All the way over. Nobody voted it out. There was no willful end. It just kind of…ends.
And it’s not just dunkball. It can be friendships. Eras. Your hairline. Your waistline. Reasonable summer temperatures.
Disappearing with no warning.
Trouble is: I kinda like life to stay the same. Maybe it’s the Taurus in me. Or the anxiety. Or something else.
High school friends. College friends. Parents that don’t age. Children in that magical phase. All that.
I had a phase a decade or so ago when I was playing concerts at the Post Theater 3-4 times a year. It was like a home to me. Now I think the last time I played there was maybe when I turned 40 in 2016 and made a bunch of my friends play a bunch of songs I love? I tried to rent it in 2020, right before the pandemic hit, for The CD Release Show I Never Had, but it was all booked out.
Like I said, one day you look back and think, geez, it’s gotta be years now.
Same goes for the days when it seems like I used to part of some group—The Lower Lights, Sarah Sample, Ryan Tanner, Sayde Price, Cherie Call, Dustin Christensen—recording albums a few times a year at June Audio. I naively thought it would last forever. Or I wanted it to. It was a golden musical period, to be that creative and to feel like a real musical contributor to so many projects.
Geez, it’s gotta be years now.
Same goes for the Rooftop Concert Series. We started doing tribute concerts in, what, 2009? Abbey Road > The Stones > Tom Petty > Woodstock > John Lennon > David Bowie > Fleetwood Mac > 1994 Mixtape. I had (ok, still have) an 81-page google doc titled Rooftop Ideas. EIGHTY ONE PAGES! Ideas for years and years. Except not the years 2019 or 2020. Or 2021. Or 2022. Or 2023. Because the last Rooftop Concert Series tribute show was in 2018 and the last Rooftop Concert of any kind was in 2019. I’d have done it forever.
Same goes for Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit concerts, which I attended for nearly 20 years straight. When my friend Billy and I were driving home from the very first one we attended, we talked about going every year from then on, and about how we’d take our families one day. In 2016, without knowing it at the time, Billy and I attended the last Bridge School Benefit concert5 ever.
See, nothing lasts forever. Except, it appears, my ongoing belief that something is gonna last forever.
I know I keep pounding on the same piano key, but today I got to thinking about my friend Pat6. I always imagined myself playing music with Pat in some form or another for the next 20 years, easy. Tribute shows. Lower Lights. The Madison Arm. Whatever. I just figured we’d be making music…forever.
The last text I sent Pat was a couple weeks before he died. Look at how compelling and personable this is. My part is truly written like a man who believes he has forever.
You can see I snuck in one more message the day I heard Pat was in the hospital, but there’s no way he ever read it: “Love you, brother. We are all pulling for you.” That one’s written with the heart and urgency of someone choking on the fact that you don’t have forever.
Most of the time, you don’t know it’s your last goodbye. I tried to capture that sentiment in my song “Carvertown” with the line “One day everybody goes / if we’re lucky we get to say goodbye.” It doesn’t always go that way. The poet Nikita Gill captured it even better:
I’ve been working on a song lately that, over the years, has tried (and failed) to be about a lot of different things—this girl, that girl, this feeling, that moment.
Somehow, I don’t really know, the other night I stumbled on the song going a wholly new direction. Pivoting, as they’d say in tech startup land. In a reverie of sentimentality, I found myself reflecting on my summer working at Tower Records in Boston in the late 90s, with this sitcom-worthy cast of characters, sharing entire days and weeks together reshelving Barenaked Ladies albums and fielding customer questions about the Lauryn Hill album release date and bickering over the in-store music. It was a wild and strange bunch of misfits, all of whom I’d never see again.
I found myself thinking about closing time, when there were no customers in the store and we’d be counting out the registers and cleaning up the aisles and turning out the lights. And how, eventually, we’d all make our way through the revolving door entrance at the corner of Mass Ave and Newbury. Each night, we’d roll out of the store and into the Boston night, each going their own way, with informal, nonthinking, almost involuntary gestures—a wave, a peace sign, maybe a “see ya” or even a “good night.” And I thought about how we might’ve treated those moments a little differently—more heartfelt, maybe even a hug—if considered how dunkball and working at Tower Records and the very idea of Tower Records itself…they all end.
Or at least maybe I would.
Basketball but the rims are lowered so that white dudes like me can feel athletic just for a fleeting, dunking moment. The rims get a little higher in high school, then back a little lower in our 30s and 40s to account for natural decline in verticality.
The Lunts. The Zwicks/Hvolkas. Rosenberg’s Dad's. The One Next Door To The Jensens. Harwood’s. The One Up At The Jewish Community Center. Chase Cannon’s a time or two. That one rich girl that goes to Highland’s. And, in a pinch, the elementary school up there nestled in that one neighborhood, but nobody really wanted to play there because the blacktop was brutal.
For what it’s worth, I would have been That One Guy, I think, if I weren’t one of the ones constantly organizing games. I had some days I’m not proud of and hope I’ve grown out of.
Any configuration of the same players winning three consecutive games results in a re-shuffling of team configurations.
Neil Young + Promise of the Real
Metallica
Roger Waters
Dave Matthews
Willie Nelson
My Morning Jacket
Norah Jones
Cage The Elephant
Nils Lofgren
Not a bad way to go out, I suppose.
A new PJ Harvey album came out. And Pat was always good for at least 10+ minutes of talking about any new album by Miss Polly Jean Harvey. Twisting the knife: the album is really good. I suspect Pat would’ve loved it.
Ain’t that the truth.
And then come the attempts at trying to recreate it one last time. Like the nostalgia tours from your favorite 90s band. Or de-aging Harrison Ford for one more Indiana Jones. Or trying to lift your kid onto your back only to find you can even lift them off the ground.