Even in this momentarily frozen post-Napster-and-iPod moment in 2007, Antigone felt like my last kick at the we’ll-make-records-and-T-shirts-and-people-will-purchase-them-unironically-and-maybe-we’ll-even-play-shows-all-over-the-country can. I’d told myself with every new band that this was it, but that phrase once rated more optimism than it did in ’07. One way or another, Antigone would be it.

We played a short thirty-minute set bespoke for the party punkers (a throwback crowd if there ever was one; one content to pogo and dance instead of knocking the snot out of one another), who put up with the performative intellectual aloofness of Victor’s deadpan reading of the nutrition label off a Del’s Frozen Lemonade cup. He was a recent graduate of the prestigious and outrageously expensive RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, and he had his own apartment in College Hill and no student loans. I still had five years more of loan payments at an elevated interest rate (having defaulted once, almost twice) despite my not graduating in 1993.

With both shows over, gear (my Marshall JCM200 and Fender Stratocaster, plus a MXR distortion pedal) stowed in Victor’s van, I Slinkyed over to the bar, pleasantly exhausted though my lower back hurt more than usual, particularly for a set that wasn’t very long.

Same guitar as Bob Mould? Still such a fanboy.

I’d been suffering from consistent but manageable lower back pain for years by then. Discs are the shock absorbers for the spine, and two-thirds of them were fused together along with my vertebrae, therefore I only had one-third the allotment of functioning discs. And those discs (and the muscles around them) got cranky. The years of performing on stages (or floors in tiny bars and abandoned warehouses) and lugging heavy equipment had taken a toll, along with countless hours standing in clubs watching other bands play, and add to that my medically reckless participation in slam dancing/moshing during the ’90s. (By the by, I’ve come to loathe that the word “moshing” and the act itself in a post-Nirvana world were hostilely co-opted by frat-house douchebros. To be fair, mindless violence was a dangerous, problematic, and stupidly beautiful part of punk from the beginning. But also, frat-house douchebros.) At least I had enough of a brain to avoid stage diving and crowd surfing, but at the height of six-four (I loved and love my new height), my unsuspecting head was a mountain peak atop the crowd, one the stage divers and crowd surfers invariably crash-landed onto first. The fuckers.

Manageable? How, and using what as painkillers?