I used to write a zine. If you know me, you might have seen Living Proof as a for-real print product. The last issue I finished and actually published was two and a half years ago, now. It broke from the narrative I had established in the previous issues, instead using the emo music of my college years—and specifically the band Rainer Maria—to ruminate on ideas of growth, maturity, and the significance of music to one’s identity. It’s a romantic idea, sure, but most everything is when you’re young. Going through the old Rainer Maria records (and also The Promise Ring albums—those are coming next) has prompted me to go back to that material and see if it still rings true. Personally, I think it does, but I’ll leave you to judge for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from the closing section, and if you want to read more, I still have a few copies of all five issues of the physical zine left. Let me know and I’ll send one out. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Sometimes, when the end comes, it’s right on time. But very rarely do things end when it feels right. Too often the end is a surprise, it catches you off guard, and you’re left in the dust struggling to make sense of your grief. Not as often, but just as difficult, is the end that drags on, milking your patience and sympathy until you’re actually happy the end has come when it finally does arrive. It’s a relief, in those cases.

I received the news of Rainer Maria’s eminent disbanding in 2006 with a bit of surprise—surprise that they’ve managed to make it this far—but also with a bit of relief. After almost a year of not hearing from the band at all (aside from a quick stopover in Chicago on a brief tour one weekend when I was out of town), they released what I judged to be their weakest album ever. After the strong showing of 2003’s Long Knives Drawn—an album that felt immediately familiar to me the moment I heard it—and the extended hiatus, I was ready to be blown away by their next effort. But the clues were blowing in the wind: after hearing the demos in the summer of 2005, Matt from Polyvinyl told me to be prepared for disappointment. Then the band jumped ship from Polyvinyl altogether, serving their final record as the first release for Grunion Records. And then there was their tour in support of the record: the last time I had seen them perform, it was a bittersweet but triumphant set at the Metro, and it felt like they could go nowhere but up. Yet when they came to Chicago in support of the new record, they instead played back-to-back successive nights at the Beat Kitchen, a tiny hole-in-the-wall venue with capacity at probably 10% that of the Metro, better suited to local up-and-comers, not former emo torchbearers who were shifting gears towards a more mainstream modern rock sound.

Those shows were fun, but I felt like the band had lost some steam. They looked older, finally, after years of reminding me what it’s like to be young. They didn’t sound much older, but they did sound a tad disappointed—with themselves, the venue, the audience, the new material itself, I couldn’t quite tell. While I had seen their audience grow steadily over the years, with younger fans catching up with the bandwagon before it took off again after each new record, this time out I felt like the crowd was only there to experience nostalgia: there didn’t seem to be anyone there who was truly experiencing this band for the first time. We all already knew what to expect, we all had our expectations for the band to fulfill. Perhaps it was too much.

An early-morning slot on Lollapalooza’s Saturday schedule and an opening slot for indie-popsters The Format appeared to be moves calculated to expose the band to new audiences, but to those of us who have been following them for years, it felt like one last attempt to break the band free of its tired emo image. I’m not sitting here crying “Sellout!”, armchair quarterbacking the strategies of three musicians who have been playing the game as long as I’ve been following it, but at some point I was forced to admit that the direction Rainer Maria was headed was not a direction I was interested in following. I thought of it as an amicable parting of ways, a difference in perspective, but the reality was that I had reached a point where the things that Rainer Maria sing about no longer figured centrally into my life. I dare say I had matured beyond the emo of almost a decade ago—it sounds trite to say it like that, but the reality is that it is a difficult thing to face the very real fact that the things that had once meant so much to me were gradually being replaced, one at a time.

Admittedly, it was difficult for me to ultimately be disappointed with 2006’s Catastrophe Keeps Us Together—I wanted so hard for it to be the best album of the year. There are some great songs on Catastrophe, but that’s exactly the problem: since 1996, every release of theirs has been consistently strong from front to back. I’d never thought I’d hear true clunkers from Rainer Maria, hoping that they had learned their lesson from the uninspired slumps scattered throughout 2001’s Better Version of Me. The fact that their last record, Long Knives Drawn, was their best since 1999’s Look Now Look Again, didn’t help at all, instead making Catastrophe’s catastrophes even more disappointing.

Yet, when Pitchfork posted the news of Rainer Maria’s demise and farewell shows, I felt relief: relief that I could finally end the charade of loving this band when the two of us had so clearly grown apart, and relief that I had the opportunity to be a part of the farewell. My girlfriend and I booked plane tickets, intending to revisit those sites of so many memories: the Church in Philly and the Bowery Ballroom in New York. Of course, things never go as planned, and the cancellation of my scheduled plane resulted in a rebooking through Allentown, a rental fire-engine-red Dodge Magnum, and a drive down the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania straight into Philadelphia—a route I apparently remembered better than I thought I would have, muscle memory kicking in when I forgot which exits to look for on the highway.

That night at the Church I recognized Mike Kinsella at the merch table, and apologized for the ruckus my students had caused when I brought an entire class of freshmen to the Beat Kitchen to see Owen and Joan of Arc perform. Amy from Pitchfork was wandering around, and it was nice to see another Chicago face in a crowd full of strangers at my old haunt. I also saw a fair amount of people brown-bagging liquor, something I had never even thought of when I used to frequent this venue years ago as an undergrad. We changed that situation mighty quickly after a trip to the liquor store down the block in between sets, but it felt weird—not because this was an actual church, but because I had spent my young adulthood in this very basement, and booze hadn’t been a part of experiencing those shows. I hadn’t come back out to the northeast to reclaim my youth but to remember what it had felt like, and even though that XL bottle of Yuengling tasted like heaven, it didn’t exactly feel right.

The concert the next night felt more like a homecoming: it had been the announced final concert, and the Bowery was filled with fans who had driven and flown in from all over, people who knew almost every word to every song, and were sorry to see this particular chapter of shared experiences come to a close. These were people like me: Rainer Maria had provided something special for their lives for years, and while we all may have moved on, that bond is one that will always exist. The Bowery held a few memories as well, but it was nice to make new memories too, introducing my girlfriend to these venues that had been the sites of so much fun during the years before we met. She flew home early the next morning, and later that evening I rode the subway out to Brooklyn with my best friend from college to catch their last performance, a recently-announced show at NorthSix, the venue that had served as their unofficial headquarters since they had moved to New York at the turn of the century.

This felt like a fitting end. After living separate lives for so long, we finally had a chance to sit down over drinks and discuss our hopes and fears like in the old days. Though we were at different points in our lives, it was right for the two of us to say good-bye to this particular band together. Rainer Maria’s final show wasn’t the last postscript in the chapter of my life that ended when I moved to Chicago four and a half years previously, but in saying good-bye to Cait, Kyle, and Bill, I said good-bye to the type of person I used to be: I said good-bye to the naïve 18 year old kid who opened a new world every time he bought a CD or went to a show, I said good-bye to the 20 year old who struggled to find common emotional ground, I said good-bye to the broken-hearted 22 year old, and I even said good-bye to the 24 year old whose excitement at having the opportunity to share new experiences with a new lover was barely tempered.

We chart our lives with the elements of popular culture that were a significant part of our lives at that particular time. Rainer Maria is far from the only band that serves as a milepost along the highway of my life, and music is far from the only yardstick I used to keep track of myself and my changing perspectives. But their music affected me in ways I’m only beginning to fully understand, and I’m not ashamed to admit that when I needed it most, emo saved my life.

I think most of all, I miss the drives home.

Throughout high school and college, going to rock shows was an event. My friends and I had elaborate rules—no listening to any of the bands’ CDs the day of the show, whoever sits shotgun is required to stay awake on the ride home, and never stop to ask for directions—and the whole thing was an event requiring hours of phone calls and miles of emails to organize. Getting there and back was half the fun, especially if we were headed to a venue we’d never been to before. This was before ubiquitous cell phones, back when Mapquest was just as likely to dump you off at an abandoned junkyard in West Philly than it was to actually get you to the show on the other side of the city. This was also before cultural relativism set in, when my friends and I were militant about our musical preferences, policing ourselves (and our friends) for any inappropriate “popular” music leanings. We misidentified immature proselytization as pretentiousness, and in that guise it was easy to assume the moral higher ground against commoditized mass entertainment and those who fell for it. Perhaps it was our way of striking back at the “in” crowd, whoever they were—we had better taste, and that was more important than anything.

We listened to the best music in the world, and we knew it.

It’s going on ten thirteen years later, and shows are now quotidian. There’s little anticipation, even for big shows, and I’m much more likely to blow off a gig because I’m broke or tired (or both) than back when the lives of myself and everyone I knew revolved around the scene. Sure, I’m jaded to a certain extent, and I bet we all are: there are very few bands left that I absolutely must see before I die, and newer bands don’t excite me nearly as much as they used to, primarily because a) it seems like there are far more of them than there used to be, and b) I now have a larger frame of reference and find it much easier to dismiss new music as merely derivative. But there are also the prerequisites that come with being somewhat of an adult, responsibilities that will only grow. It’s hard to admit that there are simply better or more important things to do than head to a show, things like: cooking dinner, catching up on sleep, not spending money I don’t have, reading that book that’s been sitting on my nightstand untouched for almost a month, visiting with family, finishing work, hanging out with loved ones, and drinking booze in the comfort and safety of my own home.

But probably the biggest change is that going to a show is no longer the zenith of a night out. It’s an everyday event, alongside grabbing a beer with friends, checking my post office box, picking up a new loaf of bread, depositing a paycheck, and watching Roseanne reruns. I don’t spend the whole week looking forward to Friday night anymore. Heading to the club—which is now merely twenty minutes away, instead of an hour and a half—is no longer a great adventure. And there’s always something to do before and after that deemphasizes the show itself. You might think that I take live music for granted, and to a certain extent I probably do—how many times have I justified missing a touring band simply by thinking that I’ll have a number of other chances to see them again?—but I also think that this familiarity has made the music more valuable, as well. Namely: back when heading out to a show was such a primary experience and the focus of days of preparation and weeks of anticipation, the music itself was practically non-important, secondary instead to the process—no, the exercise—of getting there and back, seeing and being seen, building camaraderie and community based on shared experiences. Now, the simple fact that I choose to see a band perform when I have so many other options (both in terms of other bands playing that night and in terms of doing something else entirely) is a reflection of my interest in the music itself, not in the show experience. In other words, when I’m at a show now, it’s because that’s what I’ve chosen to do over many other things competing for my attention.

When you’re young, everything’s a spectacle, practically an experiential requirement. When you’re older, it’s a conscious choice.

There are things that I miss, sure. The absolute surety that I’ll see someone I know at a show, simply because I always see someone I know. The prospect of making a new friend—boy or girl—based on this single shared experience. The feeling that I’m experiencing something huge and important, and knowing that my life is better than that of everyone who’s not at the show. Having that bond in common with the couple hundred other people there. Knowing that there’s nowhere else I’d rather be than at that very show. But most of all, I miss the drives home.