The Gaslight Anthem

I had been to one gig beforehand, which I hated. I don't know what I expected but it wasn't floor-to-ceiling speakers throwing out death metal, with indiscriminate lyrics that encouraged people to throw beer and piss everywhere. Needless to say, I would describe the experience as akin to someone taking a pneumatic drill to your legs, drilling through the kneecaps until the blade's exposed at the back, for no good sense other than its brutal appeal to others. It induced a kind of physical and sensory pain that I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe. I could feel the bass rattling my body as if I was a glass, just sitting there, vibrating until it fell off the proverbial table and smashed to pieces. I metamorphosed into a chrysalis, but beneath the hard shell, I was present, soft fleshed and struggling to break out. I couldn't. I was stuck.

My friend recently described You Want it Darker by Leonard Cohen as a tongue that enters your ear, tickling its way down your body, reaching the pit of your stomach that tingles when you drop suddenly down a hill. I can only agree, and also encourage him to write fiction. If that song, and the physical sensations it spurs, is the Apollonian side to music, then this gig was the Dionysian. It bypasses any positive memories. This is embellished by my friend entering diabetic ketoacidosis during the set and nearly ending up in a coma. I was 14 years old, and 9 years away from my autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. I put my disgust at the experience down to the band themselves, which is unfortunate because they're a fantastic band. I wouldn't go to another concert for 2 years. But the interregnum, if you will, between those two gigs were life-changing. 

My high school girlfriend dumped me. I was struggling with not feeling quite right; something felt off; I didn't feel comfortable around her friends, and after the way I treated some of my truest friends earlier in high school I was feeling my way back into being inducted back into their circle. We were patently not good for one another and I still hurt over the way she treated me, but I would take my confusion out on her too. It probably seems ridiculous that I carry the weight of my anger and guilt around, as an adult, almost 10 years later. But as discussed in my previous post, autistic people feel an amplified sense of pain and responsibility due to our extraordinary depths of emotion. The fact we often cannot convey such feelings lucidly serves only to build a sturdier bridge, from one lone rocky mountain of inner pain to another externally. 

But one thing we share with neurotypical people is a deep investment in music. One stereotype we may carry of severely autistic people is the verbally reticent, medium-length haired teenage boy that is prodigious in maths and music. I do think the two are related; music in its most abstract form is the execution of mathemtical formulae using alternative tools. Though I'm not prodigious, I played a large number of musical instruments to a good standard. These included the piano, keyboard, guitar, saxophone, drums and banjo. I am extremely keen to not turn this post into a pop-punk song about how I got dumped, so I'll be concise and say that playing and listening to music catalysed channelling my sense of being the 'other' in society, school, and a multiplicity of other spaces, through my favourite band and one particular gig, into a place where I was comfortable pushing for the ASD diagnosis. 

I had long listened to Bruce Springsteen, for he wrote about the human condition stripped to its barest form. I grew up in the post-industrial North of England and North Wales. The injustices he sang about -- the arms of the state, such as the police and armed forces, being adequately funded whilst communities collapsed around us -- resonated deeply. I'm sure they do for most people. Music triggering memories is, after all, synesthesia. That is, input meant for one sense being decoded by another sense. For some people, this means literally seeing sounds or smelling letters. But for most, it takes the form of sounds, mostly music, triggering lucid memories. I listen to Thunder Road or Jungleland and a flashcard slaps my hippocampus. The desolate garage at the end of our road in Prestatyn. The boarded-up stores around Stockport. My grandad struggling down the road, as I, a seven-year old child that completely and absolutely idolised him, wheeled his oxygen tank behind him. Of course, we remember the painful, or beautifully melancholy. But the pain of my then-situation, feeling alone and being cast aside, connected to this reverse-nostalgia via the music I'd listen to. 

This nexus would unravel as I grew older, but speaking with my mother, we both recognise that I had an uneasy relationship to music and had done since a young age. I'd scream and cry when she put the house stereo on. I'd accusingly march upstairs as if she'd intentionally tried to upset me. I would become distressed as she played the same albums in the car. I'd repetitively listen to the same songs that I happened upon. Of course, these patterns only becomes evident looking back. Deep music caused deeper distress, and deeper melancholy. 

Then I 'discovered' The Gaslight Anthem. They are a New Jersey-based rock band that are on indefinite hiatus. Their music is diverse, like Brucey's, but the first album I listened to was American Slang. I had bypassed the critics' favourite, The 59 Sound, as I was just that bit too young (12) to be exploring record stores whilst YouTube was in its infancy. One thing that became evident as I listened was that music could be channeled to induce positive memories. They made me feel the same things I usually connected to music, but more. I didn't feel any sense of foreboding anymore. I still think about my grandad, who I lost aged 10, and become inconsolably upset. But I began to think about him with that smallest tinge of happiness that you instinctively know can blossom into something larger. Of course, organically growing up is probably the main reason for this change. But The Gaslight Anthem's music provided a stick with which to carry that change. I still can't properly articulate feelings of grief, or sadness, but they were the first band who gave me a proxy voice. Some autistic children will despise music because of its sensory qualities, but others will have similar experiences to me. It will connect to something just out of reach, something intangible. 

So, in 2012 when their 4th album, Handwritten, came out, I was quietly confident that it would mature the way I thought about things that had happened in my life. But upon its release, something seismic happened. My grandad's death and my best friend's death, both of which became fairly public, the loss of my great uncle (who saved pound coins for me in a jar), my dumping and this sense of social unease became suddenly totally articulable. Or at least, mentally decipherable. I lucidly remember making a campfire with my friend and pleading with him to put on the title track of the record, Handwritten. It is a song with no cadence; its consistent 4/4 time matched with some of the most poignant lyrics ever written, coverge with the pure aesthetic appeal of modern-classic rock to create the most uplifting and emotionally damning experience in the world. He put it on, and I wept tears of pure catharsis. "There's nothing like another soul thats been cut up the same." Wow. I told him in that moment, through teary eyes and a running nose, that I felt nothing but love, and sadness, and grief. He looked at me as though I'd thumped him and then offered him a yoghurt. But this whole world of tumultuousness had been condemned to the Upside Down. 

I caught them on their Handwritten tour later that year. Their introduction consisted of 14 notes played over 4 bars by the lead before the lyrics and the rest of the band kicked in. It was the song Great Expectations, which drew me in as a bookworm from the outset, a song which articulates loss and feeling alone in a way in which autism compounds you to feel most of the time. The first line is "Mary, the station is playing every sad song, I remember when we were alive." The lead singer, Brian, barely made it through the word "Mary" when I received a jackhammer of an elbow, accidentally, to the face from an enormous, burly man that I would struggle to see over for the rest of the gig. He split my lip right down the middle, and I still have the scar. 

Needless to say, I had an entirely different sensory and emotional response to this than I did to being covered in piss, eardrums suffering, and my friend slumping against the wall 2 years prior. I love that scar. Its a symbolic reminder of what changed during that gig. I saw 4 men - "manly" men - sing about grief, love, loss, unhapiness, depression and other things that tend to only loosely bind people together. But you sensed the entire audience were experiencing something seismal. This became extremely apparent when a stranger took me by the waist and simply hugged me. She apologised and said "I'm sorry, I don't know why I did that. I think its the way your shirt is sticking to your back." I don't think this was an advance. I think it was two humans engaging the power of this conduit, realising they were part of something bigger.

I have since lost my baby cousin, another friend, and a cherished uncle. 3 of my closest friends have attempted suicide, including one particularly close call. The Gaslight Anthem's music has been there, waiting, for me, everytime. Of course, music is no substitute for medical and therapeutic help for depression, anxiety and ASD. But that gig transcended my sensory uneasiness of loud noises, crowds, humidity etc. to appeal to something baser in me. Music can become such a complementary tool for "getting better," and not just a short-term dopamine fix. That gig enabled a great deal of introspection and even though I'm still very poor at articulating my feelings, it has enabled me to do a lot of things that I would have otherwise shaken off.

Writing this, being one. And pursuing a diagnosis, being another. I'm relatively happy living as I do, the ASD formal diagnosis compensating for my inability to consistently tell people how I feel. But that one gig in 2012 opened up so many emotional possibilities. I could begin to get over my dumping, which has resulted in the best relationship I have ever had with my best friend from high school. We've been together for nearly 5 years. Whenever I find myself crying, I can approach her, or my mam, or my sister, or my best friends, and I think they're comfortable enough to shoulder whatever it may be that's unknowingly causing this. 

I don't want to regurgitate the usual "thank you Gaslight for..." trope, because I'm sure they've heard it all before with varying degrees of sincerity. I wanted to share this with the regular audience of these posts, because only then do we know firsthand how ambivalent, but also formative, music can be for autistic people.