Guest Writer: David Sampson
Words Ring Forever. Young Hearts Don't Last. You Must Move Fast: Lovesick

Posted by: steve | From: August 03, 2005

I moved from Cleveland Ohio suburbs to Grand Rapids Michigan in fall of 1999. My first year there, I was bitterly disappointed, having imagined that everyone's move to college brought cascades of new discoveries and strange new refined/unrefined culture. I learned to love it eventually, but my new home didn't have an art house theatre, a record store to speak of, or a video store weird enough to rent Antonioni movies. I mean, at this point it totally makes sense that I wouldn't feel excited about Michigan. I had't driven across the state to see Lovesick yet.

October of 2000, a dude a year younger than me I had just met asked me if I wanted to drive him to Ann Arbor that weekend. He was all like, "dude, flashpapr is playing the Pirate House and Lovesick is playing the Detroit Contemporary!" These names meant nothing to me, but I kind of knew from his enthusiasm for these shows that I needed to go. So I did. Aside from a couple tracks from a weird dorm room record player, I showed up that Friday night at the Detroit Contemporary almost entirely cold. All I knew was that both Lovesick and flashpapr starred this dude named Fred Thomas. The bands sounded nothing like each other.

It sounded crazy to me, the scene we were traveling to. I felt like I was peeling back the tent flap on exactly the kind of circus I wanted to see. This little town with a thousand bands and shows every night and the rock stars wrote diaryland entries and drank Mountain Dew with all the rock kids.
Just like everytime I ever went to see a show at the Detroit Contemporary, no matter how late I thought I was for the show, I would walk in and the first band would be loading in their equipment. So, my friend and I just kind of cooled it, and I tried to pretend that I wasn't trying to look so much cooler than I was. A dude who looked just like Basquiat came in. I thought he was high.

Then Fred Thomas bounded in the venue. He was super psyched to see my friend. He seemed like a 10 year old kid who is almost crying from excitement to go climb trees because he is very sickly and usually he is laid up with rheumatism all summer : maybe like Robert Louis Stephenson in his Counterpane days. I'm mostly not kidding. That's the way I can explain the kind of desperate happiness that Fred had. He had an old camera strapped around him that he said his boss just gave him as a going away present. He was moving to New York City. He took portraits of everybody he knew at the show. He told us that he had gotten his wisdom teeth out that day. His junk looked all swollen.

An hour later or whatever, Lovesick took the stage. I seriously wasn't the same after they did. I really actually was not the same after they played. You can look at a picture of them. A picture is worth a thousand words. right? That's really not true about pictures of punk bands. Nikki Margosian on bass. Do I have to let you know that I had a crush on her for a couple years? Do I? Michael Troutman on guitar. They stood there in that way that people in fast bands can stand there if they have a frontman that would steal any spotlight that would have been on them anyway. Who stood there like that? The bassist from The Who? John Entwistle? Totally. Same thing. Because Fred Thomas entirely "TAZZED OUT" on the drum kit.

It was one of those delicate balances of violence type of deals that always seems falling apart. I think he's a tall guy, but at the very least he's a lanky guy, and he played a pretty minimal drum kit like he was flailing trying not to sink in water. FRANTIC. These kind of drummers are always fun to watch. The Deerhoof guy and the Lightning Bolt guy. But Fred SANG too. He was the singer in Lovesick, and to be able to, he wore the jankiest little frail headset mic you have ever seen; the kind that comes with a shoddy tank video game at CompUSA. So as Fred flailed, the headset, with the combination of all the herky-jerky and all the sweat, would start creeping for the edge of his head. In those rare fleeting moments of silence in their songs, he would grab for it and set the world to right. But in between he would be leaning back in his seat to keep it from falling, the microphone dangling into his mouth like a fish hook. In one of these moments that night, I could see the blood splattered against the back of his mouth. I could see the wounds left in his body by that day's carnage.

This brings me to the other remarkable thing about Lovesick shows. The talking. The dang monologues. The verbosity and ferocity with which Fred Thomas attacked between song banter. It wasn't like those rock show moments where whichever drunk guy yells "Play a SONG!" either. The talking was part of the Lovesick show. They had 2 minute long songs, and half hour sets, and half of that was Fred gasping for breath, getting up and pacing, and giving manically rambling monologues. He explained, and more often expounded on the songs. The themes were almost always about screwed up communication and hearts on fire hurting each other and not meaning to (or meaning to), and not going to the parties and going for walks instead, or just going to the parties and hooking up and feeling horrible about making a problem worse.

Here are some lyrics from the latest record Fred has put out (with his band Saturday Looks Good To Me) that fit in with Lovesick monologues a lot.

"By the drum kit in the basement I was trying to get to sleep. I heard your voice come through the floorboards on my answering machine. But by the time I reached the phone's ring, the only thing still singing was the dial-tone."

Missed chances, foiled communication, the frailty of young hearts. That's what Fred shrieked about in every Lovesick song, and in the audience I don't see how you couldn't feel it. The shows took you to a place it's hard to get to. And Fred acted like such a hopped up shaman that you started looking at everything like metaphors. The wrecked drums, the disastrous mic, the vocals that warbled and spiraled out of control; they all fit into Lovesick as a package. And I looked at it that way consciously at the time. Like a couple paragraphs up when I was talking about seeing his bloody wisdom teeth mess? I remember looking at that and saying "I can see the wounds left in his body by today's carnage. That is just like the songs he is singing." Who thinks that?? What? Not me! I'm not that corny of a dude to be thinking stuff that sounds like My Chemical Romance lyrics in my head or anything, but that's what Lovesick did. They made the late teens and early 20's feel like tragedy we were coming together to mourn. No. That's totally wrong. I think it's more like we were celebrating the speed and passion of young adulthood, but mourning the fact that it can be so derailed.

"WORDS RING FOREVER. YOUNG HEARTS DON'T LAST. YOU MUST MOVE FAST."

Here's a short part of a zine interview with Fred about Lovesick

Music should be an expression of something. Music is something inside of you that has to get out for whatever reason. Music is something within oneself

I could say this about whatever music I'm playing, and it would probably be really dumb. Lovesick is the only band I've ever seen play where I could completely trust that they weren't playing music because they were bored college kids. The music they played was inside them. It NEEDED to get out for whatever reason.

The music that lovesick makes is a complete and exact expression of the times that we are going through right now. Lyrically for me it's about things that are happening to me and what has happened to me for the past 20 years. Musically it is an expression of what is happening to the three of us.

Again, this was so apparent. There wasn't a conceit to Lovesick. It came out exactly how it felt.

[music] is communication. It's about people talking to other people. Not like I am on stage and its some mystical thing. I just want to communicate everything that is possible. People should listen to things they don't like and read books by people that aren't like them. People should try to have as many cross cultural, cross racial, and cross gender experiences as they possibly can. So they can become better people and understand people better. This is what we are trying to say in our band to do.

And this seems to be the most important part. Lovesick yearned for communication. Heart to heart with every emotionally scarred kid in Ann Arbor.

So it was like that. Two minutes of spazz out, and two minutes of hearing a guy dangerously out of breath write his generation's diary page in front of you. Exhausting. Before the last song, Fred decided to thank every band they had ever played a show with. People started yelling stuff out like "LED ZEP!" and "SALT & PEPA!" and he would repeat everything that they yelled out. He went on, alternating between real punk bands they played with, and the joke bands people suggested for a couple minutes. Then he grabbed his camera and took a picture of the whole audience, saying he wanted to remember all of us forever because it was the most important time in his life. I don't like to say "heady" a lot, but it was "heady stuff". Lovesick was one of the shows you left looking at your friends wide-eyed like, "I can't believe we just saw that."

And I guess there's no way I can even get into the Lovesick discography. Their first self titled 12" was amazing and excactly what it needed to be. Their second full length was a self titled cd on Makoto records. The songs and the performances on it are amazing. They put out splits with Aloha and a band called Emergency and a couple other bands. It's all good. The sad part is, I don't know if Lovesick records would have ever snagged me like they did if I had never seen the Lovesick show. Maybe it doesn't matter that much at this point, though, since I can't find a single one of their releases to buy online.

Fred Thomas has a bunch of other projects; his Phil Spector sounding studio thing called Saturday Looks Good To Me, the mystical avant-folk band flashpapr which is basically done or on hiatus forever, the afro-pop band he helps out in called Nomo, and his solo records, which sound like Bob Dylan or something. They're all really amazing, and Fred Thomas, overall, is one of my favorite people making music, but Lovesick was my first, and the most shocking, and the most heart rending, and for these reasons, it's no exaggeration when I describe them as The Greatest Band Of All Time.

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