This is um... something. tell me what you think. I wrote it in a blaze of glory last night, to replace the more straightforward, but less interesting(I think) preamble to the great american novel. It works if you want to read the rest. But the rest isn't quite complete yet. lots of love, john.

The final Elastic Waste Band performance, or, as I enjoyed calling it, the Elastic Waste disBand, took place on the third day of the year 1999, in the dining room of the Magnolia Bakery Cafe in Roswell, Georgia. I had worked at the bakery for 6 months, approximately, at that point, and was set to resign from my position immediately after the fading out of the final chord of the final song of the final Elastic Waste Band performance, and leave to attend Georgia State University the following week. The last song that night, and the last song of every Elastic Waste Band show previous to that night, was called, appropriately, "Goodnight," and was written, by myself, about circumstances which had occurred years before, when the Elastic Waste Band first came to be.

I came up with the name one night camping with Scott, about three years earlier, when he'd somehow (and I know not how) separated the elastic from his briefs and, for reasons unbeknownst to me, showed me the sad product of the nasty divorce. When he explained to me what it was he was displaying, I quickly adopted it as a potential band name. When you're seventeen, bored and unathletic in suburbia, every utterance is either a) a great band name or b) a candidate for a tasteless joke about someone's mother. The item in question could have been either, but I chose the former. The existing name for mine and Scott's musical venture was a:aardvark, and it suited us well enough that we continued to use it, but I filed the Elastic Waste Band in the back of my mind for future reference.

The title fit well within my ideals for a band. The "waste band" part was just a silly pun, but the "elastic" bit implied that there was always room for growth and change, stretching boundaries, I thought. Pretentious, I know, for a noise-folk band. It also, in my mind, allowed for drastic personell changes throughout the history of the band. In its three year existence, the organization encompassed anywhere from one to five members, and no one combination, save the one that consisted of only me and a guitar (I called this "Nukular Waste"), performed twice. I didn't plan it that way, it just sort of happened. But anyone who kept tabs on the EWB throughout its brief run will quickly inform you that the definitive line-up of the band played its first and only show on the third of February, 1997, in David Kipp's living room in Cumming Georgia, to an audience of fewer than fifty people. David himself played the electric bass and the baritone horn, John Dunn played lead guitar and harmonica, and I played guitar, banjo and keyboards. As a last minute addition, and a reunion of sorts, Scott Schmidt, the true originator of the Elastic Waste Band name, sat in on percussion and Navajo Indian flute. And we set up in the corner of the house, lit only by a halogen floor lamp, between two public address speakers borrowed from Mount Pisgah United Methodist Church. We played many of the same songs that would be played at the Magnolia Bakery Cafe two years later: songs written about circumstances which, in 1997, were slightly more recent, and slightly less removed. We choreographed it so that the halogen floor lamp was turned off after the fading out of the final chord of the final song, which was, of course, "Goodnight."

After the performance Scott left town indefinitely to pursue painting and filmmaking. David, John and I entertained the notion of successive shows as a trio, but became sidetracked with other projects and life-changing events. David got a new job, John sold his guitar and swore off music, and I undertook the writing of the prose you see before you. It wasn't that simple, of course. It never is. John's mother, Nancy Dunn, was one of the many (if fewer than 50 can be called "many") who had been duly impressed by our short performance in David's living room. I believe she'd described it as "neat," in fact. And as a birthday present to David, whose birthday coincided with the show, and as just sort of an everyday present to John and I, she had made duplicates of a year-old 4x6 snapshot of the three of us, and gave us each a copy, with David's in a frame. And though it was taken long before we would ever come together as a musical ensemble, we began to refer to it as our "publicity shot." I even had notepads made up of the damned thing.

There was a good deal of head-scratching and deductive reasoning before we figured out that the picture was taken sometime around April 8th, 1996, probably by Nancy herself, at the party celebrating Chris Dunn's 18th birthday. Chris was John's brother, Nancy's son. But even when we'd agreed on an approximate date for the photo, the details of the instant it depicted eluded me. Perhaps you've had the sort of experience, where the only proof you have of being somewhere, of participating in something, is what other people say, what a picture attests to. It's nearly all we have to go on of our toddler and preschool years, isn't it? Sometimes we even convince ourselves that we remember something after being told about it a thousand times, after having the photographic image burned into our retinas. For all I knew, before discovering that snapshot, I had left the earth in a flaming chariot for the six months that surrounded the instant in which it had been exposed. The evidence before me forced me to reconsider.

I sometimes wish that the picture could speak for itself, that I could trade it for the thousand words it's worth. But it only stares at me with red eyes. And it's up to me. If it's up to anyone, even. I realize, I warn you, that my memory is anything and everything but photographic. But here goes nothing. Here goes everything...