Bench marks

By Annie Holub Catalyst

Send comments to: catalyst@wildcat.arizona.edu

photo courtesy of Web site "And on the 8th Day, God Created Frank Black" at http://www.germany.net/teilnehmer Could Frank Black himself be looking into a window from a lonely downtown street?

Because when you're not old enough to get inside the bar, you have no choice but to stay outside. With nowhere else to go, you turn to the streets. Door after door slams in your face and after a while, you feel like a failure, and you give up trying to pass through the gateways of success to the air-conditioned smokiness of the hip bars in town. Desperate, addicted, alone, you stand outside the bars, your face pressed against the glass, watching the show the only way you know how.

Sure, you may not be able to actually see whatever godly band is making the floorboards shake, but you can hear them. The sound may have lost some of the high end and midranges, and it may be muffled, but you're there. And the streets may be cold and deserted and dark, but there are always those sidewalk benches - free seating for the underage.

My first sidewalk bench outside the bar experience was a few years back, when Frank Black was playing at Club Congress. I was 18, and after having dinner at the Grill with a couple of friends, I marched them down Congress with me and I stood outside the window, gazing longingly inside, watching Black Francis himself perform on the Club Congress stage. There's a perfect view of the movie screen from the street. I made face marks on the window as my friends made fun of me. But I wasn't alone. There was another guy, leaning up against a lamppost, with one foot on the bench, hands in his pockets, watching Frank Black play. We stood there, he and I, enamored, enjoying a great show, from outside the club.

It was a desperate, humiliating act. There we were, innocent music fans, who marveled at the Pixies in our youth, who bopped to the Breeders and Black's "Teenager of the Year." It was pop, it was us, and as fellow underager and indie popster Ben Lee so aptly put it, "I'd do away with the Pixies if you could give me something more."

I mean really, what more could there be?

Other than Frank Black coming back for another show at Club Congress tonight.

"Frank Black!" my friend Tom exclaimed when he found out about the show a few weeks ago, "I'm old enough to go now!"

I sighed. I'm still not. But not like that's going to stop me. I'll still be there, outside, on Congress, and since I'm getting sick and tired of turning to the streets because there's no where else to go, I'm turning it into a revolution. I'm bringing my own chairs, and maybe an ice chest with Coca-Cola, the choice of the underage generation. And you're coming with me. You know you want to do it. It's crossed your mind, but you never thought anyone would be brave enough to do it. But if we do it together, it'll be all the more meaningful and powerful and vengeful and if we get the sidewalk so full, they might just call the cops on us.

But we won't have been doing anything wrong. Just enjoying the public sidewalk, listening to one of pop music's great deities in the only way the law allows. It'll be a silent protest, a gathering of Pixies fans who were coherent in the '80s, but who can't yet cross through those big black swinging doors of Club Congress; it'll be non-violent, peaceful, a celebration of love.

Outside. On the sidewalk. Sitting on the benches.