I’m not sure how this happened and I don’t know how to make it stop. One minute I was minding my own business, listening to Kings of Leon’s “Only by the Night,” the next I found myself wearing a greasy black tank top and sitting in a smoky Nashville green room listening to the Followill brothers talk about painting houses in Tennessee. By methods unknown to me, I’ve been transported 14 years into the past and am trapped on tour with these guys.
It’s true, my 16-year-old self would have been awestruck to hang out with this band, but I’m getting desperate to get back to my own time. I can’t drink any more of this lukewarm beer, but the only alternatives are dragon fruit Vitamin Waters and American Spirit yellows.
The weed here is terrible.
The band has been little help. They assumed I was part of the road crew when I showed up, so I earn my keep by carrying speaker cabinets and doing liquor runs multiple times per day. Any time I broach a heady topic like time-travel, music theory, or splitting the check, it’s grounds for screaming, drunken arguments, which sometimes escalate into brawls. Afterward it takes hours to clean the hair off everything.
2008 isn’t all bad. Boomers are too scared of social media to ruin it yet, and Obama’s whole “Hope” schtick is still fresh. Plus, “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire” are instant classics and none of the guys in this band are sober yet so they really belt it out.
My knowledge of the future weighs on me, though. I have to act surprised every week when we watch Breaking Bad on cable, and my warnings about the housing bubble have gone totally ignored. There’s this young roadie who keeps talking about paying off his student loans and leaving his studio apartment in a few years. I can barely look the poor bastard in the eye.
Update: After witnessing someone physically mail a DVD copy of “Mind of Mencia” to Netflix, I redoubled my efforts to leave this time period to its fate. I believe I have succeeded. All I have for reference is Kings of Leon’s latest album “When You See Yourself,” though, and since it sounds indistinguishable from the era I just left, I will have to confirm some other way.