{"id":111635,"date":"2017-06-08T16:12:51","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T20:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111635"},"modified":"2017-06-08T17:58:09","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T21:58:09","slug":"carsickness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/08\/carsickness\/","title":{"rendered":"They\u2019re from Here, and They\u2019re Great"},"content":{"rendered":"

Revisited<\/a> is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Michael Chabon\u00a0recalls discovering the Pittsburgh band Carsickness<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Carsickness.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I saw Carsickness play for the first time in the fall of 1980, somewhere on campus at Carnegie-Mellon University, where I was a freshman. I\u2019d listened to their self-released EP, Police Dog<\/em><\/a>, about a hundred and seven times by then, and I found their live show unaccountably stirring, because there was nothing that seemed likely to cause a stir about the five guys who made up the band. They had on jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of them wore a cardigan. A couple of the guys verged, particularly when it came to the way they wore their hair, on the unkempt, but most of them looked, frankly, a lot like CMU engineering students. None looked even remotely, in the fall of 1980, like punks.<\/p>\n

This came very much as a relief to me, I remember. I was kind of afraid of punks, or at any rate I was going to be afraid of them, I believed, if I ever actually met any. They did not have punks in the suburban Maryland town where I\u2019d grown up and bought my first Clash, Blondie, and The Jam records.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A dude on my dormitory hall (Donner A-Level West) introduced me to Carsickness\u2019s music soon after we arrived at CMU. His name was John Fetkovich, but people called him Fetko, and he was the first, but by no means the last, ninth-level grandmaster of rock fandom I ever met. His knowledge was deep, wide, and intricately hyperlinked. He could steer you from the Velvet Underground to David Bowie to Uriah Heep to Pere Ubu to Patti Smith to Bruce Springsteen in one listening session without ever departing his zone of musical happiness. He was an engineering major, bespectacled, small of stature, generous with his knowledge and the record collection that dominated, milk crate by pilfered milk crate, every available corner of the Fetko half of his shared dorm room. In short order he managed to secure a slot on WRCT, the campus radio station, and in time became a vigorous champion of the bands that had begun to ooze and bubble up from dark subterranean seams all over America: H\u00fcsker Du, X, Black Flag, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, et cetera. There was a certain air of Muppetry about Fetko: he spoke in brief, precise declaratives, with a Jim Henson gulp in his voice, bobbing his head for emphasis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you like punk,\u201d he had told me, soon\u2014like,\u00a0minutes<\/em>\u2014after we first met, \u201cyou should check out Carsickness.\u201d He bobbed his head. \u201cThey\u2019re from here, and they\u2019re great.\u201d<\/p>\n

I went out and bought the aforementioned EP, a seven-inch with grainy, Xeroxed cover art. It had four songs, among them the local \u201chit\u201d \u201cBill Wilkinson<\/a>,\u201d a takedown of a prominent white supremacist, with a slinking game-show organ and a radio-hostile, anti-fascist chorus. (\u201cWhaddaya say \/ KKK, fuck you!\u201d) As I said, I loved it. But did I like\u00a0punk<\/em>? And\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0Carsickness a punk band?<\/p>\n