by JJ Koczan

We continue with JJ's report from the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Holland. If you missed it, check out Day One, Day Two, and Day Three. The fourth and final day was Sunday, April 26, 2009, and that's what we have here...

Saint Vitus at Roadburn (gilles etasse)

The vibrating of an incoming call on my cell phone woke me up at 06:30 this morning. It was an old friend of mine -- probably the oldest, come to think of it -- whom I've known since third grade or so. He's a veteran now and got out of the Marines this past New Year's Eve, having done a combat tour in Iraq that provided him with nightmares and memories I can't even imagine and don't want to try and physical ailments which the military is now trying to screw him out of his health benefits to cover.

He was crying into the phone because one of his fellow Marines, with whom he was apparently quite close, died yesterday from complications resulting from terminal cancer. As I understand it, the complication in that circumstance is that you have cancer. It took two strokes to kill him, and aside from his wife and parents, he hadn't told anyone he was sick. My friend, who's already had far too much of the reality of human nature shoved into his eyeballs, was blindsided, and he'd spent that entire day making phone calls to say that another one of his buddies was dead.

I'll stop short of falling into some kind of "death as impetus for reflection on one's life" thing, but I think about that experience and I think about the last four days I've had, which as far as music goes have been some of the best of my life, and all I can chalk it up to at this point is privilege. I'm not rich, I can't afford this trip and knew I couldn't when I decided to undertake it after it was announced that Saint Vitus, whose logo t-shirt I'm now wearing, was playing. But I am a white American from an upper middle class background, and apparently that's enough to do whatever you want to in life. Like write about music for a living, or take the time out of the day to reflect on one's own cultural privilege -- or, more likely, not.

continued below...

Continue reading "Surviving Roadburn, Day Four: In Which My Liquified Brain Drains Out Through The Various Holes In My Head"