Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault

Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault - ...

by Bobby Curnow

Truth be told, I came into the real fun of high school fairly late… I didn’t touch alcohol until Junior year, and didn’t smoke pot until Senior year. I was a certified ‘nice guy’ who felt worried about my friends ‘experimenting’ while feeling terribly left out at the same time. I blame my good relationship with my parents and comfortable 6.5 on the popularity scale for not getting on the partying bandwagon earlier. I was simply too well adjusted and too self-righteous to feel that I needed to partake in illegal activities in order to have fun.

Yet as we all know, peer pressure is the un-slayable hydra of youth and before long I got sick of my friends sneaking off to drink and smoke without me. I jumped on board and quickly realized what everyone else seemed to know… drinking and doing stupid things was incredibly fun. Seeing that everyone had a head start in the Getting Fucked Up race, I hustled to catch up. I went to all the parties I could. Suddenly a whole new world of delightful chaos opened up to me. And where there is high school and chaos, there is drama.

So much drama, and so much of it completely, utterly, pointless. The puking, the recriminations, the making out, the gossip, the passing out, the breaking stuff, the betrayal, the new friendships with the wrong person… all of it was new, and all of it felt dangerous and exciting.

All that was missing was fast paced music with lyrics that unambiguously mirrored exactly what I was going through. Jawbreaker’s “Dear You” would make a couple rounds as an important emotional backdrop to my everyday life… it’s got the perfect amount of “angry-at-nothing” lyrics while remaining self aware and clever enough to appeal an honor student who was convinced he understood exactly what Samuel Beckett was talking about.

I swallowed this music whole, killing more than one cassette tape as I blasted it as loud as I could in my dead grandma’s ’79 Volare. “Dear You” on a whole is an angry, bitter album, but it has moments of pure pop bliss. “Bad Scene, Everyone’s Fault” was the perfect burst of energy after the hyper-gloom of the Christopher Walken in Annie Hall sampling of “Jet Black”. The guitar volley opening and relentless head-boppin melody instantly got me jumping in my car seat as I waited at the drive through at Arby’s. I remember it as a fist pumping reward for sympathizing so thoroughly with Blake Schwarzenbach’s bleak lyrics in the previous songs. I could always turn off my mind when “Bad Scene…” came on and simply rock out. And no one can ever rock out as much as a 17 year old in his own car driving to a party.

Today “Bad Scene, Everyone’s Fault” holds a special place in my heart because it so thoroughly captures that time in my life. Stealing beers, hearing a friend whining about an ex-girlfriend, and embarrassingly knowing every drum fill to a Zeppelin song. “Bad Scene” covers all that ground with a wink and a smile as well perfectly conveying the baffling contradictions of high school heartbreak. It’s an ode to the pure stupid drama and chaos that is a high school party... otherwise known as your most precious memories that you can barely remember. The song is quick and over too soon, seemingly like my 15 months of drinking in high school. But it ends at exactly the proper moment- right when the cops show up.