Making Life with My Brother
I didn’t fall in love with music first. I fell in love with my brother Steve. Same as today, Steve is four and a half years older than me and that was a chasm growing up. I worshipped him. Whatever he did, I did. Whatever he liked, I liked. He didn’t always like me. And that meant that sometimes I didn’t like myself. I only need to explain this to the non-younger siblings in reading range. All the little brothers and sisters got it immediately.
My love of my older brother was the north star for my personality for at least the first 16 years of my life. Probably more like the first 25 years of my life. I am so eternally grateful my brother was into cool shit cause I would for sure be into whatever he was into cool or not. But he was into The Roots, The Black Crowes, tennis, Monty Python, weird little models of airplanes*, stand-up comedy, baseball, guitar pedals, The Pharcyde, old ass blues records, De La Soul, video games, Dungeons and Dragons, sneakers and sushi.
Now we’re getting up there in years. My brother turns fifty this month and he’s celebrating at the White Squirrel on Saturday. In a lifetime of doing cool shit like raising an amazing family, ushering professional soccer back into Minnesota with his work for MN United, writing about basketball and music professionally at the highest levels including for the New York Times, being an absolutely murderously talented trivia buff and one time bouncing a little-ass ball in Bethesda, Maryland so high that it never came down and is still orbiting our planet, it’s possible that the coolest thing Steve has ever done is be a ferocious blues guitar player. He doesn’t go full on blues-guy in most of the bands he plays in now but he’s bringing back the band that played their first show on the night of the series finale for Cheers (May 20, 1993). That band is Catfish Blue. I had the honor of being the primary bass player for that band for most of their history. It’s the band that made me love bands. It’s the band that made me play bass. It’s the band that made me love blues. And at one point it was the band that made me hate my brother.
Brothers aren’t supposed to do everything together when they’re young. Too many cooks in not enough kitchens. Too much pride to comfortably share a spotlight let alone a lyric sheet. But those were young man problems and now we’re not young. We’re grown. And we love each other. And we love the blues. And I love my brother. I hope you come out and help us celebrate 50 years of Steve. If you want to know a little more about Steve, check out his recent appearance on “No Brains, No Lightbulbs”.
And look, Heiruspecs is retired with no plans of a reunion. But my brother wrote some amazing jams when he was in Heiruspecs including “Life as a Superhero”. And Felix is coming out and we’re playing that song on Saturday. That might be the closest you’ll get to a Heiruspecs reunion this lifetime and if that matters to you, don’t miss it.
*I never really went for that stuff
*Steve and I will die on the hill of this being absolutely a fact