Shut It Down

Before we start, the single most important discovery of my professional life:

Confidence is indistinguishable from authority if you’re wearing the right object.

A lanyard. That’s the object. A piece of nylon with a laminated rectangle on it, and people will move barricades for you.

Add pointing, and you can run a small government.

I learned this at the MidPoint Music Festival in Cincinnati, on the night I ended a headliner’s set early.

I should say up front that I was not really present for most of what follows.

I was there. Physically. My body was on site and operational. But this is not my memory. This story was returned to me, in pieces, over several years, by people who were standing farther away and drinking considerably less.

Treat what follows as testimony rather than recollection.

All of it is on the record.

None of it is on mine.

Here’s the setup, and unlike most of my stories, I was actually supposed to be there.

My band had played earlier that day. A real slot, on a real stage, to real people, some of whom were not related to us. I’m told it was Grammer’s, and I have no reason to doubt that beyond my general track record.

And because we’d played, we had credentials.

By credentials, I mean lanyards.

Now, about the headliner.

Only recently did I figure out why none of us agrees on the headliner: we played that festival more than once. I keep finding out about additional years. Same city, same September, same lanyards, different headliners.

Which means every memory any of us has from that place is a composite of several separate weekends, shuffled together and filed under one night.

So I’ve asked around.

Our drummer says Dinosaur Jr. Then reconsiders. Then says The Walkmen. Then says it doesn’t matter.

Our singer is confident it was Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Our bassist has produced a different answer every single time I have raised it, with total conviction, like a man reading from a card.

I have no answer at all, which is not the same as having forgotten. Forgetting implies I had it once.

Doesn’t matter.

What matters is that a working professional, mid-set, in front of a few thousand people, was told to wrap it up by a man from the four o’clock slot.

And did.

Third Man Records had their rolling record store parked at the festival one of those years. A yellow truck that traveled the country on its own schedule.

I am reliably informed that I spent a portion of the evening standing near it.

That detail matters only because it describes the whole night. I was standing next to things more important than me, and it was going great.

Because a man in that condition, wearing a lanyard, standing near production equipment, starts to get looked at. Not suspiciously. Expectantly.

Stagehands’ eyes would land on me, then the lanyard, then back to me, doing the math: he’s back here, he’s got the thing, he must be somebody.

And there’s a half-second where you can correct that math.

I did not use the half-second.

I started giving stage directions.

Small ones at first. A nod at a cable run. A thumbs up at a lighting guy, then a little circular gesture at the rig like I had opinions about the wash.

The lighting guy ADJUSTED SOMETHING.

I want that on my tombstone. A man adjusted professional equipment because of my wrist.

And then I unlocked the move that made me untouchable, the move that turned a lanyard into a badge:

I started asking for Gary.

“Where the hell is Gary?”

There was no Gary. I invented Gary.

But I said it with such managerial exhaustion, scanning the wings, checking a phone with nothing on it, that everyone within earshot became nervous on my behalf.

Nobody has ever worked an event where there wasn’t a Gary who was supposed to be here by now. Asking for a missing subordinate is the most authoritative sentence in the English language.

Two stagehands started looking for him.

For Gary.

Who does not exist.

Before we go further I have to explain the phrase, because the phrase did not come from that night. The phrase came with us.

“Shut it down” was already ours. It had been for years.

Somebody would say it in the van. In a green room. At a diner at three in the morning. Shut it down. Shut that whole thing down. Shut that shit down.

It applied to everything. A bad take. A worse idea. A guy at the bar telling us about his podcast. A song one of us loved that the rest of us had decided to kill.

It had gone past joke and into liturgy. It was just a thing our mouths did.

I want that understood before we continue, because what happened next was not inspiration.

It was muscle memory with a stage in front of it.

My bandmates were out in that crowd. I could see them. They could see me, side stage, lanyarded, gesturing at infrastructure.

This wasn’t a con for gain. This was a bit. A performance for an audience of four guys who I knew were watching, escalating exactly the way every bit in my life has ever escalated, which is: past the point.

So when the set was running long, and the night was peaking, and somebody’s face in that crowd egged me on with their eyebrows, I did it.

I turned toward the stage, filled my lungs, and screamed, with the full diaphragm support of a trained vocalist:

“THAT’S IT! SHUT IT DOWN NOW!”

And the headliner looked over.

A man in the middle of his own set, at his own show, turning toward the wings to find the source of the yelling. Which was me. A guy whose most recent professional achievement was evacuating a VFW hall with a fog machine, admittedly some years earlier.

And here’s where I want to slow the film down. Because I had a choice, one more exit ramp, and instead I gave him the gesture.

You know the gesture. The twirling wrist, pointer finger out, spinning sideways. Wrap it up.

And then I pointed at my watch.

I was not wearing a watch.

I tapped bare wrist, at a professional touring musician, with total conviction.

And he gave the small professional nod of a man who has seen ten thousand curfews, leaned into the mic, and told the crowd they were going to have to wrap it up.

He complied. With the lanyard. With the wrist. WITH THE INVISIBLE WATCH.

So naturally, riding the greatest high of my performing life, I screamed it again.

“SHUT IT DOWN NOW!”

Full spectacle. Somewhere in that crowd, four grown men in a local band were crying laughing, which was the entire point, and a working headliner was landing the plane early because a stranger with festival wristband energy told him time was up on a watch that did not exist.

You’d think that would be the end of the story. It is not, because the night had one more gear.

Later, still backstage, still celebrating, somebody I half-knew grabbed my shoulder and said the sentence that has preceded most of my finest disasters:

“Hey, you’ve got to meet somebody.”

And I got introduced to a tour manager. An actual one.

A real Gary, if you will.

I could not tell you whose band. Add it to the list.

“I’d like to introduce you to Brandon.”

And I said, “Pleased to meet you,” like a gentleman.

And then, dead serious, maintaining eye contact, I raised my drink, a completely full double Jameson and ginger, and poured the entire thing directly on top of my own head.

Then I flicked the man’s hand.

No wink. No smile. Just a man in a lanyard, whiskey running off his ears, flicking a music industry professional’s hand like a tiny duel had been declared.

I did it to get a reaction. That’s the whole explanation. That is, if I’m honest, the explanation for about sixty percent of this book.

I don’t remember his face. Witnesses say it was the face of a man recalculating his entire evening.

For a long time I didn’t tell this story, because I didn’t have it.

It came back to me in pieces, from other people. Somebody at a show would say, “Wait. You’re that guy.” Somebody’s girlfriend would mention that her friend was there. A soundman I had never met brought it up during a load-in like the two of us had been at the same wedding.

Losacker was side stage during the headliner telling everybody to wrap it up.

That is how I learned what I did. From strangers. From other people’s laughing. Assembled secondhand, over years, like a bootleg of a show I attended.

By every account they played nearly the full set anyway. My contribution to music history was maybe one song. History will recover.

Guilt isn’t what keeps me up.

Side stage, soaked in my own Jameson, inventing coworkers, I was the most confident any human being has ever perceived me to be. Total authority. Zero credentials beyond nylon.

Meanwhile I have sat in actual meetings, about jobs I was actually qualified for, doing work I could do in my sleep, feeling like a fraud about to be discovered at any moment.

The imposter felt like the professional.

There’s another thing, which took me longer to say.

The single best performance of my life is one I have to take other people’s word for.

More people looked at me that night than any other night I have ever had. Thousands of them, in the dark, in a park, in a city I grew up in.

And I have to ask around to find out what they saw.

There is a written record of me at that festival. A published account, by an actual writer, filed at the time.

It is not about the headliner. It is not about the lanyard, or Gary, or the invisible watch, or the whiskey.

It is about my van.

Somewhere in a festival recap there is a paragraph in which I collect a group of people, including my own frontman and a music critic, and walk them out to look at my conversion van. The writer inventoried it. Cooler in the console. Heated and cooled cupholders. Television. Retractable bed. Wood grain dash panel.

He called it a Swiss Army van and seemed, if anything, moved.

That is the artifact. That is what history kept.

I ended a man’s set with a watch that did not exist, and the permanent record preserves me giving a tour of my cupholders.