Seeing Buffalo Tom, 1997, by Anonymous

From MemoryArchive

Who: Anonymous
What: Buffalo Tom Concert
When: November 1997
Where: The Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge

It was 1997. I was 22 and living in Cambridge. I was dating a tall Serbian girl who suggested we see a Buffalo Tom show at the Middle East. I had one Buffalo Tom album, recently acquired, but had yet to see them live. The Push Stars opened. We inched our way nearer to the downstairs stage. Between sets, the Serbian girl told me that several weeks ago she had seen Sonic Youth and that Thurston Moore had retrieved her lost jacket for her. (I was suitably impressed.) Buffalo Tom started. I recognized a few of their songs from the one album I owned, and I also recognized a few others which were still played with some regularity on WFNX at the time. But there were many that I listened to for the first time.

An encore followed. It was the kind of encore that is written into the setlist. Then, I think, a real encore followed. The band ripped into a staccato two-chord riff. It was a new song for me, instantly memorable, and even at the time I knew it was significant. The crowd erupted. A tall gangly man and several girls bounded on stage. The girls swayed predictably, but the man's dance was wild and exuberant.

The song, I later learned, was called "Treehouse", and it's still one of my favorites. In the intervening years, I acquired all of Buffalo Tom's albums, and saw them many times. The Serbian girl fizzled. About a year later, I met a girl at another Buffalo Tom show. We dated for quite a while. She enrolled in a film class that as it happened was also attended by Buffalo Tom's bass player. Shortly thereafter she left me (for him I think). Years later we would all meet at a bar across the street from the Paradise.

I live in Utah now, and probably will never see Buffalo Tom play another show. I will never see the Serbian girl again, or the girl who left me for the bass player, and it's even doubtful that I'll ever see a show at the Middle East again. The other day I was getting my haircut at a Great Clips in Salt Lake City. I was chatting with the girl who was cutting my hair. Boston came up. She told me that she once cut the hair of Chris, the leader of the Push Stars, when they were in town playing. I hadn't thought about the Push Stars in ages. But I was instantly brought back to the Middle East all those years ago. I thought about "Treehouse" and the man dancing wildly on stage. I heard the two-chord riff. It was a moment I savored.