In 1999, the rock band known as Train was the entertainment world’s equivalent of a Greek god, a multi-platinum-selling sacred cash cow with videos and singles circling the heavens and bouncing back and forth from orbiting satellites to earthly receivers like billions of invisible rubber darts. They regularly headlined music festivals throughout the world.

Festivals like the now defunct City Stages, for instance, in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1999 Train was at the top of the City Stages bill along with other musical heavy-hitters like Iggy Pop and Ben Harper. But in the cool of that June evening, while the first stars winked in the sky, there was only a fraction of the expected crowd waiting in front of Train’s stage.

This sobering fact had begun to increase the collective blood pressure of Train’s entourage. Where was everybody? Train’s show was about to start! Why weren’t masses of people pressed against the front of the stage with eyes aglow and breasts heaving for Train favorites like “Drops of Jupiter”? What was the problem?

The problem was Pain. That was the band I was in. The rhyming band name thing is a coincidence, by the way, and the “a-i-n” was the only thing we had in common. Pain had no major label support, no platinum selling records, and no videos playing on MTV—we had two custom made videos (one of which had seen some action on MTV 2), lots of great underground press and strong ties to various independent labels and booking agents, and we had done a commercial for the Cartoon Network. Nothing within the same light year as Train’s ongoing media blitzkrieg, though. They had huge Top 40 hits like “Meet Virginia.” Plus, Train just looked famous. They wore the very best of edgy street fashion. Their veins ran clear with filtered spring water instead of blood.

Pain, by contrast, looked like a kennel of friendly, scruffy lost dogs, the kind that you can’t resist throwing a piece of old hamburger to but then shoo away before they rub the mange on your pants leg. My own attempts at self-expression via fashion were a haphazard failure. My hair was blue or green at the time (I don’t remember which), done by somebody’s friend’s friend who had lost her job at the salon for good reason. I had on the same dirty pair of shants (see illustration) that I’d been wearing for a week. Pose, the bass player and my best friend in all the world, was wearing a tee shirt and a pair of faded khaki shorts. The other six members of Pain were similarly bedraggled and odd. We were not rock star material.

We were pouring our hearts out, though, all 8 of us, pouring them all over that side stage and into the eyes and ears of a captivated audience. We were about four songs into our set at this point, with horns blasting and guitar riffs raking the air. It had become clear at last to Train’s entourage why people were not gathering at the Train stage.

They were still at the Pain stage.

Train’s road crew was, apparently, in a state of enraged panic over this. They were frantically trying to bring about the end of Pain’s show, berating the crew responsible for our stage, threatening them with actual bodily harm if their demands were not met immediately.

I had no idea. At the time, I personally was looking out at a veritable ocean of some of the happiest, most enthusiastic faces I’d ever seen. There were something like a thousand people looking at me and my ragtag band, many of them shout-singing our lyrics, cheering for more. Behind me, Train’s Fan Management Patrol was literally threatening people with ass-beatings if the plug wasn’t pulled on our show.

So, the plug got pulled—if I remember correctly, it happened right in the middle of “Fight,” a likeable, popular song of ours. People went nuts. The crowd erupted into an earthquake of boos and howls.

Our drummer, George, was infuriated. His Irish blood turned to magma in situations like this. He had always been like that, ever since we met back in high school, and I loved him for it. Adam, the guitarist, was pissed, too. They both looked to me with the expectation that I would lead an assault on Train’s stage like it was an English fort and we were painted Scots. That’s the kind of thing that was expected of me, after all. I had beaten up people before—why not Train people, too?

I wanted to. I was reluctant. Why? Maybe, in part, it was the pseudoephedrine, which I was taking on a regular basis in those days. Then again, the whole reason I took pseudoephedrine was to fuel my pre-existing anti-social tendencies which would then cause me to rock the effing mike, or something along those lines. A guy like that would be expected to join a rumble—so what was going on with me?

I didn’t feel comfortable telling anybody the real reason for my sudden seizure of non-violence.

I couldn’t fight, because I had told God I wouldn’t.

End Part 1

Part 2 here