Stage Four, Ten Years Later
Reflections on watching Touché Amoré celebrate the bittersweet anniversary of their landmark album.
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Today’s post is about seeing a show at the Palladium this weekend that celebrated the ten-year anniversary of one of my favorite hardcore albums, Touché Amoré’s Stage Four. Oh and if you like this you may also enjoy a recent conversation I had with guitarist Nick Steinhardt about making the album’s intricate box set, among many other topics.
HOW HAS IT ALREADY BEEN TEN YEARS?
There are a lot of ways to tell when a band has made the big time. When an SNL host announces their name, when they’re thanking their moms from the Grammy podium, when a disgruntled ex-manager sues them for millions. But to me there is only one definitive way of measuring when a band has ascended to the highest rock echelon: It’s when bootleggers start selling their t-shirts outside their concerts.
Stand in the parking lot outside whatever stadium Springsteen or U2 is playing that night and you’ll see them. Guys with rolling suitcases full of the heaviest cotton Gildan tees with the thickest ink printed on them. Maybe even a misspelling if you’re lucky. Twenty bucks each but you can usually talk them down. In my mind, you’re nobody until these entrepreneurial street vendors think you’re someone they can make a quick buck off of.
I never thought a hardcore band like Touché Amoré would reach bootlegger status. But on Saturday night as I stood on Sunset Blvd. and looked up at their name on the marquee of the iconic Hollywood Palladium, a woman flashed me a black t-shirt with a drawing of a cat below the words Touché Amoré on it. “Tosh A-more?” she asked. “You want?”
No thank you, I said, no Tosh A-More for me tonight.
This night at the Palladium marked a bittersweet anniversary. Ten years ago, the Los Angeles-based Touché Amoré released their fourth album, Stage Four, which centered around the recent loss of frontman Jeremy Bolm’s mother to cancer. The band didn’t realize it then but the album would change the trajectory of their career.
For the first several years of their existence, the band was seen as the new kids on the block by the old guard of hardcore who, they say, didn’t show them much respect. It’s the tale as old as time in the scene—an older generation refusing to make room for younger bands who are putting their own spin on the genre. Touché Amoré did things differently. Their riffs weren’t crushing and chugging the way moshers like ‘em. Their guitars sounded a bit more delicate and jangly than a lot of their peers. Bolm, a student of songwriters like Leonard Cohen and The National’s Matt Berninger, sang lyrics that were more thoughtful and poetic than the bluntly antagonistic screeds typically found in punk songs. But even without the support of the older crowd, the band put in the work, grinding in basements and small clubs around the world for nearly a decade and building their community.
But after Stage Four was released in 2016, something changed. The band accidentally struck a universal nerve by documenting the pain and grief that comes with losing a parent. This was not the kind of vulnerability on display in hardcore songs, let alone sustaining entire albums.
Stage Four is as beautiful of an homage to another person’s time on this earth as anyone can hope for. Its songs are Bolm’s journey through the stages of grief—regret over missing his mother’s final breaths while on tour, anger with her God that she believed in, and, ultimately, acceptance. But even through the screaming and catharsis, there is a warmth in the songs. The listener comes out of the record feeling like they know this woman they’ve never met.
There was an undeniable immediacy to the record, and the people who were working on it could recognize it before it even came out. Tre McCarthy, founder of the label Deathwish Inc., once recalled to me: “Jeremy really fucked with me unintentionally after that record was recorded. I was out in LA and he was like, ‘Hey, do you want to hear the new record?’ So he drove me around LA playing the record. I’m trapped in his car, looking out the window, and I’m crying. I’m trying not to, because he’s talking me through these songs, but I can’t stop. It fucked me up real bad the first time I heard it.”
After the album’s release, Bolm started noticing that he was getting a lot more people coming up to him at shows with tears in their eyes, sharing with him their own heartbreaking stories of loss. He had beautifully put into words a pain that all of us will experience, especially as we reach the age where we watch our parents slip away, and now he was the reluctant recipient of the scene’s grief.
In the ten years after Stage Four, the Touché Amoré’s audience grew in size and in age range. The doubters had been won over. Bolm recalled to me a few years ago: “I remember when I first played the record for [Drug Church singer] Pat Kindlon, he was like, ‘Well, you just completely dissociated yourself from your young audience. No 17-year-old is gonna be headwalking to this song.’ And he was absolutely right. All of a sudden, we were being accepted by old hardcore guys who wouldn’t fuck with us before.”
Touché Amoré released two more records in the years since and, while impressive accomplishments in their own rights, there is something so deeply personal and honest captured on Stage Four that continues to resonate with fans. It’s like there is the rest of the band’s catalog, and then there is Stage Four, an entire body of work onto itself.
As the Palladium crowd waited eagerly for the band to take the stage and the now iconic opening note of Stage Four to ring out and kick off the collective mourning, they instead heard another familiar sound. A piano melody started playing as the band members appeared one by one. It was the one from Death Cab for Cutie’s “What Sarah Said,” a song about death that’s referenced on the second track of the Stage Four, alongside Sun Kil Moon’s “I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love”:
“How has it already been a year? / I skip over songs ‘cause they’re too hard to hear / Like track two on Benji or “What Sarah Said” / They just hit too close when I’m already in my head”
Touché Amoré ripped through the entire record start to finish, even the hidden final track that’s not usually available on streaming services. They brought out Julien Baker, who is featured on “Skyscraper,” to sing her parts. Everyone in the room got to shout along to their favorite lines, the ones that have gotten them through their own tough times.
Midway through the set, Bolm took a moment between songs to thank everyone for being at this monumental night in the history of the band. He dedicated the show not only to his mother but all the friends and family the band has lost in the decade since Stage Four was released. Bassist Tyler Kirby walked up to his microphone and made an emotional addition, “I lost my father six months ago and this entire set is dedicated to him as well.”
It’s a rare thing when you can know what every person in a room is thinking. But in this moment we could all feel that everyone was reflecting on our own relationship with mortality. I thought about the loved ones I’ve lost over the years and stood next to my friend whose mother passed just a few short years ago. We were all here for the same reason, feeling the same emotions.
I never got the chance to meet Jeremy’s mother when she was alive but I wondered what she would have made of this surreal sight. Her son’s band playing the most iconic venue in the city where she raised him, 4,000 people hanging on his every word about the cosmic significance of her life. People outside selling bootleg t-shirts based on songs about her. Then I remembered that I asked him this question once a few years ago. “You wrote this record to honor your mother,” I said. “What do you think she would make of that?”
“Oh my god, she would be so excited!” he responded without hesitation. “She loved being the center of attention. Whenever she came to see us play, I’d be like, ‘Yo, my mom’s here, give it up for her!’ She’d have the whole audience look at her and she’d wave. So, if there’s a world outside of this, I hope she knows that there’s a record about her that’s everybody’s favorite.”
Then I suddenly started thinking about a photo I love. It was taken by Ralph Crane for LIFE Magazine in 1946. An incredible wide-angle shot of the floor of the Palladium, packed with couples dancing and smiling. I’ve seen a large print of this photo and could stare at it for hours, scanning the faces of all the people, imagining what their lives were like in Hollywood in the 1940s.
That was 80 years ago. I wondered how many of those people are alive today. None of them, if I had to guess. They’ve probably all died and their parents have died as well. Maybe 80 years from now we’ll all be dead too and this room will be filled with 4,000 people who have yet to be born. They will be singing and dancing and forgetting for one night about the cruel finality that awaits us all.
I realized I was standing in the same spot where the photo was taken. I raised my camera to my eye and took a photo. Maybe one day someone will see it and know we were all here together and they’ll wonder what our lives were like. Maybe they’ll sing about us. It’s the best anyone can hope for.
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This record left a mark on me. I was already a fan, because “Just Exist” got me through a very difficult situation.
S4 came out a few years after I lost my mom to cancer and it absolutely destroyed me when I heard the first single. I can’t listen to it at work, but I do listen on e in a while to have a good cry and remember my mom.
reconciled to an ongoing sadness https://boxd.it/HrgDK