#delayoh

My (and Probably Your) Ergs! Discovery Story

One could easily make the argument that The Ergs! are the quintessential cult band of the 21st century, so I’m going to make it. Hell, I may even slide into an over-the-top argument that they were the best band of the Oughts, just you wait. The reasons that underlie the greatness of “the near-sighted three” are as intricate in certain areas as they are blatant in others. Let’s begin with one of the most blatant: almost everyone who knows the Ergs! has an eyes-widening, volume-rising, heartbeat-accelerating story about the first time that they saw them. Here’s mine.

One day in 2007, I got a text that told me of an upcoming show from nerdy pop-punk trio called The Ergs!, who were in town from New Jersey. I had heard of the Ergs! through a handful of still-extant music blogs as well as Mitch Clem's comic strip Nothing Nice to Say, so I figured it would be well worth my time. Though my main preoccupation was stand-up comedy, I had spent much of my life in DC by that point going to see shows at the city’s legendary mid-size clubs, even leading some friends to joke that I secretly lived in The Black Cat. I had not really ventured much into the house-show circuit that had steadily thrived in the District, mainly because I did not know the right people nor, apparently, many of the right bands. This came at a time when MySpace had devolved into a mess and Facebook had yet to usurp most of that site’s "functionality" as a promotional conduit. Needless to say, even this deep into the internet age, you still needed to rely on the kindness of acquaintances most of the time.

The show that Sunday was held in a soon-to-be-shuttered DIY venue in Tenleytown, DC called the Party Pit (a refreshingly straightforward Hold Steady reference). My friend who I was dating at the time and I walked in, not really knowing and only vaguely recognizing anybody there, even though we both identified with the DC punk scene as it stood. I had only lived in the city for a couple years at that point, while my friend spent most of her teenage life there. We still regularly reflect on this show to this day.

The opening bands included Delay, an excellent power-pop trio from Columbus with whom I've remained in contact. While their songs were infectious, I complemented the brothers Eilbeck on their genuinely funny stage banter (their chemistry, as twins, kind of went without saying). I fail to remember either of the other openers, but when the Ergs started playing, a few images of those couple minutes burned themselves into my memory. First, several kids were piled onto the washer and dryer. The basement ran out of space quickly; my friend and I were huddled close to the bottom of the staircase, which already had as many people as could safely fit onto it. Second, I couldn't see who was singing. It took half of their first song to realize that it was the drummer. The goddamn drummer. I eventually craned my neck to see the wirey dork sitting behind the kit and screaming sideways into a cheap microphone (his rightful status as punk rock's Woody Allen was not yet apparent to me). Third, despite the appropriately shitty sound system for the venue and the uncomfortable environs, we could tell something important was happening.

Within about ten minutes, my friend and I both realized that this was one of the most magnetic bands we had seen. Halfway through their set, they broke into one song that a solid 2/3 of the packed basement was screaming along to, then within a minute, they segued into a slightly slower yet more intense song. Every single person was singing along to every word. Let me repeat that. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PERSON IN THE BASEMENT (other than my friend and I) WAS SINGING ALONG TO EVERY FUCKING WORD. ‘Why isn't this band headlining the Black Cat with this level of fanaticism?’ I wondered. There has to be a reason they're playing in an uncomfortable basement tucked away in Northwest DC.

Within a few more songs, the trio tore into the Gin Blossoms' 1994 goddamned-classic "Hey Jealousy," and I got so excited, I grabbed my friend's head and shook it back and forth as we jumped along to it. Holy shit, who the hell sent this band down to us? She and I had just been singing along to the original less than a week prior and laughing about it, now we were watching a band rock out a beautifully faithful cover of it. As stupid as it seemed, it was almost as if these three strangers knew about our inside joke all along.

For my first few post-college years in DC, I attempted to ease into adulthood by clinging to whatever Talking Heads-ripping trends the cool people seemed to expound, making room on occasion for three-chord transgressions like Screeching Weasel. Within months of my first time seeing the Ergs!, I had become an unapologetic lover of all things pop-punk, making it my mission to dig into the finest three-chord bubblegum across the world while permanently questioning the types of tastemakers who considered Clap Your Hands Say Yeah a great band. Of course the Ergs! weren’t my introduction to pop-punk (I nearly wore out my copies of Something to Write Home About and Through Being Cool driving back and forth to my girlfriend’s house in the summer of 2001), but they reintroduced me to a world I, like way too many people lucky enough to come of age when we did, was an idiot to disregard. If it hadn’t been for the Ergs! and my introduction to labels like Insubordination, Whoa Oh, and Don Giovanni, who knows if I would have discovered so many of the bands I listen to and love today.

If you didn't like this story, there are plenty more where it came from, just ask any Ergs! fan. Even Jay Hunchback, one of the Ergs' most established contemporaries (and for whose mother they reunited to play a benefit in 2010, their only formal reunion) adorns their first singles collection with his own. Nearly everyone who fell in love with this dorky trio during their eight-year existence has that story of discovery. While many bands they influenced (and even some of the members' own subsequent bands) would rocket to success via facebook, bandcamp, and spotify, all the Ergs! had was a basic html website, a myspace page, and association with a message board ("bored") that notified their future fans of low-brow, low-prestige gigs with impacts that were anything but. Few other bands of that quiet, cushy era between the death of Napster and the rise of streaming music built such a dedicated following through such remarkably modest means. Like countless progenitors of their sound and aesthetic, they broke up right as they got too big for the scene that contained them.

Delay asked me to write them a new bio awhile ago. This is what I came up with.