#skwm

"He was strung-out on Ex-Lax. He was fucked in his lungs."

Silkworm - "Miracle Mile" (Firewater; eng. Steve Albini; Matador Records; 1996)

Watching the Couldn't You Wait? documentary and crying a little.

I hope someday more members of the indierati get lucky or clueful enough to discover the incandescent brilliance of SKWM—and to join fans like me in mourning their crushing end.

Silkworm were one-of-a-kind.

Bottomless Pit in Memphis, TN (9/22/12)

but your face will grace god's marble doorstep if he even exists to fuckin' hear the knock and crack the door and stand before someone i know and have always loved i'm confident that you can win him over 

silkworm is my favourite band, ever.

i first heard silkworm in 2006. what i heard, specifically, were their first two records as a three-piece, after the departure of excellent guitar dude & songwriter joel rl phelps.

firewater and developer both perfectly set the mood for their respective records, while at the same time distinguishing each record utterly from the other. the former opens with the crashing, enormous "nerves," while the latter kicks off with the deliberate, measured "give me some skin." they couldn't be different, in terms of their emotional tenor, but the playing on both tracks and both records is distinctly silkworm: andy cohen's arch, sometimes vicious guitar work; tim midgett's steely, bone-hollowing basslines; and, of course, michael dahlquist's thundering drums.

i remember three things, in murky order: i remember burning both records onto one CD for james, back when he still lived with his parents; i remember reading a chuck klosterman essay in what i want to say was sex, drugs, & cocoa puffs (though i can hardly be bothered to go check), where klosterman described how he was happier to be gently buzzed and listening to guns n' roses in a bar somewhere away from a music writers' conference where the assorted critics were probably talking about how silkworm was the greatest underrated american rock band, and i remember that mainly because i read that sentence and instead of empathizing with klosterman i just thought to myself, "yes, they are" (it's sort of weirdly teenaged to have a favourite band, but here we are. something about the band just hits a sweet spot somewhere inside me, makes me realize i'm listening to the music i always wanted to and only ever needed to. so i yammer on about them a lot, but it's out of love, and it's also out of the fact that it's a crime that rock radio stations do not have "treat the new guy right" in regular rotation. that last bit is honestly criminal); i remember learning that michael dahlquist had died and silkworm was no more.

many of the friends i've made on the internet in the last several years had the chance to meet or at least get to know michael. i never did, and it strikes me as a great loss, if only because michael apparently had an incredible impact on everyone he got to know. several times, i've reviewed a few of his posts on a particular forum i have plenty of friends on, and i get the impression that i would have liked michael a lot, personally, but i can never get very far into his posts simply because i have a tough time reading the posts of dead people on the internet. a friend of mine from another forum, graham, died suddenly earlier this year; every time i see one of his posts, my body feels like someone punched me in the chest from the inside. i can imagine what it must be like for people who knew michael, but only just.

there's a lot about michael's death that i don't really want to get into, in part because it's well-documented elsewhere. what i do want to mention is that, during jeanette sliwinski's sentencing, someone close to michael brought in a binder full of reminiscences and remembrances of michael for the judge to read.

it landed on the judge's desk with an audible thud.

what i'll always remember of michael - what i have to remember, due to time and circumstance - is how, as a drummer on what average out to be most of my favourite records, he was a songwriter's dream: impossibly powerful, impeccably controlled, sensitive to every tiny change in mood and tone, responsive to everything that the song needs. there is not a single silkworm song i have heard where i've thought anything about the drumming other than "these drums are perfect."

but what others remember of michael is remarkable. warm, fun, clever, playful, kind. the kind of things that make one memorable. michael dahlquist and silkworm were never famous, but they were - he was - aspirational. meaning you wanted to aspire to be them. the outpourings of grief and joy that i see every time his name comes up among the people i know online are a testament to how wonderful a figure he was, he must have been.

after michael died, the members of silkworm started a new band, bottomless pit. the first track on their second LP, blood under the bridge, is titled "winterwind," and it quotes liberally from the song "bar ice," a song on silkworm's final posthumous EP, chokes!

when i saw bottomless pit play "winterwind" live in chicago in 2010 - in a room full of michael's friends and admirers, on an occasion semi-officially dedicated to the man's vibrant and infectiously alive life - almost everyone in the room sang along. and almost every one of those people singing was in tears.