Late-August of 2006, I was a 23-year-old BYU-Idaho student who had just barely started a semester teaching ESL in the city of Anqing, Anhui Province, People’s Republic of China. My American roommate Ken (whom I’d only just barely met and had yet to befriend) was out to dinner that evening with co-workers, so I was just mindlessly surfing the internet on the office computer, when I suddenly had that moment of: what the heck am I doing in here? I’m in China! I’d dreamt of traveling the world since a child, I’d spent the whole last calendar year feeling stuck and trapped in small town Rexburg, I’d finally escaped in the most dramatic way possible–and now I’m just sitting here at a desk reading old Onion articles?! I abruptly grabbed my iPod, marched out the door, raced down the stairs, and started walking down those Chinese streets towards the moonlit Yangtze River, simply to do something.
I put on The Rocket Summer’s then-recent 2005 album Hello, Good Friend, and let the biggest smile spread across my face. That opening four-song stretch of “Move to the Other Side of the Block/I Was So Alone/Around the Clock/I’m Doing Everything (For You)” is some of the most irrepressibly happy and optimistic Indie-Rock you are ever liable to hear—and that not naively, but with the sort of youthful joy that bursts forth only after you’ve escaped your greatest heartbreak to find your dearest love. Even as the rest of the album never quite matches the giddy heights of that four-song opener (and a couple of the more treacly Christian-Rock ballads are downright skippable), that album still felt the absolute best soundtrack for the moment. It’s what I was listening to when I at last stood on the banks of one of the longest rivers on earth.
Before the semester ended, I took a 17-hour train ride all the way to Beijing to finally see the Great Wall and Forbidden City and Summer Palace and Tiananmen Square and Temple of Heaven; I saw the lights and lanterns of the Mid-Autumn Festival; I explored Anhui Province itself, where I hiked up some of the most sacred mountains in Buddhism and beheld the fog lift from Yellow Mountain. These all became sacred moments to me in my young adulthood, and still are; yet even now, all these years later, I think my favorite China memory of all was still that one late-August evening in residential Anqing, when I walked down to the Yangtze River as the Rocket Summer blasted in my ear-buds. The thought did occur to me then that I was quite possibly the only person in a 3,000 mile radius listening to the Rocket Summer.
Maybe I still am.
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Just why do certain bands make the leap to mainstream stardom while others that seem right on the cusp never do? A year earlier in the Fall of 2005, I had just arrived in Rexburg to take a job roofing new residential construction; Jake Clayson—future owner and proprietor of this very website—was my foreman. He invited me one weekend to make a road trip down to Salt Lake City to see this up-and-coming Indie-band called The Rocket Summer, which I gladly jumped at despite knowing nothing about them (even then BYU-I was already getting on my nerves). Jake had lived in Dallas for a stretch in High School, and one of his old buddies had become a touring guitarist for fellow-Texan Bryce Avery, the frontman/singer-songwriter and sole continuous member of The Rocket Summer. We went out to dinner with the band at the Blue Iguana after the show. Pleasant guy, Bryce Avery was very cordial the one and only time I ever met him (but then, so are most people when out for dinner). Jake Clayson’s buddy said that part of him was kind of envious of our construction jobs, how we were working with our hands and all that, which sounded more and more appealing amidst the endless grind of touring. We offered to switch him.
It was a fun show, by the way. The crowd was very much into it, great energy, lively sing-alongs, he had clearly built up a strong cult following just in a few short years, one that seemed to be reaching critical mass. I met and dated a surprising number of cute girls at both BYU and BYU-I who owned their second CD Hello, Good Friend–and since Pop music is largely determined by and for teen girls, the band seemed well-positioned to make the crossover to the Pop charts themselves. It was the same mid-2000s era when a lot of Indie-Rockers were making the leap to the majors, and the rising tide seemed poised to lift his boat next; the band had already toured with other recent breakthrough bands like the All-American Rejects; acts like Creed and P.O.D. had already proven the crossover appeal of Christian-Rockers only a few years earlier; and it was also the era when “Screamo-Emo” so-called was starting to wear out its welcome, such that Bryce Avery’s much happier brand of alt-Rock seemed a savvy anecdote for the coming backlash. On paper they were well positioned to be the next big thing.
Hence it was no surprise when the Rocket Summer got signed to Def Jam/Island Records shortly thereafter. They released two ravely-reviewed albums in ‘07 and ‘10 that nonetheless got zero radio airplay, after which they were dropped from their label and disappeared back into obscurity. Everyone kept thinking they were the next big thing right up until they weren’t.
Jake Clayson and I tried to see the Rocket Summer one more time in early-2006 the next time they passed through Salt Lake, but got so caught up in our conversations with each other on the drive from Rexburg that we didn’t realize we were driving the wrong way until we saw a sign say “Welcome to Montana.” In a panic, we tried to cross the median strip on the freeway but got stuck in the snow-drifts. A kind passerby in an SUV with tow-cables pulled over to help us out. While we waited, a Highway Patrolman also pulled up to see what the problem was. Jake, like a true BYU student, decided honesty was the best policy, and confessed we had tried to illegally cross the median. Whether the winter wind got in the way or what, the patrolman didn’t understand him and simply said that no, the next exit was still another mile down the road. At that point, Jake decided to not push his luck and just let it slide.
We got away with no ticket but of course missed the concert by hours. Jake has on several occasions over the years said that we should take another long road trip together with a tape recorder and then transcribe the extended conversation like an essay–jumping and leaping ceaselessly from one topic to another, feeling, exploring, with no end-goal in mind for the conversation but its own questing nature–like all essays should be. (The result would perhaps be similar to Andy Warhol’s a: a novel.) I imagine it would be called something like Jake and Jacob. He actually recreated a fictional version of this dialogue for his MFA Creative Non-Fiction thesis at BYU. Maybe we still will do something like that for reals one day–but, you know, we both have kids right now.
We never did try to see The Rocket Summer again, and I confess to never having listened to either of their major-label releases (beyond the cursory samples on Amazon, anyways). Years and years later in the mid-2010s or so, I was catching up with Jake and another mutual friend, and he showed us a rather cringey promo video for whatever Bryce Avery’s latest album was, one that was very much distancing itself from the sunnier stuff of his youth, positioning himself as exactly the sort of depressive emo singer he was once supposed to be reacting against—and that a solid decade after the genre had peaked; it did not make any of us regretful that we hadn’t been keeping up with him since college. Jake’s old high school buddy also hadn’t played in the touring band since the Bush administration.
Of course, plenty of much cringier and cheesier acts have made it to the Pop charts than the Rocket Summer (cheese, in fact, seems to be most Pop stars’ determining feature), so it still leaves unresolved the question of why The Rocket Summer never quite made the final leap themselves, despite by all appearances doing everything right. Probably its just one of those random things, without rhyme or reason, of who makes it and who doesn’t; it’s why the Preacher proclaimed lo these many centuries ago “that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Selah.
Not that any of that Pop stardom nonsense actually matters, obviously; Bryce Avery in fact already knew that–indeed, those two treacly Christian-ballads I was dismissive of earlier (“Tell Me Something Good” and “Treasures,” for the record) are the ones where he most clearly expresses how wrong he knows it is to seek after the vanities of human fame in the first place. I hope he didn’t lose that knowledge, though the sheer fact he wrote songs about the topic shows it still preoccupied still his thoughts. Maybe that frustration and ambivalence is why his post-major-label releases got darker. Or maybe that just comes of growing older in general. Lots of things seem darker now: China is much more authoritarian now under Xi Jinping than it was under the relative thaw of Hu Jintao in the mid-2000s; for that matter, censorship of library books state-side has objectively worsened during the same interval; iPods were replaced with “smart”-phones that track all your personal data (also like contemporary China); and CDs were replaced by streaming-service algorithms that make it even harder than ever for Indie-musicians to survive, let alone thrive. The Great Salt Lake is at increased risk of evaporating entirely. More than one-quarter of China’s arable land is becoming desert. Things just seem verifiably worse in general than before.
Or maybe I was just younger before; America was embroiled in the insane quagmire of the Iraq war when I was in China, which was assuredly not any brighter a time in American history than now. I was also working construction in Idaho for only $7/hour (lower even than the current Federal minimum wage) as part of the housing boom that would directly lead to the economic collapse of 2008, the over-corrections to which would directly lead to the housing crisis of today. All these things are interconnected and were prophesied from the beginning. Maybe it’s less things got darker than I started paying attention more, who knows.
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I still put on Hello, Good Friend once in a blue moon, by the way, if for no other reason than to recall that one magical moment in China, lo these many years ago. I used to roll my eyes as a teen at older people who listened to older music for strictly nostalgic reasons, only to become one myself. But then, maybe it’s right we all do so as we age, if we are to become as little children, for of such is the Kingdom of God–the place where all things will feel young again, precisely because we will be able to feel all our boundless eternal potential spread out before us again.
The Rocket Summer’s defining character back in the day was joy; CS Lewis entitled his autobiography Surprised By Joy; and The Book of Mormon describes a joy that exhausts one’s strength, of a resurrected Savior himself saying “My joy is full,” all of which implies that joy is what we should be preparing for in the life to to come. It will be the sort of youthful joy that bursts forth only after you’ve escaped your greatest heartbreak to find your dearest love.