mehan jayasuriya

In the summer of 1999, at the age of 16, I got a job working at the vehicle emissions testing station in Racine, Wisconsin. Wisconsin, like many states, requires that all licensed vehicles be tested for emissions every few years and for a couple of months, I was paid minimum wage to stand behind cars and collect noxious petrochemical fumes with a rubber hose. I soon fell in with a co-worker named Charlie, a spindly, dark-haired kid who played drums in a local hardcore band and sported a Black Flag tattoo on his right arm. Charlie drove a beige, late ’80s Ford Taurus that always seemed on the verge of collapse—whenever he drove the car on the highway, it was the duty of whoever was riding shotgun to hold the dashboard in place so that it wouldn’t detach at high speeds. That summer, Charlie and I wiled away many an afternoon chatting about music while pretending to mop the breakroom and it was during one of these sessions that I asked him what the single sticker on his bumper—a rectangular, sky blue piece of vinyl with the words “at.the.drive.in” printed on it—meant. He explained that upon first purchasing the car, he had decided to honor only one band by affixing their sticker to his Taurus and since there was no such thing as a Fugazi sticker, At the Drive-In had been chosen for the prestigious spot.

In hindsight, the summer of 1999 may just have been the ideal time to discover At the Drive-In. The band had just released the Vaya EP, which built upon the serpentine, latin-tinged sci-fi-core of In/Casino/Out while hinting at the more muscular sounds just around the corner. After spending the better part of my summer and early fall digesting those two releases (despite the fact that it was the summer of Napster, Acrobatic Tenement and the early EPs were near-impossible to find in those days), I got word from Charlie that the band would be playing at the Metro in Chicago in November. Needless to say, I immediately procured a ticket to the show. If memory serves me right, the face price was $9.99 plus Ticketmaster service fees.

Just a few days before the show, I received terrible news from Charlie. His beloved Taurus had finally given up the ghost and as such, I would have to find my own way to the venue. Having no car of my own and knowing no one else who was planning to make the 2-hour pilgrimage to the show, I had to resign myself to catching the band the next time around.  

Of course, there would be no next time around. Though I ended up moving to Chicago in 2001, the band would announce an “indefinite hiatus” on the eve of their post-Relationship of Command victory lap, having had enough of the road and each other by that point. I’ve spent the years since watching bootlegs of the band’s spastic, wildly energetic performances (YouTube in particular has a treasure-trove of footage, including a full-length recording of the set that I missed) and wishing that I had been there.

So yeah, I’m very excited to hear that the band will be reforming, presumably to play at least a few live shows. It’s nice to be reminded that sometimes an “indefinite hiatus” is really just that.