Twice a day, our just-over-one-year-old cats completely and extremely lose their minds. I mean, they exhibit bananas-adjacent emotions throughout the rest of the day/night but this particular freak-out fest is special. It follows a regular trajectory: utterly despondent meowing despair paired with saucer-size pleading eyes followed by Muppet-madness leaps of uncontained joy. Feeding time. fifteen minutes end to end. Then there is a flattening of exhaustion onto the floor. For me. They go off and play.

While I’m on the ground, I ponder that kind of intense expression. When was the last time I felt or was in the presence of such an unadulterated amount of head-exploding earth-shifting happiness? Has there come over time a flattening of emotional arcs? Maybe. That kind of zero-to-ten-thousand fluttering feels now on a scale with a baseline of around thirty topping out around three-hundred. Or maybe I just measure things differently now since, as mentioned here fairly regularly, my happy meter is currently pretty well-tuned so it doesn’t fluctuate quite so wildly. Maybe a difference is that I actually understand the controls better so I can speed up and slow down on my own time.

In summer 1997, post-SPIN and Elektra Records, I had an assignment to go on the road with the band Bush during their Razorblade Suitcase tour. I was a bit burned out by all things music but this was for a pocket-size book that would be primarily Polaroids with only small snippets of observations by me. The format was loosely based on the SPIN Pearl Jam piece I’d done and documented with Polaroids, which had been more spur-of-the-moment than posed photos. Simon & Schuster would then take this little tome of Bush tour moments and sell it in record stores (remember those) positioned at the check-out line as an impulse buy. I loaded up my Polaroid cameras along with an extreme amount of film cartridges and went off to join the band. I didn’t really know Bush and was dropping into a tour that had been running for months (or forever, depending on who you talked to). The band was in the groove that happens when you’ve been going from city to city, country to country, day in and out. You are each other’s family. In the bubble of drama, fierce protection, verbal and visual shorthand there’s not a lot of room for outsiders. Groundhog’s day with different backdrops and languages. And since I hadn’t ever hung out with them before, my role was truly as an observer. For me, that was a mixed bag of nuts. Given my torn edges regarding the business of music, I felt both cynical and somewhat lonely at the outset. (You can maybe spot the former attitude from my all-access pass picture above. Didn’t I look so happy? MiLord, pictures can tell a million mental stories.)

An amphitheater show in Hershey Park, Pennsylvania, was my first stop. HersheyPark is a theme park connected to the Hershey Chocolate company. Every light fixture is shaped like a Hershey Kiss. Cheesy or, depending on your proclivity, whimsical. I was leaning on cheesy. The band went on. The crowd went bananas. Knew all the words. I took many pictures and learned that it’s really quite challenging to pull out Polaroids lickity-split, then discover the cartridge of film is empty and need to kneel down and change it out, all while side stage getting in people’s way. Over time I developed a system, mainly one that included carrying a large bag that by the end of the night was filled with pictures and a lot of foil wrapping and empty plastic cartridges to litter a landfill for millenia. Good times. Truth be, during those early shows I didn’t really pay much attention to the crowd. To my eyes, they were just always rabid. Wanting, yelling, sometimes weeping.

On the second date of my assignment at Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a professional photographer had jumped on board since I’d found that really, Polaroids do not take very excellent live shots. They make for some really interesting smudgy, I’m-on-acid kind of images. (“Woah, weird man. Is that a blue elephant? The devil? Wild.) Yeah, no. This book needed some actual real shots of the band performing and such. This took a lot of pressure off me so I could spend some time watching what was happening onstage and in the audience.

And what was going on was rather epic in the way of pheromones flying. Phew, there were quite a few bouncing around when I looked out over the first rows and as far back as the lights would take me. Majority young women, but some guys too. Rapt. In rapture. Gone girls and boys. Especially by around the third song because that is when Gavin Rossdale, singer, guitarist, focal point of hotness, would take off his shirt. I mean, sure, it gets pretty toasty up there onstage what with the lights and all-out rock movement, but yet…but yet…this move was one-hundred percent foolproof I-Got-Ya lust-inducing. And because it seemed to be common knowledge that this moment would come, the audience would be primed. First through third song, I’d look out and see slight panic in people’s eyes. When. Would. Gavin. Take. Off. His. Shirt? It’s not like they wouldn’t sing along, be perfectly happy with the early moments but yet…but yet…c’mon. They would agitate, saucer-size eyes trained on the stage, then as Gavin would make the move (this clip, minute 15 where his shoes also come off. You’re welcome.), absolute banana-pants mental release. Muppet-madness leaps. I would experience a contact high from it and by my fifth date with them in Montreal, I could cycle through the agitation-deliverance moments by watching the audience rather than the band. They made for good photos too, albeit also blurry weird color wheels, but still, the emotion was there pulsing in reds and greens and blues.

I also came to fully understand the endorphin high that people onstage can get addicted to. Although touring itself can be mind-numbingly mind-numbing, that adrenaline shot for sixty-or-more minutes onstage maybe makes up for it. For the musicians anyway. For the fans, they often were hungry for more. There was no lying down on the ground to recover. I’d once made the mistake of leaving the backstage area directly after a show and was immediately mauled by many who wanted my backstage pass. Some offered hard-cold cash. I saw in their eyes that they’d created a solid picture of what was behind the door in the band’s secret lair: velvet love seats, Persian rugs, Fleur De Lys wallpaper, the band draped seductively, half-naked, eating grapes and drinking champagne. That instead there were usually ratty couches, concrete floors, Pepto-Bismal colored walls, sweat-encrusted band members who were mostly in separate rooms picking from a deli-platter cheese selection chased with bottles of beer was a more accurate picture. But yet…but yet…the magic of imagination. And the power of anticipation. Good fuel.

Those crowds restored me in some way back to what it means to just fucking want a thing to happen and then it does and you let go inside of it. And you come back from it too. Mostly in one piece. Not completely broken but instead altered. When I want to remember what it means to imagine and embody a moment of pure emotion, that experience is what comes to mind.