I guess I should put a trigger warning on this post for things related to mortality and death. If you want to skip this one just know that DCHM is active again and I’ll be doing a ticket give away next week on the site.
It’s Friday, May 17th and over two months have gone by since my friend Blake Harrison passed rather unexpectedly. I had put DCHM on hiatus for a while and promised a post about him. If you’ve been paying attention I’ve already been updating the upcoming concert calendar the past few weeks, however I’ve been really struggling with what to write about Blake. There’s been some incredible posts and articles and all kinds of things written and spoken about him all over the internet and honestly I don’t really know how to come at any of this from a new or unique angle. I wasn’t Blake’s oldest friend, nor his best or closest, and he isn’t the first close friend of mine to die either. As tends to happen with these things, I still notice his absence from things quite a bit.
The Goons are playing the Black Cat tonight and I’m still on the fence about going. A friend of mine that I knew in high school through our mutual love of Milk & Cheese and other underground comics, Tom Omachel, became their drummer at one point and so I started going to as many of their local shows as I could to support him. I remember being proud so proud of him when I bought their Live at the Black Cat CD that he played on at the Fairfax Tower Records when it came out. I didn’t keep super close contact with Tom over the years but I’d always chat him up a bit at shows. Unfortunately Tom ended his life in 2011, which lead to the band breaking up, or at least that’s my understanding as I didn’t really know the other guys in the band that well. Anyways, fast forward to January of 2023 and The Goons were playing a reunion show at the Black Cat as a special performance after another member of the band had just passed away (PJ who I didn’t really know). The band was also releasing that old Live at the Black Cat album on vinyl for the first time at the show. I went to that reunion show with Blake cause he’s one of the few friends I had that actually cared enough about the Goons to go see them. [Check out Nation in Distress here if you haven’t heard the Goons.] He wasn’t in the best shape due to the medical stuff he had going on so we just hung out on the rail by the back red room bar the whole night, which honestly was fine by me. It was weird seeing the Goons again, now without Tom behind the kit, but the crowd was excited despite HR of Bad Brains putting on a snoozefest of a set just prior.
The last time I saw Blake in person was at the Municipal Waste show at the Black Cat on February 15th of this year, and I hardly talked to him. He tended to get swarmed at metal shows by people coming up and saying hi, trying to catch up and whatnot, especially people that really only see him at shows. I said hi briefly after the final band had played and he asked me why I didn’t come hang out more with him that night, and I told him something along the lines of, “hey just catch up with people while you can, you haven’t been to many shows lately. We can always hang out soon any time.” Well that clearly didn’t end up the way I had expected, and I’d probably feel terrible about that being the last thing I said to him in person if it wasn’t for the fact that we did hang out a lot outside of shows. In my bar or attic or at his place or, hell, we’d go and get lunch together every few weeks just to hang and catch up, especially when he wasn’t doing well enough to do things like go to shows, bars or parties, but even recently too. I was one of the lucky ones who got to just get some down time like that with him once in a while. We’d talk about job hunts, frustrations, tell stories and jokes, musical projects and upcoming gigs we wanted to go to, and anything to do with HP Lovecraft. I miss that shit.
Blake was a good guy in too many ways for me to explain properly. Once he bought a ticket and came out to a show that I booked with a headliner he didn’t like and made sure to make his presence known to me because he was that good about supporting his friends’ endeavors. He ended up leaving early because he was throwing up from all the medical shit he was going through fighting cancer, and had the audacity to tell me he was sorry for leaving before it was over. Like no dude, I’m sorry you came out when you felt that bad. He got me a backstage pass to Dark Lord Day once, one of the biggest and best craft beer fests in the world, when his band was playing just because he knew I was so into craft beer. I met countless other good people because of him. Of course I’d trade it all just to let him try another one of my expensive, rare, highly sought after on the craft beer secondary market stouts for him to only tell me one more time that it’s still no Guinness. But that’s just not how it works, is it?
So now here it is, the day the Goons are going to play the Black Cat again. Only this time it isn’t just going to be weird because Tom isn’t drumming but also because I won’t be going with Blake. And I’m gonna miss him a lot and there’s no crying allowed at punk shows, right? Supreme Commander is on the bill too and their front man, Boo, is another friend (who happened to be bartending at the Desolus album release show at Pie Shop last weekend) and I really haven’t seen his band live in a while. It still feels weird not seeing Blake at metal shows all the time, and with Maryland Deathfest next week I know that I’m gonna feel that even more while I’m there. I’m old enough to know you never really get over these kinds of losses in your life, you just kind of get a little more numb as they add up over the years.
I guess that’s where music comes in for me, in this world of ups and downs I still get excited for seeing bands I love play live, and not matter what shit may or may not be going on in my personal life I can always get away from it for a little bit when a great band is playing a killer set. I’m not gonna stop making more positive memories with the friends around me at shows and elsewhere if I’ve got anything to say about it. So it’s decided, I’m going to the show tonight. We’ve only got one shot at this life thing and I’m as determined as ever to live it the best I can, just like Blake did.
Blake at the Black Cat watching the Goons 1/21/23
DCHeavyMetal.com 