Two guys are working at a convenience store, Boston suburbs, late nineties/early aughts. Making a living is part of life, although a better part is the band they have together, playing grimy, mean rock music. But while they’re making that living a guy comes in every day, gets his coffee and whatever and then proceeds to hang out, slinging tall tales and enumerating petty beefs and unloading the shit of his own life while they’re stuck behind the counter and unable to get him to leave. Unable to stop him from dumping his life all over theirs. So they start using the store boombox to secretly record his raving for their own amusement, but then they realize there is something in his words to build on. The rants are reworked and set to music and become songs for the band, enough songs to make an entire album released by a local label run by some compatriots in the heavy music scene. The album doesn’t sell a whole lot but it’s the first release for the band, which is still playing 20 years down the road. It’s not a full-time concern, all the members have day jobs again, but they’re still living the life.

I’ve written about Black Helicopter and their beginnings before, while looking back at their 2010 album Don’t Fuck With The Apocalypse from the vantage point of a decade later and recognizing how its meaning to me has grown over time. (And I passed that writing onto the band, striking up something that is hopefully more of a friendship than a punisher’s piling on.) They continue to play and I continue to go to the shows to hear old favorites and new bangers. Their most recent show was a week or so ago, part of a memorial and celebration of life. One of the guys who had put out that first album had died of cancer in 2022 and his family and friends had organized a concert to celebrate his love of music and painting and food, dozens of metalheads of varying ages (and their young kids) rocking out in the garage space of a local brewery. There was a solo guitarist’s looped doom riffs stretching “Born In The USA” on the rack; there were Motörheadish heavy rockers extolling headbanging and beer; there were two guys in Jason Vorhees masks and Danish flag capes shouting goofy perversities over industrial beats (this was Four-Way Anal Touch Play and the young kids thought they were hilarious).

And there was Black Helicopter, playing a great set that touched on a few songs from that first album, That Specific Function. “King of Wormtown” isn’t a usual part of their sets, it’s a longer song from the perspective of that long-ago customer looking back on an old girlfriend that he loved but his parents thought was trash. She wasn’t fit for their classy boy and his titular status as Worcester royalty. “On the shit side of town,” the narrator sneers again and again, knowing it’s the place he’d rather be and maybe belongs in. But there are plenty of problems to go around — the band has moved on from chronicling that specific malfunctioning malcontent but is still sketching characters who can’t see a way out from where they are and limning feelings of frustration and fear. And they got specific about their own woes in new song “Charlestown Is Burning,” about gentrification swallowing up all the old practice spots in the area and leaving musicians with nowhere to workshop new material or just play together. Nowhere to live their lives.

I’d seen the group a few months earlier at their first show of the year. They’d been quiet while bassist Mark Erdody recovered from cancer treatments, but he and the rest of the band — guitarist/vocalist Tim Shea and drummer Matt Nicholas, those two guys in the convenience store all those years ago — came out for an all-day fundraiser to raise money for Erdody’s medical bills. The concert bill was full of local folks who’d been part of Boston’s independent music scene for decades. Nicholas played in Erdody’s legendary 90s “chimp rock” band Kudgel (Shea played on a track or two for them as well), as did Black Helicopter’s first bassist, Zach Lazar. They reunited for a set, and Lazar sat in with Black Helicopter (and their other bassists were at the show as well) while Erdody sang and played guitar on “Mousemeat,” another old track off that first album and one of my all-time favorite songs. The cranky customer providing the lyrics was more bitter than usual, his regrets crafted into a cyclical lament of how he is alone in the world, how he never created a family and found “someone to contend with.” I’ve seen the band play this live several times and played it for myself several hundred times but it was in a new register here. Erdody was singing this cry of disillusionment and isolation while surrounded by his friends and family — before the set I shot the shit with one of his kids who was running the merch table, great dude — and the pain in the song still came through but with an empathetic perspective from that other side, knowing how loss is not that far away. The life in the song and the life of the singer not contradicting each other but enriching, making something new.

***

A week earlier I had taken one of those old CDs off the shelf (actually the tower) and put it in the boombox on the porch, ready for a lazy afternoon with Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby. I’d gotten their 2012 album “A Working Museum” after seeing them live at a now-shuttered club, both were kind enough to sign it for me that night. It had been a while since I’d listened to it but the songs and voices bounced back in my brain like an echo from the last time they’d stuck in my head. Eric Goulden’s nasal and still youthful twang, dialing up the menace in “Zero To Minus One,” and Rigby’s husky quaver that can contain so much vulnerability because of the clear-eyed strength at its center. The two have been making music in some form or another since the 70s but didn’t meet until the early 2000s. The story of that meeting at a Yo La Tengo show — “That New Year’s Eve they backed us up/We really fucked it up” — is wryly recounted in the album’s final track, “Do You Remember That,” with Rigby cataloguing the joys and mishaps and yes, fuckups, and singing their existence into art. Your band could be your life.

It’s a life with plenty of ups and downs. After listening to the album I poked around online to see what the pair were up to and caught up with Rigby’s substack — “everyday life and music from the original mod housewife” — where her lyrical precision and honesty is reflected in her prose. A melancholy post about moving details the endless tasks of packing up lives and goes on a very funny ramble about an albatross of a propane tank, but also finds despair tucked away in a corner. “Maybe that’s part of what’s so exhausting about moving: you’re confronted with all your failings in quick succession and it takes a toll. Hundreds of copies of me and Eric’s 2012 album A Working Museum, that we thought was a big success, emerged from the depths of a closet,” Rigby writes. It made my copy seem more valuable to me — not as a scarce item to sell on Discogs, but as proof that their work did make it outside of that house, to become part of someone else’s life.

Rigby has had other brushes with success, in particular her 1996 solo debut Diary Of A Mod Housewife. That voice is in full form already and the songs hit a sweet spot of pop-rock with tinges of country that blows the concurrent male-dominated modern rock of the time out of the water, to say nothing of the wit and again, vulnerability she casually shares. “Beer And Kisses” should’ve made her millions in a country cover or crossover, and “We’re Stronger Than That” is a 25-years-early sequel to “Do You Remember That,” what happens when it’s hard to remember. Rigby’s perspective is unostentatiously female, and this is what in part excited critical attention if not sales — a woman writing about horniness and not having enough money and wanting to fuck and throw out a lazy bum at the same time. But it is most importantly her perspective, and by radiating specificity in detail and evocation it creates something that intersects with other lives on the tangent.

“Knapsack” is a yearning ode to a cute guy Rigby sees at the bookstore — “I wasn’t looking for anything more than a book / but I looked / isn’t that what eyes are for?” — and the lust for him and the fantasy he represents of leaving her life behind. I don’t know if it’s based on a particular dude she saw and felt for but it feels real, and within the particulars is a feeling I’ve felt, in a plaintive jangle that couldn’t be further than most of the music I listen to. Certainly it’s different than Black Helicopter. Or is it?The song ends as Rigby is fired from her job and can’t go to the bookstore anymore, the fantasy is foreclosed on but she still has her dreams and “isn’t that what dreams are for?” It’s a person holding on to the barest memory of a hope, whether this is despondent or essential or both is besides the point, it’s a look at a life, and another tangent connects.

***

This was going through my head coming back from that Black Helicopter show, how the narrators of “Mousemeat” and “Knapsack” would probably cross the street to avoid each other while being secret siblings of quiet desperation, and how the different musicians can tap into their different lives to find something that intersects. This isn’t an argument for realism — I’m not sure what Black Helicopter’s “Seams of Geldor” is about but it sure has fantasy/sci-fi vibes, and Rigby’s ecstatic “Dancing With Joey Ramone” is about taking a starstruck turn on the floor with a rock god I’m pretty sure she never met. Making things up is a foundation of songwriting. But there’s a person making it up at the base of it all, pulling from life or reacting to it or rejecting it.

There’s really not much to say about large language models or generative AI at this point, about how they’re sold to us as ways to create art, to “write” a song or “draw” a comic. They’re obscenities and they’re hateful and they’re boring. In that post about moving, Rigby thinks about her time at her soon-to-be-former home and getting older, how age isn’t “just a number” but is “songs written, countless posts, albums made, books written; gigs played, merch slung,” friends and family growing up, friends and family dying. “I don’t want age to be just a number, I want all the experiences we’ve been through to add up to something,” Rigby says, and that’s what real art is. Generated “content” — finally, an appropriate deployment for that turd of a word — is just a number, it adds up to the amount of things the generator stole from actual artists. The sum isn’t worth shit.

Can a machine create a song that will sound different years later, because of what it and you are? Can it make “a song so magical I learned it halfway round the world and wished that I could be your girl,” as Rigby sings of a tune her husband wrote in “Do You Remember That?” Of course it can’t, because it only does what it’s told to do, it can’t hear something and make it different. Something new that is unique and also shared. And it’s pretty clear that everyone who doesn’t stand to make money off this dogshit knows this and yet no Luddites have arisen. These machines are still going, they are lamented but unsmashed.

And hey, I can’t say I’m out smashing things. Or even openly advocating for it — after all, there’s probably some law that protects a machine from threats instead of one that preserves art and the livelihoods and lives that make it. I’m just here listening to Black Helicopter’s “Army Pup Tent,” another song off That Specific Function that they played at both of those recent shows. Turning up a 20-year-old song made by some frustrated local artists, where a brass-knuckled bass riff and belt sander guitars and pitiless drums back a bilious middle-aged guy recalling the aggression of his youth and how it could be directed, and taking what it offers for my life now.

Fuck, I had my first rifle at 7
My first shotgun at the age of 8
My first pistol at 9, and I was good with a snowball
Good with a slingshot, good with a rock
You can sneer and laugh at these things
But I gotta tell you
I gotta tell you