When I saw that Waterdeep is playing at the Inklings
Festival on October 20, I immediately asked Director Erin Doom if I could write
a narrative essay reflecting on their music and my experience of their music.
So forthwith: a chronicle of my history with Waterdeep, an erstwhile
slightly-more-than-normally-obsessed fan’s tale of a musical affaire d’amour
.
And let me just disappoint you now
so that you’re not disappointed after you’ve put in your valuable time reading
this: I don’t have any insider’s view or journalistic acumen or special
connection with the band; just a robust, ahem, preoccupation dating back to my
late high school years, the heady days of the mid- to late 1990s, and
continuing into the early 2000s. So, i.e., caveat lector: this essay is a
vanity project. Those expecting a research-based history of Waterdeep will have
to look elsewhere.
In high school I was a youth group student leader at my
church. At a planning meeting in our church library one Sunday afternoon, the
first item on the docket was whether to book a band to play at our church. The
band was called Waterdeep, and they were on tour supporting their new album Sink
or Swim
. I had first heard the name Waterdeep a week or two prior. An older
friend who had what I considered to be not-horrible taste in music recommended them.
“Are they a Christian band?” I asked. “Well, yes,” he replied, “but probably
not like you think.” That was my context for hearing their music at this
meeting. So I was guardedly optimistic. Our youth pastor played fifteen to
thirty seconds from several tracks to give us a feel for the music and then
asked us what we thought. I was struck by the unflashy directness, bluntness
even, of the lead singer’s delivery. Though I could detect definite influences,
this band didn’t seem to be aping any other band or trend. But they were
unabashedly Christian. My friend was right. I didn’t have a category for music
like this.
I would of course become a fan (see
the entirety of the rest of this essay for evidence thereof), but I don’t
remember being bowled over. I do remember being enthusiastic for booking them, though,
mostly because the idea of booking a band at our church, especially one that
didn’t seem interested in toeing the Christian-music line, seemed unassailably
cool and edgy. Our church didn’t do this kind of thing much (book rock bands,
that is), and it was a step in a new direction. In fact the concert would
eventually become an occasion of minor controversy, when our music pastor pointedly
resigned as a direct result of the concert. More on that in a bit.
Though I was an unrebellious
evangelical Christian pastor’s kid at an evangelical Christian church going to
an evangelical Christian high school, I had up to this point in my life held nothing
but withering scorn for Christian recording artists of all kinds. Christian
music to me was either my parents’ Sandi Patty and Dino Kartsonakis records or pathetic
attempts to market a Christian version of whatever was selling that year.
The night of the show I was there
early. Passing by the church kitchen, I caught a flash of faded jeans, flannel,
leather boots—the band grabbing dinner. Standard attire for the nineties, but
at a boring old conservative church in central Kansas it was enough to be kind
of exciting and earthy.
A lot of what looked to me like
bona fide latter-day hippies turned up for the show, dancing to the faster,
jammy part of the concert and doing really elaborate hand jives. (This seems
weird now, but seemed really cool then.) They gave our staid, determinedly
non-charismatic evangelical church a jolt of the Jesus movement. (I would later
learn that the band actually had ties to the Jesus movement.) It was these quasi-hippie
Jesus people who were the last straw for our poor worship pastor. He had
already registered several concerns with the church’s supposedly loose ways,
and he quit not long after, citing in dour tones the “gyrating bodies” of these
young people. (I should say that I still know this pastor, and he’s a real
solid guy.) Though that energy certainly appealed to me, it was the fact that
there seemed to be a real intellectual and spiritual depth wrapped up in the
long hair and electric guitars that really lit me up. In between songs Don
Chaffer talked. And what talk! He dashed off little extemporized observations
and sermonettes that managed to be both unaffected and eloquent without at the
same time seeming pedantic or preachy. He quoted both Bob Dylan and King
Lear
in the space of a few minutes, and I made a mental note to listen to
the one and read the other as soon as possible.
Because the fact was that Don
Chaffer was cool
. But he was also, and more surprisingly, sincere. He
cared. Which gave him mounds of influence. And he was sincere to the core. Up
to this point in my life, Christian music that was sincere was tasteless, and
Christian music that had taste was cynical. (I am just a skosh too young to
have been pulled during my high-school years into the orbit of the great Rich
Mullins, another ultra-sincere, intellectually substantive, and spiritually
deep songwriter with connections to central Kansas.) Don wasn’t trying to “use”
his sincerity to reach people or connect with the younger generation. He was
just being honest. Don Chaffer’s potent cocktail of coolness, sincerity, and masculinity
was really intoxicating. Here was somebody, maybe for the first time for me and
for many males of my generation, who had things of spiritual and intellectual substance
to say who wasn’t shilling for a message or a brand. He was authenticity
itself.
And he embedded this authenticity
in songwriting that exhibited real attention to the craft. He had an ear for
colloquialisms that he inserted into his lyrics. Or rather, he wrapped his
music and lyrics around idiomatic expression and colloquialism, something he
inherited from his immersion in the long tradition of folk music. All through
his songs one finds snippets of stories, vivid little tendrils of narrative,
images that are not just illustrative but that constitute the fabric of his
songs. (It’s no accident that he’s now writing musicals, I think.) Don
Chaffer’s blend of honesty and sincerity gave his lyrics a bluntness that
managed to be edgy but not so blatantly offensive that it put him beyond the
evangelical pale. He dropped words like “bimbo” and “condom” and “idiot,” which
wasn’t swearing by a long shot, but still slapped you across the face a little
bit. Plus the whole thing was just soaked in God. The pabulum that was so much
Christian music made you just want to be done with it, and even encouraged the
idea that aesthetic excellence must be sought outside of the faith. But with
Don Chaffer up front singing about loneliness and death and grief—and Jesus—Waterdeep
provided a way for me to explore the many emotions that were swarming inside of
me but that I could not give name to. When I revisit Waterdeep’s earlier
recordings now, years later, some tracks strike me as a little whiny, but nobody
bats a thousand. That’s the hazard and the price of an unwavering commitment to
honesty and depth.
Of course I didn’t realize any of
that at the time. As a high-school adolescent, I was just one big yearn. A
walking ball of undirected desire. Don Chaffer allowed me to direct my
unaccounted yearning into a real sadness that the manufactured earnestness of
so much Christian music could not harness, and which only warded me off in its
very attempts to pull me in. I learned from Waterdeep’s music that my life
carried overtones of sadness that I did not know were there. Listening to their
music gave me the realization that to look at life honestly and with compassion
entails observing that suffering is all around, both within your soul and
without. Waterdeep pulled me into the deep end of emotion.
I was just learning to play the guitar
at the time; and though I never took a lesson from him, Don Chaffer has been my
longest and most influential guitar teacher. Don is an amazing guitarist, but
he is not a technical virtuoso. His songs for the most part are based on the
I-IV-V structure of most folk music, which made them eminently playable for a
beginner. Playing along at home to my Waterdeep CDs allowed me to explore their
music from the inside, to see and hear the textures in new ways.
At that first Waterdeep show I
attended, they handed out flyers for another upcoming Waterdeep show at a place
called the Solid Ground Coffeehouse (R.I.P.) in Wichita. I went to the show but
I still wasn’t completely hooked. My friends and I left early to go hang out at
a Borders (R.I.P.) before it closed at ten. I remember being conflicted, and as
we left I looked at Don on stage. I swear he was shooting daggers straight at
me! Or maybe I was just feeling guilty. It was high school. You do what your
friends do. And my friends were leaving.
Sometime over the next few months,
though, a switch flipped in my mind, and I went from being moderately
interested in Waterdeep’s music to obsessed. I know this because I can recall,
a few months after that Solid Ground show, thinking back to leaving early and
wondering WHAT ON EARTH I WAS THINKING. I chastised myself and vowed I would
never ever leave a Waterdeep show early again. I never did.
Also at that show, before I left, I
bought, from Christena Graves, the wife of the drummer (she would later join
the band), who was staffing the merch table while Waterdeep was on stage, three
albums: To Chase Away the Birds
, Sink or Swim
, and the then
recently released double CD set Old Stuff
. It occurs to me now that this
is what accounts for the switch flipping in my mind. I went home and listened
to all those albums over. And over. And over again. I learned the guitar chords
by heart. I memorized the lyrics. I found out Waterdeep had this thing called a
website. And I fell in love.
Then—O bliss! O felicity!—Waterdeep
announced they were moving their home base from the New Earth Coffeehouse in
Kansas City to Wichita. To Wichita! To my back door! I couldn’t believe my
luck. Nothing at the time could have seemed more providential. Nothing could
have made me happier.
I henceforth went to every
Waterdeep show within a two-hundred-mile radius, and followed their every move
and development. I got wind once that Don was going to lead worship at his home
church on a Wednesday evening. What a treat! An intimate, informal gathering. A
time of worship with just Don on the guitar. When my friends and I arrived and
sat down in the sanctuary, Don walked in and, its being close to Christmas, led
us in two verses of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Then he was done. The musical
high point was when, during the extended pause between the verse and the
chorus, he blew one of those kids’ siren whistles: “And he showed me the
waaaaa-aaaay . . . whiiiiizzzzz
. . . Go tell it on
the mouuuntain . . .”
The summer after I graduated from
high school was the summer of the first annual Everyone’s Festival in Kansas
City. Everyone’s Festival was styled to be a two-day arts festival of sorts,
with workshops and discussions as well as musical performances. Since Sink
or Swim
, Waterdeep had released a lot of music, including their epic live
album Live at the New Earth
, but not a follow-up studio album. In that
pre-Twitter era news came mostly in scraps and hearsay. There were rumors of
some recording sessions but so far no proof. Then we learned that Waterdeep had
signed with Squint Entertainment, a hip new record label headed up by an elder
statesman of thoughtful Christian music, Steve Taylor. Sixpence None the
Richer’s newest album was on the Squint label, and their single “Kiss Me” was riding
high on secular radio that year. After Jars of Clay’s crossover success a few
years before, and with other Christian bands like Burlap to Cashmere making
waves, Waterdeep’s star seemed to be on the rise. Surely they were just about
to break into the mainstream.
To me it seemed like another sort
of providential arrangement. For I too was about to break into the mainstream! My
star also was on the rise! No more obscure life in a rural backwater. For I was
leaving for college in the fall of 1999. The festival was my last hurrah before
moving away from home. I was delirious with pleasure the whole weekend, so much
so that I forgot to eat for almost the entire day. I watched bands, attended
workshops, bought the T-shirt, the whole shootin’ match (a phrase I learned
from Don Chaffer and still use to this day, as you can see).
So I took my devotion (I do not
think this is too strong a word) to Waterdeep with me to college. But looking
back I can identify a definite change at this point. Prior to going to college,
my relationship to Waterdeep’s music was primordial; the band had a mystique
that was never quite fully fathomable. My emotional reaction to their music was
immediate, pre-rational. After this time, however, my memories are cleaner and
more self-aware; the liminal space had been crossed and the mystery cleared
away. Something deep had touched my soul in high school. Waterdeep’s music had
been the catalyst to a profound change within me, at a determinative time in my
life. But that shift can only take place once, and after the change has
occurred the rawness of that encounter wears off, and one seeks instead to
maintain it. “Humankind,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “cannot bear very much
reality.” I now also knew myself to be a fan, and the concertgoing,
album-anticipation cycle had established itself as a routine. From that point
on, my experience of Waterdeep’s music was always in a certain sense one step
removed from the thing itself.
Not that I would have ever admitted
this to myself or was even remotely aware that I was trying to prolong the magic
of that initial encounter. If anything, the unconscious change made me step up
my devotion to the band even more, in order to recapture the essence of what I
had experienced and now lost.
Growing up is hard to do.
The transition to college is rough for everybody, and it
makes college freshmen do weird things. All the ground is shifting under your
feet, and you have to keep your balance somehow. At my small Christian liberal
arts college, all the freshmen were plunked down into a few dorms, and
everybody spent the first weeks and months sifting through all the social
dynamics and new situations. Everyone was trying on these new personas and
identities. The one thing I knew about myself was that I was a bigger Waterdeep
fan than anyone there. Or at least I would make sure I was. Waterdeep sort of
became my security blanket.
Everyone’s Beautiful
,
Waterdeep’s Squint debut, appeared my freshman year. My university was in
northwest Arkansas, and again I went to Waterdeep shows whenever they were
within reasonable (to my mind) driving distance. And they were in reasonable
driving distance a lot. During my four years in college I went to Waterdeep shows
in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Fayetteville, Fort Smith, Joplin, Carthage, Wichita,
Kansas City, and many, many more. I even drove with a buddy out to Memphis the
summer after my sophomore year to take in Everyone’s Festival, which was now
held (I imagine for financial reasons) in its own special tent within a much,
much bigger Christian festival. Over my college years Waterdeep also put on
some excellent Christmas-break shows at the New Earth Coffeehouse in Kansas
City, and if you were willing to go a day early you could see Don and Lori
perform upstairs, acoustic without the band, where anything might happen. They
might take requests or play obscure back-catalog numbers. One year, they simply
started flipping through a big dictionary of folk songs and playing whichever
numbers struck their fancy.
Seeing Don and Lori perform
together in settings like that is unlike anything else I’ve experienced
musically. Watching a song unfold between them gave me a sense of what was
possible—in music, in marriage, in life. I mean it. Don Chaffer was always the
biggest draw for me to Waterdeep. But his personality was so magnetic partly because
of his moments of quiet generosity on stage. The way he could give himself over
to one of Lori’s songs was superbly intimate. You could see the tension,
tempestuousness, reconciliation, and easy familiarity of holy matrimony all
play out between them in the course of one song.
Waterdeep played one show at my
university during my time there. One of my friends had a beat-up old Crown
Victoria with the antlers of a huge buck wired to the grill. Another friend,
who was a digital-media major, painted the car to look like the cover of Everyone’s
Beautiful
. Don seemed pretty entertained by it, and even asked to take a ride
in it to go get some guitar strings at the local music shop.
All told, I think I went to over
fifty Waterdeep shows over the course of half a dozen years.
By this time I was buying every
piece of music even tangentially associated with Waterdeep. I had all the
B-side albums, all the solo projects, all the side projects by other members of
the band. Anything they released I owned. At that point, however, two things
happened: First, our college dorm rooms were outfitted with high-speed internet.
Second, Napster made digital music universally accessible. Waterdeep allowed
bootlegging of all their shows, under certain conditions, and all
of
those recordings were on Napster. I downloaded hundreds, maybe thousands, of
Waterdeep bootlegs over the course of one year—one semester actually. Then
three other things happened: First, the university, uncomfortable with the
murky legality of free song-sharing online, severely restricted the amount of
bandwidth that could be devoted to Napster, and our downloads slowed to
molasses. Second, Napster lost a court case and was shut down. And third, my
hard drive crashed, and I never saw (or heard) any of those bootlegs again.
(Update: In the process of writing this essay, I have discovered that there are
many Waterdeep bootlegs available on archive.org. I’ve even found several of
the concerts I attended—for instance, a show in the Everyone’s Festival tent at
One Festival in 2001. When they say they’re from Wichita I can hear my self of
eighteen years ago cheering. Sometimes the internet is so surreal.)
I wasn’t a groupie. I didn’t drop
out of college to follow Waterdeep on tour. There were bigger fans than I was,
especially those who were recording the music and trading bootlegs. But I did
get to the point where I went to their concerts not just to discover but to
catalog, to catch a new arrangement of a cover tune or an older track. I wanted
to hear the little improvisations and improvisations on improvisations, to
witness the creative process and feel like I was participating in it. Attending
a show became not so much a one-time experience but a chapter in a larger
narrative. At one point I found a picture of Don and Lori online, and by the
guitars they were playing, the places their capos were set, and the chords they
were fingering, I knew which song they were singing.
My junior year of college I met the girl who would become my
wife. We hit it off pretty quickly, and I made her an annotated list of my
favorite Waterdeep songs. (N.B.: This is not the way to impress girls.) Try as
I might, though, I couldn’t get her to love them like I loved them and be moved
by them like I was moved by them. To be sure, she didn’t dislike them. She
already owned Everyone’s Beautiful
when we first met. But as we started
dating, she perceived my devotion to the band as a threat to my devotion to
her. And I perceived her lack of enthusiasm for Waterdeep as a threat to my identity.
It was kind of a mess.
As you might imagine, more than one
fight centered on some aspect of a Waterdeep show. She was always a bit
relieved when the jam sessions were over, because “real” fans stood at least
for that whole part of the show, and she was even more relieved when the show
was over, because then she got her boyfriend back. The whole thing was
emotionally fraught. Nevertheless, she was (and is) a good woman. She did her
best to good-naturedly put up with my enthusiasm, and I tried not to impose on
her the expectation of becoming a superfan.
But our different responses to
their music was emblematic, I think. Over the years as Waterdeep grew more
popular I slowly became aware that the average Waterdeep fan was increasingly drawn
to the acoustic-guitar-based, spiritually straightforward, more emotionally
accessible side of Waterdeep’s music—the music the band tended to play at the
end of their shows. These fans merely endured the twenty-minute jam sessions and
wah-wah-infused guitar solos nearer the beginnings of their sets.
Then there were the diehards, among
whom I of course counted myself. But it felt like there were fewer and fewer of
us all the time. (I learned eventually that you could immediately discern what
kind of fan a person was by asking them what they thought of Don’s Old Stuff
cut “The Animal.” Ignorance of it was the first tell; displeasure with it, the
second. But if they displayed enthusiasm you knew you’d found another true
believer.)
I think this was a real shift in
the band’s culture, at least in terms of their fanbase. At that very first
Waterdeep show I attended, as I’ve mentioned, hippies streamed into our church
and so vehemently gyrated their bodies that they provoked the resignation of our
worship pastor. But more and more as the years went by, Don and Lori actually
had to exhort
their fans just to stand up, let alone gyrate anything. In
fact there were almost two Waterdeeps: The perpetually touring, high-energy,
electric jam band à la the Grateful Dead or Phish, and the emotionally
sensitive folk band playing heartstring-pulling ballads with beautiful
harmonies à la Simon and Garfunkel. Early on, funk jams like “The Razor Light,”
a concert standard from To Chase Away the Birds
that the band played about
a third of the way into every set, seemed to arise out of the same source as
folk ballads like “If You Want to Get Free.” But as the early intensity of
Waterdeep’s formative years mellowed into what obviously needed to be a more
stable creative (and financial) arrangement, those two aspects of the band’s
creative force seemed to have less to do with each other. Even if they still sprang
from the same fount, there was at least a growing tension between what Don Chaffer
wanted to play and what his fans wanted to hear.
The year or two following the
release of Everyone’s Beautiful
seemed to be a fallow time creatively. They
began working up more and longer arrangements of old Negro spirituals like “Go
Down, Moses” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” which injected some
needed creative energy into their setlists. A cover album of spirituals around
that time would have been glorious, and the less-is-more approach to artistic
expression might have given them the creative boost they needed. (There had in
fact a few years prior been rumors of an album solely of acoustic hymn
arrangements performed by Don and Lori, and one track, an achingly lovely
arrangement of William Cowper’s “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” made
it onto the B-side album Dogpaddle
.)
Any such project, however, would
have disrupted the consolidating, popularizing trajectory Waterdeep was on.
(And who can blame them for attempting to follow it? Their vision had always
been to break out of the underground and reach a larger audience with their
ministry, which is what they explicitly understood their music to be—a
ministry.) Their second (and last) Squint release, the worship record You
Are So Good to Me
(2001), brought them more recognition than any album
previously. The album had some flashes of the old creative energy, but it
seemed almost obligatory; they were riding the wave of worship albums that was
then (and still is) glutting the Christian music market. The summer after it
came out Don mentioned at a concert that the band had written and recorded the
album during one of the driest spiritual seasons of his life. And looking at
the song list now (why had I never noticed this before?), Lori carries the
album creatively. The songs for which Don has sole writing credit that have any
staying power are re-recordings of standouts from the earlier Enter the
Worship Circle
.
At that time, Squint was imploding.
Steve Taylor was forced out of leadership, and the label was shunted around until
it was bought by and absorbed into a major Christian music label. Transition
was happening, whether anybody wanted it or not. Now without a label, the band
seemed a little directionless creatively and professionally.
Then in the summer of 2001 Don’s
mother died of leukemia. In Surprised by Joy
, C. S. Lewis wrote of
his mother’s death that “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and
reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures,
many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now;
the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” Don’s experience of losing his mother
seemed to affect him the same way. (Maybe the loss of anyone’s mother does.) Shortly
thereafter 9/11 occurred, and then Don’s father was diagnosed with cancer. These
events would release a flood of creativity resulting in two full albums, which
represent two poles of Don’s response—one, What You Don’t Know
, a very
personal, intimate solo album; and the other, Whole ’Nother Deal
, a
communal effort recorded live with all past and present Waterdeep members and
friends in a room.
Not that all, or even most, of the
songs were new. I had been hearing many of the songs that ended up on both
albums in concert for years. But the song titles alone belie a grieving soul struggling
to find ways to cope: “Bring the Sadness Back In,” “What You Don’t Know,” “Long
on Diagnosis, Short on Cure,” “Leave Me Alone,” “We’re All Dying, Tracy James,”
“[Finding Reasons to Live].” There is, to be sure, plenty of hope and
redemption on both albums; they are not chronicles of despair. But it is clear
from Don’s songwriting that what hope we have is more dearly bought than we
knew.
I remember commenting to a friend
when I bought the two albums at a show in Tulsa that these would surely in the
future be considered Don’s best work. Whether that’s proved true I don’t know.
But at the time I didn’t quite know what to make of them. The songs seemed
inconclusive, somehow. Don’s trademark bluntness was still there, with even a
few bona fide swear words, but it was now immersed in a deeper ambiguity. The
post-cancer, post-9/11 world Don was describing was more complex and more
confusing than before. The swear words he employed were not simply profanity
but the theologically freighted words damn
and hell
, and were
used as such. That is, at some level Don felt like he was undergoing a sort of
hell and damnation. I can’t say I found the new ambivalences in Don’s
songwriting aesthetically inferior to anything he had written previously. But I
did find it vaguely dissatisfying. Perhaps that’s the price of growing up with
somebody’s music, and coming to depend on it for certain forms of comfort and
connection. I had not been through a terrible year; I was not yet old enough or
aware enough of geopolitics to absorb the enormity of 9/11; I did not yet know
the deep poignancies of personal grief. If I found the new music dissatisfying,
it was most likely because I wasn’t capable of following where Don was leading
me.
But consider an example. For years
I had been hearing “Long on Diagnosis, Short on Cure” in concert. The lines at
the climax of the bridge say this:
you can crawl to
the altar of sadness
and call for the
knife
But either way
you’re just denying your hearing.
Put your ear to
God’s chest, and clearly
it’s the pulse of
life.
Then silence. Save one whole note, plucked every measure. A heartbeat.
On What You Don’t Know
the liner notes tell us that it was written in
1997, “with a couple last minute changes in the studio.” The lines just quoted
had been changed to the following:
you can crawl to
the altar of sadness
and starve at the
base
and devour your
history
in the shadows of
misery
and your [sic]
gone, gone, gone, without a trace.
I’ve heard Don say in other contexts that he’s concerned
about certain things being “overstated” in some of his older material. This change
would seem to be a prime candidate of just that idea. I’m not sure the revision
is aesthetically superior. “Devour your history / in the shadows of misery” is
evocative; but “put your ear to God’s chest, and clearly / it’s the pulse of
life” is a stunning, concrete image. The change, I would guess, displays a
concern to avoid the whiff of triumphalism. But I missed (and still miss) the
image. The intimacy, the rest, the comfort it conveys are gone in the new
material. The one says, “Look, here is God. Feel his pulse surging through
everything.” The other is more irredeemably sad. You can probe the heart of
sadness and never emerge from it; despair can eat you up and annihilate you. The
threat is real. The song still ends on a hopeful note, but God has not been
named, leaving the presence of the divine more allusive. Certainly I can
imagine it would have been almost impossible for Don to sing the earlier
version at that time in his life.
In 2004, the year after I had
graduated from college, and not long after my wife and I got married, Waterdeep
announced two “Farewell to Touring” shows at the New Earth Coffeehouse. It was
the end of an era. For the band and for me. On their end, the Chaffers now had
a kid or two, and were moving to Nashville to begin another phase of their
career. Raising a family and touring regularly would undoubtedly be a difficult
lifestyle to sustain, and Nashville provided a one-stop-shop for a stable career
in music.
On my end, I had a bachelor’s
degree, was freshly married, and was headed to the West Coast of Canada to
study theology. It felt to me like the beginning of the rest of my life. I was
not long for the Midwest (I thought at the time I was leaving for good), and in
a way I was putting many of my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual commitments
on hold to figure out what I really thought and believed. Waterdeep’s putting
themselves on hold in a way, therefore, mirrored my own phase of life, so it
seemed natural to close off that source of emotional energy while I forged a
completely new set of associations.
As my wife and I drove home from
the Farewell to Touring shows, she tentatively submitted that maybe it wasn’t
such a bad thing that this was the last Waterdeep show we would be attending
for the foreseeable future since, you know, they kind of maybe occasioned a
slight, wee bit of tension between us. I proved her point by getting huffy and
defensive because I was a Super-special Committed Fan and this was a tender
emotional time for me. But my defensiveness struck a false note, even to me. It
served more to compensate for my lack of feeling than channel the force of it.
Our tiff didn’t last long, and that was the last time we ever fought about
Waterdeep.
I never got to know Don Chaffer. For all my camp following,
devotion, obsession, and commitment, I never was the kind of fan to befriend
the band and be known to them. I felt like I had this really intense, personal
connection with Don, but I was all too aware that the relationship was asymmetrical.
Happy to watch from midway back in the crowd (always from the left side of the
stage, so I could see what they were playing on guitar), I came early and stayed
till the end. I bought the merch—music of course, but also stickers, posters,
T-shirts, and so on. But approaching them seemed cloying and artificial;
overeager. I was just another face on the tour, and I wanted to respect their
moments off the stage, when they seemed all too eager not to perform. I was also
always a little too starstruck to approach Don.
Almost always. My freshman year of
college I did approach Don after a show in Tulsa. For the encore he came on
stage alone, just him and his guitar, as he almost always did, usually to close
with “If You Want to Get Free.” However, tonight he wondered aloud what song to
play for us, and as he did his eyes lit up and he alighted as if spontaneously
on the song “And.” I considered this to be my favorite Waterdeep song at the
time and, naturally, also considered his decision to be an indubitable act of
God. Anyway, I wanted to thank him for it and tell him how much his music meant
to me.
When I approached him, I tried to
come up with something dramatic, and I blurted out, “Your music changed my
life.”
I meant it. I meant every word of
it. And it was true.
He paused and looked
. . . what? Maybe a little surprised. But more surely to me he looked
grateful. I assumed he had been told this fifty times that week already. Maybe
he had. But he was so touched, so palpably moved, that it caught me off guard. It
was like throwing a rubber ball at a wall and having it rebound and smack you
directly in the face. I backed into safer emotional territory and bumbled
around for a graceful way to end the conversation.
That was still early on, but I had
said what I wanted to say. I never tried to talk to him again.
As brightly as my devotion to the band burned for those half-dozen
years, I suppose it’s not a surprise that it dimmed so quickly. Within the
space of a year I had graduated college, got married, and left the Midwest for
grad school on the West Coast. I had moved out of one spiritual, emotional,
intellectual, and geographical space and into a very different one. Thoughtful
Christian music was no longer as difficult to come by: The internet was making
it much easier to find (while simultaneously scrambling the music industry
beyond recognition), and the communities I was a part of were no longer
isolated conservative evangelical enclaves but intellectually sophisticated groups
of Christians in major urban centers. The interval between Waterdeep’s Farewell
to Touring shows and Sufjan Stevens’s appearance on the indie music scene (or
at least the time when evangelical Christians noticed him) was only a year or
two (if that), but to me it felt like decades.
After those last shows, and despite
the seeming “end” of Waterdeep, the band nevertheless continued, almost without
pause, to crank out albums and side projects. I listened to very little of it. When
I did listen to a new album or single, something in my heart resisted that made
it difficult to listen to, even to continue to the end of a song. The emotional
immediacy that I had so readily experienced was no longer available to me, both
because of where I was and where their music was. The emotional textures of their
music were more sophisticated and adult, and I had never come to them for that
kind of experience; connecting now would take work, as any long-term
contemplation of the world as it really is must, especially as one grows older.
I guess I wasn’t prepared to put in that kind of work, at least with
Waterdeep’s music. That’s not what it was “for.” Plus, in 2004, I was
determined to move on to new, exciting things, which required that I jettison
my former loves—at least unconsciously. In the years following, I might pull
out Sink or Swim
or To Chase Away the Birds
every once in a
while, but in a nostalgic way, like looking at old high school yearbooks. But Waterdeep
was guilty by association with my old life. I had moved on.
All of this seems really fickle now.
My life was wrapped so tightly around their music in such formative years that
it seems churlish and ungrateful not to take the necessary pains to allow it to
continue to speak to me. But returning to the site of such concentrated passion,
I found that the wound of beauty had been scarred over. I changed. So did
Waterdeep. It’s part of life. Simple.
But the narratives we make of our
lives are often more complicated than we think. Or at least it became so in my
case. In 2009 I decided with my wife and growing family to move back to my
hometown near Wichita. This move was an intentional effort on my part to
disavow the narrative that fulfillment is supposedly found in moving away from
home and pursing a career in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city. One of the
lessons I’ve learned in moving back is that, even if real change has occurred
in your life, everything you thought you left behind when you moved away actually
remains a part of you and continues to shape who you are. All those things you
think you’ve jettisoned have continued to operate as the background data to
your new experiences. All that to say, among other things I’ve learned, I think
I’m in a better place to “hear” Waterdeep’s music again.
So what do I hear now, fifteen
years later?
For one thing, I can take stock of my
enthusiasm for their music with a little more critical distance than I had as a
teenager and without the vaguely contemptuous dismissal I had as a young adult.
Was that six years of orbiting around Waterdeep’s music worth it? Was it a good
thing? Was it healthy? Could not all that emotional energy and all those hours
and dollars have been spent on things more worthwhile?
Perhaps.
I’ve used the word obsessed
a few times in this essay to describe my relationship with Waterdeep’s music,
but I’ve been at pains to dial it back to something shy of mania while indicating
more than everyday admiration. I’ve also used devotion
a number of times,
which rightly carries religious connotations. Pitching the tone just right is
difficult. I very much would like to sound not-deranged. But one man’s
preoccupation is another man’s hysteria. There may have been a whiff of
codependency on my part—I needed Waterdeep to help me generate the emotional
states I considered essential to myself.
Despite this, a few things militate
against a negative conclusion, I think. First is that I came from an intact,
loving household, and I wasn’t looking for music to fill an otherwise vacant
space of abandonment or abuse. And even if I had been, it could have been
worse. Alcohol! Drugs! Sex! Satan worship! What’s a little musical obsession
among directionless teenagers when they could be ruining their lives? Second,
my love of Waterdeep pulled me out of myself and into friendship and community.
Waterdeep uniquely among bands that I have followed fostered a sense of
togetherness among their fans. In high school my friends and I bonded over
their music in real and lasting ways. And third, Waterdeep’s music not only
reoriented me away from myself and toward others but also pulled me beyond
myself toward the infinite horizon of God. The power of Waterdeep’s music, both
then and now, is that it gets your attention, picks you up where you are, and
puts you down in the proximity of the divine. Not because of its sublimity or
aesthetic splendor but because Don and Lori inhabited that space and invited
you to inhabit it with them. If I eventually found that I didn’t “need”
Waterdeep to get to that space anymore, well, maybe they’re a victim of their
own success.
Which is not to say I’m content to
leave them in the past, mementos of my coming of age. In fact, in the course of
writing this essay I decided to dig up all my old Waterdeep albums from the
basement storage room where all my CDs (R.I.P.) now reside. After rummaging
around for a good ten minutes I had found all of them—except my two favorites, To
Chase Away the Birds
and Sink or Swim
. I went upstairs and told my
wife I couldn’t find them. My oldest son and daughter, who are twelve and ten, were
nearby and piped up. “Did you say Waterdeep? We got those out, and we’ve been
listening to them. They’re on the bookshelf downstairs by the DVDs.” A friend
of theirs had made the recommendation. I stared at them openmouthed, and then I
smiled. Here is a new context to discover their music through my children and
rediscover it for myself, and that in a less solipsistic kind of way. Perhaps
when a relationship—even with music—takes on the contours of codependency, it’s
necessary to sever the bonds, at least partly, so that you can reengage on
healthier terms.
What I have found is that when I
revisit Waterdeep’s music now I do not find simply a guide to my adolescent and
post-adolescent angst. I do not find a history lesson or a picture of my former
self. I find that I am still touched. Their music changed my life. And I find
that I am grateful.
Feast of St. Cosmas the Hagiopolite
Anno Domini 2019, October 14
Jeff Reimer
i
s a
freelance editor and writer based in Newton, Kansas.
