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Satori Live In Boston
It’s 4 AM and I’m driving a supposedly eco-friendly school bus through the dark hills of some northeastern state.
Is it Maine? Massachusetts? New York?
We roll at a steady 20 miles-per-hour, maybe 30 or 40 if we hit a downward slope. There’s really no way of knowing our speed without a working speedometer, or the luxury of other cars to provide relative movement. It’s just us and this endless road, occasionally illuminated in the flicker of unnecessary hazard lights.
My ears are teased by the faint hint of a David Bazan song I’ve heard countless times since that moment before dawn when Steve first played it for me on one of these late-night drives. Does this shitty bus have shitty speakers, or is its half-hearted roar actually loud enough to drown out my last resort of entertainment?
Glancing upwards toward the all-seeing, all-knowing mirror, seeing the depth of this monstrosity, I know now how the bus drivers of my early days felt. The sheer size of the thing presses the weight of responsibility into your gut and fills your head with the drunken illusion of power. I control the fate of these limbs and guitars, these bodies and basses. Look at them sleeping, dreaming. Or am I dreaming? I see Jesse’s feet stretched across the aisle, which makes up the center of his bed for these few, but long-awaited hours of rest. Has he slept at all these past few days? Are these the first moments he’s had away from the giant wheel of this beast? I notice his dreadlocks strewn about the seat, and for a moment they begin to morph into snakes, slipping and sliding up the walls and out the windows.
Looking back at the road, I chuckle at my twilight delirium, before remembering I’m not alone.
“So, what do you want to hear next?” Steve says, bringing me back.
“You decide. Play me something I haven’t heard.”
Steve is a quiet companion, but a companion nonetheless, and while every other late-night passenger promises to stay awake, he’s the only one who manages to follow through. Within the grand spectrum of our lives, Steve and I really haven’t spent all that much time together. Despite this, I still call him one of my good friends, and I still feel that even if I didn’t see him for another month, another year, another decade, I would still feel this way the next time he came around.
Satori is much the same way. I’d be hard-pressed to count more than 20 shows I’ve played with Satori, if even that many, and yet I feel forever a part of it. When I think back on the time I’ve spent with the band, it’s less a period of time than a series of moments, both onstage and offstage, in which I was completely at home, and happy. Even driving that bus, when my body wanted nothing more than to be asleep, when the heat from the engine was nearly unbearable, when my leg was cramping up from being consistently forced down upon the seemingly inoperative gas pedal, even then was a moment in which I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Satori is and it isn’t Steve. It is Steve, because it represents how he lives his life, as something he holds dear in his hands and yet longs to share with the world. It isn’t Steve, because it is everyone else he has welcomed into its folds. Whether they were in Satori for a day or a month, they are in it now.
I look forward to my next Satori show, whenever that may be, and I hope that in my life I’m able to stay true to the things I love so deeply, as Steve has done and continues to do.
-Kevin
Kevin Verni On Guitar
