The Jackpine Social Club

I'm Not Ghosting You, I'm Just 55

I named my record label, Jackpine Social Club, after the native forest from my youth in Minnesota and its dramatic flair: the Jack Pine tree only reproduces if it burns. The tight pinecones need fire—literal, scorching and destructive fire—to open up and release their seeds, which blow far and wide to be a pioneer species in post-fire environments.

The social club aspect was that we’re all a bit dinged up, so come on in; that was sort of the modus operandi.

The label was a small operation fueled by equal parts desperation and romanticism, with a healthy helping of dot-com layoff parachute capital, thriving only under extreme pressure, the idiocy of Jagermeister shots and my particularly Midwestern tastes, lashed to a newfound enthusiasm for psychedelia, outlaw country, 60s pop and other ephemera.

My college stomping grounds in Minneapolis, where I lived close to the famed and infamous CC Club, home of the Replacements song “Here Comes a Regular,” helped fuel this idea. And to my Minneapolitan ears, I had great taste in my discoveries.

The artists I signed – Jesse Denatale, Kelley Stoltz, Loquat, Oranger, Tom Heyman -were working musicians of the Bay Area who I knew from clubs and backyard parties and my beloved Make-Out Room, on 22nd  Street in the Mission. You could go there alone on any night of the week and bump into regulars.

They were along for a bumpy ride through criminal distributors, ad hoc showcases, cover spreads on the SF Weekly, Thee Parkside residencies and the a retail program that was barely infantile. But we rallied around shows and record releases and label holiday parties.

Years later, the metaphor has only deepened. Although it doesn’t take a forest fire to get anything done anymore.

Age, experience, sober thinking, these things have contributed to a considerably steadier hand on the wheel.

But still, meaningful work still has to happen when things are on fire—when deadlines loom, bills keep coming due, relationships are fraying, or the diagnosis is unclear.

Something about crisis flips the switch.

The human condition? Or my peculiarities?

I wish it didn’t have to be this way. But I also wish Jackpine trees could have their babies without third degree arson.

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This week was the 16th anniversary of moving to Austin, a place where I was sure I’d fit right in. My western shirts, my record collection, my pseudo-outlaw bullshit. My friend Kevin, born in Texas, told me I looked like I’d been born there too.

And for a while, I believed him. I dig BBQ, country music, and we had a built-in friend group since we moved here with the entire staff of Batter Blaster and their partners, 12 people in all, not to mention band dudes we knew like Ian Moore and Jesse Dayton. Our friend group was established even before we arrived.

But Austin and I never quite found our rhythm. In San Francisco, I’d worked the door at the Make Out Room, to discover new acts for my label, and shaken enough hands to develop metaphoric calluses - as pointed out by my late pal Peter Ellenby one drunken evening - and built a social architecture around my life. I figured, to keep discovering new music, I had to go out and support new music, be on the scene.

Here, in Austin, it felt like I showed up to a party that had ended just as I arrived.

There is beauty here, but it’s scattered, like song lyrics you can’t quite remember.

There’s Old Austin, which lives mostly in lore. New Austin has turned into something else—a lifestyle brand with mixed-use condos, shitty bro comedians, and a legion of Incel Caminos blocking traffic on every thoroughfare.

And maybe that disconnect isn’t about Austin. Maybe it’s about me.

I’m 55. Pretending I’m 30 feels like cosplay at this point. My body has new ideas about what it will and won’t tolerate. It’s called aging, baby. I drink two beers and need a nap. My left shoulder fires pain down my arm, my right side throbs with a dull ache. Could be gallbladder scars, could be the slow reckoning of a once-indestructible liver.

There was a time when I thrived in social settings. When I could drink like a fish, charm a room (to be clear, *thought* I could charm a room), and go out five nights a week.

That was my superpower. These days, I mostly hide. Behind a keyboard. Behind a pile of meds that say “don’t mix with alcohol.”

Stopping the alcohol is restarting the healing, trying to get my days and nights to feel better, to get that chill back.

My innate truth is that I have a real creative gift in crisis management. The Jackpine way. When shit’s on fire, you get after it.

Just like when I ran the Arts section of my college newspaper The Nightly, it is still true: Get me near a deadline, and I’ll write like my life depends on it.

Minnesota theater programmer and now-professor Bob Cowgill once told me at dinner that I’d live a life of peaks and valleys. (He says he doesn’t remember that, and that I put too much import into that memory.)

That I’d never be the steady one. I bristled. Then I lived it. Then I lived it again. Isn’t life itself for anyone freaking peaks and valleys?

The Social Club part? That was always aspirational. A place for people like me. People who need a little self-destruction to get anything meaningful out the door. A loose affiliation of late bloomers, side-hustlers, and creative fire-starters who still believe in showing up, even if the invites stopped coming.

I keep writing these articles and abandoning them. One about job hunting in middle age. One about the creeping invisibility that comes with being over 50 in industries you helped build. One about the agony of billing clients who undervalue your time, but never your output. One about how organizing my bookcase for Zoom calls felt like staging a set to suggest I had my shit together (and hiding the copy of Infinite Jest).

Here I am. Still kicking at the pricks. Still writing.

A friend told me it sounds like I’ve just had a run of bad luck. And he’s not wrong. But bad luck feels less like an event and more like an operating system lately, that I can’t help but keep logging into.

Every so often, I talk with my friend Lane about resurrecting the backyard horror double features we used to do. We did food pairing themes and called it Gore Met Cinema. Cartoons, trailers, the humid Austin air. A dozen people under the stars. Maybe that’s what the Social Club is now. Not a scene. Not a label. Not a career move. Just a reason to gather.

Maybe the fire isn’t for destruction anymore. Maybe it’s for warmth. For light. For making everyone sweat balls when it’s 104° outside.

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You can always get in touch at nicholas@areyouexperienced.co