TRAUMA DUMPING
Carrying on with High Vis through punk
On our final drive together, before cancer took him, I played my father High Vis. Getting burritos and cruising down to Ocean Beach was our ritual whenever I was home in San Francisco, whether it was one of those signature overcast gloomscapes the Sunset District marinates in, or—like that day—a rare burst of sunshine. On these trips with my dad, he always wanted me to show him new music. Despite being born in 1954, he managed to never get old in the sense of rejecting new shit. Turns out the last band I’d get to show him was High Vis.
When he was briefly separated from my mom in the early '90s, he started dating a bunch of random cool alt women he met from Usenet boards. Rarely would I meet them, but they would leave behind CDs for him: Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M., and, in retrospect surprisingly, a grip of the Creation Records catalog. High Vis felt like a critical hit in his tastes, recontextualizing the style of Britpop titans like Oasis and Blur with the energy of a punk band. He immediately wanted to know more about the band, why a new band sounded older, everything. In the truck at the beach, we blazed through all of Blending, doubling back so he could hear “Trauma Bonds" again. I told him about what it felt like when I saw the band play it; every single person in the room was screaming the words, latching onto the band with whatever their own take on the lyrics was.
