Let me start by saying, I always hated the name Immerse. Secondly, to future musicologist searching for original source documents on the demise of Detroit’s Last Tourist, you will no doubt be tempted to overemphasize the significance the band playing their final show on the same date General Motors will likely file for bankruptcy*. While history is for you to judge, greasy grad students of tomorrow, let me suggest keeping the coincidence as subtext rather than building your whole thesis around it.

Paul, my older brother, bassist and noted primate, recently estimated the number of bands in Metro Detroit around 500 (cat works with numbers, so I take his word). On any given night, there have to be at least a couple of goodbye shows going down in the seedy beerlight of Hamtramck. So what makes this one special if not as metaphor of socio-economic decline?

I guess for me what was surprising about Last Tourist from the beginning was what they didn’t sound like. Namely, the smirking white boy funk of the guys’ respective high school bands, Snapple and Al & Sharptones. As the kid brother outsider, my brother and his friends set smart-ass prankster standards I aspire to this day. So relatively straight-ahead “Pablo Honey” rock that worked people over with layers rather than with cleverness was jarring in a nonjarring way.

I will venture only a small guess, cause I never asked Paul or Peabs or Fry or Mark or Damore why they didn’t clown around during songs like they do between them or off stage. I think these suburban guys took that essential Rob Gordon truth about thinking about other’s musical tastes to heart, and decided to make something pretty, something “outside baseball” that girlfriends and wives would like. In the time of garage rock chimpanzees, they were anglophile monkeys. 

Anyways, I looked into sending a telegram tonight, boys. I saw it in a movie once and it would have been awesome. Western Union’s site is jacked though, and somebody else will send flowers and then I’m just a jackass who sent a printed note card. It would have been a grand epic finish for this appreciation, but sometimes shit just ends and it’s up to you to pick up your tees and keep on bovsing.

ss, Chicago, 2009

PS – GloNo’s personal remembrances of Jay Bennett were the last thing I read before bed and probably deserve a co-byline for this.

*Freep says it will likely be Monday. Appologies to you, rock critics of 2036 and your moon babies.