Featured Essay: Open Hand

by Elliott Bueler

Vinyl records are like watches – there’s no real need for them anymore, but try telling that to a collector. Do and you’ll discover as many reasons to collect as there are collectors. As an elder millennial who grew up spinning records at home, literally wearing out tapes—first 8-track and then cassette—in the car, and witnessing the dawn of digital music, I take an only-the-sentimental-hits approach. 

So, by most vinyl heads’ standards, mine is a modest collection. A few dozen albums that run the gamut from Van Morrison and The Beatles to Vulfpeck and Cursive. Each one a totem, be it funk or folk, punk or pop, that conjures the people and moments that populate the story of my life. 

Nothing embodies this better than my clear pressing of Open Hand’s Evolution EP. I was 16 the first time I bought it in the summer of simpler-times 2002. Kelly Clarkson was on her way to becoming the first American Idol and Queen Elizabeth’s honorary knighting of Rudy Giuliani seemed foolproof. But my world was even simpler. Nearly all I thought about was when and where the next concert was. Often the band mattered less than who I was with, and that was usually Alex. 

I’m the youngest of seven boys, but Alex, the fifth child five years my senior, was the big brother. Known and liked widely, “Ox” as most called him seemed to keep himself effortlessly at the center of things. His charisma, I see now, had a sort of cautionary-tale quality, a virtue fueled by so many vices. But in my memory, he crystallized first as my personal musical vanguard. When he got tired of ten-year-old me calling in to the local radio station to request The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, he lent me his Skankin’ Pickle and Reel Big Fish tapes. Collective Soul? Try a little Bad Religion. And so it went as he gravitated toward hardcore and the burgeoning emo, tapes giving way to CDs—of Hot Water Music, By a Thread, and so many others. 

Open Hand would prove to be the apogee of my tutelage. The California indie rockers didn’t even have a full album’s worth of material when Alex, unwilling to settle for a fandom based solely on traveling the two hours to Las Vegas or the five to Salt Lake City, reached out to the band. He insisted the stopover in our Southern Utah hometown would be worth their while. 

They found it was. The band quickly established a small but devoted following that showed up again and again, no matter the venue, each time a little bigger. 

The shows were something like communion. The band just above us on their dais. Black t-shirts their cassocks. Guitars hung from stole-like straps, gaudy, de rigueur Marshall half stacks doing the work of pipe organs. And all of us singing from the same hymnal. The voices of 30, 50, 100 pre-Internet adolescents. This was social media. Open Hand often ended their set the same way their Evolution EP does, with the aptly titled “This Is The End.” It might be my all-time favorite. “You say you don’t understand me,” it opens. “So why are you here?” Rolling snare, spare strummed guitar, vocals too smooth for the angst they contain. It’s a track aware of its own kineticism. Again and again it builds, teasing a summit only to pull back and start again. When it finally comes, triggered by a record-scratch pause that still gives me chills, everything explodes in a controlled demolition. And just as the dust begins to settle, the single guitar re-enters, over which the call of “I know it’s right” is followed by the shouted response of “I know it!” It didn’t matter if it was your first or fortieth show, all were invited to partake. 

Alex was so pumped when I handed over the only $20 I brought for merch. It hardly mattered that I didn’t own a record player; it was as much artifact as album. So, it was with a sickness of letting someone or something down that I found, only days later, the record warped badly on the seat of my ‘74 Volkswagen Beetle. I had left it to bake in 115-degree heat. I tried to fix it. Following advice from the nascent internet, I warmed it in the oven and pressed it between coffee table books. But it was no use. And given the band’s relative status and the run of the pressing—both small—there was no replacing it. 

Alex died unexpectedly in 2022. As these things go, we had spent the intervening decades talking the big talk of the charmed. Opportunities were endless. Sure, we would go see Open Hand again. Wherever they were playing; it didn’t need to be our hometown. And while we were at it, Boysetsfire and Poison the Well and and and and and. Just like old times. 

A few weeks after he died, I went to my local record store. Thumbing through the stacks, a clear album whose center label I had rendered in pencil and ink, across notebooks and forearms was suddenly in front of me. “Tour-only limited edition,” the label read. “Some light intro noise, otherwise Mostly NM.” So, I bought it for a second time. “To love objects is to love life,” the poet Theodore Roethke wrote. Neither love need be explained rationally. Collecting is an emotional enterprise, expressing, as Susan Sontag wrote, “…a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires.” And while I don’t believe Alex was standing over me pumped by the redemption purchase, I love it with something of the love I had for that time. For who I was when I was with him. 

I put it on every now and then. Sometimes I’ll lay on the floor in front of the speakers. Close my eyes. Picture us there in front of the stage, arms around each other’s shoulders, belting out the lyrics like the end would never come.

Elliott Bueler is a writer, editor, and researcher with an MFA in creative nonfiction from New York University. His work has appeared in Surface Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and The Salt Lake Tribune. He lives in New York City.   elliottbueler.com