By TJ Buck
A Brother’s Tribute to Rob Buck for the 10,000 Maniacs Anniversary.
This photograph was taken in Tempe, Arizona, in September 1997. That’s me on the left, wearing the bandanna and B.U.M. Equipment shirt, and my brother Rob Buck, a founding member of the 10,000 Maniacs, on the right in the red shirt.
What I remember most about that day is the heat.
I was living in Arizona at the time, and 10,000 Maniacs were in town to play an outdoor pregame show before an Arizona Cardinals game at Sun Devil Stadium.
My memory has always put the temperature somewhere around 105 or 110 degrees. Historical weather records say Phoenix reached 101 that day. I am willing to accept the official number, but I also maintain whoever recorded it was not standing in a parking lot near a football stadium while a rock band played under the Arizona sun. At a certain point, 101 and 110 become philosophical distinctions.
This was not the ideal weather for an outdoor concert. I feared Rob and possibly every other member of the band would pass out at some point. Fortunately, none did, at least as far as I recall.
Rob, for reasons known only to him, apparently decided a red overshirt was appropriate desert clothing. I went with a T-shirt, sunglasses, and a bandanna, which at least suggests I had some understanding of the climate. Neither of us looks especially comfortable in the photograph, although after enough time in Arizona, you mostly stopped expecting comfort between June and October.
The Maniacs played before the Cardinals faced the Dallas Cowboys. Arizona won 25-22 in overtime, although nearly thirty years later, I remember much more about the concert and seeing Rob than I do about the football. That probably makes sense.
By 1997, 10,000 Maniacs were a long way from the band that started around Jamestown almost two decades earlier. They toured the world, sold millions of records, appeared on television, and became one of the best-known bands to come out of Western New York. Natalie Merchant left the group a few years earlier, Mary Ramsey was now singing lead, and the band released Love Among the Ruins that summer.
When I look at this picture, I don’t really see a photograph of myself with a member of 10,000 Maniacs. I see a picture of me with my brother, Rob.
There is nothing particularly glamorous about it. We aren’t standing backstage at some famous theater or posing at an awards ceremony. We are outside a football stadium in Tempe. People and equipment fill the background, and, if memory serves, that’s Steve Gustafson walking behind us. Rob has his arm around me. We are both wearing sunglasses because the Arizona sun was doing what the Arizona sun does.
I have no memory of thinking the photograph was important when it was taken. That is one of the strange things about old photographs. Nobody tells you which ordinary moments are going to matter later.
You have a picture taken because somebody has a camera handy. You stand next to each other for a few seconds, somebody presses the shutter, and everybody goes on with the day. You don’t think about where that photograph will be almost thirty years later or what will have happened by then.
Rob died in December 2000, a little more than three years after this picture was taken.
Naturally, that changes the way I see it now, but I don’t look at the photograph primarily with sadness. I am glad somebody took it. I am glad we happened to stand together for those few seconds after the show. I am glad an otherwise ordinary moment was preserved. I saw the band again a year or so later at a club in Phoenix. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a photo that night, but I do remember it was a great show.
That may be what I like most about the picture. It doesn’t announce itself as something important. It is just two brothers together on an unbelievably hot afternoon in Arizona. Rob and the band played a concert. There was a football game about to begin. We stood together for a picture, probably talked for a while, and went on with the rest of the day.
At the time, that was all it was. Nearly thirty years later, that is enough.
And I still say it was 110 degrees.