The Enduring Michael Dahlquist

Twenty years ago today, on July 14, 2005, Michael Dahlquist and John Glick and Doug Meis went out for lunch. They were together in a car, stopped at an intersection in Skokie, when a suicidal woman intentionally accelerated and rear ended their car.

I didn’t know John. I knew Doug just a tiny bit - we’d gone to college together, and of all things, we’d been in the same tennis class. They were both drummers in Chicago.

And, through so many twists and turns of the world, so was Michael. And maybe it’s not quite right to say I knew him. But I felt close enough to go to his wake.

I’ll never approach the eloquence that Steve Albini achieved when he mourned Michael at the time. Please read what he wrote.

And now that you’ve read that, understand that as a fan, having seen Silkworm eight times, with this friendliest and most charming of brutes manning the skins… he only barely knew who I was, but I loved the guy. And I loved Tim and Andy too. I felt such a strong sense of belonging at a Silkworm show that when the time came, the place where I’d seen them the most often - Schubas - was the place I told Michelle we should get married. And that’s what we did.

The day Michael died, Tim declared that Michael was irreplaceable and the band was over, and he was right. Tim and Andy went on to form Bottomless Pit, and then Tim formed Mint Mile, and Andy put out an album with Light Coma, and I’ve been lucky enough to have lived in the same city (more or less) and to have seen at least one member of Silkworm on stage at shows a combined 33 times.

Steve Albini died last year - you likely read about it here - and as part of his funeral a number of his friends were asked to play. And it happened that Tim and Andy and Joel were all there, and with Jeff Panall on drums, they played Silkworm songs together, and it went very well… so well that this September, Silkworm returns to play a run of five shows. My first Silkworm show was three years after Joel had left the band and I’ve never had an opportunity to see him. Jeff has been with Tim in Mint Mile since their inception in 2014. This “alternative history” incarnation of the band with Joel and Jeff makes tremendous sense, and I’m ecstatic they’re doing this.

For me, and I think it’s true for so many others, this run of shows doubles as a celebration of the band’s legacy, and by extension a celebration of Steve (who recorded most of the Silkworm albums), and a celebration of Michael. To my ear, maybe excluding the earliest recordings, Silkworm doesn’t sound dated. The recent reissue of 1997’s Developer sounds amazing, and as vital as ever.

And it’s in that light that I want to remember Michael today - as a man and musician who, 20 years gone, remains vital, vibrant, vivacious.

The documentary released in 2013 offers this excerpt on Michael which gives you an inkling about what it was like to see him live:

It’s criminal how little good video footage pops up on YouTube. This was one of the better single song recordings I could find:

It may seem like a strange choice but among my favorite moments of Michael’s are when he and Andy come in on “Pearly Gates” (from 1998’s Blueblood) with only a minute of song left:

I think it’s “Dremate” though (from 1994’s In the West) where you really get a sense of what Michael could be about. It sounds like he’s pulverizing the kit, and in the process it’s the drums laying the groundwork for Joel’s song which would reduce the average emo band to mere embers:

Michael didn’t take a lot of vocal turns, but when he did his baritone could be glorious, as it was when he shared vocals with Tim on “Bourbon Beard” (from 2002’s Italian Platinum):

He also handled vocals on the Crust Bros. (Tim, Andy, Michael, and Stephen Malkmus) cover of “Spanish Harlem Incident”, which got issued posthumously on 2006’s Chokes!:

Silkworm though was about albums, not singles, and about entire shows, not just fleeting moments. If you want to experience the band, you need to listen to the albums, and by that I mean the entire discography, from the earliest recordings all the way to the end. Especially from In the West through It’ll Be Cool, eight full lengths across eleven years, there’s no band that’s ever been more consistently great.

My worldview has been forged by a great many things, with rock and roll being absolutely core to that worldview, and over the last 30 years, Silkworm being the band most central to that core. And reflecting today upon Michael and what he represented in the band, it occurs to me that he provided not merely the rhythm but also the light. And so I may not have known him well, but I - like so many others - will always carry that light.