159. Song No. 2,485: “The Devil’s Ball,” The World/Inferno Friendship Society
Red-Eyed Soul, 2006

Though I’ve never gone, every year, for at least as long as I’ve been a WIFS fan, the band has commanded a devoted Hallowmas crowd in New York City for its Oct. 31 Devil’s Ball, a decadent celebration that gives this song the raucous dark-cabaret treatment it deserves. Last year, they shifted the tradition to a virtual stage for obvious reasons; this year is the first year one of the most incredible, unusual, ceaselessly and equally energetic and inventive, and pitch-perfect politically accurate bands to ever grace the space will greet the absolute best holiday without the traditional fanfare.

It has been a while since a musician’s death absolutely gutted me. There is always that sense of personal, selfish loss riding in on a future suddenly filled with yawning silence where far more music was supposed to be, but learning that Jack Terricloth—a man who truly seemed to be a living myth—had sauntered beyond the mortal realm came with the crushing blow of losing a comrade and a bona-fide credit to the species. It didn’t need to be a surprise to be just awfully, infinitely, infuriatingly sad.

I spent most of 2020 just kind of numb to everything. Being an unapologetically emotional person, I didn’t know how to handle such a stubborn slog through endless ennui. It might be why I started to wonder if certain friendships had started to stagnate, though I did eventually get to the point where anger and frustration with shitty friends was almost preferable to months and months and moooonths of never registering any feeling beyond grey, unending meh. There were tiny oases of joy along the way, of course, and moments of lesser emotional reprieve, but the year is largely, in retrospect, already just a prevailing sense of fuzzy detachment.

With 2021, it all came flooding back. So I shouldn’t’ve been surprised that I was walking around with a broken heart when the denial over my best friend since college moving half a continent away finally yielded to the reality of moving her stuff to a shipping unit and snatching up any cast-offs she offered because I am both emotional and sentimental. Our last six days together, the weeks prior, a solid month after were just pockmarked with moments of me crying wherever the unfairness of reality hit me. By then, it has been quite some time since I last felt like I was an open wound and there is nothing about the feeling that I missed in its blessed absence.

After saying goodbye to the closest person I have to a sister at the same airport I’d only known as the beginning of the last big hurdle between a work trip and home, I first dove into a work article I’d later submit thousands of feet over the same American South I’d traversed in my best friend’s car just days prior, then voraciously attacked the news feeds I’d neglected in favor of getting as much time with bestie as humanly possible. And found a whole new reason to cry with abandon in that airport as I read how I would never get to see a Hallowmas in person. The death of WIFS’s charismatic caricature of an irreplaceable frontman, the Pumpkin King himself, a seemingly inexhaustible force of anarchic good, had closed the chapter on speaking of him in the present tense, just as the past year and a half has forced so many other untimely ends and unwanted goodbyes.

This, of course, being the year that I will actually be in New York on Halloween for the first time since college because traditions with the bestie won’t be deferred by the minor inconvenience of geography and just happened to fortuitously fall on the king of holidays in a year that snatched away far more than it offered, makes the loss cut a little deeper, though building the foundation of my musical taste on the classic rock I’d been born too late to enjoy in its contemporary heyday had at least prepared me for a lifetime of always being just a little too late to the party and saying goodbye to a stranger who’ll never know me but whose impact is inarguably, indelibly profound and worth the price of a distantly broken heart.