Time Travel Through Punk with ‘The Cold Record’ (Review)

by Blake Weil
Blake Weil
•
February 11, 2019
•
4 min read

Rude Mechs’ Kirk Lynn takes us back through an interactive storytelling experience

Pabst Blue Ribbon has an incredibly specific taste: not necessarily good, but specific. It tastes like college dorm rooms, those late nights spent talking with friends where every word, no matter how prosaic, feels profound. The first beer that many young people can afford, it’s a first taste of growing up and the perceived fresh air of adulthood.

So despite the subject matter of The Cold Record staying in the third grade, it was entirely appropriate that the experience opened with Kirk Lynn (author and star of the show and one of the artistic directors of the Rude Mechs theatre collective) offering me a PBR.

Cold Record starts less like a performance and more like a conversation with an old friend. A few days before the show, we each got an email asking us to name one punk song that meant something to us. “Punk” being a vague enough term that we were allowed to interpret it however we liked. For me, the answer was easy: “Four Simple Words” by Frank Turner.

“So, why this song?” asked Lynn.

We were all sitting in a semicircle on a wildly varied assortment of chairs. I sat up in my plush armchair, smiling. The show began as a chat and mixtape listening session, each person getting to introduce their most meaningful song to the group.

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“Well,” I said, “My friend Josh always teased me for having awful taste in music. I grew up on a diet of nothing but Electric Light Orchestra, ABBA, and Stephen Sondheim, and he made it his mission to expand my musical horizons. This song was always on our roadtrip playlist. He’d throw it on whenever we arrived at our destination to get us pumped back up after a long trip. Skip to the middle, though, the intro is super slow.”

All 15 or so of us got a chance to share our song and the story behind it. Admittedly, at this point, the quality of the show was only as good as the audience’s participation. Some people came in with meaningful stories that touched us all, but a fewless articulate “I just like this song” responses crept in, dragging on with hems and haws for seemingly endless minutes. But as Lynn shared his favorite punk song (which I won’t spoil here), we transitioned into the main event.

The meat of the evening was a monologue delivered rapidfire on the pains and emotional triumphs of adolescence. The story, following a middle school punk rock fan trying to break the record for most sick day absences from school, has a certain O’Henry-esque poignancy. Its emotional beats hit hard and fast. There’s a sense of closeness in The Cold Record, in finding meaning in the songs that get us through the day. The preceding conversation makes the audience a part of the emotional world Lynn creates. I can’t give many more details about what happens next as the show ends with the audience promising not to spoil what happened, making a permanent bond between audience and author, a trust that I took home as a souvenir.

Story aside, the performance was fantastic. Lynn’s delivery brought the audience into that state of adolescence where ideas feel so profound and come so quickly that they need to spill out, lest you explode. Equally adept at comedy and tragedy, Lynn manages to hold the audience in rapt attention, punctuating the performance with more audience participation. One moment that stuck out to me was when the audience was tossed handfuls of band-aids from the school nurse’s office, a place the story turns to over and over. Just having an object from the storyworld to hold on to (or stick on my skin, in my case) gave the audience a tether to the reality of the story and lent it an unexpected extra weight.

But the band-aids weren’t the only thing we were given to hold onto. Weeks later, another souvenir arrived in my email inbox: a playlist of all of our favorite songs and recordings of why they meant something to us. Maybe this playlist was not as fun to play on a road trip as “Four Simple Words,” but it proved the same point; music connects us all to each other, and to a certain point in time, and all it takes is the press of the play button to transport us there in a heart (or drum) beat.