Right. Where were we?
No-one could accuse the Trio of not cleaving to the punk aesthetic. Matt Skiba himself has said every song on their debut album is just the same three chords in different orders. Their subject matter is similarly narrow - every song is about someone who is miserable, commonly due to either drugs, booze, heartbreak, or a combination of same (to be clear, none of this is a complaint).
But then there's the plane thing. Skiba doesn't sing about planes a lot, exactly, but they're certainly a recurring theme in his work. Planes can offer escape ("Trucks And Trains") or send you unknowing into disaster ("Dead On The Floor") (they can also be a metaphor for both love ("Nose Over Tail") and dickheads ("You're Dead")). Mostly, though, they're what tears you from the people and places you love.
"San Francisco", Alkaline Trio's first plane song, is a case in point. The narrator sits in an airport lounge, waiting for the flight which will take him from the city he has fallen in love with, back to "sour home Chicago", and spending his wait tracing a downward spiral of self-pity and solo drinking. It's a bleak, slightly morbid song, taking the titular metaphor from Tony Bennett's "(I Left My Heart) In San Francisco" and making it rather less warm and fuzzy a proposition. It's an early example of how perfect a vocalist Skiba is for these tales of death, dearth and drinking; his trademark bruised baritone for the verses, shifting into a howl of gravel and blood for each chorus. The last of these sees another shift, the melody both soaring and becoming more desperate as our hero flies upward and outward, leaving his beloved bay behind.
Douglas Adams once wrote "it can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport"." I've actually been to at least one pretty nicely done-up airport, but I take Adams' point. Airports are liminal spaces absolutely nobody wants to be in. Everybody surrounding you - and that's generally far, far too many people, either wants to be at their destination, or resents having to have left their point of departure. They're the closest thing to Purgatory most of us will ever know during our mortal span; it's no surprise it's tough to figure out how to make that look good. It's no surprise our narrator can't think of anything to do while he waits for his plane to Hell but start on the booze. Not so much drinking away his sorrows, but drinking to his sorrow of going away.
And keep drinking. Even at insane airport/aeroplane prices. It's not wholly clear in the song why the drinks get more expensive for our hero when he hits 5pm. One option is that it's because he's now on the plane, and the booze has become even more outrageously pricy. The other though is that he's drinking in an airport bar which has just upped the price, post-happy hour. I like this interpretation, because it gets to the other thing about airports, which is that they're not just awful places to be, there places you're forced to find it awful to be for hours. And that's even if things go well - there's always the chance your flight will be delayed, possibly for hours, and with you still having nothing to do but buy more pints and feel more sad. It's a peculiarly unique sensation to be stuck in a place you didn't want to be, but also not wanting to leave the only way you'll be able to leave, and to be annoyed because the trip you don't want to take is going to start later than you thought it would. All whilst increasingly drunk.
I guess that's just a way of noting a more general truth, that when we're stuck in statis, we'll eventually get to a point where we'll happily make things worse, if only so that something changes. I also guess that explains no small amount of why people drink themselves miserable in the first place. In any case, however much the song's themes can be generalised, it's the specifics that hit me hard. Every time a gigantic tube of metal, fuel and assholes is prepared to take me away, I find myself acting this song out in the least miserably crowded bar the relevant three-letter coded shithole has to offer. The only difference, when I'm doing it, I'm singing this song in my head all the while.
B-side
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