On Monday, I messaged music writer Ben Salmon, as I have often done over the past 20 years.
“Did you start at The Bulletin about 20 years ago this month?”
“Yup. How come?” was his response.
I’ll tell you how come, old friend: Because I am a sentimental sap, and 20 years of friendship — as adults? in this day and age? — seems worth remarking on.
I love me some Ben Salmon. I’d guess a LOT of local and national musicians would agree that he is an excellent, knowledgeable music writer, and still, I don’t think he gets enough credit. (By the way, Ben also hosts “Left of the Dial” Thursdays at 8 p.m. on KPOV-88.9 FM for more Salmon-curated sonic journeys.)
But Ben is more than a terrific music writer. He’s a great dude. I don’t know if Ben brightens every room he walks into, but rooms brighten for me when I see him, and I know why: He is one of the funniest people I know in real life. When we ran into each other while shopping with our wives at December’s Craft-O sale in Bend, he had me laughing within the first 30 seconds.
As he and I have often drolly observed over the years: “It feels good to laugh.”
Ben’s a son of Kentucky who spent five years in McCall, Idaho, working for a small paper after graduating from his beloved University of Kentucky. In 2006, he was hired as my replacement on the music beat as I prepared to do general features writing full-time. I kept a hand in the game, helping Ben out with the occasional music feature, or interviewing favorite bands when they came through.
After his start, it was immediately clear that we’d gotten extremely lucky hiring Ben. The guy lives and breathes music. I can’t tell you how many bands he got me listening to, some of them veteran acts I hadn’t bothered to check out, like Teenage Fanclub and Nada Surf, which given my other tastes, Ben correctly guessed I’d love.
We still playfully debate the merits of one of my favorite ’90s indie rock band, Archers of Loaf, versus his favorite, Pavement, both of whom had clever, wry lyricism and melodically odd riffs, but Archers just did it for me. The truth is, we both admire both those bands. I still have two or three Pavement CDs. Ben, an ardent analog fan, would approve.
Ben got me listening to 2000s bands, too, such as The New Pornographers. I’ll never forget the day Band of Horses’ “Cease to Begin” dropped in 2007 and Ben told me something along the lines of, “You have to listen to this song.” The song was “Is There a Ghost,” maybe the best quiet-loud-quiet song ever written. Through a good set of headphones, it will still blow my socks off.
I’m running out of space, and I haven’t mentioned our Diet Coke addiction or inside jokes, like “I like all kinds of crackers,” a callback to a very awkward staff dinner one evening. In struggling to make small talk, I told our then-publisher, “I like all kinds of crackers,” in a tone as dry as a cracker, successfully provoking a reaction from nearby Ben, who still quotes me back to myself now and then.
But like all good things, the era of having one of my best friends sit near me at work couldn’t last forever.
He and I were frequent lunch buddies, often after donating blood at the Red Cross. But something felt different the day in 2015 that he suggested we go to lunch.
Sure enough, Ben broke the news that he was leaving. Reader, you, like Ben, know me well if you guess that I cried at the news.
Once you’re out of your 20s, it’s hard to make friends you click with the way Ben and I did. It had been fun while it lasted. We had nine good years of laughs and irreverence on the most fun and coveted beats in journalism. Few of the talented people who have passed through The Bulletin newsroom have been lifers. Like so many of them, Ben moved on to communications work.
We still went to bloodlettings and occasional lunches together, like in the old days, and met up at the occasional New Pornographers or Vampire Weekend show. We also maintained our tradition of sending short videos of ourselves lip-synching to songs (usually Peter Cetera) in grocery stores.
In 2020, the chaos of COVID-19 presented an opportunity to bring Ben back, this time as a freelancer. Reading his prose remains a highlight of my workweek. You can tell he has fun writing even a brief of a few paragraphs, and I still learn about new music and bands from Ben. We also have more occasions to meet for lunch and IM each other thanks to our work relationship.
No, it’s not the same as when we could sit and play catch with the Spider-Man promotional football that now sits deflated in my work desk, but it still feels good to laugh.