Ever since my grandmother died when I was a teenager, I've held the unyielding belief that people have one specific purpose in life. (Ugh. I know no matter how I phrase this, it's going to come off New Agey....) I believe people are put on this planet to teach certain lessons, and when their missions (for lack of a more eloquent term) are finished, they are called back to wherever it is they come from. Sometimes these lessons take many decades to unfold, and--as in the case of Grandma, a brilliant, frustrated writer with no outlet save for a lifetime of letters and journals--people's deaths, as well as their lives, are the lessons to be learned. Some lives stand as tales of caution. Others reveal that there is much evil in the world, and that no one is allowed to make stupid decisions, however innocent or malicious, without suffering awful consequences.
Still other people, like Takino, are delivered here to remind us that believing in something and seeing it through is an important (perhaps the most important) task. I was fretting over something the other day when a friend told me simply that nothing that is very good comes easy. In fact, he said he wished he could have those exact words tattooed backward across his forehead so that in times of doubt or despair he could look at himself in the mirror and remember. It must have been a scary prospect for Takino, at the time an employee of Sub Pop, to take a band he'd heard who were out of Couer d'Alene, Idaho, and create a label of his own to put them on--just as it must have been scary for his closest friends to put together a public memorial service for him years later during a time when everyone was hurting and hiding. That band, Built to Spill, flourishes and flowers to this day, as do the rest of the bands or artists Takino put out on Up Records. Some, who went on to other, more prominent labels--as in the case of both Built to Spill and Modest Mouse--have found fortune, or at least some amount of fame, by taking their own leaps of faith, a skill that was probably taught to them in part by Takino's own example, and, more precisely, his faith in music. Bands like 764-HERO have used their associations with Up to allow themselves the luxury of changing and expanding upon a formula that was already perfect from the beginning, and with each record and song comes a new, different kind of perfect that stays as true to its creators as it does exciting to its fans. Some artists, like Mike Johnson, were given the space, the outlet, to sing what their hearts needed in order to move to happier times. Takino made his choices wisely, for the good of everyone who came into contact with him, whether they realize that now or years from now.
His friends and family gathered at Capitol Hill's Scottish Rite Temple on a cold afternoon, Sunday, October 22 to be exact, weeping openly and with abandon in front of their closest friends and perfect strangers. They told stories of friendship and love, and comforted one another. All of it, just like Up Records, was a celebration of goodness, as well as a reminder to all that taking a leap of faith isn't ever easy, but a necessity just the same.
