For Christmas I received a device which will allow me to convert hours of old 8 mm tape to grainy, slightly out-of-sync video, archive it on an external hard drive, and then forget it forever.

The new decade, coupled with my occasionally uncomfortable revisiting of this old footage, reminds me that while a monumental leap occurs between a person’s second and third decade of life—teenagers graduate from high school, gain weight, develop various bad habits, get jobs, make mistakes they hope aren’t irreversible—the transition that occurs over the course of one’s twenties and early thirties is more subtle but no less striking: the people in these old videos are committing various ill-advised acts of debauchery and naivete, but have survived, flourished, started families, and cultivated new lives that elaborate on but never entirely supplant their old hedonistic ones.

As a recovering nostalgia addict, I am careful never to dwell or wallow for too long in the past. Especially now that ten years ago doesn’t feel as deep in the past as it used to, I have to be careful about ascribing too strong a negative or positive quality to it. It just was. These videos from that era provide the most objective viewpoint I’ll ever have, and the subjective one is there if you’re looking for it: I was young, cocky, and a little pudgier than I am now. I had potential. I was done with school but still had a lot of growing up to do. I could play the drums and I could write and I had no idea what to do about it.

But I was in a band, which played a lot of shows around the Midwest for a while in the late nineties and early naughties. Out of all the footage I salvage from my whiny little 8 mm camera, most of it won’t, and shouldn’t, be made public. But there are a few clips, mostly musical, that are worth putting out there, and might be of interest to the people in them and to those old friends with new lives.

This is one of them. One of the tightest shows we ever played was to about twelve people at Gabe’s (now the Picador) in Iowa City. Maybe the best thing about this video is that Phil has no idea what’s going on behind him.

Speed of Sauce, “Feels Like Home” (Gabe’s, Iowa City, November 2000)

This next one is “Reminder,” prefaced by one of our notorious snippets. Despite the fact that we were clowning quite a bit and flubbed some notes, this is probably my favorite performance of this song.

Speed of Sauce, “Reminder” (Gabe’s, Iowa City, November 2000)