So I got a text message the other day, that Andy Beach died. And it hit me really hard. I dont think that anyone called him Andy, though. He was known nearly universally as 'Beach', and he was one of the good old class of 2001. He wasn't in the SHS yearbook (I actually had to double check this - I swore he was), and he wasn't on facebook or myspace (as far as I knew..), so in recent years, from my perspective he kind of went off the grid.
I met him in middle school in shrewsbury. Back when he was
also the red headed kid who wore metallica shirts all the time. I always thought he had the goddamn best sense of music. He also wore those badass metal shirts. Pantara, Rage, Deftones.. I even sold him a Metallica shirt one time - the unforgiven one with the doomed earth on the back. But it wasn't just metal; I remember listening to a lot of classic rock - Hendrix and Pink Floyd.... He even had one of those huge 'Stairway to Heaven' posters in his room - the kind that they sold at Newbury Comics that sold for thirty bucks in the huge metal frames. Except for some reason, he hung it upside down.
That was back when I carried a video camera around all the time. Just for filming the times when we would bullshit around but also when we would do class projects. One for a science class on lightning, and the other on the dangers of alcohol for Mr. Marchands health class. Beach had a lot of legos. His family had this sun porch and there was this entire lego town that took up a huge portion of the floor - complete with roads and even a church. We used this in our videos for school - trying to learn the 'art' of stop motion video that either ended up with a lego guy in a car accident, or, in the lightning video, firing hairspray into a lighter to simulate the explosion of the lego oil tanker as a bolt of lightning just so happened to strike the base. (we made up that this happened in real life, but presented it as fact in the video).
I remember that Beach got me into the movie 'The Crow'. I cant even tell you how many times ive seen that movie.
I also remember that time we got high and ordered pizza - there was a new simpsons that night - the one where Homer becomes a boxer, which premiered November 10, 1996.
Beach had an iguana named 'Quincy', named after Jason Fox's iguana in the comic strip 'Foxtrot'
He was probably the first person to teach me: guitar + distortion pedal = anything you play sounds good.
He was a good kid, and we shared a lot of the same friends. He got ragged on a lot but it was all part of the dynamic. Like all bass players experience. Because he played bass in a band. This band was 'Panic'. Beach didnt own a bass, so he just took his guitar and strung it with bass strings. Again, we were all in middle school so what the hell did it matter?
During high school me and Beach lost touch. I remember it happening really really fast. I don't think it was a falling out.. it was likely because we fell into different crowds.
After high school, I saw him in 2006 at a party in Shrewsbury. It was actually kind of a spectacle to see him, and I took a picture of the tattoo on his arm - the cover of the Beatles 'Revolver' - with my cell phone camera.
The last time I saw him was in 2007 - at a tattoo convention in Worcester. It was really brief, some small talk about what was going on in our lives, and that was pretty much it.
