Our friend Bradley R. Weissenberger, stalwart of the PRF, drummer of rock band .22, took his own life sometime in the last few days. I am still working on what I think about it, though I haven't stopped thinking about it. Brad paid a surprise visit to the studio last week, something he had done many times. it was short, light and friendly, but now it seems ominous, as though he was making a farewell tour. As sad as this moment is, I am framing my thoughts around loving Brad, how much I enjoyed seeing him, talking to him, listening to him, reading what he wrote and thinking about his ideas.

Brad was a gifted drummer and even better music fan, and I loved spending time in his company. I met Brad when his band .22 came to record at the basement home studio that preceded Electrical Audio, and have admired his drumming and his enthusiasm ever since. Brad was a regular at PRF events and shows of affiliated bands, and he thought nothing of driving hours or worse to catch a show. When Shellac played a show in Istanbul, Turkey, it happened to coincide with Brad's vacation there, and it was an oddly familiar normalizing moment in a strange and confusing city, literally byzantine, to see Brad stroll through the door and set up shop in the back of the venue there.

This thread can serve as a place for us to remember our times with him, the things he said and did and posted and played. Everybody who knew him will have something, I'll start with the Electrons.

The Electrons was an idea for a baseball team for all of us out-of-shape not-jocks who loved the game and hadn't played it in a while. Someone, I forget who but it easily could have been Bradley, found the Chicago Metropolitan Baseball Association, an unaffiliated league that had been running since 1927, and in the winter of 2002 figured out that if we raised the requisite fees we could put a team on the field every few days throughout the summer. And so the Winnemac Electrons were born. In the early going, the core of the Electrons lineup was Bradley's bandmates and friends, a few friends-of-friends and Electrical Audio staff, starting with John Novotny, Greg Norman, Russ Arbuthnot and me, but FM Intern8033 Andrew Mason was also our starting catcher prior to founding Groupon.

The Electrons coalesced around a few basic ideas. Being good at the game of baseball was nice, but not a prerequisite. Being a good hang was absolutely mandatory. No bitching, no jocksmanship, no hotdogging. We didn't have tryouts, we had hangouts. At the beginning of the season we'd meet at Winnemac park to limber up and learn the new guys' names, bat some balls around the infield, take some fly balls then head to the bar, whichever bar we'd decided would be our "sponsor," (I don't think they had a choice in the matter) and kill the rest of the evening. At the bar or the following morning the veterans would decide who made the team, generally based on who did the best at the bar, not at Winnemac field. I think somebody got cut for not tipping, One guy almost got cut for telling us to call him "Kodak," because in his words, "you'll remember the moment." We decided we could bust his balls about it for eternity and that was reason enough to have him.

Brad was only an Electron for our first couple of seasons, but more than any other person, Bradley personified the foundational idea of the Electrons. We're not here to kick anybody's ass, we're here to revel in each other and play whatever kind of baseball we can manage, as aging, out-of-shape heavy smokers, then get to the bar and kill the rest of the evening. I "played" several seasons for the Electrons, though not often in the field, and in 2005, I was 0:the season at the plate. Nobody cared. When I made it to a game, despite being a statistical drag on our win probability, if Bradley was designated manager, he would stick me in the lineup somewhere. The score was a formality. Win or lose, the bar filled with uniformed guys in good humor, the jukebox banged out classic rock and everybody remembered having fun for a few hours.

Brad moved away and over time, and as the old guys filtered out, the Electrons actually got good at the game of baseball, eventually winning the pennant a couple of times. It warms my heart that our little social experiment was fruitful in real baseball terms while retaining the personality of a weekly hang. There have been teams that did better at the game of baseball, but there has never been a better team than the Electrons, and Bradley helped dream it into being, manifesting the dude good hang idea behind it all.

Dude good hang was a kind of theme for all of Brad's endeavors. His band kept going despite physical distance and the general drag of aging and obligations because the reward for keeping it going was getting to hang with your guys and make music. Brad participated in the PRF because it was a kind of online good hang, with all the jostling, ball busting and backslapping of an in-person (brick-and mortar?) good hang, and a couple of times a year it would bloom into a for real PRF in-person good hang, at the BBQ or a night at Cals or Quenchers or a PRF outing to see the White Sox. In the meantime, Brad posted on the PRF with economy and insight, making the baseball conversations smarter and the rock conversations funnier.

One of his best ideas was an outgrowth of this thread. Whenever some awkward phrase, say "I did not expect to find a possum in the foyer..." appeared in a post, there was a high probability Brad would reply with "I would not go see this band Find a Possum." This example is not as funny as Brad's, sorry. FM Stackmatic dedicated an entire thread to having Brad rate fake band names, and eventually Brad devised a NCAA bracket-style tournament to find the best possible fake band name. Spoiler alert, the ultimate winner was Police Teeth, which beat such notables as Test Fuck, Practice Wife and Are You There God It's Me Danzig.

I loved Brad. He had been through a lot and his outward affect betrayed the struggle of containing it, but despite that he was always a pleasure to be around and his enthusiasm for the things that animated him, his band, baseball, the music of REM and Public Enemy, and particularly his love for his daughters, made him glow incandescently. I remember fondly being bathed in that light and it made me want to love the things I love with the same intensity. I miss him already and I'm sad he thought he had to go. I can't judge that, but I can remember Brad as I knew him, and cling to the friendship he added to the world.

(balloon emoji) Requiescat Bradley R Weissenberger.

He was the first person to formally introduce himself to me at the first PRF BBQ. It was fairly empty at that point and he walked right up to me for no particular reason and introduced himself. First and last name. Asked me where I was from. How was the music there?

Don't think i quite made the connection between the face and the PRF Forum member. So many new names and real names being thrown at me so fast but he made me feel a bit less nervous about being there.

I remember being a little bummed I didn't get to talk to him that much at the last PRF Camp out and thought "we'll catch up in Chicago"

For whatever reason the memory that keeps popping up is one of the last PRF BBQs where he was telling me about his neighbors. An older retired couple who he became friendly with and were almost like another set of grandparents to his kids and how they were coming through to Chicago and coming to the BBQ. He was very happy about that relationship and that they were coming. He introduced me to them when they arrived and it was all smiles and lots of Guppy and Kiki talk.

of all the funny and ridiculous memories...that one is stuck in my brain

Sorry for the double post, but want to have these words in the right spot.

---

I was so intimidated by Bradley at first.

Back in those early EA Forum days, when I was posting nonstop like a loudmouth and making friends with the people on the forum that had real life mutuals with me, Bradley was, like, a MAIN DUDE of that place. It feels ridiculous now, but he seemed to be part of an inner circle of confidently cool people steering the conversation. The adults in the room. I think it was Beth King who eventually introduced us at a bar...was it Cactus Club? Was it Quenchers? Shit, maybe it was the Mutiny. OUCHO Fest? I don't remember. But i remember that he was reserved, but warm. We made small talk and that was it.

A million text messages, collaborations, baseball games, and rock shows later, i have no idea why i was so intimidated by the guy. I mean, we're talking about the dude who dressed up as a pirate and sang "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" at the first PRFBBQ; the guy who ran around shirtless with a Horse head, hurricane-style, at Auktoberfyst at Klas.

He was the first person to find out that Dixie and I were dating. His exuberant "AMAZING!" after seeing Body Futures for the first time (our third show, at the first Thundersnow) meant the world to me and convinced me that we were on to something. God, I respected his opinion so much.

When we did the UNINTIMIDATED project, he messaged me to let me know that he and Jon and Jason had a band and that they wanted in. No, they didn't have a name yet. But they had an anti-Scott Walker song and they wanted in. Of course I had to say yes.

Fuck, you guys. Scott Walker outlived Bradley and it's NOT RIGHT.

Bradley missed our wedding in *hilarious* fashion. We had the proper ceremony and party, you see, and then we had a karaoke party at Cactus Club the weekend after. He was absolutely HONORED that we had invited him - sent me a message thanking me profusely for the invite, that being invited to the wedding of two such wonderful people made him feel like he was doing something right with his life. He was so excited to be at our ceremony. And then he promptly mixed up the dates. He thought the ceremony was the weekend of the karaoke party. He texted the next day PROFUSELY apologizing, using the words "abject, pants-shitting terror" to describe the feeling he had when he saw the photos start coming in on social media. We laughed and told him we loved him and that he should come to the karaoke party, which he did, of course.

We constantly texted about the Brewers and Packers and occasionally about whatever fucked-up bullshit nonsense was happening in Wisconsin politics. He loved Wisconsin so much -- all of the Midwest, really. He loved Iowa and Illinois and Michigan and gave them all his attention.

Last summer we went to see the Brewers face the White Sox at Miller Park (fuck you, American Family). Dixie and i were super nervous about attending a baseball game even with vaccines in us, but we wanted to spend time with Brad, and dammit, it was his favorite two teams, and we wanted to feel fucking normal, so we absolutely gutted it out. He was super chill and understanding of the situation the whole time, noting to me a few times that we could bounce any time it became too much. It never became too much. We felt right at home in the upper decks with our friend Brad. And i am impossibly grateful that we schemed to surprise Michelle Spack-Krutke with him that night, as she was celebrating her 50th birthday and had no idea he was in town.

He deleted his Facebook profile apparently, so i didn't realize until earlier this evening that the photo he took and posted of the three of us at the game may be lost now. I'm pretty upset about that.

My current profile picture is courtesy Brad. We were at the PRF Campout and i had joked with him in a text about how i wished there were photos of Robin Vos on the archery targets. The next morning he arrived with Guppy. "Meet me at the archery range. We have work to do."

Jesus, i'm broken over this.

Bradley, if the Brewers win the World Fucking Series or the Packers take the Super Bowl this year, i will raise a High Life in your name. You always made it damn clear how happy you were to have us in your life. I hope you understood how much you enriched ours. Goddammit.

Goddammit.

At a Thundersnow, I bought a bottle of super cheap rye at a Woodman's on our way up. It was an oversized bottle, one that you would find at Costco (or Woodman's, I guess hehe). The funny thing about that brand of rye was the the bottle made it look expensive and also, it tasted expensive. Anyway, the first night about half the bottle was used up and I remember putting it in my room. Later that night, we had a big party in my room and I woke up in my bed in the morning with no shirt on being snuggled by Jason A. After that party, I couldn't find the bottle. I figured everyone drank it all up at the party and whatever, it was a bottle of rye meant for sharing and caring.

So, the next day goes by. By evening, we're all getting nice and toasty on drinks and music and shitty Escanaba buffet food. I remember walking back into the hall where the music was happening and I got a tug on my elbow. I turn around, it's Wessenberger holding the bottle of rye, still at about half empty. He says something like, "I gotta apologize. I stole this rye from you. But I had one sip and realized it was really expensive by the taste, so I felt bad and thought I'd give it back to you." I laughed in his face, took the bottle.

"An expensive bottle like this, how much you think it was worth?" I asked.

"Gotta be like $50 or something," he said.

It was a $12 bottle of bottom of the barrel rye.

"Well, I got it to share with everyone," I said.

We poured ourselves some cheap-ass expensive sounding and tasting rye and enjoyed it together. I never told him it was the cheap stuff.

Adding to something I wrote in the other thread:

penningtron wrote: Thu Mar 31, 2022 7:41 am ..the one or two personal things I may have asked him were met with almost curt answers, which is fine. It was cool just having someone like that in your corner.

An example of this came to mind. I think on FB at some point he started a thread like 'What is the best song you've ever written? Here's mine' and it was a song credited to the Book-Burners called You Won't Hold My Hand When I Die. It was a melancholy acoustic guitar number recorded on a smart phone while a few of them were hanging out at Electrical Audio (which is a goofy thing to do when you're inside a pro studio, but made perfect sense if you were familiar with his 'just knock it out and move to the next thing' attitude).

I saw him a few months later and told him that song he posted was really good. Probably a bit caught off guard or maybe just shy, he responded something like "oh.. that thing recorded on my phone..". I didn't press it any further, because he already put it out there in the world and maybe that was as much as we were gonna get.

I can't seem to find it on Bandcamp (edit: thank you Sam for finding it) , but it does appear to be in Episode 5 of Protonic Reversal (along with an interview), which is probably archived in Spotify or iTunes.

Great, haunting song. Here it is.

offal wrote: Thu Mar 31, 2022 2:04 pm Great, haunting song. Here it is.

I remember this song well. So good. We'll miss you dearly, Brad.

I posted this in the general memorium thread but I'll repost it here:

I first met Brad at a show we played with .22 at Cal's back in 2005, before I lived in Chicago. We reconnected at the Drug Church BBQ, I see this guy coming up to me wearing a button-up shirt and khakis, straight up business casual attire in that 95 degree 100% humidity room, and introduces himself, we hit it off, then had that "oh yeah" moment that we'd already met 5 years earlier.

Any time on here or on FB when we were semi-unseriously yelling at each other about the right way to cut a pizza or whether ketchup can go on a hotdog or if a particular planet is stupid or whether wearing shorts and flip flops on stage is uncouth, as we are wont to do in these spaces, he would PM me and say "you know I'm joking here, we're still friends, right?"

I'm still in shock about this and have been breaking down on an hourly basis since I woke up. I can't make sense of it. All I can say is you are loved, the world is a better place with you around, and don't quit.

I never met the man, but was friends with him on FB and loved his input on mk1 of this place. His love for his daughters and the various activities he participated in was infectious.

In the end, he did what in that moment felt like the only correct course of action, whatever his motivation. That it wasn’t the only choice and in fact pretty much the worst choice is utterly horrible and I offer my sincerest condolences to those of you who knew him in person.

The world is worse today than it was yesterday.

Requiescat, BRW.

This is terrible. My condolences to all of you who knew him.