The last show ended with the band literally dismantling the stage, and standing on each other’s shoulders.  The drum kit was in its component pieces, passed around the stage, through numerous sweaty hands.  The noise was thunderous.  The crowd was cacophonous.  And then the whole thing was over.  The show.  The band.  The dream.

There were only a few hundred people at that final show, played on the sprawling back patio of a slightly hippie coffee shop in a Texas college town.  The band had played bigger shows, but their headlining gigs usually topped out around that number.  Among the less conservative students at the university, they were a phenomenon, a slice of Austin in their Baptist burg, a real live rock band with professional CDs and everything.

The local shows were better attended than any others.  The fans sang the harmonies while the singer flailed and the guitars shrieked.  They knew these songs so well, were so tight by the eighth year of their existence, that they could’ve played them in their sleep.  The song with the hooky, guitar-driven chorus was getting long in the tooth in the band’s mind, and they rarely played it any more, but it drew the biggest crowd reaction when they did.

You don’t know what band I’m talking about, but you’ve heard this band.  Well, maybe not this band, but one like it.  Maybe they were from your hometown.  Maybe you got into them in college.  Perhaps they provided the soundtrack for your first untethered years. They had meaning to you, this gem you’d discovered.  And then it was over.  Real life intervened, for them and for you.

For every rock n’ roll glory story, there are hundreds more like this one.  The local band made almost good.  Those who saw and heard them knew, knew that they were destined for greater things, but those Greater Things found other suitors instead.

The band I loved, whose last show I attended a couple years ago, I’m convinced were victims of timing.  Their sound wasn’t right for the moment.  I saw their second show ever in 2002, and innumerable ones thereafter until late 2008.  During that window of music history, they didn’t have a place.  In the late 90’s and earlier 00’s they would’ve been hailed alongside The Dismemberment Plan and Swervedriver, but a few short years later they were swamped by bedroom folk and Joy Division revivalists.  They were post-Seattle and pre-Williamsburg, and so found their home where they started, in central Texas.

They were always hard to classify.  Not spacey enough to be prog rock, too nice to be punk.  The songs were too free form to be pop, but formal and fast to be post-rock.  They were too out there to be emo, but much too sincere not to be.  Like so many bands after “OK Computer,” they could easily have worn the label of Radiohead wannabes.  They just rocked, and felt, and most of all, performed.

Their songs would soar and sweep in a way built for arenas, but that rattled and practically deafened in the coffee shops and tiny punk clubs that they normally played.  All the band members but the bassist played violently, as though exorcising each note or beat from their own bodies, by way of the instruments. (The sedate bassist was the band’s press spokesman, naturally.)  The live shows built their reputation, but they struggled to harness that energy in the studio.  The first album is flat and echo-y, and only the knowledge of how it works live provides the key to unlock its promise.  The second album did better, but only the post-mortem EP really got the essence right.

But it was too late.  Real life caught up.  The members married, had kids, started careers.  The little college band that could didn’t survive in the post-college world.  The positive mentions in Relevant and Alternative Press weren’t enough to secure a record deal, and $8 shows don’t put food on the table or pay off the student loans.  The choice had to be made between toil and stability, and the rent won out.

So it goes across the country.  As many bands as there are at this moment, struggling to find their place in the spotlight, the avenues for making the leap are still limited.  The kingmakers may have changed – a positive Pitchfork review carries the same weight a Rolling Stone rave once did – but the money spent by the public on music is tighter, and they just don’t really make stadium bands anymore.

It doesn’t rob any of the joy from these bands.  The best among them know their ceiling.  Every night, they play their greatest hits, getting a crowd reaction that touring bands who travel halfway across the country to play in front of a bored barroom would kill for.  It’s not a hollow dream; those of us without any musical talent would love to have even five minutes of a crowd eating out of our hand like that.  Even if it’s not on stage, we would love to have that many people recognize that we’re good at something.

Even after they moved on, they couldn’t resist.  They played a reunion show last year, and this year released an EP of final studio recordings.  The pull was too strong.  Once you’re a rock star, even in a small way, your regular job kind of pales, doesn’t it? The bar for success is set wherever you like, and they didn’t need to be a blog band phenomenon or a hipster champion to make a limited-time-only comeback.

I’m disconnected now from the close-knit little music scene that fostered several bands I fell in love with in the years after I graduated from college and moved back to my hometown.  I found this band by showing up to a show at a soon-defunct dive bar in a shady part of town, but now I find out about bands through blogs and Twitter.

It’s not worthwhile to play the futures market with the commodity of Cool; it’s for us to proselytize for them, hoping that by sheer force of will we can put them over the hump to stardom.  It’s for you to drag friends to that shady dive to see them play, then buy a t-shirt and chat with the band afterward.  Many artists can survive in obscurity, but few can live without the encouragement that comes from knowing they’ve been seen and heard.

Bands like this are still out there.  Music is an arbiter of cool, but sometimes it’s more important to listen to the music that needs listeners than the music that everyone listens to.  It’s not about snobbery, or who heard them first, it’s about being the crowd that encourages; any night could be their last show.  The men and women in the band on stage could end up playing packed arenas or being your kids’ favorite teacher.  Invest in those moments, and let music be the uniter of crowds and expression of the soul that it was designed to be.