Benjamin Kramer on Miles
That's me on stage in the teal shirt looking at his phone in the photo before the Collaboration section. I had met Miles and Akron/Family a year earlier at Kohoutek, the Pitzer College music fest (thank you JP & Jared, for making it happen). I was helping run the show, and I was so bummed to have missed the set. We'd run into each other again that summer, then again in the fall, and then there in the picture, closing out the 2nd stage (I think?) of Mess With Texas, an "unofficial" festival during SXSW. I again helped run the show, and Miles was stoked that I'd turned my college passion into some work. Sometime shortly after the photo was taken, Miles yelled at me: "Kramer, everything's going wrong!" What is? "You're missing the show again!" I put the phone away and took another turn holding the flag.
Our paths crossed a dozen times or more in the years afterward. Miles would give me fun-grief for missing the show, or the phone, or whatever. I'd respond with some ridiculous claim (sitting on the back bumper of a taco truck in LA, Miles started running down the street when I asked if he'd subconsciously lifted the lyric "you and I and a flame make three" from Eagle Eye Cherry's "Save Tonight"). We were not friends, but whenever we were in the same place, we were old buddies. I was amazed at his memory where mine was terribly faulty, but I do recall a very good Jewish-grandmother voice asserting that my protestations of lack of Jewdom didn't matter, I needed to eat more regardless, I was all skin and bones, skin and bones.
I didn't have a way of getting in touch with Miles. I always kinda trusted we'd cross paths again and again because that's what had been happening for over a decade. I can't pretend that the loss of that feeling doesn't make me terribly sad, not that my grief is infinitesimal in contrast to so many others. I just know that there are so many more people like me; there must be–everything I see indicates that Miles stuck with people the way he stuck with me–and together, our pain is immense. Miles was a treasure. What he left for us is a treasure. He will be so terribly missed.
