THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN Frontman Looks Back On 9/11

Today (Sunday, September 11) marks the 10th anniversary of the horrific terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that brought down the Twin Towers, killed 3,000 people and forever changed both the future of the United States and the course of history.

THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN frontman Greg Puciato has posted the following message on his official web site:

"So strange. A full decade. I remember my friend and our manager at the time Tom Apostolopoulos calling me and telling me to 'wake the fuck up now and turn on the television.' I was supposed to drive up to Ben's [Weinman, guitar] house that day, so that we could play CMJ festival the next day in New York, in what was going to be my first show with THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN. Tom had a habit of calling me and waking me up in whatever offensive manner that he found to be the most hilarious, so really I wasn't expecting anything serious. I asked him what channel, and he responded with 'it doesn't fucking matter, dude,' which immediately made me take him a little more seriously this time. Still, I assumed that at the most someone famous had died, but I never expected what I was about to see.

"I turned on the television and in immediately faded the image of one of the World Trade Center towers on fire, Tom narrating through my shitty Nokia phone that a plane had hit it, and instantly my first thought was that some asshole with a private plane had lost control of it, perhaps had a heart attack and crashed. something to that effect. That thought had barely finished going through my head when the second plane went through the other tower. Our immediate simultaneous, 'HOLY SHIT' was followed by a stretch of hand-over-mouth silence, and an immediate fear, a fear which would continue to rise throughout the morning, particularly with my close proximity to Washington, D.C.

"Our show was cancelled and rescheduled for a few weeks later (a show, tellingly enough, that I remember far less clearly than that phone call),but the lives of the people lost that day and the innocence, naivety, and carefree attitude that our country possessed would be gone forever. Ten years later, years that have included the Iraq war, a worldwide financial meltdown, Hurricane Katrina, a U.S. housing market collapse, massive unemployment, debt spiraling out of control, the war in Afghanistan, and now almost three nearly worthless presidential terms, it's hard to believe that at that time our most recent pressing concerns as a nation were things like whether Clinton had gotten a blowjob from his intern, whether all of our computers and appliances would stop working when the year 2000 came, or whether paper votes had been miscounted.

"There are a million related ideas or tangents we could go on related to 9-11, nearly all worthy of way more discussion than for which there is even enough time in the world. None of those discussions would change the fact that 9-11 was our generation's Kennedy assassination, in that there hasn't been since, nor was there before, a single isolated event that's happened in my lifetime that just about EVERYONE my age can all relate to by way of being able to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of it. This post has no large agenda, no message, no patriotic rally call and no skeptical conspiracy theory pushing criticism. I just wanted to share what I was doing at that instant on that day, and if anything, by doing so, contribute my small insignificant memory to the collective massive significance of the moment."