The Sidekicks’ Runners in the Nerved World is 10 Years Old. I Miss the Sidekicks So Much.

On March 17th, 2019, I found myself at Mahall’s in Lakewood, Ohio, in the company of a white jumpsuit-clad Steve Ciolek strumming his acoustic guitar alone on a stage in a room not yet ruined by a new, bubblegum-colored, Red Room-touched renovation—back when it was just a congested, dank space in a two-floor bowling alley. His band, the Sidekicks, had put out their fifth studio album, Happiness Hours, 10 months earlier, but no one knew it’d be their last. Ciolek was doing a solo run as the opener on a Slaughter Beach, Dog tour, road-testing some tracks (“Good Ghost” and “Big Songbirds Don’t Cry”) that would end up on his eventual solo debut (as superviolet), Infinite Spring, in 2023.

It’s fascinating, looking back on a night like that, where I swayed to Ciolek singing, “Love is just a phrase that I invented somewhere around Summit Avenue,” with Alexia, a girl I loved so hard we wound up moving within spitting distance of Summit together barely 16 months later. My old roommate Chase was there, with their girlfriend Taylor, whom I cared for deeply, too. We all cared so much about each other, but I don’t talk to any of them anymore. The Sidekicks don’t make music together anymore, either, although Matt Climer, Toby Reif and Ryan Starinksy did show up on Infinite Spring. While I still believe that “Twin’s Twist” is one of the catchiest rock songs of all time, its lyrics—“Kissing other people and trying not to fall in love / Dancing in the darkness, but in the daytime it’s just a shrug / The lemon rind can reek in the summer heat / But then seems so sweet later on”—feel like pieces of my own past I can’t get back, when I force myself to remember all who’ve departed from my life.

But when I still lived in Columbus, I used to run into Ciolek sometimes, be it at a Two Dollar Radio poetry reading on the east side, or during a Ratboys show at the Rumba Cafe, or on the Goodale Park sidewalks in the runoff of an arts district ruined by forgettable restaurants, bad cops and too-expensive stores. As a teenager, the Sidekicks were a band that represented the sonic identity of Cleveland, the closest city I could call my own, living up to their self-imposed “Greatest Band Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in America” moniker. As an adult, Ciolek became my neighbor, a barely-part-time musician working towards a master’s degree in physiotherapy at Ohio State. I was trying my best to detach from my quasi-coastal, Northeast Ohio roots and embrace my then-Middle American, college-town present. Perhaps it was divine intervention that such a consequential band in my life would exist in both places, as well, in this hotbed of celebrity birthplaces and sources for invention.

I found out about the Sidekicks in 2015, around the time Runners in the Nerved World came out, because they were touring with Cayetana, whom I worshipped. “The Kid Who Broke His Wrist” re-arranged my atoms upon my collapsing into its melody; I listen to “Deer” now and can hear just how it may have inspired bands I fell in love with during the Sidekicks’ absence in early 2020s, like Vundabar. The Sidekicks were a DIY phenomenon, at least to me—a skeleton key into an indie scene I lived too far away from to truly feel connected to, working in communion with other Ohio bands that spanned from the Cuyahoga to the Scioto, like Saintseneca, Tin Armor, Runaway Brother and Delay. They played shows with all of my favorite bands—AJJ, Tigers Jaw, Modern Baseball, Hop Along, The Menzingers—and I’d bet that few acts have spent more time on the road with Jeff Rosenstock than the Sidekicks, having done tours with Bomb the Music Industry! (they played at the Sidekicks’ house in 2007, which they called the Soggy Dog) and Rosenstock’s solo getup in their decade-ish existence. They made splashes on bills with aughts favorites Against Me! and the Gaslight Anthem, too, becoming the proverbial “your favorite artist’s favorite artist” band long before Chappell Roan came around.

The Sidekicks formed in the late 2000s, when Ciolek and Climer were scraping by while playing Rancid covers at house shows on weekends. As Ciolek told me nearly two years ago, the band was never supposed to be a forever thing. But they stuck around for more than 10 years and became a Midwestern band making music for the Midwestern life I was born into—until their 2020 breakup got announced in 2022. Unlike the National, an “Ohio band” that abandoned Cincinnati for Brooklyn before getting famous, or the sell-out Black Keys, who’ve spent the last decade honing their Joe Rogan sympathies, bumping uglies with Crypto losers and haven’t made a good record since they still lived in Akron, the Sidekicks were a band that broke away from their local fame but never forgot to come home. As I get older and watch DIY spaces across the country expire, I remember how much Ciolek and his bandmates loved Ohio and I remember just how fleeting a truth like that has become.

I was never a scene kid, but I knew scene kids—teenagers like Lee who came from poor folk but managed to bum rides 40 minutes north to see shows, or teenagers like Dakota, who were three or four years my senior and played in straight-edge bands I thought were hot shit. My parents were too strict on me; I didn’t go to my first concert alone until I went to Warped Tour with some friends in 2015. Then I heard Runners in the Nerved World and decided I’d never miss a Sidekicks show in Cleveland. And then I never saw the Sidekicks do a full-band show, so their KEXP session became my Rust Never Sleeps. But they were still a mouthpiece, if not for some scene-specific community then for me and my relationship to live music in Ohio. But nobody I knew cared much for the Sidekicks. Maybe they saw Ciolek and his band as just another local opening act getting in the way of the headliner they paid to see.

When I was still living in Columbus, I would chat with folks at small-time gigs in venues I always claimed to hate but now miss too much, and they’d tell me all about local bands I’d never heard of, and sometimes I’d forget to catalog their names and the bands’. Once upon a time I believed Runaway Brother were the next guys up after seeing them open three or four consecutive shows for bands they sounded nothing like in Cleveland in the summer of 2017. Seeing Left Out open for Ciolek’s first superviolet show at the Rumba Cafe in 2023, I caught myself nodding in agreement with all of their songs, thinking, “They’re for real.” I saved their album to my Apple Music library, in the same way I used to keep a notes app of local acts I really liked, memorializing Archie and the Bunkers, Heart Attack Man, Dark Spring and the Sonder Bombs in my phone forever.