I don’t know what to say. I loved this man. It doesn’t seem real.
I never saw anyone work harder in my life and I never saw anyone more effortless. One afternoon we spent together in Austin… it was a Sunday three years ago, in November after Jayhawks-Longhorns… he was in the office that morning. We met at Yellow Jacket the bar and he invited then drove me to his dad’s house and I had dinner with his family. His dad is a luthier and Wade plays flawless piano and his son ran to the drums right away when we got inside and pounded on them… he was 14 months old? His daughter is one of those immediately aware, very very smart and independent children... an amazing force of a kid. He would send us videos… Then Wade dropped me off at YJ and then he made his way back to the office. There was cereal in the front seat of his car, cereal in a bowl, two cheerios and milk in the bowl, by the passenger’s feet. And a spoon on the floor. He dropped me off at YJ and then went back to work, 11 PM on a Sunday.
He had worked for a big Austin firm, the one that built the state is what I heard, Brown and Root type, one of a handful of young lawyers there without double Ivy League degrees. Wade had to hit an insane number of billable hours a week and he did. He was doing carpentry and luthiering after college and before law school in Houston… He then clerked for a Texas Supreme Court judge after law school…
My friend Clif said Wade would go immediately to the guitar whenever he entered a room with one… Wade played piano better than anyone I knew and guitar better than anyone anyone knew, really. He played guitar in Iron Age… that band, his band, their music will last forever or longer than that… There is music he wrote which is the music that instrument was built for. Its almost highest purpose. And there were other musical projects too, I don’t know the extent of their publicity. Strongblood, Drop Out, My Luck, Mammoth Grinder. They all were special. How I met Wade, how we all did… music you grow out of, real music, both, whatever… Records last, that’s why they’re called records…
Iron Age practiced about daily last summer or the summer before. They improved which is not a bet I would have taken a decade ago; who improves on greatness? From the start… they walked among us but were different… it was exciting when they just played music but they would just grow... Wade’s brother Jared played drums and so it was all forged, in the specific sense, and special… There are so many stories about Wade… many of them involve fights and close calls… one of them is a mutual friend being made to eat the glass from a mirror… another is Frank Ocean taking a private plane on the night he was nominated for a dozen Grammys to see Iron Age play a reunion in Austin, and he stagedove… there is the story about the dozens of bikers in Clearwater… there is one with him charging a gun in Alabama to save another friend’s life… they would both go on to be lawyers… there is Power Trip, who did what they did so beautifully in so many ways because of Iron Age… a couple months later I was in Austin again and Wade and I got in a fast fight with someone who I remember… or rather feel… had a hand tattoo of the Metallica logo… down his whole arm… outside Hotel Vegas… he mouthed off to Wade, tried swinging at him and then fell on himself. Wade didn’t move… It was over in a split-second… Wade left right then, “because I’m a lawyer with kids… I don’t need this shit.” I left too…
The night Iron Age played the first time I saw them 15 years ago they covered an Icemen song, who were probably the slowest hard-core band there ever was, and the most spare…. What jumped out is how still Wade stood when he played guitar. If he moved he swayed, from his base, like an oak or something, in a storm, only slightly, with force…. his eyes were closed the whole time, and it all looked as fluid, effortless and easy as Michael Jordan dribbling a basketball or fingers tapping on a desk… but of course it took a lot to get there… guitars don’t move and Wade didn’t either... Wade loved NBA basketball and would text me photos of his new Concord Jordans or Flight 96s and kept up with their release dates much better than I did… he had perfect posture... he never wore a shirt indoors… he loved Oxblood and 6ix9ine and Condemned 84 and Felt (the 70s band) and George Jones and George Strait and Pete Rock… his kid went to sleep in his big white Mortuary Drape shirt… Wade was a very direct person… The only other musician I’ve seen stand as still as Wade while they perform is Omar S… no one else who is artistic stands that still; it’s only athletes who do that.
I met Wade in 2005 I think. He stayed at my parents’ house in 2007 and him and Jason worked out on my dad’s Nautilus machine while my other friend Matt took a two-hour shower. I had never met anyone from Texas before Wade… the world is built on love…
Wade was an amazing friend. He was so funny and so talented and painfully intelligent and a beautiful, handsome man. The music he made and wrote felt like the backdrop for a whole generation, and then a couple generations after that. I loved him.
Goodbye Wade.
Wade Allison
Wade was a rare beautiful soul. I remember in the third or fourth grade he walked up to our old beat up piano in music class and started playing classical music like Beethoven and Mozart effortlessly. He had a huge heart with a passion for music. He was talented in everything he done and everything he done was done very well. RIP Wade
Thank you for writing this, so beautiful 🙏 Wade was my cousin, but him and I grew up as brother and sister. He was my ultimate love and life partner, and I’m beyond heartbroken. I love your stories that you shared, thank you so much. And that pic, he always wanted to be a fighter falcon pilot when he was little. Beautiful.