Some People Stay With You: Remembering Chad Gilbert

Riot + Reverie

Sep 20

4 min read

Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory points toward the camera while performing onstage under blue lights.

There are people you know for years who somehow disappear into the blur. And then there are people you meet once, maybe twice, who stay with you for decades.

Chad Gilbert was one of those people.

I don't remember what we talked about.

That's the strange part.

I remember the hotel room. I remember Chad being tired after the show but still genuinely excited about the set. I remember how easy he was to talk to, how completely absent any rock-star bullshit seemed to be. New Found Glory was becoming one of the biggest bands in the scene, but sitting there with him, you wouldn't have known it.

Mostly, I remember his warmth.

My friend Steve Hoy has a word for people like that. He says they have "spark." It's difficult to explain, but you know it when you're around someone who has it. There's a light there. Something that makes you remember how they made a room feel long after you've forgotten what was said.

More than 23 years later, that's what I remember about Chad.

New Found Glory had already been woven into my life by the time I met him.

I'd found the band through Nothing Gold Can Stay in 1999. I was 23, freshly out of art school and living above an Indian restaurant in Cabbagetown in Toronto. I spent more nights in clubs than I did at home. There was usually a camera in my hand. I photographed bands constantly.

It was that particular stretch of young adulthood when your entire world can somehow fit inside a record collection, a handful of friends and whatever club you're going to that night.

Music wasn't something happening around my life. It was my life.

New Found Glory belonged to that time.

A young Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory performs at a microphone with his guitar.

By the time I found myself at MuchMusic's Flake n' Bake at Blue Mountain in March 2003, things had changed considerably for them. Sticks and Stones had arrived the previous summer, "My Friends Over You" was everywhere, and the scrappy Florida punk band I'd discovered a few years earlier was suddenly playing on an entirely different level.

That makes what I remember about Chad even more striking.

There was no performance once the performance was over.

After the show, a group of us ended up hanging out in a hotel room. Chad was visibly tired, understandably so, but he was still talking about the set with the enthusiasm of somebody who genuinely loved what he'd just done. He was friendly. Present. Completely without pretense.

Eventually his phone rang.

He took the call, and I quietly let myself out, figuring the guy had earned the chance to come down from the night without another person hanging around.

That's it.

No profound conversation. No great piece of rock-and-roll mythology. I didn't know Chad Gilbert, and I'm not going to pretend that I did.

Our paths crossed only briefly.

Somehow, the impression lasted.

I crossed paths with New Found Glory again not long afterward, when friends of mine in The Getaway opened the band's Arrow Hall date outside Toronto. There are little fragments from that period that have somehow survived intact in my head. Talking with Jordan Pundik about Sugar and how fucking good Bob Mould is. Talking with Ian Grushka about photography. Riding back toward Toronto with the band.

New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert performs live onstage with a black Les Paul guitar.

The kind of memories that probably seemed completely ordinary while they were happening.

Then twenty-three years go by.

Lives get built. People get married. Kids are born. Careers change. Clubs close. Bands break up and reunite. Records you bought when you were 23 somehow become anniversary editions.

And every once in a while, somebody from that part of your life is suddenly gone.

When news came that Chad had died, I thought about that hotel room.

I'd watched from a distance as he publicly navigated years of cancer treatment, surgeries and setbacks while continuing to talk about his family, his band and the life he was still determined to live. There was something painfully familiar in it.

That spark.

The same quality I'd noticed in a tired guitarist sitting in a hotel room after a show in Ontario, Canada was still there more than two decades later.

Maybe that's why his death has landed so hard across this community.

New Found Glory helped build a corner of punk that became home to an enormous number of people. Chad's fingerprints are all over it: in the records, the riffs, the bands he produced and championed, and in generations of kids who heard a New Found Glory song and suddenly wanted to start a band of their own.

Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory jumps into the air while playing guitar during a live performance.

But there are plenty of great musicians.

What people seem to be mourning is the person.

I can only speak to a tiny fraction of that person. A couple of encounters more than two decades ago.

But sometimes a fraction is enough to recognize something.

I was 23 when New Found Glory entered my life. I'm 50 now. There are records from those years I can put on and immediately remember the apartment above the Indian restaurant, the camera around my neck, the clubs, the friends, the feeling that music might actually be enough to build an entire life around.

Maybe in some ways, it was.

And somewhere inside those memories is Chad Gilbert, tired after a show, still excited to talk about playing music.