Your Band Sucks Part 2

School years have a particular rhythm, but the rhythm I moved to during my senior year had remarkably little to do with college. I lived from show to show. I went to my cla.s.ses, more or less. But mostly less, and when I did, I often stopped paying attention, hid behind my long hair, bent over my desk and started scrawling song t.i.tles and lyric fragments in the margins of my notebooks. I got a B+ on one final exam, and under my grade the professor wrote, "You seem to have done very well for someone who barely came to cla.s.s. Congratulations," and suggested that it might have been nice if I'd actually spoken up on those times I did show up. There were maybe ten students in that cla.s.s. It wasn't easy to hide and stay mute in such a setting, though somehow I managed.

But how could you bother with school or cla.s.ses if crate after crate of new records arrived at the radio station each day, and if you played in a band? I kept devouring fanzines. Now they contained reviews of Star Booty. The British music weeklies, back then surprisingly and annoyingly influential in Europe and even in America, loved the record and wrote, in their typically overheated prose, comments like "A great and necessary thing, every angst-ridden adolescent's crystal ball." (Uh-huh.) "b.i.t.c.h Magnet worry. Theirs is a seared, skinless sensibility, p.r.i.c.ked by anger, fear and self-reproach. b.i.t.c.h Magnet want back in." (I laughed then, but now think: pretty dead-on. For me, at least.) You learned fast that people heard much different things in your music than what you knew, or thought, was there. One guy in Germany compared Star Booty's horrifyingly bad guitar sound to Hendrix. More than one writer from Europe saw Ohio in our mailing address and imagined us as hulking, crazed, glue-sniffing rural American freaks. They clearly had no clue what kind of kids went to Oberlin.

We printed a thousand copies of Star Booty, which sold out almost immediately, and labels in America and Europe started calling and writing. Sooyoung and I paged through record contracts while sitting outside the bas.e.m.e.nt smoking lounge in the campus library. I ran up WOBC's phone bill, talking to one label in the Netherlands and another in London called s.h.i.+gaku. We eventually signed with s.h.i.+gaku, the European home of Moving Targets, the Replacements, and Live Skull, because they offered us a $2,500 advance for the European rights to our next alb.u.m. Though in true indie rock fas.h.i.+on, s.h.i.+gaku went bankrupt about a year later, without ever paying us a dime in royalties.

Orestes still lived in Boston with his girlfriend, but he was also seeing a woman at Oberlin, and it was nothing to get him to hop in his truck and drive twelve or fourteen hours to practice and play a party or a show. The good part about living seven hundred miles from him, as anyone who's gone through the honeymoon phase of a long-distance relations.h.i.+p knows, was that every meeting was a reunion and every occasion a genuine occasion, joyous and hilarious. The bad part was that we spent little time together, and the miles separating us nagged at me.

Sooyoung, meanwhile, was cranking out a new song every week or two, it seemed, each sounding huger than the last. (Many of them ended up on our second alb.u.m, Umber.) One fading, college-boy-angsty afternoon, on one of the last days of September, he turned up at my converted-attic rental-one that shouldn't have been an apartment at all, with too-low slanting ceilings and a kitchen jammed into a s.p.a.ce far too small-with the makings of "Americruiser," a slow and understated song with terse, spoken vocals that somehow captured all that I felt at that moment. It wasn't the vocals or the lyrics. It was everything taken together: the slow procession of the song, its loud, wordless chorus, as much what it hinted but held back as what it described. You spend so much time searching for music that names your unnameables-the hard stuff, the millions of shadings beyond "I love you" or "I hate you" or "I'm angry" or "I've been mistreated" or "I will give up everything I know for this moment of abandon" or "I'm scared but I don't know why"-and here was this guy at my school, in my band, nonchalantly reaching into some inaccessible recess of my brain. I remember thanking him-thanking him!-for capturing what I couldn't quite put into words.

That fall we also started playing "Motor," which eventually became the first song on Umber. Shortly after Sooyoung gave me a rough version of the song on ca.s.sette, a brand-new guitar slide materialized, taped to my mailbox at school. An honorarium for you, the note explained, in Sooyoung's neat, tight handwriting. He wanted me to use it during the intro. A brilliant idea, and I started smearing abstract slide guitar over Sooyoung's cras.h.i.+ng, distorted ba.s.s chords and Orestes's b.a.s.t.a.r.dized Dixieland snare rolls. Sometimes you know right away a song is a great leap forward, and "Motor" so exploded me with joy that for a while, whenever we played it live, excitement ran so far ahead of me that I often couldn't play it correctly. Sometimes I'd end up on the floor at its ending, pelvic-thrusting with each chord flourish, wondering afterward, Where did that come from? It made me want to jump high enough to bang my head through the ceiling. It made me want to run with it through a brick wall. It made me want to set my guitar on fire, and maybe myself, too.

We played weekend shows as often as possible-at clubs, not campus parties-and put together a mini-tour of the Northeast during fall break. None of us owned a vehicle big enough to haul all of us and our gear, so Sooyoung and I would throw our amps and my guitar and his ba.s.s into the backseat and trunk of my car, and Orestes would jam his drums into his Isuzu Trooper, and we'd meet at wherever we were playing. I craved all the rituals of being in a band, but so many were lost to us: no late-night drives together, no shared drama of arrival, no drowsy late-afternoon stretches of highway under a waning sun. Our distance meant that much of our communication took place during nighttime phone calls, or asides in the school library, never with the three of us together. I realized that any two of us could fas.h.i.+on a noose for the other, quietly and out of sight, without anyone needing to fake his body language and smile and be all No, what are you talking about? Everything's fine. Trios often devolve into two against one. I wondered if Orestes worried about that.

More often, though, I thrilled to the social set now opening up to us, a web of a.s.sociations and friends formed around this music, the bands you met and with whom you played shows. Names on the backs of records moved into your address book. Phone pals became real pals. In the summer I'd adored the "Craig Olive" single by Honor Role, another brainy and aggressive band from an unexpected place-Richmond, Virginia-that broke apart rock music and rea.s.sembled it in an interesting way. A few weeks later I was on the phone with their brilliant guitarist, Pen Rollings, setting up a show in Pittsburgh, barely able to believe my luck. I don't know if you could call it a movement, but all over America outcasts were finding one another with delight and relief even while many of us-myself included-still sometimes nursed a very high school fear of rejection. Justin Chearno, a guitarist and ba.s.sist who's pa.s.sed through a record store's worth of bands (including Unrest, Pitchblende, Turing Machine, and Panthers), neatly encapsulated that social anxiety: "I was like, 'G.o.d, I hope this crowd accepts me. Because if these people don't, then I'm f.u.c.ked.'" I knew exactly what he meant.

Anyone within fifty yards could see that the music and the excitement were leading me around by the glands, because I was not at all shy about showing how hopped-up it made me. Nor could I have hidden it if I tried. (To steal a line from Hunter S. Thompson, my nerves were pretty close to the surface and everything registered.) But Sooyoung and Orestes were as reserved as I was hyper. Sooyoung, an unusually expressionless front man, preferred recording to performing. While Orestes loved playing in any context, he despised clubs and wasn't much charmed by those who congregated within them. The one of us who worked hardest onstage, he especially hated the fog of secondhand smoke in which bands invariably performed. Before shows I bounced around the club, chatting up musicians and fans and new friends, while Orestes sat dead-eyed and bored backstage, if there even was a backstage, clutching his sticks, clearly uncomfortable, refusing any booze until after the show, eventually stirring to warm up with some fundamentals, the basic movements drummers drill as calisthenics. Neither he nor Sooyoung had much patience with the schmoozers who worked for labels, and since it appeared I knew how to talk to them, I generally drew the short straw and dealt with them. But I didn't mind. I wanted to know everyone.

We played a bunch of shows with Bastro, the band formed by Squirrel Bait's guitarist David Grubbs and-ill advisedly-a drum machine, but then Grubbs and ba.s.sist Clark Johnson recruited a friend of ours at Oberlin named John McEntire to play drums, and they got really great. Complicated, super smart, oddly chorded and in odd meters, played at blinding speed-what Grubbs did with his bizarrely tuned metallic-pink Tele was unlike anything else I'd heard before, or, for that matter, have heard since. We played together just after we both released our first records, and our shows routinely drew twenty-five people, but each time I saw them I thought, Christ, this is one of the best bands in the world, and no one knows it. The way they-forgive the tired term-rocked, without having the slightest thing to do with "rock." How they provided a purely visceral rush while still being so musically advanced and so thoroughly bent.

Another Squirrel Bait offshoot was far more mysterious, right down to the name: Slint. A quartet led by two extremely taciturn guys, Britt Walford and Brian McMahan, whose inside references were so intricate they seemed almost like a form of idioglossia. In 1988 we got a tape of a nine-song record, Tweez, before it became an LP the following year. Its songs were named after each band member's parents (and one of their dogs), and they all sounded tweaked and slightly metallic and often swung-in the jazz sense-in a way very few others in our underground could. The vocals were occasional, incidental, and sometimes started to tell stories without ever really finis.h.i.+ng them. When the alb.u.m came out, the cover was a simple black-and-white shot of a Saab Turbo-with SLINT going where the SAAB was and TWEEZ replacing TURBO, and very little information appeared on the back or the insert. I cannot overemphasize how thrilling and absolutely unique it sounded or-and this is the part that gets lost today when people talk about that band-the oddball humor underneath it all. b.i.t.c.h Magnet went crazy for Tweez. I listened to it every day. A ca.s.sette of it turned up in a photo we used for the insert to Umber. In 1988 almost no one in the world had heard of them, but that just fed the intoxicating feeling that you and your friends knew secrets no one else did.

The thing I most treasured about this time was that you kept stumbling over set after set of smart misfits playing amazing, fully realized music that sounded like nothing else. All the town weirdos were suddenly in bands. Some, like Slint, were making records while they were still teenagers that would age as well as those made by distant rock G.o.ds like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. In the rest of the world hair metal was king, and its bands-Warrant, Winger, Poison-ruled the radio and MTV, selling upbeat party-time bulls.h.i.+t in which the guy always got the girl and all underdogs triumphed over their adversaries by the third verse, if not sooner. The bands in our underground, like those that inspired them, told stories that didn't fit into such narrow schematics. No other music so accurately evoked the black hole of self-loathing, and the power you could find within it, as "Nothing" by Negative Approach or "Black Coffee" by Black Flag. No mainstream artist drew such precise lines between us and them as Saint Vitus did in the embittered, extended middle finger of "Born Too Late," or as ferociously as Minor Threat's "Filler," or with the naked anguish of Hsker D's "Whatever." If our bands didn't invent writing about the absolute abas.e.m.e.nt of romantic despair and loneliness-Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and Crazy Horse's "I Don't Want to Talk About It" came first, after all-nothing on the radio or MTV or any major label expressed it as clearly and starkly as American Music Club's "Blue and Grey s.h.i.+rt" or "Laughingstock." Our bands even nailed standard rock topics better than anyone else around: the aimlessness of American youth, like Meat Puppets' "Lost," or the joy of libido and an open road, like Urge Overkill's "Faroutski."

And the lyrics weren't even the important part. Not when Sonic Youth and Slint and Slovenly reached heights of gorgeousness and mystery that almost never had anything to do with what they said. Rather, it was how they sounded, even on records made as cheaply and quickly as possible in studios held together with duct tape. Songs were finally liberated from verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Bands everywhere made incredibly evocative alb.u.ms, like Tweez or EVOL or Die Kreuzen's October File, that sounded like nothing that ever came before them. Other musicians realized you could strip the exciting parts off metal's carca.s.s-loud distorted riffs, relentless rhythm sections-and make them into something else. Something better. Very few bands playing metal in 1987 ever set their instruments and amps to "crush/kill/destroy" as effectively as the instrumental Dutch band Gore did on Mean Man's Dream-an alb.u.m recorded live in the studio, with no overdubs, which no straight-up metal band in the eighties would ever have the b.a.l.l.s to do.

THE MUSIC AND THE SMIDGENS OF ATTENTION WE WERE GETTING began to go to my head. I kept my mouth shut in high school, convinced I'd be misunderstood. Now, full of late-adolescent s.p.u.n.k, electrified by guitars, I was d.a.m.n well going to be heard. Finally confident enough, for the first time in my life, to be absolutely straightforward. Though the people around me might have preferred to call it "being an a.s.shole." "You lived your life," Orestes told me much later, "like you played your instrument." I still couldn't bully anyone physically, but I could bully everyone aesthetically. Oberlin, a colony of art nerds and mousy nose-to-the-textbook types, was a very safe place to do this. Despite its deserved reputation for excruciating political correctness, and even though the campus newspaper's letters page endlessly hashed out the minutest aspects of s.e.xism and racism and taking back the night, few people there knew how to put up a real fight. Pa.s.sive aggression was more common: a large percentage of b.i.t.c.h Magnet flyers were routinely torn down. We gleefully replaced them, and then some.

Sometime during junior or senior year I was pulling together a few bands for another dorm or house party when, with some reluctance, I approached a musician I knew. He was really annoying, and I didn't care for his band, either. When I mentioned the party and asked if they could do it, he barked out a superior prep-school "Ha ha!"-and it really sounded exactly like "Ha ha!"-and added, "Everyone wants us to play that show!" Without hesitating, I banged out, "Well, I think you guys pretty much suck. But other people asked."

He may have deserved that, but back then I sprayed that s.h.i.+t everywhere. I said stupid things. I did stupid things. On one of the first weekends of the school year, I slept with the woman at school who was involved with Orestes. I apologized to him, first on the phone and then in a self-lacerating letter, but a fissure opened that couldn't be easily closed. And I had other problems with Orestes, because he bought a dog.

I'm serious.

Specifically, a baby English mastiff he named Victor. I'm told they are delightful, but an English mastiff is a dog in the way that an aircraft carrier is a boat. Adult mastiffs can weigh more than 130 pounds, and they get big before they realize they're big. As a puppy Victor might see you lying on the floor and step on your face, unaware that this could break your jaw. When he leapt up to greet you, he would practically knock you down. You prayed he wouldn't cuff you in the nuts, because his paws were as big as baseb.a.l.l.s. Each day the overflow from his panting mug could fill a few pint gla.s.ses. Luckily he didn't bark much, which was good, because when he barked, it scared the absolute c.r.a.p out of you.

Orestes was too broke to kennel Victor-and G.o.d knows the band wasn't making any money-so oftentimes he brought him to shows, where Victor would wait, long-faced and lugubrious and panting and drooling, in the back of Orestes's truck while we played. Today, I understand the balm to loneliness Victor was for Orestes, but to me, back then, he only looked like an enormous pain in the a.s.s. And Orestes was as bad as a new parent about him. One day he went on and on about how much he liked mastiffs and then he told me he wanted to get another one, and I lost it and started screaming. How the f.u.c.k would he be able to handle two mastiffs? He could barely manage one. You had to be a weight lifter-or Orestes-to take Victor for a walk. Once, when Orestes wanted to visit his girlfriend on the side, he tried, desperately, to talk me into boarding him at my parents' house for a few days. I turned him down. Possibly after a lot more yelling.

What causes most band conflicts? Disagreements and compet.i.tions over girls and boys. Money. People getting f.u.c.ked up on drugs and booze, especially if different members prefer different substances. "Creative differences," which means someone's ideas are so bad you start to hate him. Orestes and I fought most avidly over a dog. Sometimes one tiny thing your bandmate does drives you insane.

A mastiff is not a tiny thing.

EACH JANUARY, BETWEEN SEMESTERS, OBERLIN HAD A MONTHlong winter term during which students completed mandatory independent projects, however half-a.s.sed those projects might be. In 1989-my last January at Oberlin-my project was playing in a rock band, which made it the second January term for which I got school credit for b.i.t.c.h Magnetrelated activities. We had a mini-tour booked across the East and Midwest, and had studio time reserved in Chicago to record our second alb.u.m with Albini. At the last minute the recording had to be canceled, because Orestes's beloved paternal grandmother, who helped raise him, died. (Albini gave the recording time to Slint, and those recordings came out in 1994 on a two-song self-t.i.tled EP.) We still planned to play all the shows, but- But let me start somewhere else.

A windy Sat.u.r.day evening in mid-January, around dinnertime at a gas station in the middle of Pennsylvania. The temperature's dropping. There's so little light by the pumps that you have to squint to jam the nozzle into the tank. Sooyoung and I are driving my grandfather's old car, a mid-seventies Oldsmobile, primer gray, shockingly huge by the standards of the eighties and possibly by those of the seventies as well. The front seat is one big bench, with nothing splitting the driver's and shotgun seats. You can seat three people up here, if necessary, and maybe four more in the back. That backseat and the enormous trunk-the kind that protrudes several feet past the rear wheels, a duck's bill sticking out its a.s.s-are crammed with Sooyoung's and my equipment, plus some a.s.sorted student detritus, like my milk crate full of LPs. We just played two shows in New York and are heading back to Oberlin for one night before setting off for our next dates in Columbus, Ohio, and Champaign, Illinois. I just finished putting our ten or twelve dollars' worth in the tank while the wind picked up, promising another kind of weather-no, that weather is here, and the first raindrops start slas.h.i.+ng sideways while Sooyoung maneuvers the beast back onto Route 80, heading west.

Somewhere between Milton and Williamsport, on a lengthy elevated stretch that connects bits of land as you cross the west branch of the Susquehanna River, the car's enormous a.s.s starts sliding. Sooyoung struggles it back into place, but then it's whipping back and forth and momentum mercilessly takes over. The brakes lock, a big, slow spin begins, goodbye to the linear, that sickening and alarmed realization instantly familiar to all who've been through it: We're gonna . . .

And we do. Head-on into the guardrail.

The good news is that it's not a simple thin steel guardrail but one plopped atop solid concrete, and we were going maybe twenty miles an hour when we crashed. The impact on our monstrosity, the front b.u.mper of which seems a Chevette's length from the front seat, registers only as a sharp b.u.mp. We look at each other, wide-eyed, and quickly understand we're both okay.

But this is a narrow roadway with only a few feet of shoulder between the lane and the railing, and since the car now completely blocks much of the road, I push open my door to begin waving people around us-and put my sneaker down on a roadway so slick that I fall before I can even stand. Though of course: Bridge freezes before highway surface. What was light rain had become-what's the term?-a perfect "sheet of ice." As I struggle back upright I see headlights a few hundred yards behind us swerve as cars start to-ing and fro-ing and sc.r.a.ping and cras.h.i.+ng.

The next part is fuzzy, because it all happens very quickly, but we calculate that we can't stay in the car. We can't stand up on the road, either, or cower by the side of the road, because there is no side of the road. The cars skidding toward us can't stop or steer. So we vault over the guardrail and suspend ourselves from a handhold on the railing. I've wondered for years if our feet found a purchase on something-they must have, but I can't remember. Meanwhile cars serenely glide by, moving no faster than a brisk jog, wheels locked and motionless, plowing unstoppably into each other and into our Olds, each collision ending with popping and bursting sheet metal and the cymbal crash of breaking safety gla.s.s.

Then silence.

Tiny cubes of shattered gla.s.s are strewn all over the highway, refracting and distorting the streetlights. It's lit like a disco out here.

A few other cars are cl.u.s.tered around ours. A woman with puffy frosted eighties-mom hair, and who looks pregnant, heaves herself out of a pa.s.senger seat, looks me in the eye, and then looks away, cradling her stomach and repeating, "Oh, my baby," in a central Pennsylvania drawl. She's fine, just frightened, and apparently a little drunk.

The Oldsmobile has a car-sized impression caved into its pa.s.senger side, right where I'd been sitting. The back window is shattered and lets in freezing rain. One guitar neck protrudes through the side of its cheap case. I touch it, then strum it. Miraculously it's still in tune.

Sooyoung snaps a picture of me on the highway, standing amid the lights and shattered gla.s.s.

I'm together enough to ask whether everyone in our wreck is all right, though if they're not, I wouldn't know what to do. (Luckily, everyone is.) Cop cars and an ambulance arrive. I have never understood how they make their way through such scenes, and I don't remember how they did here. Elsewhere on this very long bridge, I hear someone say, a tractor-trailer jackknifed. The cops tell us to sit in the ambulance. I guess they want us off the road. One guy inside with us seems confused. He was in a different wreck. He keeps saying he doesn't know where his wife is. One cop tells him she's at the hospital and they'll talk to him there, then looks away, and in the silence that follows a terrible feeling blooms.

Sooyoung snaps another picture of me inside the ambulance while I'm making a strange face. Local volunteers in their twenties, wearing thick sweats.h.i.+rts, sit among us, chatty with each other and with the emergency workers. I'd say they're friendly, but they don't talk to us or anyone else from the wreck. Aren't they supposed to be handing out hot chocolate or something? They seem very casual about what has just happened. But it's comforting. I'm grateful that these multiple crashes aren't being acknowledged. The guy whose wife is at the hospital is quiet now, and I'm grateful for that, too.

Sooyoung and I don't go to the hospital, because we're fine. The Oldsmobile gets towed to a junkyard, and somehow all our gear and baggage end up with us in a motel room. I call my parents and tell my mom that there was a crash and the car is destroyed but we're unharmed. She does not take this news especially well. I find out later that people died in some of the other wrecks. I never learned what happened to the other man's wife.

The next morning we dig through the local Yellow Pages, find the closest cheap rental car, load it up, and drive, under a diamond-bright winter sun, to Stache's in Columbus, where we play with Hypnolovewheel and cancel the show in Champaign, and afterward drive the hundred miles back to Oberlin. To get into my tragic converted-attic apartment, you have to walk up a creaky back staircase. That night, when I arrive after three a.m., I find my housemate, Susannah, wild-eyed, waiting in her bathrobe.

"I heard you guys were in a really bad car crash and you were in the hospital."

She's half-right, at least. I throw my head back and give her my best maniac cackle, saying it would take more than that to stop me. She's looking at me like I just came back from the dead. Everyone should see that on a friend's face at least once.

The rest of January was small-bore and soap-opera-y. I stayed up late, slept in, saw little daylight. We bored college kids, left alone in a frigid and snowy rural isolation, drank as much as you'd expect. There were irritations and small fights and intense bonding with others also stuck at school. Orestes and I and some other friends spent one night giggling and tripping on mushrooms, without Sooyoung. I think we wrote one new song. Whenever Orestes made spaghetti sauce for dinner, he added at least a half stick of b.u.t.ter, and for a while I thought this was the best way to make it, too.

When Sooyoung showed me the photos he took that night, they didn't look as amazing and otherworldly as I hoped. But I still wish I had them today. Because the crash was the highlight of that winter. Before we knew what really happened, nothing else was nearly as strange and as interesting-as magical-as vehicles turned into b.u.mper cars, and the pure percussive crunch of each slow-motion collision on a highway suddenly as slick as an ice rink. Not a girl taking off her s.h.i.+rt in your room. Not another night at one of Oberlin's two bars. Certainly not the campus buildings looming over the flat, frozen landscape under gray and indifferent Midwestern skies. Bands died in wrecks. College students died in wrecks. Our cla.s.smates died in wrecks. People died in our wreck. But nothing happened to us. This is a f.u.c.ked-up thing to admit, I know, about something really awful, but those still moments on the bridge, amid the safety gla.s.s glittering in the streetlights, are among the most beautiful I've known.

SCHOOL STARTED AGAIN, AND THE BY-NOW-FAMILIAR counter-rhythm returned. I'd been pursuing a preposterously hot freshwoman, and suddenly she acted interested. Full lips, blue eyes, pale skin, a hint of a British accent, a tangle of long, loose, curly hair. She moved through campus with a dancer's upright posture, wearing an expression broadcasting that no one could tell her anything she hadn't already known forever, all of which I found incredibly inflaming. She didn't seem to realize she was way out of my league. Over the years I've gotten very little play as a direct consequence of being a musician-after a show, I mean-but I know I never would have approached her were it not for the band.

s.h.i.+gaku was planning a European tour for us the following fall: six weeks, something like seven countries, around thirty-five shows. Sooyoung and I scanned itineraries outside the library's smoking lounge. Orestes's grandmother had left him a brownstone in Brooklyn, and it was agreed-I thought it was agreed-we'd all live there after Sooyoung and I graduated. When I blabbed about it to our American record label, that factoid showed up in a press release, which didn't thrill the other guys. As always, I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut about anything that excited me, whether in interviews or in private conversations. I didn't realize that my bandmates' silence did not equal consent. Nor that they were starting to feel that I was hogging the spotlight, inasmuch as there was any spotlight s.h.i.+ning upon us.

I sensed that things were starting to feel a bit strained with Sooyoung, and things with Orestes weren't any less complicated. He was the first male friend to whom I routinely said "I love you," but then I slept with his girl on the side and courted her afterward, which at Oberlin meant we s.e.xlessly shared the same bed and sometimes mashed mouths while drunk. Then-and I don't know why-Orestes became a target for my rants about music. In April we played Club Dreamerz in Chicago with Slint. Afterward-all the band riding through Indiana together in Orestes's truck, for once, along with one of his old friends-I unloaded, at high volume, for something like fifteen minutes straight on a silent Orestes. Neither of us remembers what prompted it, but there's a good chance (I can barely write the rest of this sentence without laughing) I was outraged that he liked the Bad Brains comeback record I Against I. Orestes explained to me much later that he'd been raised in places where people didn't go off on someone like that without getting beat up, and in fact it took serious impulse control for him to keep driving and not pull over to kick the s.h.i.+t out of me. I kept dinging Orestes's fierce loner pride-whether accidentally or on purpose or accidentally-on-purpose. As for Sooyoung, years later he told me he was growing increasingly p.i.s.sed off about day-to-day control of the band and people's perceptions of us. (My comments and story lines tended to dominate interviews and articles.) But there were girls and cla.s.ses and new records at the radio station and letters from fans and fanzine interviews and plenty of other reasons to avoid confronting a growing chill.

Spring finally came, and the fields and trees sighed in relief, and the air smelled of wet earth and mowed gra.s.s and cornfields. I was six weeks from graduation, lucky to be living a luxury rare among my cla.s.smates: I didn't have to worry about what came next.

Then one evening, while I was eating dinner with the preposterously hot freshwoman, Sooyoung stopped by our table and asked me to meet him after dinner on the steps of the student union. "Band business," he explained, totally deadpan.

We finished our separate dinners-we no longer ate together, as we once did-and ran into each other en route to our meeting, made small talk, joked about musicians and students we knew. There was a table on the union's terrace, overlooking the expanse of gra.s.s between the library and the academic buildings, and as we sat down I cried out-a single strangulated cry, the kind a kitten makes when someone sits on it by mistake, and the kind of sound a boy in a punk rock band never wants to hear coming out of his mouth. I quickly insisted it was nothing, but maybe I had sensed something coming, even though there had been no hint beforehand.

Then: "This is something we should have talked about a while ago, but Orestes and I want you to leave b.i.t.c.h Magnet."

Jesus, here it is. A gasping, airless feeling I'd prefer never to feel again. I did manage to shudder out "Why?"

"I'll get to that." Though I don't remember what "that" was, because I don't remember anything else. When I interviewed Sooyoung for this book, he said one night he and Orestes had a short back-channel conversation and made a decision pretty quickly. Sometimes power struggles in a very loud band end quietly. The idea of trying to talk any of our issues through had occurred to exactly none of us.

The full extent of my life plan was: I am playing in b.i.t.c.h Magnet. I had no long-term vision beyond recording an alb.u.m in June and touring Europe in the fall. So now what?

I went looking for Martha, even though our on-and-off thing had been off for a while.

The next morning before breakfast the freshwoman saw me walking in a different direction from where I lived, wearing the same clothes she had seen me in at dinner. This led to a very unpleasant phone call later that day and a subsequent meeting to "talk," one I had to leave faster than I should have, because I was expected at another meeting to "talk" with Sooyoung. I left her in a bathroom with the lights out, crouched on a sink, crying. I liked her. I did. Just not enough. But even if I'd loved her madly and forever, that night I would have left her unconscious and bleeding in a ditch during a thunderstorm, because talking my way back into the band was the only thing that mattered. I didn't, but what I did do was point out to Sooyoung that it made no sense to break in an entirely new guitarist or two in the few weeks before recording an alb.u.m of material we'd already honed for months, and that argument got me back in the band temporarily-just enough to play on Umber.

Oberlin was a small campus, where people tended to know by breakfast on Sunday who'd hooked up with whom on Sat.u.r.day night, so the news spread quickly. My circle of friends was very kind to me, despite how obnoxious I'd often been to them, but the final weeks of school were awkward. How can I describe the feeling? A soft blow to the heart? The kind of mild heart attack after which everyone whispers, He's just not the same? Maybe that. Without the band I wasn't sure who I was anymore. What had happened felt like a rejection from every band I knew and everyone else I'd met on each strand of our spiderweb, and I experienced it with all the drama and high tragedy you'd expect from someone who in many ways was still a teenager. And the thought of losing the music-those songs-was much worse. Lou Barlow, famously and abruptly booted from Dinosaur Jr. in 1989, described that situation like this: "I was kicked out of the band because they didn't like me." But his reaction was "Who gives a s.h.i.+t whether you like me or not? The music we play-that's the most important thing."

Getting kicked out also confirmed the hidden, horrid, nagging feeling that I never quite belonged. And maybe I didn't. Near the end Orestes often suggested that I start playing guitar solos. I refused, partly on aesthetic grounds-this is punk rock; we do not play solos-but partly because I didn't think I could. Unfortunately I lacked the wit to reply: we are a trio, therefore everything I play is a guitar solo. Though I doubt that would have worked.

SOOYOUNG AND I GRADUATED IN MAY OF '89, AND IMMEDIATELY afterward we recorded Umber in Hoboken, with one of Orestes's best friends, Dave Galt, on second guitar. That fall Orestes and Sooyoung toured Europe with two guitarists: Galt and Bastro's David Grubbs. I moved to an apartment hard by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and took an idiot temp job. On lunch break I read rave reviews of b.i.t.c.h Magnet's shows in the British music weeklies. At least Linc was still my roommate. He owned a copy of I Against I, but I was getting slightly better at overlooking it.

IN EARLY 1990 SOOYOUNG SENT ME A LETTER ASKING ME BACK into the band. We had another alb.u.m to make, he explained. It would be his last record before retiring from rock forever.

We chatted briefly during a quick phone call. I was thrilled but wary. He promised to FedEx a ca.s.sette. That tape contained the makings of "Dragoon"-the ten-minute-long song that opens our last alb.u.m, Ben Hur-and after listening to it once, I called Sooyoung and said, "I got the tape. Let's make a record."

He sent me a check for past royalties, wrapped in a letter of apology. His head got too big, he said. All he could see was his own vision of the band, and he needed to make it happen really bad. He'd made the mistake of thinking a modic.u.m of attention was all he needed.

So we had a lot in common after all, I thought, reading it.

In time-honored indie rock tradition we rehea.r.s.ed and finished writing Ben Hur in the bas.e.m.e.nt of my parents' house in New Jersey in the spring of 1990. I hadn't seen Orestes since we'd recorded Umber in June, and when he showed up, I strode over and hugged him, a bit desperately, a bit overeagerly, and his body language made it clear a gulf still lay between us. Rehearsals and recording went better than ever. But Orestes got very squirrelly whenever the topic of touring came up, and shortly after we finished making the record, he visited Sooyoung and quit the band.

Sooyoung and I found a replacement and carried on. (More on that later.) I was a little sad to see Orestes go-though not much more than "a little"-and never forgave myself for fooling around with his other girlfriend. But the machine was grinding into life again, and that, I thought, could salve almost any wound. There was a record, there were fans, there were gigs, there was a van. I didn't need or want for anything else.

BANDOGRAPHY.

Ribbons of Flesh DURATION: AugustNovember 1986, more or less LOCATION: Oberlin, Ohio PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (guitar, vocals), Doug MacLehose (ba.s.s), Lincoln Wheeler (drums), Roger White (guitar) RECORDS: None b.i.t.c.h Magnet DURATION: November 1986December 1990, April 2011October 2012 LOCATION: Oberlin, Ohio; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Calgary/New York City/Singapore PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (guitar), Orestes Morfin (drums), Sooyoung Park (ba.s.s, vocals) OTHER PERSONNEL: Tim Carper (drums, 1987), Dave Galt (guitar, 1989), Dave Grubbs (guitar, 1989), Jay Oelbaum (drums, 198687), Doctor Rock (drums, 1990) RECORDS: Star Booty (1988), Umber (1989), Ben Hur (1990), b.i.t.c.h Magnet (triple LP/double CD retrospective, 2011), Valmead/Pea 7" (US only, 1990), Valmead 12" (Europe only, 1990), Mesentery 7" (Australia only, 1990), Sadie 7" (US only, included with first 1,000 copies of Ben Hur, 1990), Sadie 7" (UK only, 1990), "White Piece of Bread" included on Endangered Species compilation (Europe only, 1990). There were some self-released ca.s.settes early on, but I'm too embarra.s.sed to discuss them.

Vineland DURATION: Fall 1991May 1996 LOCATION: Brooklyn PERSONNEL: Countless lineups, but the final one was Jon Fine (guitar, vocals), Jerry Fuchs (drums, 199596), Fred Weaver (guitar, 199496), Kylie Wright (ba.s.s, 1996) OTHER PERSONNEL: Bob Bannister (guitar, 199194), Lyle Hysen (drums, 199193), Jenna Johnson (ba.s.s, 1994), Eamon Martin (ba.s.s, 199495), Dave McGurgan (drums, 199394), Gerald Menke (ba.s.s, 199193), Mike Mihaljo (ba.s.s, 1995), Doug Scharin (drums, 1994), Dave Tritt (drums, 1994). Other people filled in for a show here and there. It's a good bet I've left someone out.

RECORDS: Archetype 7" (1993), Obsidian 7" (1995), "Beholden" included on the This Is Art compilation (Europe only, 1993), "Archetype" included on the American Pie compilation (Australia only, 1994) Down and Away DURATION: 1989?

LOCATION: New York City PERSONNEL: Jon Coats (drums), Jon Fine (guitar, 198990), Billy Pilgrim (guitar, 1990), Jerry Smith (ba.s.s) RECORDS: Change Order (1992) Jon and Jerry had been in Phantom Tollbooth and were another excellent rhythm section I played with before I really knew how to play guitar. I quit to rejoin b.i.t.c.h Magnet after Down and Away played one show in Boston, which I still have on tape somewhere.

Don Caballero DURATION: 199195, 19972000, 2003present LOCATION: Pittsburgh, Chicago PERSONNEL: Mike Banfield (guitar, 199198), Damon Che (drums, 1991present), Jon Fine (guitar, 1999), Pat Morris (ba.s.s, 199194, 99798), Eric Topolsky (ba.s.s, 19982000), Ian Williams (guitar, 19922000). Damon re-formed the band with no other original members in 2003.

RECORDS: For Respect (1993), Don Caballero 2 (1995), What Burns Never Returns (1998), Singles Breaking Up (1999), American Don (2000), World Cla.s.s Listening Problem (2006), Punkgasm 2008), Gang Banged with a Headache, and Live (2012), Five Pairs of Crazy Pants. Wear 'Em: Early Don Caballero (2014), Look at Them Ellie Mae Wrists Go!: Live Early Caballero (2014) I played around twenty shows with them in 1999, after Mike Banfield left the band. Never recorded with them. Damon Che was one of the two drummers we auditioned to replace Orestes in b.i.t.c.h Magnet in 1990.

Alger Hiss DURATION: 199498, 2000present LOCATION: New York City PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (ba.s.s, 199698), Haji Majer (drums, 199498), Jordan Mamone (guitar and vocals, 199498, 2000present), Dalius Naujokaitis (drums, 2003present), Chris O'Rourke (ba.s.s and vocals, 199496), Frederick Schneider (drums, 20002002), J Yung (ba.s.s, 2000present) RECORDS: Settings for Nudes (1995), Graft vs. Host (1997) I played ba.s.s for them, when I was broadly b.u.mmed out about music but couldn't entirely quit.

Coptic Light.

DURATION: 20002006.

LOCATION: Brooklyn.

PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (guitar), Kevin Shea (drums), Jeff Winterberg (ba.s.s) RECORDS: Yentl 7" (2003), Coptic Light (US and j.a.pan, 2005), Coptic Light EP (US and j.a.pan, 2006) The weirdest band I ever played in.

What I Liked.

After the first record came out, we got a proper booking agent and we did eight-week tours and weekend shows almost every other weekend. If something was within six hours, we'd drive there Friday night, play it, play somewhere Sat.u.r.day, and then drive back on Sunday. We'd drive to Chicago for a weekend and play two shows. We'd play Louisville. We would play North Carolina. We would play Boston quite a bit. We'd play a lot of Ohio shows.

That's how you discovered the whole network. You'd meet these people who booked shows-these people running unprofitable businesses, basically. Every weekend night: setting up an out-of-town band with a show, paying them, getting a sound guy. This was happening in all these towns all over the country. Fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred people would show up.

We decided, let's see what happens with this. Everybody quit his real job. We would do temp work when we weren't touring. We did three big tours. Big, as in you have to bring two seasons' worth of clothing because it's going to be snowing, and then you're in L.A. and it's 75 degrees.

On the road you get used to having bruised hip bones from sleeping on the floor and you get used to using your pants as a pillow, and, no matter where you play, this is the quintessential story. You'd play Columbia, South Carolina. No one ever shows up, but you always book a show in Columbia, just because. You play the show, and no one shows up, and that's fine, and at the end of the night, after you say from the stage, "Hey, thanks for coming. By the way, if anyone has a place to stay, we'd totally appreciate it, we're clean, we're not picky, thanks a lot," there was always a guy in a place like Columbia, South Carolina, who will take you back to his house, feed you not-so-great food but very well-intentioned food, and then make you stay up watching the Sun Ra movie.

In almost every town where no one will come to your show, that guy will show up, and that guy will take care of you. He will put you up-he's probably paying two hundred bucks a month for his entire house-and you will have a decent night's sleep. In the morning, because you'll ask, "Is there a cool diner here? We're going to need to get breakfast," he'll take you to a Waffle House, or someplace like that, where you'll get four thousand calories' worth of food for six bucks, and then off you go. Then you'll be in Bozeman, Montana, and you'll find that guy again. And you'll watch the Sun Ra movie, or something like it, and he'll play you a record you never heard of, and you'll think, this is a crazy record, I need to find this record, and you'll write it down, and then a year later you'll find it and realize it's the greatest record of all time.

There's always that guy. Not in big cities. Not even in places like Chapel Hill. But in the places where that guy is so psyched that your band has come through, because nothing happens there.

And it's always the Sun Ra movie. I've seen the Sun Ra movie at least eight times.

-Scott DeSimon, ba.s.sist, Pitchblende and Turing Machine Timing is everything, even in punk rock, and starting in the latter half of the eighties, it became much easier for weird bands to do band things: play shows, make records, go on tour. The hows and whys that had been so elusive just a few years earlier were now shared through surprisingly effective samizdat and word-of-mouth networks. The bands that had done the most in a previous generation to start wiring those networks together were Black Flag and Dead Kennedys. (I am compelled to note that I still love the former; the latter, not so much.) They were the first underground bands to not just play shows on the other side of America-both were from California, and Dead Kennedys made it to New York first, in late 1979-but to tour nationally, and do so steadily, because they made a crucial conceptual leap: they decided that playing in a band was their job and started doing it all the time. What they faced and overcame in the process-Black Flag, in particular, a story probably best told by Henry Rollins in his memoir, Get in the Van-is rather mind-boggling. But these bands, and others, made it clear you could do it yourselves, and put particular clubs and cities on the map, and helped audiences grow accustomed to different kinds of music-first hardcore, then everything else.

Though touring early on often meant a diet of disappointment. "I remember playing in Cleveland" in the early eighties, recalled Mission of Burma's Roger Miller, whose band broke up just before key connections in the independent network were soldered into place. "These two girls came up and said, 'Wow! You guys did "That's When I Reach for My Revolver." That's such a cool song! We'll be at the show tonight.' We thought, We're golden. After the first song, the audience is against the far wall. By the third song, there's zero response. Then we start taunting the audience, and there's still no response. We play 'Revolver,' and there's no response. Then the next band comes on, and people dance. Then we play our second set, and there's no response." And, as Miller explains, even when it started to get better for bands, it didn't really get better: "The second time we were in San Francisco, after [Burma's landmark 1982 alb.u.m] Vs. had come out, I think there were like two hundred people there. A day later we played Los Angeles, and there were like twelve people in the club. You'd go from thinking, Wow! We are finally cool! to Oh, right. We aren't cool."

Even in the late eighties we all still played music far different from what most people expected, and club owners and soundmen would occasionally freak out over, say, how loud you were. Or you might run into a sound guy like the one at Cedars in Youngstown, Ohio, apparently badly in thrall to U2, who put a bizarre delay effect on my guitar until I demanded he stop. Nor were low-level rock clubs back then particularly concerned about Better Business Bureauesque ethics. A pal in a fairly well-known band played a show in a decent-sized city, met the owner in the office afterward, and asked for the band's guarantee. Then the owner opened a desk drawer and casually gestured toward the gun he kept there, and my pal decided to forgo that night's wages.

But every touring band had stories like that. In a different and smaller city the dead-calm club owner wore a sharp silver suit and was said to be mobbed-up and to carry a gun, and when it looked as if his promoter might stiff us, I told him that he ran a really nice club and it would be a shame if word got around that he didn't pay bands. (Crazily enough, this tactic worked.) Because after a couple of pa.s.ses through America and Europe, states and countries stopped being flat maps in the dogeared road atlas we kept stashed between the front seats of the van and became three-dimensional, with memory and incident and images and the people we met: Newport, Kentucky, where the amazing hillbilly speed-metal drummer in the opening band looked twelve but was twenty-four; Cincinnati, where everyone played a bar called Sudsy Malone's that contained a Laundromat and where, in 1993, a guy tried to pick me up; London, Ontario, where the sole hot girl at the afterparty kept squealing that hearing the Stooges made her come, but her boyfriend was way too drunk to take advantage of this information; Brixton, where we stayed in London, where someone broke into the van and made off with most of our gear and merch; Athens, Ohio, where we played a dirt-floored and underheated venue in January until the cops shut us down for being too loud; the small town in Austria where we cut the set short because the PA malfunctioned and the crowd seemed menacing and I'm still not sure if I really heard anti-Semitic mutterings or was just paranoid; Osijek, Yugoslavia, where the primitively Xeroxed gig flyer advertised GUITAR FLAME NOISE, and where we didn't spend enough time with the lovely guy who'd set up our shows there: a budding minister of culture, who understood everything about music and art, was endlessly curious about both, and managed to find us a bottle of Jim Beam in a broken, barely post-Soviet state that used a currency that lost all value as soon as you left the country. Before we left he gave us his address, painstakingly writing YUGOSLAVIA in capital letters at the bottom, before observing with a shrug, Of course there won't be a Yugoslavia in a year, and he was right.

You learned fast that doing it yourself applied to many more things than calling clubs to book your band and pressing your own records. "We played the Khyber Pa.s.s in Philadelphia in 1994 and stayed with [longtime local promoter] Brian Dilworth," remembered Andrew Beaujon, the front man for Eggs. Dilworth lived in an industrial, isolated, possibly unsafe part of town, where, luckily, there was a fenced-off lot in which Eggs could park their van. When the band arrived, though, cars were arranged in a way that left no s.p.a.ce big enough for them. So Brian turned and told everyone, All right, guys. There's like thirty people here. We're gonna pick up one of these cars and move it. And they did. Or you might arrive at an Elks Lodge in Louisville for your first punk rock show, as Jeremy DeVine did long before he became the founder and owner of the Temporary Residence Ltd. label, and find people hammering together scavenged two-by-fours and wood planks to build a stage because the Elks Lodge didn't have one. (And, as soon as that show was over, they broke down and discarded what they'd built.) Still, as the eighties became the nineties, the bigger battles had been won. A network of clubs spread across America, and a far nicer one traversed Europe. Many important American underground bands could barely sc.r.a.pe together a hundred fans for hometown shows, but the British music weeklies Melody Maker, NME, and Sounds wrote about them extensively-as did major press outlets on the Continent-and much bigger crowds greeted them when they toured overseas, at clubs that treated them far better, with ample food and beer backstage, and real meals after soundcheck. There promoters put bands up in actual hotel rooms. (Not in England, though. Because promoters knew you were going to play London no matter what? Because there were different touring economics? Because the Continent has always valued artists and culture more? I still don't know why.) Eventually endless tours by third- and fourth-rate American bands exhausted European audiences, and their appet.i.te for this music collapsed in the mid-nineties. Until then, though, Europe was our yellow brick road. Orestes would have been happy only touring Europe and never playing the States again, and his was not a unique opinion.

But it wasn't mine. I liked touring America as much as I liked touring overseas. Because I liked everything about this thing of ours.

To pinch something that Elizabeth Elmore-who led the bands Sarge and the Reputation-once told me, I loved the surprise of each day on the road. I loved waking up in the morning not knowing what the night would bring. Or that, five or ten or twenty years later, I might still be in touch with someone I met at that show.

I liked plotting weekends just as Scott DeSimon described: scanning mileage charts in the back of a road atlas to see how far you could drive and still make it home in time for work on Monday morning. I liked it when, driving southeast on a Sunday after playing Boston with Vineland the night before, stuck in traffic but not unhappily, our ba.s.sist asked where we'd play next, and I rolled the idea around for a moment and declared, "Richmond and Pittsburgh," and a few weekends later, we did.

I liked the long, empty highway s.p.a.ces: the zen boredom of the generic American interstate, the lulling rhythm of the ride, the continuous forward motion. I liked being anywhere in a vehicle groaning from a full load of gear, on stretches of highway in West Virginia or Michigan or even Iowa, where the major roads almost always intersect at ninety-degree angles, on which you made long, straight drives through endless flat landscapes. I liked the giant standing irrigation rigs alongside the road in the fields of Indiana, those metal spiders the size of football fields. I liked how being stopped in traffic at a forgettable bridge in Delaware could be transformed into an event by a startling sunset.

I liked the voices you heard on college radio stations while driving on the interstate, for the ten or fifteen minutes before static buried them. They sounded like people you could know. No. They sounded like people you did know, and since some invisible connective tissue joined us, in a sense you did. I liked hearing my friends' bands on the radio in unexpected places. I liked hearing my own band on the radio in unexpected places, even though it didn't happen much.

I liked arriving at a club in the late afternoon, the few people in the hushed beer-and-cigarette-smelling room only starting to yawn and stretch into another day. (Even if the first thing that always happened was that everyone in the van employed subtle machinations so as not to get stuck with finding parking for an oversized vehicle with inadequate rearview mirrors in a city during rush hour. Unless it was a club that had parking s.p.a.ces set aside. But it almost never was.) I liked the ritual of pulling up to the curb, inert bodies groaning into motion again, unthunking the van's back door, disa.s.sembling the gear puzzle one more time: the procession of speaker cabinets, drum cases, amp heads, drum stands wrapped in blankets, guitar cases, boxes of merch, everyone's duffel bags, toolboxes or milk crates stuffed with cords and distortion pedals, everyone's backpacks or briefcases. Walking past the manager adding up figures from the night before or hauling cases of beer and the sound guy wearily uncoiling speaker cables and setting out mike stands as you hefted everything onstage: the drummer rebuilding his kit, everyone else rea.s.sembling their rigs, staring off into s.p.a.ce while the sound guy miked the amps and drums and trudged back to the soundboard to start the soundcheck-kick drum, snare drum, toms, hi-hat, then the entire drum kit. (I stood in the middle of the club for this part, because a good drum sound was crucial, but I also loved watching good drummers rip.) Then the ba.s.s, then the guitars, then the vocal mikes, then a song or two. I liked chatting with club owners I saw more than once-Dan Dougan at Stache's in Columbus, Bruce Finkelman at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, Peter Weening at the Vera in the Netherlands. I liked Louise Parna.s.sa, who managed CBGB, even though whenever you called the club, she always seemed to be in a very foul mood, because a couple of times I think I made her laugh. Her phone manner and growl made me picture a stooped, chain-smoking sixty-year-old, so it was a shock to meet her and discover she was not only around my age but also pretty cute-long hair, smoky eyes, a knowing smirk-even after spending all those hours in that lightless cave.