This is an excerpt from Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) by Jon Fine, which is available in stores and online May 19 through Viking.
Somewhere 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. Though back then, low-level rock clubs weren’t particularly concerned about Better Business Bureau−esque 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 indie band had stories like that. In a different 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 passes 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; 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.
All this, now that a network of clubs had spread across America, and a far nicer one traversed Europe. Many important American underground bands could barely scrape together a hundred fans for hometown shows, but the British music weeklies 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 had to play London no matter what? Because the Continent 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 appetite for this music collapsed in the mid-nineties. Until then, though, Europe was our yellow brick road. Orestes, the drummer in my band Bitch Magnet, 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.
I liked plotting weekend shows by 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 the long, empty highway spaces: 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 as big as 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 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. I liked the ritual of pulling up to the curb, inert bodies groaning into motion again, unthunking the van’s back door, disassembling 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 and 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 reassembling their rigs, staring off into space 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, then the bass, 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 Parnassa, 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.
I liked how our rehearsal room smelled of old amp tubes heating up. I liked the staticky way its PA crackled into life after you flipped its switch. I liked having a nodding acquaintance with Ronald Shannon Jackson, the ultra-badass drummer who’d played with Albert Ayler and who practiced down the hall. I liked how, whenever we loaded in our gear at three in the morning after a show, we’d hear him drumming to what sounded like a CD playing backward while a thick scent of pot drifted toward us. I liked knowing I could go to the practice space late at night if I needed to, because sometimes I needed to, when it was my only friend. I liked how Sundays were practice day, so starting with whatever show I attended Friday night, it was basically all rock until Monday morning.
I liked handwriting the set list each night, and I liked identifying songs by shorthand or in-jokes so no one in the front rows could know what was coming. I liked being onstage, even if, for many years, I wasn’t quite sure what to do once I was up there and remembered so little of it afterward. Not because I went into a trance, or because I walked onstage into a dream that made no sense once I woke up, or because the excitement created a blur in which only a few moments registered, like images glimpsed while riding a roller coaster, though every show was its own roller coaster. But because everything that happened up there vanished once the music stopped, lost in the stage lights and the adrenaline and the confusion from surfing so many currents at the same time: the songs, the sound, the volume, the crowd, the tiny changes bandmates made onstage, the parts I improvised every night.
I liked how some people in the crowd watched with real intent while you were just setting up. I liked how diehard fans planted themselves by the lip of the stage for all the opening bands and grimly held that position all night, never leaving to pee or grab a beer. I liked finding that coolest guy—or was it having that coolest guy find us?—in Columbia, South Carolina; or Worcester, Massachusetts; or Savannah, Georgia; or Eugene, Oregon. The smaller towns could surprise you. The first time Bitch Magnet arrived in Morgantown, West Virginia, we had no idea what to expect—and we found a packed room, and when we played, more people stage-dove than at any show I ever played, anywhere. I booked Morgantown on every tour thereafter. The shows were always good, though the local economy was always depressed, so the crowd was too broke to buy much merch. But pretty much everyone there had weed, if that was your thing. (Though, alas, it wasn’t my thing.)
I liked staring into the eyes of random people in the audience until they looked away. I liked alternating coffee and beer before the show on the nights I was tired. I liked drinking two beers, no more, before the set, but I also liked the nights when I drank one or two too many and was a little looser and sloppier onstage. I liked how playing in a band was license to talk to anyone at the club. I liked working the merch table just after the show—wired, sweating, hollering—because how could you not like meeting people there and hearing them say, in sometimes stammery syntax, how much your band meant to them. I liked meeting the biggest music nerds in each town and hearing about the good local bands, even if those bands weren’t always as good as you wanted. I liked having a backstage to escape to, even if backstage itself was often a shithole. (People fucked on those sagging, cigarette-pocked couches that stank of armpits and stale grief? Yes. They did.) I liked the club at the end of the night, after everyone had left, because I liked knowing the arc of a full day there and not just the brief interval its customers saw.
I liked how being on tour moved you in a perfect counter-rhythm to the nine-to-five world: your adrenaline rose when it ebbed for those at work and peaked after they went to bed. I liked how unmoored, how far out from shore, you were after a few weeks on tour. The minor insanities of your day-to-day: the fast food and cheap beer, the cumulative fatigue and hangover, the rising preshow tension and its ecstatic onstage release, the ringing ears, the squalor in the van and the houses where you crashed. I liked the drug-dealer feeling you got on tour from carrying a bag containing thousands and thousands of dollars in cash, sometimes in a jumbled rainbow of many different currencies. I liked learning that the smell of American money is like sour wood and sweat, gamy and slightly sick-making, which you didn’t know until you kept a lot in a very tight space. I liked hearing other bands’ disgusting, tragic, and hilarious road stories, the strange things each band did, like how members of A Minor Forest would shove dozens of slices of steam-table pizza from all-you-can-eat joints into a shoulder bag, dump them on the dashboard of their van, and survive off them for the next several days, or how they’d buy twenty or more breakfast tacos from Tamale House every time they played Austin and do the same thing.
I wanted to stay on the road forever: Sell the house sell the car sell the kids find someone else forget it I’m never coming back, not that I had any of those things to sell or anyone to not come back to. I hated how each tour eventually deposited you, without mercy, at work on Monday morning after you barely made it back home a few hours earlier, blinking bloodshot eyes at the bright fluorescent lights, feeling abandoned and far from love.
I liked the eight or ten or fifteen fanzines I read religiously, and the excitement I felt when they irregularly appeared. I liked See Hear, the all-zine store in a basement on East Seventh Street. I liked that I could make it there and back during lunch hour from the small architecture firm where I worked my first job after college, from late '89 until the following fall, when I quit to tour America and Europe with Bitch Magnet. It was the only thing I liked about that job.
I liked cassettes—demo tapes, mix tapes—their covers made from colored markers and collages on photocopy machines. These were perhaps the defining relics of this culture’s handmade ethos, and today they exist almost entirely as pure objects, since only diehards like me kept their tape decks. I liked the tapes and letters that would arrive at the band’s post office box from fans with whom we’d traded addresses while on the road. I liked opening that PO box with a sense of anticipation that I never felt when opening the mailbox at my apartment, and I didn’t even mind waiting in the achingly slow line to pick up packages sent there.
I liked staying late at work to make flyers for upcoming shows on the office copy machine, and I liked carefully carrying home thick stacks of them, still warm and smelling of ink and chemicals. I even sort of liked mixing wheat paste and water in a bucket until it reached a disturbingly semenlike consistency, and hanging flyers all over the East Village at night back when you could do that without getting arrested.
I liked staying up all night with people I just met. I liked—and was always awed and moved—when people in each new city adopted you for a few hours or a day, took care of you, showed you around, showed you cool stuff you didn’t know. I liked the intensity that attached itself to those relationships, and your condensed togethernesses whenever you met on the road or in each other’s hometown. I liked hosting other members of our tribe in my city and taking them to my circuit of dive bars, record stores, and cheap restaurants. I liked meeting people whose records I knew. I liked the way people reflected where they grew up and where they lived—Seattle, Cleveland, Richmond, Charlotte, Austin—as well as our commonalities that transcended origins and accents. I liked learning local slang in one region and introducing it to another—"dookie" for "shit," years before Green Day stole it; "dodgy" for "unreliable"; "wheef" for "pot." ("Wheef" came about when we almost certainly misheard something said by Urge Overkill’s Ed Roeser, but we liked saying "bad wheef" way too much to drop it.) I liked coming back from Europe with a few affectations that let those who could hear the dog whistle know where you’d been: a phrase in German, some new British slang, a taste for a cigarette hard to find in the States. I liked leaving graffiti for friends in other bands backstage at clubs in Europe: Lyle Hysen: call your mother. Britt and Brian: make sure your van has seatbelts.
I liked the way all this organized and structured my life. I liked that we all found this way to stay young, well into our twenties at first, and then well beyond. I liked believing that we knew something most everyone else didn’t. I liked believing that we were going to change music. I liked believing this would last forever. Because, for a while, that was easy to believe.