Your Band Sucks (10 page)

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 sexlessly 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 shit 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 pissed 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 classes 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 grass and cornfields. I was six weeks from graduation, lucky to be living a luxury rare among my classmates: 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 grass 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 Bitch 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 Bitch Magnet.
I had no long-term vision beyond recording an album 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 album 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 Saturday 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 shit 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 Bitch 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 album 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 cassette. That tape contained the makings of “Dragoon”—the ten-minute-long song that opens our last album,
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 modicum 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 rehearsed and finished writing
Ben Hur
in the basement 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