Your Band Sucks (13 page)

That's why I didn't smile onstage.

On these stages, in these crowds—here, at last, was the arena in which anger and sadism and revenge and submission finally all made sense. When I was onstage, I wanted to destroy. But when I was in the audience, I wanted to be shoved around by how bands sounded and what they played.

One chilly, gray day at Oberlin—sorry, redundant—I walked around with Sooyoung seriously discussing which was better: being in a band or having a girlfriend. Even though we teenage punk rockers pined, often quite sappily, for a girlfriend, we both picked the band, and it wasn't that hard a choice. Contrary to traditional rock mythologies, we didn't form a band to meet girls. (As you may have guessed from the name.) And, yes, I loved the music. But everyone says they love music. What I really loved, once I got my hands on a guitar, was the power. The electricity it shot straight into your heart. That's why we—well, I guess I just mean me—were doing it. For the voltage you generated by fitting a few distorted chords together with a scratchy vocal line on top. Once you added drums, it got so much bigger. And onstage it got bigger still. It didn't matter if that stage was a corner of a living room in a rented house slowly being destroyed by a different crew of college kids each year, or in an old man's bar on a weeknight, with only five people there. It didn't even matter that it took years for me to understand that being onstage—and finding a way to be onstage that had nothing to do with the arena rock theatrics we hated—required as much practice as playing an instrument. In time, the best of us learned how to fill bigger stages, and those with the right kind of imagination starting having much more fun with the power of such settings.

The Jesus Lizard once played a sold-out show to about a thousand people at the Masquerade. Atlanta's version of the biggest place in town for a touring punk rock band, and a club with a giant dance floor, not a sea of seats. At one point, between songs, David Yow told the crowd that the band had planned something really amazing, but it required the entire audience sitting on the floor. The audience wasn't having it and hooted down the idea. But Yow kept at it, telling them that this thing would be
really
cool, and unforgettable, but if they were gonna to do it right, everybody had to sit down.

Amazingly enough, a thousand people shrugged and scrunched themselves onto the floor. Yow took in the sight for a long moment.

Then he burst out laughing, and the band launched into the next song.

T
he earliest stages of any band were lousy with longing for the moment you could finally stop saying “
a
van” and start saying “
the
van.” Because nothing was more central to this culture's tiny mythology than our beat-up, barely running vans—they signaled independence, they signaled seriousness, they signaled that we didn't need a tour bus and a driver—no matter how squalid most of them became, no matter that civilians would peer inside, their eyes would go wide, and they'd slowly back away. Everything happened in the van, and much of it stayed there. The wadded McDonald's wrappers covering the floor, mud prints on the top layer from the last time it rained, alongside convenience-store coffee and soda cups, empty plastic bottles, gum and candy wrappers, half-eaten and long-forgotten snacks. Most of which inevitably migrated to the door wells, so every time a door was opened, the van puked out debris. But on the road the van was our home, our castle, our magic carpet, sometimes the setting for a hurried tryst in the parking lot in the back of the club, or even while parked on the street. Half our legends revolved around vans. Like:

Just before another all-night drive the guitarist and bassist ate a bunch of trucker's speed and became so hysterically motormouthed for the entire trip that the other guys demanded that they never, ever do that again. Or: They drove through Nebraska so often that the drummer made a game of trying to make it all the way across the entire state without stopping to pee. Or: They had to drive straight from Oregon to make it to their next show in Chicago, and they each took six-hour shifts and stopped only for gas and bathroom breaks and they made it. Or: They had to drive straight home after the last show of the tour because the bassist had to be at work at 8:30 the following morning, and they drove all night and dropped him off at 8:25.

After one crappy Boston show we wanted to leave town so badly that we started driving back to my parents' house at 2 a.m., until the wind and the rain pushed us around on the road and my eyes kept closing, and I managed to pilot us off the highway to a quiet country road, where we slept a few hours. I drove home from CBGB after the show, even though it was very late. We drove home from Providence after the show, even though it was very late. We drove home from Philadelphia after the show, even though it was very late, because it was St. Patrick's Day, and I expected all the loud guys and women in high heels and too-short dresses to start puking in the gutters and worse. We drove home from Charlotte after the show, even though it was very late, but home was then New Jersey, and once Orestes and I got to Maryland and it was well into the next day, I understood that this was a very stupid idea. We drove home from Boston after the show, even though it was very late, got back to our practice space in Hoboken, unloaded the van, took the subway to our apartments, showered and changed, got back on the subway, and went straight to work.

The van was a blue Dodge we bought for six hundred bucks, and the following day we found two unused tickets to an Ace Frehley show in Minneapolis wedged into the backseat (which I flash for a second in the video Bitch Magnet made for “Mesentery”). Or it was a Mercedes rental in Japan, and I climbed into the back to sleep alongside the gear, wearing earplugs to block out sound and an eye mask to block out light, and the bassist leaned over the backseat to snap a picture that looked as if it should accompany a ransom note. Or it was a maroon Plymouth minivan that didn't have enough seating for all of us, so for the duration of the tour we stood a cinderblock between the sliding side door and the back bench, and each morning one band member would grab a pillow, fold it onto the cinderblock, and perch on both for the entire day of traveling. Or it was the generic white Ford Econoline, with only ten thousand miles on the odometer, the floor lining still slick from whatever the car dealer used to wax it, and a power strip that we ran from the front cigarette lighter to charge our laptops and phones, all of which felt luxurious after years of creaking, half-dead vehicles. Or it was the yellow-and-green Dodge from the eighties, previously owned by a lawn-care company, in which, even after years of touring, you could still smell the raw chemical undertone of old fertilizer.

The best place in the van was the loft: the shelf atop all the gear in the back, which you wriggled up onto from the backseat. A simple sheet of plywood nailed onto a very simple frame of four two-by-six posts screwed into the van's floor to keep it stable. You hid the gear underneath, and it also provided a place to store small or squishable items, like sleeping bags and pillows and merch boxes and winter coats. The shelf was rarely more than sixteen inches from the roof of the van, but privacy is hard to come by on tour, and it was an excellent place to nap or escape during the long drives. Shelf life was deeply meditative, because there wasn't much you could do while nestled within such a shallow space, hemmed in on all sides by boxes of records and CDs and sleeping bags and whatever else got stuffed up there, apart from lying on your back and looking straight up at the sheet-metal roof of the van, vibrating along with the ride. Amazing how thin, how unadorned, that membrane was. The steady white noise of the road was louder up near the roof, and lulling. Once you comfortably understood that you'd be pizza should the van roll over in a wreck, the setting was remarkably restful.

The shelf was also a very good place to whack off into a dirty sock, one of which I mistakenly left up there while on tour with Vineland in 1994. (Sorry, guys.) To steal a pal's observation, the only chance you had for sex in a touring indie rock band was if you played a town where an ex-girlfriend lived, and the privation of such sexless surroundings led some bands to hold tour-long whack-off contests: who could rack up the biggest number? Story goes that one band took this seriously enough to keep track of each member's tally on a patch of sheet metal behind the driver's seat. Said band is driving late one night after a show. Everyone's too tired to talk, and all seems hushed and still. Then one of the guys in the backseat shifts his weight, reaches over, and adds a fresh hash mark beneath his name. Every band had some version of that story—something stomach-turning to the rest of the world that, from inside the van, didn't seem so bad.

Anyway, the disgustingness of any band's van generally hinged on three factors:

1.
whether its member were slobs

2.
whether they ended each show drenched in sweat

3.
whether they used piss bottles

Bitch Magnet was a no for numbers one and three, but every band I ever played in sweated onstage like it was summertime in New Orleans. I didn't discover that some musicians
didn't
sweat onstage until I interviewed one member of a much gentler band. (Not judging. No, I'm totally judging. Make an effort, for Christ's sake.) Not us. One Vineland drummer sometimes hung his sweat-drenched show shirt in the van after the show so by morning it was dry, albeit crispy from all that salt. Vineland was also not particularly good about item one, which is a nice way of saying we were total slobs, but we were a no for item three. Don Caballero, unfortunately, ticked the yes box for all three items.

So I guess we gotta talk about piss bottles, the portable emergency commodes often used by bands, especially those that day-drank the previous night's leftover beer. They were especially popular in bands with more than three members, in which, practically speaking, not every call to nature can be answered with a bathroom visit, because any rest-area stop inevitably meant thirty to forty-five minutes off the road: someone has to use the pay phone, someone else gets on line for a burger, two people mysteriously wander off, and the next thing you know the sun is setting. (Rule of thumb: time spent at rest stops increases exponentially with each additional passenger leaving the van.) Each stop also meant significantly longer drives to the next show, because the longer you dithered on the highway, the more likely it was that you'd get mired in the swamp of any city's rush-hour traffic, which meant you'd probably miss soundcheck, and maybe the show, and I've got to get out of this paragraph right now, because just thinking about this is totally giving me an anxiety attack.

Therefore: any large empty Gatorade or soda bottle starts looking like a solution. Ideally widemouthed bottles, not because everyone had giant dicks but because such vessels forgave bumps and jiggles and imprecise aim. (Physiology meant that women musicians were more apt to use a piss
cup.
Big Gulp or larger, please.) In time, you and your van mates developed quite a casual relationship with piss bottles. On one tour I left my camera in the van while I drove to a couple of shows in my car, and when I later developed the film, I found photos of the other guitarist pissing into a one-liter Gatorade bottle in the backseat while the woman who sold our merch rested her head on his shoulder, watching, nonchalant. Even a liter bottle can be, occasionally, technically insufficient but in a pinch would keep you traveling until the next real bathroom stop. This interval could last a long time, so it was important to save bottle caps—crude though our sanitation instincts were, we knew that much. But then sometimes you'd find orphaned piss bottles that had been fermenting peacefully for five or eight or ten days under the backseat.

I knew that everything happened in the van, but what I
didn't
know until very recently was this: people shit their pants in the van much more often than you'd think. On tour with Scratch Acid in the eighties, David Yow was smoking hash oil in the back, took too deep a hit, and got into a coughing fit so ferocious that he crapped his pants. Unfortunately he was wearing his favorite silk suit. Doubly unfortunate: he wasn't wearing underwear. The driver pulled over so he could clean up on the side of the road. But Yow didn't want to just
throw away
the pants, though the rest of the band—quite understandably!—didn't want them back inside. Which is why, for several hundred miles, a pair of sharp but badly stained gray silk suit pants flapped in the breeze, tied to the roof rack atop Scratch Acid's van.

All this amid the day-to-day of life in the van:

They fought constantly as they drove from show to show. They never said anything as they drove from show to show. They laughed and drank beer as they drove from show to show, and realized that they liked each other and that this band could work, and twenty years later they still make records and tour. They decided, as they drove from show to show, to start an urban legend on one end of the country and see if it ever made its way back to them on the opposite coast, and the rumor they tried to start was that Dave Thomas—the comically mild-mannered Wendy's founder—was convicted of manslaughter in the sixties. (My embellishment: he'd killed a man with his bare hands.) Two bands toured America together, and the practical jokes they inflicted on each other's vans culminated in hundreds of crickets being dumped into one, and
I'M DRUN
K AND I LOVE COP CUM
scrawled in the dust on the back of the other, with an accompanying illustration. No one in that van noticed until a highway patrolman pulled them over, demanded that the driver step outside, and showed him the graffiti. “I don't care,”
said the cop,
“
but lots of people have been calling and complaining.” Then, “Wait. You guys are in a band? What kind of music do you play?” When someone mumbled, “Rock music,” the cop said, “Oh, like Aerosmith?” and, sensing an exit, the guy said, “Yes,
exactly
like Aerosmith,” which was much easier than telling the truth, and they got away without a ticket after gifting the cop a CD. We were driving through Pennsylvania and, as a car full of girls passed, we thought,
Hey, why not?
but the only note we could come up with to hold out the window while we passed them read,
WE'RE IN A B
AND
, and then they passed
us
, holding up a sign that said,
WE'RE NOT
, and that was pretty much the end of that. Once when we were overseas, a young roadie who didn't speak English very well confided that he had bought a vibrator for his girlfriend and was excited to try it out. A few days later he told me he had, and when I asked how it went, he frowned and said, “She pee,” and I kind of did a spit take and repeated, “She
pee
?” and he nodded sadly and said, “She pee, and she cry.”

***

I ASKED EVERYONE I INTERVIEWED FOR THIS BOOK FOR THE
grossest van and tour story they knew, and the winner came from Rjyan Kidwell, who performed in a solo electronic project called Cex (say “sex”), and Jeremy DeVine, the label head of Temporary Residence, who tour-managed Cex on an ill-fated 2003 tour of the UK and Europe, a tour for which DJ Beyonda opened.

JEREMY:
We played in Nottingham, and instantly after the show Rjyan and I both hooked up with beautiful women. They lived together, so everything is super cool, and we go back to their house.

RJYAN:
We parked in front of their apartment building. I was really wasted, and there were stairs, and we were like, “Do we have to bring everything up?” And the girls were like, “No. There's a security camera right there.” They pointed to the end of the block, and there was a security camera pointed right down to where the car was parked. So we were like, “Perfect.” I brought almost nothing inside.

JEREMY:
Rjyan goes up, hooks up with this woman. I hook up with this other woman. Everything's great. The next day . . .

RJYAN:
It was pretty early, and I needed to go down and get my clothes and toothbrush and stuff. Sander, the driver, went ahead of me. I went to the back of the car, and the door was swinging open, and I asked, “Sander, you opened this door, right?” He said, “What? No.”