Your Band Sucks (14 page)

JEREMY:
The van has been broken into. All the merch is gone. Rjyan's suitcase, his passport, all gone. This is something like day two of a twenty-one-day tour.

RJYAN:
I had just made this awkward “Okay, we live in other countries, so no number exchanging” goodbye. Then I had to turn around and go back up the stairs and say, “All our shit was taken. What do you think we should do?”

Then we looked up at the security camera that had been staring at our van the night before. It had pivoted ninety degrees during the night and was now looking down another street.

JEREMY:
The only way to get a passport is to go back to the American consulate in London. So we do the drive. And Rjyan snaps, but not in an aggressive way. He snaps like, “You know what? I'm going to take ownership over this thing that happened to me, because these people do not own me. They can't make me miserable. I'm going to own my own freedom.” I said, “Okay. And how is that manifesting itself?”

He said, “I am not going to bathe for the rest of the tour.”

RJYAN:
I had one set of clothes. I bought a skirt at Camden Market and just wore that for the rest of the tour. I thought,
You're going to take all my stuff? I don't need stuff.
I also didn't shower at all. Like,
You can't bring me down. I'm going to wear the accumulated stress. And everyone is gonna have to deal with it.

I don't totally remember what the thinking behind that position was.

JEREMY:
Me and the other people in the van said, “But that doesn't resolve anything. And eventually it very slowly tortures everyone around you.” And he just said, “It's going to be the smell of freedom.”

RJYAN:
That does ring a bell.

JEREMY:
We didn't take it seriously. Day three, day four rolls around. He still has not bathed, and he's played a show every night. Day six, day eight. Wow. He is really going for it. He's wearing the exact same clothes.

For the rest of the tour he never bathed. Eventually it got so rancid in the van that we couldn't drive without all the windows open. Even if it was cold. Sander, the hired driver, was getting visibly more upset as the days went on.

RJYAN:
Very early on I feel like we figured out that Sander was not psyched about us at all.

JEREMY:
We play a show in Paris. We play in a club that looks like a pirate ship. The ceilings are only eight feet high. It's really close quarters. And you can smell him. A stench is permeating the room. I don't know if the crowd knew it or not, but it's him.

RJYAN:
Maybe to other people it's not like this, but I feel like I can tell when I have B.O. It's not as bad as anyone else's smell. It doesn't have that weird garbage, rank, sour smell. Mine has this nice, sweet smell. It smells like chalk or something.

JEREMY:
That night he goes home with some woman he met at the show. I was thinking,
He smells homeless and dead. There's no way that is attractive
.

RJYAN:
What I thought was, that's pheromones. That's how you find out who really likes you, when you're really kicking out those pheromones. It smells gross to people who are not suited to be your mate, and it smells awesome to people who are.

JEREMY:
They hook up. Which really disgusts me. It really bums me out. And I'm a total hobo. I don't shower every day. But I shower every
other
day. And I change my clothes.

It ended up in a fistfight with the driver in the van. Because eventually Sander just snapped: “You have to fucking bathe! This is ridiculous!” And they get into this strange and existential argument, because Rjyan kept saying, “This is the smell of freedom!”

Sander is kind of meek. He's not someone we ever felt threatened by at all. And he punches Rjyan in the face as hard as he can. Then keeps driving and never says another word.

RJYAN:
I actually don't remember that. But it probably happened. I feel like I just took it, and honestly, I feel like it wasn't a hard enough punch to have a memory of it. There was a period when I actively tried to forget a lot of things from this tour.

JEREMY:
I said, “I don't know, dude. I'm going to be honest with you: that might have been deserved.”

He smelled very swampy. Like a Cajun corpse. Louisiana
Walking Dead
−type shit. I think at the end of the tour I literally threw what little money I had left at Rjyan and walked away.

RJYAN:
It was at some café or diner. No one was there but us. I can't remember what I said, but I feel like I provoked him, with some kind of matter-of-fact thing like, “This has been the worst tour I've ever been on. Thanks.” Something shitty like that. Then he threw the money at me, and then I felt bad.

I gave everything that was left over to Beyonda. I feel like she was invited along on the pretense of my being a successful electronic musician, so this is going to be really easy and fun. She endured a lot of hardship for no reason.

Jeremy and I did two records after that.

I
realized I was very different from the guy we called Doctor Rock one morning around 2 a.m. while I was entwined with a very recent acquaintance on a living room floor in Madison, Wisconsin. This was during the last round of Bitch Magnet tours in 1990, the ones right after Orestes quit. Doctor Rock was his replacement. He and I both had girlfriends back home, but that night we had made fast friends with two young women who'd driven eighty miles from Milwaukee to see the show. One of them told me they'd gotten stoned and listened to
Umber
every day that summer.

I was pretty anti-pot by then, and the stupidity of weed was a running inside joke. Sometimes onstage, as we paused mid-set, I'd step up to the mike and declare: “This is a song about smoking pot.” But since we rarely smiled onstage, people often missed the point. In Columbus a soft-bellied, sad-eyed guy sought me out after the show, begging for weed, claiming it was impossible to find any. Of course you can't, I told him, deadpan: we have
all
the pot. Still, the image of two cute girls getting stoned to our record during long, flat, hot Midwestern summer days was quite picturesque, and I ended up with Mary. She was blond
—
Catholic, I guessed
—
and when I introduced myself, she gestured in the space between us and said, “John and Mary!” I could tell she was spelling my name wrong even as she said it, but beyond assuming it was some New Testament reference, I had no idea what she meant. But I just Googled “John and Mary” and discovered that it's the title of a movie, released in 1969, wherein
goyishe
Mia Farrow and Jewy Dustin Hoffman meet in a bar and end up in bed. Was that what you meant, Mary? Did I miss
the whole point
until now
?

After the show we maneuvered our new friends out of the club. That night a fight had broken out on the sidewalk and ended up on the hood of our van, leaving blood trails smeared across the windshield. After windshield-wipering the bloodstains away, we drove to the house where our hostess, a kind and shy friend from college I'll call Sarah, turned the living room over to us and tactfully disappeared.

There it was: the fluttery feeling of new lips, new mouth, new body, my hands under her shirt tracing patterns on her smooth and wondrous skin. But distractions quickly started pinwheeling:
I have a girlfriend. What am I doing? Do I, like, fuck Mary right here, in front of everyone? And—oh, shit—Sarah is friends with my girlfriend. How will she not find out?

The foreknowledge of regret. The dickless indie rock anhedonia kicking in. Before getting too entranced by the cool of Mary's skin, I contrived some excuse—
too tired, long drive tomorrow,
something like that—kissed her good night, rolled over, and closed my eyes. Approximately eight feet from my head Doctor Rock and Mary's friend were going at it like they were playing tackle football, she sounding simultaneously like the opposing team and the cheerleading squad. Sooyoung was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, or—I dearly hope—calmly writing his recollections of the day in his notebook, eyes fixed to its pages, in the farthest corner of the room.

Sooyoung and I had very active governors on our ids. Doctor Rock's was innocent of any such mechanism. (Not for nothing did he earn that nickname.) Maybe nothing pushes a hedonist to comical extremes more than the company of ascetics. Now, I'm not judging Doctor Rock, though I certainly did then. But we had no business playing together, for reasons that were becoming brutally clear.

***

DOCTOR ROCK WAS SEVERAL YEARS OLDER THAN SOOYOUNG
and me. He was compact and lean with a round face and big, white Midwestern teeth—the sort of face you could tell freckles had once spread across, and there still remained something very boyish about his enthusiasms and petulance. His shoulder-length red-brown hair had thinned and often went Albert Einstein on him, which was not a good look. Even before his audition, it was clear he did not speak our language of punk rock cred and correctness and hadn't spent years going to hardcore shows, reading zines, and hanging out at a college radio station. (Though neither had Orestes, and that worked out great.) When I called and left a detailed message for Doctor Rock with his live-in girlfriend—
We're in this band he knows, album's coming out, we need a drummer more or less immediately for upcoming tours of America and Europe
—she immediately asked if “management” would pay for relocation. My response: “You're talking to management, and we can't.”

Just after we met, he enthused about how cool it would be to have an electronic kit that triggered various industrial sound effects. 1990 was a long time ago, but not so long that this notion was in any way novel. There he is, locking eyes with me, miming hitting a cymbal and vocalizing a robotic
Rrhhhooonnngggkk
. There I am, trying to look noncommittal about a totally horrifying idea for this band. Still: he was a
really
good drummer. Powerful, precise, and at ease playing both the complex and the simple. He was a metalhead, but that could be kind of cool and might help in a conflict I knew could arise between my desire to get heavier and weirder and Sooyoung's pop sensibility. Then again, he'd also played the glammy fake-metal crap we hated during a stretch of the eighties he spent in Manhattan, where he briefly lived in an illegal basement apartment in Alphabet City. (The toilet was a simple drain cut into the cement floor.) Anyone reasonably familiar with that time and place will not be surprised to learn that his most promising band collapsed when key personnel, himself included, got too familiar with narcotics. The coup de grâce came when a bandmate stole most of Doctor Rock's possessions, including a pretty nice stereo.

So, yes, he had a few miles on the odometer. But he'd cleaned up, and, unlike the only other drummer we tried out, he auditioned well. Welcome aboard, Doctor Rock. He threw his drum kit and some clothes into his Honda station wagon and drove down from the upper Midwest, moving in with a couch-tenderized South African Spicoli type I'll call Strom, whose accent rendered his favorite phrase as “ab-so-lewwt-lee NAHSSING!” To hear it, you just had to ask what he'd done that day. Strom's dedication to lassitude was so heroic that he affected a limp and wore a knee brace while working as a paralegal, to avoid having to do any physical work
at
a law firm
.

***

YOU NEVER FORGET THE NEW SENSATIONS OF YOUR TEENS
and early twenties. Or maybe it's that certain transitional moments in your life stick with you, and something about the way you find yourself waiting within them, in a pleasant sort of limbo between two destinations, etches them into memory. I loved those few weeks before we went on tour. I'd uprooted myself to North Carolina—Chapel Hill, where Sooyoung had moved after college. Once there, jobless, I aimlessed my way down the main drag a few times each day, chatting with people I'd met in clubs or at bars or through the whole brotherhood-of-bands thing. Sometimes I scammed free food from a Bitch Magnet fan who worked at the pizzeria. I was dead broke, but Taco Bell served unlimited iced tea and 39-cent tacos, and one day I was able to feed myself with the spare change I found on the floor in my room. The Char-Grill in Raleigh served tea so sweet it made your teeth hurt, and shakes so thick that, as I believe Thurston Moore once observed, sipping them through a straw was like trying to suck a wrench out of mud. Sometimes I loitered outside Cat's Cradle when interesting bands came through, to charm my way onto a guest list. (When Sonic Youth played there, they arrived in a tour bus with
FRAMPTON
emblazoned in the skinny front window where buses once announced their destination.) I pulled long late-night sessions in the twenty-four-hour Kinko's—where Laura Ballance, the bassist for a new band called Superchunk, sometimes worked nights—constructing and Xeroxing show flyers and press kits, then skulked the deserted downtown, stapling flyers to telephone poles and bulletin boards while crickets sawed at the moist night air. My girlfriend lived hundreds of miles away, and contacting her required careful budgeting or a stolen credit card number. But this was a very contented time, and even today I can remember the tickly feeling spreading:
So much was going to happen
.

The only problem was that Sooyoung worked, and lived with his girlfriend, so Doctor Rock was my primary activity pal, and he seemed a bit bewildered by the setting and by us. Sooyoung and I didn't drink much, weren't into big hormonal displays, and our ambitions and demeanor, onstage and off, didn't exactly match Doctor Rock's. He adored the juicy, dirty pleasures of rock and the showmanship of an earlier era. We'd never play footsie with major labels or be in nakedly commercial gutter-metal bands in New York—and if we had, we
definitely
wouldn't have worn eyeliner and scarves, as he did. He had never heard of the bands we held closest to our hearts, though his mind was properly blown once I played him Voivod and Honor Role and Slint and Gore. (Not for the first time, I thought,
See? This stuff is so great it can convert anyone!
) Though he was full of great and horrifying stories. In one he went on a hiking trip with his ineffably gentle Midwestern parents while secretly coming off heroin. I made him retell these tales, howled in appreciation, then filed them in the mental ledger that tallied his faults.

***

A TRIO ON TOUR IN AMERICA SANS DRIVER OR SOUNDMAN OR
other helping hands, as we were, is forced to get workmanlike pretty quickly. The days tick by: drive to gig, unload gear, soundcheck, set up merch table, grab quick dinner nearby, sit at merch table, play, have someone dash to sell merch right after the set (prime time for sales), get paid, load van, drive to sleeping quarters, unload van if necessary, sleep, repeat. The profit margin depends on finding strangers' floor space. Three of us sharing one motel room? A rare luxury. In other words, ours was not a party van. Before the tour began, our booking agent showed me the standard contract rider his bands used. In the part outlining what food and drink we required backstage, I crossed out
one case of beer
and wrote in its place
one twelve-pack of beer
. At one point Doctor Rock confided to a mutual friend that the tour felt like being among scientists. He hadn't been in a band like ours: sober, somber, serious, somewhat distant. Somewhere in Ohio the bassist in an opening band—a ferrety, older Johnny Thunders type whom I immediately distrusted—said he had Seconals, which astonished me.
Seconals?
Who in the '90s was still eating reds?
I don't think Doctor Rock indulged. But that night he had more to talk about with that guy than he had with us.

Anyway, it wasn't that Doctor Rock was so much older. It was that he seemed so much younger. At an afterparty following the last show of the American tour—in case this sounds in any way exciting or louche, it took place in a college dorm lounge, lined with grayish institutional couches and ablaze in fluorescent light—he exulted, as hopped-up as a twelve-year-old, over our upcoming tour of Europe. Throwing his hands in the air, pumping fists, all that: “Yes! I'm going to Europe! Yes! I get to go to Europe! Yes! Yes! Yes!” The veteran of a zillion bands, he was butting up against the realities that being thirty brings into sudden sharp focus—and here he was, high-fiving strangers about a trip overseas.

Having been kicked out of my band for being a loudmouth, I'd internalized one lesson from that experience: If I was ecstatic about something, I assumed I was always best off
keeping it to myself.
I'd grown very conscious that how I acted affected everyone's emotional weather. I hadn't considered how much Doctor Rock's behavior would affect mine, to say nothing of Sooyoung's. Not for the first time, I stared at our new bandmate in disbelief. Where had this guy come from?

***

AT THE END OF THE AMERICAN TOUR, SOOYOUNG AND I DID
some basic accounting and discovered that, on a series of dates that seemed well organized and reasonably well attended and that paid us decently, we'd lost something like fifty bucks. A few days later Sooyoung called a band meeting, where he announced that he'd enrolled in grad school and would start shortly after we returned from Europe.

Doctor Rock took this all in. Then he announced that, given this development, well, with great reluctance and with many thanks for this amazing opportunity and a great time all around, after this last round of dates he was going back home. He said all this with great Midwesternness. Great modesty and affability, accompanied by many smiles and self-deprecating head bobs. There was a touch of insincerity around the edges if you fixed him with a penetrating gaze. But I couldn't blame him if he'd had enough of our nerdy, solemn ways. And of course he had reason to smile: a decision had been made for him. (I should probably say here that both Doctor Rock and Sooyoung later told me that this meeting was not the first time Sooyoung made these plans known, but I assure you, the news was a giant surprise to me.) Anyway, it didn't seem like there was much reason to stick around, so I, too, said I'd go back home. There was just this entire European tour to get through first.

THE GREAT CULTURAL DIVIDE WITHIN BANDS LIES BETWEEN
the drummer and everyone else. If your band is at all serious about impact and power, your drummer's job is the most physical and violent, and by far the hardest. Other musicians can half-ass it—distortion is a remarkably forgiving tool—but the drummer must be both caveman and mathematician, and has a far smaller margin of error than anyone else. While the task is to bang the staff on one rock, loudly, the drummer also has to know, to the millisecond, when to start whacking the next one. You don't want someone just good enough: you want someone
great
, someone obsessed with drums and rhythm and beats and cymbals, who plays for hours every day and subsists on raw meat and steroids and pornography and power lifting. You want sheer fucking power tempered with just enough finesse, and if you don't, I'm basically not interested in your band. Such a regimen won't civilize your average young adult, which is where the cultural divide starts. Those who write lyrics are thinking about
poetry.
The drummers are thinking about murdering animals with their bare hands. (Or should be.)