Your Band Sucks (2 page)

I
n the woodsy New Jersey suburb where I went to high school in the early eighties, the idea of a band as a unit that writes and performs its own material did not exist. The term “cover band” wasn't used, because that's what all bands effectively
were
, playing some version of the hits, and their names generally signaled the ground they plowed. Rapid Fire was metal, and ambitious, which meant they sometimes rented a lighting rig. They wore denim and black leather and played songs by Judas Priest. Leather Nun, who apparently didn't know the Swedish band that first used the name, was a more poorly accessorized version of the same idea. Scufl (pronounced “scuffle”) wore bright colors and lots of hair mousse. You know: new wave. Some of the guys in Scufl and Rapid Fire ended up in a band called Fossil that had a blink-and-you-missed-it moment on Sire in the early nineties. General Public—which wasn't the dull English Beat offshoot that had a minor hit with “Tenderness”—probably had the highest percentage of honor roll members. One guitarist was even a class president. The one time I saw them, he carefully applied a pair of Ray-Bans just before going onstage with his new-looking Strat. General Public played songs by Genesis and Men at Work, and, to paraphrase Raymond Carver quoting Charles Bukowski, here I am, insulting them already.

Other bands had headache-inducing early-eighties names like Feedback and Steeler, and a few of them actually wrote a song—like
one
song. The only punk rock band in our school was the Pukes. (Could I make up that name? No.) Their singer had spiky hair—still a novelty in the suburbs back then—a rubber face built for bugging eyes and bared teeth, and a stick figure's physique. I thought they played extraordinarily fast, but I saw them before I'd heard much hardcore. They, alone, may have written their own material, since I can't imagine that the song titles I think I remember—“Puke Now,” “Mercenary Life for Me”—were covers.

The idea of making your own record was completely inconceivable to us, even though, by the mid-eighties, it was a reality rampant throughout the world. How did you even do it? No one knew. Teenage bands in our stretch of suburban New Jersey didn't even have a place to play. There were no rock clubs near us. Bars were out, since the state drinking age was raised to twenty-one in 1983, and, as far as I knew, you had to go to a city for any all-ages hardcore shows. But once a year local high schools staged a battle of the bands, and bands crossed town lines for them, to perform for other students amid humid atmospheres consisting of hair mousse and longing and hormones. Our school hosted its battles of the bands on a Friday night in late fall, when the days were cooler but not yet cold, and dark arrived in the late afternoon. Under inky skies parents' cars nudged through the parking lot, brake lights flashing on and off, disgorging clots of teens. Returning to school after hours made you think that the normal rules were somehow suspended. Everyone searched for someone to fumble with in a dark corner, or for some small bit of contraband to make the evening.

Yeah, those nights. Even outcasts like me were susceptible to whatever hung in the air.

All the girls in makeup, in skimpy tops, in short skirts, in leg warmers, and doused in perfume; the scent they trailed was unbearable. A girl from French class showed up in skintight satiny black pants made more remarkable by the big chunky zipper traversing the entirety of her crotch, belly button to spine. MTV was now widely disseminating bad-hair ideas, so I urge you to visualize the horror show atop this crowd's heads. Parachute pants, loud colors, and geometric striped-and-gridded shirts and skinny ties for the Scufl fans. The more fashion-forward dudes among them wore white Capezios—jazz oxfords—which, somehow, no one found hilarious. The guys who didn't particularly fit in wore Members Only. (I was one of them, dividing my time among the pocket-protector crowd, the most droolingly unregenerate dope smokers, and a few smart outsiders orbiting around art and music.) The boys identifying as heavy metal all had spandex pants and faded-denim vests emblazoned with Iron Maiden and Judas Priest and Ozzy patches. These vests had been denim jackets before their arms were ripped off, leaving behind dangling fringes of white cotton fabric, which you burned off with a lighter. If you weren't careful while you did this, you set your vest on fire, though it was kind of fun when it happened. Only the stoners had a look that still holds up today: lank-haired, sleepy-eyed, jeans and faded tees. They were totally onto something, and they
didn't even know it!

The cafeteria was briefly remade into something else—the lunch tables hauled away and a couple of makeshift stages quickly assembled at opposite ends of the room. In a major concession to atmosphere the blazing fluorescent overhead lights were turned off. If you squinted, it kind of looked like a club. It would do. It had to, anyway. Then the bands nervously took the stage and played other bands' songs. Oftentimes the
same
other bands' songs. One night, during that odd interval when Quiet Riot was briefly the biggest band in the world, three different bands covered “Metal Health.”

Rapid Fire impressed me. Or at least their guitar solos did. The witless commercial-metal version: finger sprints, really, dashing up and down blues scales as fast and as smoothly as possible. The sheer speed lit up something in my brain. As much as I professed to detest metal, at home I'd shut the door to my room, plug my lousy Peavey guitar into my lousy Peavey amp—both bought with bar mitzvah money—and see how quickly I could run through scales, too. (In sum: not fast enough.) Then Scufl would play the Cars' “Touch and Go,” and suddenly everyone in the room was singing along and reaching up to mime the “I touched your star” part, as if that lyric was about a star in the sky and not, you know, a vagina. I joined in while secretly glancing at the preposterously hot girl I was crushing on, wholly without hope, who was nice enough to befriend me, though nothing more. Michelle was half-Asian, half-Italian, absolutely
Jesus Christ she's beautiful.
I wore oversized glasses with lenses so thick they distorted my face, a halfhearted Jew-fro, and braces. I cringed when I looked into mirrors and was mutely grateful for our long phone calls. For any flakes of her attention, really. At this battle of the bands, she was all tarted up, hotter than a heartache, and, unlike everyone else, she didn't sing along, just nodded her head and languidly chewed gum in time with the music, a hand on her hip. Grown men have gone to jail for less. I looked at her and thought, as overwrought as any teen,
She does not know this entire moment is about her
, even though girls that pretty usually do.

Everything about these nights was totally Tinkertoys, and I knew it even then. But knowing it didn't stop how crazy and excited and bottled-up and absolutely unable to express it I felt, so uncomfortable in my skin it may as well have itched, crazy from the crowd and the guitars and the amps and the drums and the girls and
that
girl especially. I thought, maybe I could start a band to impress her. No. Wait. This is better. Maybe I could start a band
with
her. I'd see her a lot more then, right? We actually tried this, though she wanted to sing a bunch of Pat Benatar songs for which I couldn't even feign interest, and in any event I couldn't play the solos fast enough. And I hadn't yet realized that you started a band not to get the girl but because you
couldn't
get the girl. To channel all the horrible churning, surging feelings—the goddamned unmanageable desire and anger and other emotions you couldn't name, you could never understand, and that nonetheless never left you alone. A band might make them into something other than what you seethed over endlessly, or what you whacked off to behind a locked bathroom door.

***

I DID MOST OF MY GROWING UP IN WARREN, NEW JERSEY,
about an hour west of Manhattan, in the kind of development common to comfortable suburbs erected in the late sixties and seventies, and the one good thing I can say about my hometown is that it gave you time and space to dream. The houses kept a respectful distance from one another. There were woods with tall trees, and great expanses of lawns. We lived well off any main road, and the surrounding streets were very lightly trafficked. Cars floated by slowly, gently, kids wriggling and bouncing in the backseat. You could ride your bike for hours, dazed and drifting, seeing no other humans, utterly and gloriously alone. The gears on your ten-speed made a nasal, narcotic clicking when you stopped pedaling, and there was a song in that sound. You achieved a minor cinematography coasting down the street, a slow pan past the trees through which you glimpsed your neighbors' houses. Though no one would want to make a movie out of this.

Other boys my age lived in the neighborhood, and though we sometimes played endless games of two-on-two baseball during the longest days of summer, I spent a lot of time alone, riding my bike on the quiet roads or reading and poring over baseball statistics in my room. Middle-class American childhood was not yet a relentlessly scheduled sequence of commitments, and you had lots of time for idle dreaming. So much stillness and quiet. So little around that you could spend all day inside yourself, as confused and whimpering as it may have been in there. You had no sense of a “we”—the thought that people like you did, in fact, exist and you hadn't spun off, alone, into some solitary and forgotten corner of the cosmos—but you knew where the “I” was.

We moved into that neighborhood when I was four and my older brother, Neil, was ten. After we had our housewarming party, I remember asking my dad if we were really going to live here, because it was so much bigger than the downstairs rental in which we'd lived before. There was a two-car garage and an acre and a half of tall trees. Neil and I now had our own bedrooms. The low-ceilinged basement had more square footage than our entire old apartment, and down there Neil and I somehow managed to play baseball and basketball. It was a big leap for my dad, an only child whose father repaired watches and whose mother ground out ridiculously long workweeks as a back-office clerk on Wall Street to put him through Columbia and med school. For years the three of them lived with my dad's maternal grandparents in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, but when he was thirty-six, he was able to move his pretty wife and two smart sons into the kind of house every Jewish mother wishes for her son the doctor, and my grandmother is a Jewish mother right down to the homemade chicken soup.

My mom grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, on a hilly and cobblestoned street near Isham Park, in a top-floor three-bedroom duplex that, if it's been left untouched, is someone's dream apartment today. Her dad ended a long career with the city's Board of Education as the assistant superintendent overseeing all of Brooklyn's high schools. That may scan as “hack,” but that wasn't my grandfather: the squib the
New York Times
ran when he died in 1993 said, accurately, that he was known for developing interesting educational programs. My mom's mother, to whom she was closer, died of leukemia when my mom was sixteen and away at summer camp. (Typing that sentence brings home, again, the horror she surely felt.) She and my dad started dating at that camp. Their courtship survived those summers, as well as the commute once the two of them were back home—Flatbush to the north end of Manhattan is a ninety-minute subway ride, if you're lucky. She ended up at Barnard and he at Columbia, and they got married just before she turned twenty. After graduating from Barnard, and before my parents moved to New Jersey, she taught fifth grade at Manhattan's PS 122. Today it's a famous performance space, but her stories made the East Village of the early sixties sound like wartime Beirut with worse parenting. She gave up teaching to raise my brother and me and became a librarian once I started grade school. She was the family disciplinarian and had a temper that terrified me whenever it blew. I'm sometimes a hothead, too. Hi, Mom!

Everyone in my house was so much older and talked so fast about things I didn't understand that at the dinner table I felt several crucial seconds behind each exchange, head-swiveling as the conversation bounced between my parents and my big brother, a few beats too slow to follow the ball in some Ping-Pong competition. Like a lot of youngest children, I craved much more attention than I got. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem—the baby of his family, too—once told me that being the youngest and feeling ignored or left to your own devices can leave you with a tight core of stubbornness about whatever you wanted to do:
All those years you abandoned me to dream this up in my room, and now you're telling me I can't? Fuck you
. I knew exactly what he meant.

My brother is one of my best friends today, but the six years between us is a huge gap when you're children, something I learned over and over again when I would galumph after Neil and his friends to be rejected, or grudgingly tolerated. Like a lot of Jewish kids from the Northeast, Neil and I went to summer camp for two months each summer, amid hills and trees and soccer and softball fields and basketball and tennis courts semicircling a mile-wide lake. Neil had gone to that camp for years and was kind of a big deal there when I arrived for my first summer. The annoying thing about him was that, early on, he mastered never looking like he was trying very hard, and he possessed the remove and equilibrium older siblings sometimes have. Whereas I always felt like I was belly flopping around school and camp and our hometown, socially leprous, barely getting by. (He did especially well with girls at camp, unlike me, about which I remain incredibly bitter.) Sometimes when grown-ups who knew him—teachers, coaches, counselors at camp—made the connection between us, they would light up, and I'd stupidly stew on this, feeling too insubstantial to cast a shadow, visible only as an adjunct to someone more memorable who'd passed through before. My mom's response was, better that than dread flashing across their faces, a sentiment with which I didn't necessarily agree.