Your Band Sucks (21 page)

S
ing it like the Buzzcocks song: Every band gets back together now. But there's actually a long history of underground bands reuniting. Wire was the first, in 1985, though they'd only broken up in 1980. Stiff Little Fingers got back together in 1987. Patti Smith released her first new record in almost a decade in 1988. The Buzzcocks reunited in 1989, Television in 1991, the Velvet Underground in 1993, and the Sex Pistols in 1996. When Mission of Burma got back together in 2002, they kicked off the reunions of a next generation's bands. It didn't seem possible that Burma could reunite, since they broke up in 1983 when Roger Miller's tinnitus became unbearable. But he continued being a musician, and even though none of his other bands was as loud as Burma, smart folk could have realized that he hadn't wholly forsaken volume and amplification and that a Burma reunion was at least thinkable. (Though I don't know anyone who thought it.) Anyway,
après
Burma,
le déluge
. A trickle of reunions soon became a torrent. There are many ways in which punk rock bands are not like big-deal rock bands, but shunning reunions isn't one of them. Today the list of underground American bands that
haven't
reunited is likely shorter than the list of those that have.

Why?

The Label Asked.
Most—though not all—important and longest-lasting labels in the American independent underground were generally beloved by their bands. (In the case of Sub Pop, the better verb is “forgiven,” given the label's multiple near-death experiences and, in its early days, a very casual approach to paying royalties.) Let's say such a label plans to celebrate its fifteenth or twentieth or twenty-fifth anniversary with a weekend-long festival. Let's say you were on that label early on, when the people behind it were overworked adolescents scrambling to make something happen. You took a chance on them, as they did on you. You made a few records together, laughed, cried, shared triumph and tragedy and that uniquely memorable state of
being young together
. Twenty years later, when the phone rings or the in-box pings and those label guys are asking your band to get back together for this massive event—are you really going to just say no?

This kind of bond absolutely does not exist between bands and major labels. Capitol could
never
get the Beatles back together, and it was Live Aid, not Atlantic, that lured the surviving members of Led Zeppelin back onstage. But it's why Corey Rusk of Touch and Go convinced Scratch Acid and Seam and Killdozer and the Didjits and Negative Approach to reunite for that label's twenty-fifth-anniversary festival, in 2006. (Corey even got Big Black back together for a couple of songs; Steve Albini essentially said onstage that they only did it out of respect for him.) It's why Jonathan Poneman got Green River back together for Sub Pop's twentieth anniversary, in 2008. It's why Matador's Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi got Guided by Voices and Chavez and Come to reunite for its twenty-first-anniversary weekend, in 2010. The people who ran your old label were a very special kind of old friend. A stranger wasn't calling. It was your brother.

The Golden Era of All Tomorrow's Parties, 1999–2013.
The first All Tomorrow's Parties, in 1999, immediately established ATP as the rock festival for people who, sensibly, detest rock festivals. The best versions were held at the peculiar British institution of a holiday camp—though ATPs have since taken place in America, Japan, Iceland, and Australia—where families go for a cheap getaway in a sort of rural English setting, albeit one crammed with water parks and small grocery stores and pubs and fast-food outlets and other amusements and conveniences. The entire ATP experience was assembled by and for indie rockers, and for good or ill—and more on that shortly—ATP held fast to the way the founding indie generation kept art and commerce separate. Unlike most every other recently created music festival, it shunned sponsorships, even while newer generations of indie rockers proved far less doctrinaire about such arrangements.

In rock-festival terms ATP was small—6,000 people instead of 20,000 or 60,000. Convening them at holiday camps meant that, unlike at various Woodstocks, an attendee was never far from all mod cons, and you were never charged ten quid for a bottle of water if you were parched or for a cup of coffee if you were freezing. The British ATP festivals became beloved for the minimal barriers they erected between performers and audience. Everyone stayed in the same complexes of cramped apartments, drank at the same bars, went to the same restaurants, and stood together at the same shows. There were no VIP areas. (Theoretically there are no celebrities in indie rock.) Most important, ATP felt like ours, another secret treasured among music freaks and kept from the rest of the world. I won't be the first to describe the old ATPs as summer camp reunions for superannuated indie kids.

The bands were chosen—in ATP-speak, the festivals were “curated”—by a luminary headlining band, and the bands ATP most wanted and chose as curators were actually among the vanguard of interesting music from the past twenty years, as opposed to those that headlined, say, Lollapalooza. Some of ATP's favored bands I liked and some I didn't, but if Shellac or Sonic Youth or Mogwai or Melvins or Pavement choose the performers, then chances are the festival will be interesting. And Barry Hogan, ATP's founder and guiding spirit, figured out quickly that reunions made his festivals much more of an event. ATP offered generally unheard-of sums—in indie rock terms—to the bands it most wanted to appear: mid-five figures, and sometimes more if they wanted you bad enough, to musicians accustomed to getting far less. Among the bands ATP effectively reunited: Slint, the Jesus Lizard, Sleep, My Bloody Valentine, and Neutral Milk Hotel.

ATP's reunions also enabled many bands to briefly reenter the bloodstream of the international touring circuit, because if you reunited for an ATP, it made sense to play London while you were over there. (Barry lives in London and often tendered a nice offer to play there, too.) Since you were traveling so far, why not a few dates on the Continent? Also, since we'll be rehearsing in the States, we might as well . . .

In most cases the tensions that broke up bands eased long ago. It had been decades since you and your band, barely old enough to drink, threw yourselves into vans and drove toward indifferent or hostile weeknight audiences. And if those old tensions still existed—well, it was just a commitment for a week or two. This was no months-long suicide mission of a tour. You could only play the places where people cared. How bad could it be?

Over the years, though, ATP's finances grew increasingly precarious. (Maybe there was a downside to offering tens of thousands of dollars to bands that never sold more than a few thousand records.) Its parent company went through receivership—British bankruptcy—in the summer of 2012, listing debts of over £2.6 million, and three of its American festivals lost a total of £520,000, according to documents filed at the time. Many strains were already evident when Bitch Magnet played ATP in December 2011. ATP had started canceling festivals, sometimes on very short notice, when tickets sold poorly. Many bands reported that just getting paid was becoming an arduous, months-long process—or longer. It was for us. Although we did get paid, after around five months, unlike some bands I know who were owed money for far longer. Me being a loudmouth may have bummed out Sooyoung and Orestes, but it had its uses.

ATP put on its last holiday-camp festival in December 2013. (Though as I write this, it's planning a major event in Iceland in the summer of 2015, despite canceling a planned East London festival on three days' notice in the summer of 2014.) A cultural moment built around remining eighties and nineties indie rock could last only so long, as even Barry recognized. “The bubble is kind of bursting for reunited bands,” he told me in the fall of that year. Partly, he explained, because almost every band that
could
get back together
had
. Perfectly understandable, in business terms, but it hurt when ATP's paychecks vanished. It marked the end of a brief era in which fan interest and financial means came together to make it especially possible—even profitable—for many bands like ours to reunite. And even if ATP were to come back in full force, given all its recent shenanigans there are now bands that won't work with Barry. As for me, I'll probably hug him the next time I see him. Bitch Magnet likely would never have gotten back together were it not for ATP. Even though—or maybe because—Barry and ATP were so much like indie rock itself: promising so much, sometimes delivering, but often falling far short.

The Fans.
In the late eighties and early nineties a left-of-mainstream American cohort graduated college and moved to cities, settling in neighborhoods bearing names we're now tired of hearing. There, in a fashion, they grew up. But unlike hippies—a peripatetic tribe—to a remarkable degree these aging creative types stayed in their cities as they aged. Indie rock's opposition to the mainstream, it turned out, was still congruent with real jobs in software and technology and law and media and teaching, those last two being long-standing destinations for smart misfits. And indie rock's fuzzy line between participant and fan meant that virtually everyone involved was more stakeholder than spectator. You may have a complicated emotional relationship with the culture that unorphaned you, but it isn't easily forgotten. Performers from this subculture were not the distant rock stars of previous generations. If you met them, there was a good chance you'd end up friends.

Also, our bands were often short-lived and broke up before many fans could see them play. Bitch Magnet played fewer than 150 shows. Scratch Acid played only a few more. Slint performed fewer than 30 times in their four-year existence and broke up before their landmark second album,
Spiderland
, was released, in 1991. While
Spiderland
was a major secret-handshake album in the nineties, it didn't get much press when it came out. Slint's fantastic debut,
Tweez,
got even less. I saw Slint twice in the late eighties, once at New York's Pyramid Club and once when Bitch Magnet played with them in Chicago at Club Dreamerz. At both, they played to tiny audiences. In 2005 I saw the reunited Slint during its sold-out three-night stand at New York's Irving Plaza, which holds well over a thousand people. The crowd from any one of those shows may have been larger than the
aggregate
audiences Slint played to while an active band. Even better-known bands found bigger crowds when they reunited. When My Bloody Valentine headlined shows in their heyday in their native Britain, they played halls that held around two thousand people. When the band got back together in 2008, they sold out five nights at London's Roundhouse. Its capacity: three thousand.

The Internet hollowed out the music business, we are told, but maybe it's more accurate to say the Internet hollowed out the business that depended on major labels. Because in many ways it made things better for bands like ours. The Web provided a central place—more precisely, a decentralized place—where many small campfires could be tended, around which widely dispersed but unusually ardent audiences traded tales and live recordings. Such audiences still cherished these bands and had been waiting a long time to see them play. While it's often hard getting fortysomething hipsters to come out to shows—they have real jobs and sore feet, and nights out often require a babysitter—they will respond to an
event
. A reunion of a band they still love. A night where they'll see others just like them, thus taking away the social anxiety an older person feels at a show. (Old age becomes childhood, and show-going fears in your forties mimic those of teenagers: you're entering an unfamiliar world, peopled by unfamiliar natives who know the rules that you don't.) And reunited bands' part-time endeavors are easily supported by such part-time fans.

Audience Realities.
There was negligible interest in Ed Roeser's post−Urge Overkill bands. Nash Kato's solo album
The Debutante
, released in 2000 on a Sony-affiliated label, sold fewer than five thousand copies. But even after their ignominious mid-nineties implosion, there is still an audience for Urge. Sebadoh's draw collapsed at the end of the nineties, and J. Mascis's post−Dinosaur Jr. shows drew smaller crowds than the band that made him famous. So it was that J.'s manager called Lou Barlow one day in 2005, laying out the proposition for reuniting Dinosaur's original trio lineup. Musicians kept learning that their old band's popularity wasn't transferable to their new projects—but if they got their old band back together, there was actual money to be made, sometimes for the first time. For lifers it was a simple calculation: it beat finding a real job.

And, of course:
Do Bands Ever Really Break Up?
Yes, the world may have ignored your band and its records while you were around. Yes, hardly anyone may have noticed when your band finally slipped beneath the waves. But now a musician never knows when some music supervisor might choose one of his songs for some TV ad or video game and catapult him from obscurity to . . . if not fame, then at least nonobscurity and a half-decent check. Some real-world examples of rediscovery are the stuff of Hollywood: here's the part where we trot out Sixto Rodriguez, the subject of the 2012 Oscar-winning documentary
Searching for Sugar Man
. A singer-songwriter from Detroit from the late sixties who released two albums (which initially sold about as well as Vineland and Freshkills) and about whom only the barest facts were known, Rodriguez somehow became iconic in South Africa—a country in which he'd never set foot. In 1998 he flew there to play sold-out arenas, a jubilant occasion memorialized in the movie.
Searching for Sugar Man
omitted some key facts, chief among them that Rodriguez had his records reissued in Australia to significant acclaim and toured that country in 1979 and 1981, the latter with the (inexplicably) huge Oz band Midnight Oil, when it was exceedingly rare for smaller American bands to get to that part of the world. That aside, the documentary parlayed Rodriguez's freakish fame far from home into something much bigger in America: sold-out shows at New York's Town Hall; appearances on Letterman and Leno. Somewhat similar is the tale of Anvil's heroic, if baffling, thirty-year commitment to a very mediocre Canadian version of eighties metal, despite decidedly limited rewards, which was recounted in the fabulous documentary
Anvil! The Story of Anvil.
When that movie became a surprise hit, Anvil
suddenly started selling out venues worldwide, more or less for the first time in its existence.