Your Band Sucks (22 page)

Chances are no one will ever make a movie about your forgotten band. (Though people made—or are making, while I type this—documentaries about Tad, Silkworm, Mudhoney, Mission of Burma, SNFU, Slint, Walt Mink, and venues like Memphis's Antenna Club and Trenton's shithole hardcore warehouse City Gardens, and that's just what I know off the top off my head.) But none of us required a movie or sold-out shows at an arena in Cape Town to make us reunite. Kind words and a few small rooms full of transfixed faces were often enough. It's all we ever really wanted in the first place.

***

BY THE EARLY 2000S A FEW LABELS HAD CONTACTED ME OR
Sooyoung about reissuing Bitch Magnet's catalog. We ignored them or put them all off:
We haven't been in touch, it's too much trouble, we don't know where that stuff is.
Then, in 2008, during the final summer of the second Bush administration, Jeremy DeVine of Temporary Residence started courting us and in his quiet and persistent way ultimately won us over.

Jeremy is blue-eyed, wavy-haired, and atypically kind and levelheaded for someone in the music business. It's easier to imagine him as the proprietor of a small family-run company than as the guy running his thriving label. (Explosions in the Sky is the marquee band, but Jeremy has had a remarkable streak of signing other acts that still sell in the mid-five figures: big numbers for a company with a full-time staff of three, including Jeremy, all of whom work in about five hundred square feet in Brooklyn.) Jeremy doesn't drink, is a vegetarian, and in conversation it's impossible to hurry his Kentucky drawl. He lacks the chip on his shoulder common among ex-hardcore kids, myself included. If his idealism about the power and nobility of indie and community is decidedly earnest and unblinking, it's because the label he more or less built single-handedly is a rare place where such idealism actually works.

Before we could make any final decision, though, we needed to find Orestes. Sooyoung and Orestes had always swapped the status of most reluctant member, but Orestes held it last. He could never hide how much he disliked rock clubs and smoky dives, always had unreadable motives—though Sooyoung's often seemed as obscure—and left the band abruptly. More to the point, after all these years, neither Sooyoung nor I knew how to find him. I knew that Orestes had taken his father's surname of Morfín in the nineties after attending college under his stepfather's last name, Delatorre. I thought he was living in Tucson, but neither he nor his wife—the girlfriend he spent that summer with in Atlanta—had a listed phone number. He was on Facebook briefly, but then his profile disappeared. I found a couple of academic citations for grad work he'd done years earlier, but there were no more recent traces on the Internet. He was not active in any band, or at least in any band mentioned on the Web. He did not appear to exist, though of course he did. Believing you can find everyone and everything through Google is another narcissism of the tech-y crowd.

One day, though, I was killing time at work watching a clip of a live Laughing Hyenas show in Germany, and when the song ended, the location suddenly changed, and Orestes's face filled the screen, talking into the camera, looking directly at me. (His friend had recorded that show.)
He had to be out there somewhere
, I thought. I kept trying. Some time afterward, I Googled him again, and his name popped up on LinkedIn. I doubted that anyone else in the world could share both his uncommon Greek first name and his uncommon Mexican last name. But there's always that instant when you can't be sure.

We hadn't spoken in at least twelve years. When I was prompted to “add a message” when I “invited him to connect on LinkedIn,” I stared at the empty text box, and all I could come up with was:

Hi Orestes. How have you been?

—Jon Fine

Within an hour I received a reply:

I'm well, thanks. And you?

I thought a bit and sent him a longer response. I said I was visiting Los Angeles. I said it was colder than anyone would want it to be. I said I'd just seen Sooyoung in New York. Then I got to the point.

A label on the East Coast—Temporary Residence—has been after us to do BM reissues. No $$ up front but a profit split. Sooyoung and I both think it's a good idea. You? I know the guy behind the label and he's a good and solid dude who will do a good job w/it.

He said yes immediately, and we kept e-mailing. Two hours later, after two more exchanges, he wrote:

Is there any possibility we would re-convene to support the re-issues?

Son of a bitch. Did the guy who I was certain would never want to play again just say that? At the bottom of my next response, I asked:

“reconvene” means what?

At the bottom of
his
next response:

Reconvene. Would we need to get back together and play a few shows, or does Temporary Residence not care?

To steal someone else's line, I wanted reunion shows so badly you could see the stains on my pants from across the street. But our band dynamic had always been me being too eager and everyone else being ambivalent, and I couldn't tell if I'd entered the reality distortion field you can slip into when you want to hear something. Orestes could well be asking, eyes rolling and prefatigued,
Oh, Jesus, are they really going to ask me to do this?
I flashed back to the summer of 1990, during one of our last rehearsals, when I told him about some new development brewing as he screwed felts onto his cymbal stands, and he sort of smiled or winced and asked, “But what would that
entail
?”

I deliberated for a bit and then wrote back.

No one's mentioned anything about playing shows, so I strongly doubt that's a prerequisite. Were you asking because you'd like to?

Ten minutes later:

I ask because there is usually some talk of playing out with this kind of thing. I hadn't thought about it, but I certainly wouldn't be averse if that was part of the deal.

So we were heavy petting. Or at least talking dirty. But I still wanted to be cautious. So I lied.

I hadn't thought of playing out as part of this, and haven't discussed it at all with Sooyoung. But I wouldn't be averse either. Have you been playing at all?

Thirty seconds later:

I haven't sat down with it on a regular basis since early 2008, but I played out a few times this past Fall and was not disappointed.

He still had that same red Yamaha kit, the one that sounded like God to me, which as far as I was concerned all but sealed it. A few months later I flew out to Tucson to play with him, but I knew going in that this was just a formality. On my second day there Orestes woke at 6 a.m., met the group of guys he cycled with, and pedaled his racing bike fifty miles in the desert. Then we loaded his drums into his car, drove to a practice space, set all the gear up, and played for six hours. He'd always been a fucking ox. Still was.

***

WHEN SIGNING A RECORD CONTRACT WITH AN INDEPENDENT
label, the smart move is to license your recordings for a specific term, such as five or seven years, so that when that term expires, all rights revert to you. (Certain indie labels—hello, Restless!—sometimes signed less-savvy bands to fuck-you-we-own-this-forever deals.) While visiting San Francisco in May 2010, I contacted Gary Held, whose label, Communion, had released Bitch Magnet's records in America. From our old contracts I knew that the rights to those recordings had been ours for a decade. But Gary was still selling Bitch Magnet on iTunes, even though he hadn't the legal standing to do so. We wanted him to stop. Also, I wanted him to cough up the royalties we were surely owed, since he last paid us around 1995.

It was a brilliant spring day in San Francisco, and, like a tourist, I met Gary at the Ferry Building, and we walked to the end of a pier to see the Bay Bridge and Oakland's hills and all the gorgeousness in the distance. But the meeting was as passive-aggressive as any indie rock business discussion could be. In a polite and almost kind way, Gary said there was no way we'd get royalties out of him, and in any case, he had no paperwork whatsoever documenting how much he owed us. He mentioned he had a small stash of a few hundred old Bitch Magnet CDs lying around, and afterward I made a few fruitless attempts to take them off his hands. He did agree to take our songs down from iTunes, and made good on this a few weeks later. He also promised to send over an accounting of iTunes sales, for which I am still waiting.

Evidently I'd learned nothing in all my years of dealing with remote and soft indie rockers and still couldn't cajole them into anything. As I started to stew, a curious Gary asked me if Bitch Magnet would reunite for a few shows, given the upcoming reissues. Normally I admitted nothing in response to such questions, but I thought,
What the hell, it's not that much of a secret,
and said that, while it was by no means certain, I really wanted to.

“You guys are lucky,” he said.

I didn't understand what he meant.

He explained that he'd grown accustomed to running into guys who played in some band and, amid backslaps and reminiscences, asking whatever happened to this or that member. And suddenly everyone is silent, tight-lipped, looking down. Musicians died young, from misadventure, from illness. They disappeared into hardcore drugging or drinking, especially around San Francisco and Portland and Seattle. They wrecked their cars and rolled their vans. When Gary called us
lucky
, he meant that we were all still around, and healthy.

Several hours later I called Sooyoung, ostensibly to tell him about meeting Gary, but really to discuss getting back together, while I paced in front of Hayes Castle, an oddball theme restaurant that had gone belly-up, leaving behind its fake-castle carcass and some bewildered reviews on Yelp. One argument I made was:
People die
. I said it with some levity—with as much levity as you can say something like that—but I was serious. Jerry Fuchs had died six months earlier. I'd been lucky, until then, never to lose someone around my own age, someone with whom I was in mid-conversation. I didn't bring up Jerry with Sooyoung, because he knew what had happened, and anyway, what do you say about that? (This, I guess: A bunch of us played hooky from our lives and went on an epic weeklong bender, it was terrible, it was amazing, I sobbed and howled and laughed and drank until the bars closed every night, my ribs got bruised from endless crushing hugs, I danced on tables and did drugs in bathrooms and terrified my wife.) Anyway, Sooyoung always responded to persuasion and logic, not a hard sell. He was unconvinced. But Orestes and I would keep working on him.

***

JEREMY WAS REMARKABLY PATIENT WITH HOW LONG IT TOOK
us to assemble the Bitch Magnet reissues: forever, basically. The master tapes were spread among four locations in California, New York, and New Jersey, and Sooyoung and I weren't certain what was where, and none of us lived within easy distance of California, except for Orestes, who, as a father of two young boys, had even less free time than the rest of us to travel and knock on doors and scour half-forgotten closets. Shortly after Orestes signed on, Jeremy assigned us the catalog number TR150. The triple LP and triple CD finally came out three years later, just after Temporary Residence released TR203.

One night in March of 2011, as the reissues slowly made their way toward a December release date, Laurel and I met Ian Williams of Battles and his fiancée, Kate, for dinner. At some point during the main course Ian mentioned that Battles was curating All Tomorrow's Parties' Nightmare Before Christmas festival in early December. Then Kate blurted out, “Hey, Ian, why don't you have Bitch Magnet play?”

Ian and I looked at each other.

I was opposed to the entire idea of rock festivals, or as much as you could be without ever having attended one, but I knew ATP would be as good an offer as we'd get.

The next day Ian told me to expect a call from Barry Hogan, and Barry reached me while I paced one of the grimy blocks in north Chelsea that defiantly, even gloriously, resist gentrification. Barry was charming. Barry was practiced at his spiel. The Nightmare Before Christmas would be held the weekend of December 10 at a Butlins (
Butlins!
) holiday camp in Minehead, an English coastal town ninety minutes southwest of Bristol. Bitch Magnet was guaranteed a prime-time slot. Rooms at the festival for the band and crew were included. Meals and flights were extra. Also, Barry said, he could book us a show in London and maybe even throw in practice space at Butlin's if we needed it. Then he named a pretty generous fee. I named another. After a day or so of negotiation, he put everything in writing.

All that remained was selling Sooyoung on it.

***

THE OFFER FROM BARRY IN HAND, ORESTES AS ANXIOUS AS I
was to get back together, both of us confident we could do it without embarrassing ourselves, we started war-gaming various scenarios with Jeremy—who was paying us attention far out of proportion to how many records we'd likely sell—and set up a conference call in mid-March with him and the three of us in Bitch Magnet. I'd stamped into my brain
Sooyoung responds to logic and persuasion
, so, in as steady and unaffected a voice as I could manage, I mentioned that we had received an offer to reunite and dispassionately read off the terms. I had Jeremy on hand to chime in with how singular an opportunity this was, but it wasn't even necessary. I don't remember when, or if, Sooyoung actually said yes, but the conversation shifted almost instantly from “will we?” to “how do we?” Several months later, in an interview in Asia or Europe, Sooyoung explained we had presented ATP's offer while he was several drinks into a night at a pub in Singapore, so his defenses were down. But, hey, if that's what it took.

Through March and April we started working out details and scheduling practice weekends in Canada—because Orestes was moving to Calgary—and New York, and Sooyoung asked if we could practice in Asia as well. Then he said, “I can get us a show in Seoul,” and—because there's always competition within bands, I guess—I said, “I can get us a show in Tokyo,” and we began planning our first reunion appearances, and our first Asian shows ever, for November 2011. Spring was coming on slowly in New York, and my days were pleasantly distracted by the logistics of plane tickets and finding practice space and lodging in distant cities, as well as by a low-grade rush always buzzing in my blood because
we were doing this
.