Your Band Sucks (23 page)

Jeremy was almost as thrilled about the reunion as I was. But he was also sensible enough to wave a yellow flag. A few days after our conference call, he and I had lunch near his office, at the godhead pioneering Bushwick restaurant Roberta's, and after we finished our pizza he made it clear that Bitch Magnet was best off reuniting only for a short and defined time. Play the biggest cities once, put it all back on the shelf, and don't linger. And
don't
make a new record. (Though he did graciously hint that he'd put it out on his label if we did.) He reminded me that Mission of Burma had just been dropped by Matador—and then got turned down by every other prominent independent label. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: In our sandbox, everyone adored Burma. Everyone came of age idolizing them. In 2011, though, no one could afford to put out their records. And Jeremy didn't have to point out that Burma was a hell of a lot more famous than Bitch Magnet.

All right. So we were still doomed. So the clock started ticking as soon as we said yes. So what?

Don't you feel tears welling up at the end of
This Is Spinal Tap—
that love story about two old friends, dim-witted as they may be—when Nigel climbs onstage to rejoin the band? (And inexplicably finds his guitar there, plugged into an amp and ready to play, which would
never
happen in real life?) Or when Rodriguez walks slowly onstage in South Africa in
Searching for Sugar Man
? Or when Anvil takes the stage in Japan at the end of their movie—old guys fearful that everyone has forgotten, suddenly blinking in disbelief at the crowd that's gathered? Their stunned faces as they take it all in, and their looks of dumb surprise?

I had no illusions that involved arenas. What I wanted was another shot at our story. To stop feeling like an outsider in a band I co-created. To write a different and better ending for Bitch Magnet, and with these guys.

L
ike all rock reunions, ours started in earnest on the outskirts of Calgary at a rent-a-rehearsal-room joint called Slaughterhouse Studios, and driving there from downtown was like watching a movie of the city's development run backward. You first passed the blue-glass curvilinear swoop of the newest and tallest building in town, The Bow, an atypically loud monument to the city's new oil money. You passed the grim grandeur of the concrete Brutalist buildings erected in the seventies. Then you left the central core, passing feed and fertilizer businesses, a creamery, a scrap yard with a huge sign screaming
CALGARY
METAL
, which never failed to make my heart happy, until you finally arrived at a cluster of absolutely unremarkable industrial parks, where businesses sold tractors and obscure parts for machines I'd never comprehend. Despite the oil boom, Calgary is still a cow town at heart. In its past life Slaughterhouse Studios had been a meat locker. Our practice room was behind the door of a giant walk-in refrigerator, one built for storing the cow and pig carcasses that had once hung there.

We started rehearsing at Slaughterhouse in April 2011, but practically nothing there suggested that the twenty-first century had happened. Hell, not much at Slaughterhouse suggested that the late
nineties
had happened. I started hanging out in places like this in the eighties, and what a relief to find one where nothing had changed at all. In our practice space were three defunct and decrepit seventies surburban-piano-teacher organs: fake wood, complicated speaker grilles, multicolored buttons to nowhere. Also a mysterious Peavey tape deck that promised to strip vocals from cassettes, a useful technology for a previous era. I plugged into a mutant Marshall half stack that coughed out a nasally, trebly shit-metal tone no matter how much you fiddled with the dials. In the lounge, cans of Canadian beer chilled in a vending machine, across the room from the smeary-screened Asteroids game or the sad, faded pool table. Cold concrete floors and unadorned Sheetrock walls in the narrow and claustrophobic hallway. The bathroom, back by the office, was appropriately disgusting. Years-old posters everywhere for a local Iron Maiden cover band that was named after Maiden's mascot: Eddie the Great, of course. And that slightly pickled scent, again, the one instantly familiar to anyone who's spent time in practice pads or recording studios run by not particularly fastidious guys. But we weren't looking to play somewhere sanitized. When it's time to create some culture, I like to have a little native yeast floating in the air.

On nice weekends Slaughterhouse's owner, Bob, rolled a grill into the cement yard and offered free hot dogs and hamburgers. Bob sported a drinker's reddened capillaries, an inveterate stoner's blown-out gaze, and the uptalk and heavy Canadian accent that always makes Americans giggle, eh? He was tall and thin and big-headed, like Big Bird, a mop of a mustache spreading above his upper lip and a wad of brown-green-hazel hair flopping over his forehead. Some late afternoons it started to smell very skunky up front, where Bob and his friends gathered. It was such a boy's clubhouse that it was hard to imagine any woman ever stopping by, but Bob's girlfriend sometimes did, to throw back beers and get roasted with Bob and his pals.

By now I'd known for a long time that the entire idea of performing this kind of rock music was inherently awkward and dorky-looking: grown men standing around, clutching instruments, making organized loud crashing noises. (Turn off the sound on many older rock videos and squint a bit, and it looks like a bunch of thirtysomething fieldhands, slightly stiff from age and overwork, grimly performing farm chores.) But the vibe and gear at Slaughterhouse and the fact that no one younger than their late thirties was ever present often made me wonder if the entire idea of a rock band was a fossil from another epoch, something younger people no longer thought about, like doo-wop or electric typewriters. I knew hip-hop now occupied a lot of the cultural space that rock once had, but was rock really this dead?

Still: fuck it. We were doing this again. The last time the three of us had played together was almost exactly twenty-one years earlier. And though Calgary seemed a supremely random meeting place, the location actually made sense. Orestes had just moved here from Tucson, and because I lived in New York and Sooyoung lived in Singapore, Calgary was as good a middle ground as any. We knew no one in this city, so it was a forgiving and private place to see if we could get into these old clothes without shredding any seams. There were no distractions, and there was no one to meet. Nothing to do but rehearse each day, then get dinner, and begin to warm to one another again, drink by drink, conversation by conversation.

Orestes and I had both been practicing on our own and came ready to rip into our whole repertoire. Sooyoung hadn't, and was far more tentative. His idea was to drill five songs, over and over again. I thought this had to do with his discipline, but he admitted to me much later that it was more about his fear. He hadn't played bass in over fifteen years—he'd sold his years ago and only bought a replacement a few days before he arrived—and knew he had a lot of work to do.

***

WE'D GATHERED IN THE SAME ROOM FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A
long time several months earlier, in October 2010, when we met in Dallas to mix some unreleased songs for our reissues. That weekend went smashingly well, and we all got along, which was important, because playing in a band on this lower rung of rock means being around each other all the time. I still felt like the only talkative one, and was definitely the only one who talked with his hands, and, as always, their reserve and stillness made me a little more frantic around the edges. But it felt good, working with them and dining with them and drinking with them and crashing the Texas State Fair, where only I was brave enough to eat the fried beer. (Their caution was well founded.)

Orestes was now an environmental scientist. He had those two sons and recently finalized his divorce. He still dressed like a rugby player, absolutely innocent of any style, and was a bit chunkier, with a lot of gray flecking his short black hair. The passing years and fatherhood and all that desert sun had aged him in an appropriate and appealing way. Sooyoung looked almost exactly the same. He'd founded a software and programming company just as the world economy went into the toilet in 2008, and though he worked constantly and always talked about how much of a struggle it was to build his business and keep it going, by now it seemed on a much better footing. Somehow he had become even skinnier while learning to drink like a Russian. Sooyoung also flew around 200,000 miles a year, since his clients were spread across the globe, and he and I started swapping nerdy frequent-flier tips. All our airline miles would come in handy for this midlife caper we were planning, the first stop of which brought us to the rehearsal room in Calgary. Where, despite the decades, and the rust on the gears, and Sooyoung's struggles to relearn bass and needing to hear Bitch Magnet MP3s to transcribe the lyrics he'd written but no longer remembered, an old feeling started stirring almost immediately.

One day when we broke for lunch, one of Bob's beefy and slightly stupefied friends stopped me as I rushed out the door and said, “Dude. Sounds great down there.”

You never knew, in these practice-space exchanges, if someone was being sincere or merely being kind. But I stopped for a moment and turned to him.

“Thanks,” I said. “We haven't played together in twenty-one years.”

“
Ehhh?
” the guy replied.

Which could mean a million different things. But why worry which?

I
slept on people's floors well into my thirties whenever I was on tour. But you make certain concessions to age, and we quickly decided that, during the reunion, it was crazy-talk to consider couch-crashing with friends or fans. For rehearsals in December 2011 for our European tour, we rented a small house in Stoke Newington in London, for the three of us and Matthew Barnhart, our driver/tour manager/soundman/one-man road crew. I've never gotten along particularly well with England, and its skies darken far too early this time of year, but Stoke Newington is disarmingly neighborhoody, and each day we walked to rehearsal past shops and pubs and young couples and children at play, and it was really quite pleasant. After practice we sat in pubs for hours. If we had to do anything in the morning, our five or eight pints each night would be a mistake. But we were on rock time now, so mornings were an afterthought, and this, too, was lovely.

House and apartment rentals are way less rock-star than hotels, because doing dishes is not very rock and roll and because you don't get to stride through a busy lobby gripping a guitar case, hungover and wearing shades. But they're much more practical. At a house there's breakfast no matter how late you sleep. You have your own room—so: privacy—and a washing machine, both major blessings when you're on the road. Instead of a lobby, you hang out in an actual living room. Where we all sat, under comfortably dimmed lights, the night before our first show in Europe.

A nice moment, this. Even domestic, if temporarily. There's a fake fireplace, with design books piled on the mantel. Chairs next to the window, through which we glimpse the patterns of streetlight and row house and shadow. Though the house is cold, of course, because it's December in England, and apparently, even in the twenty-first century, no one in this entire country understands
heating
.

I'm playing my black Les Paul and surreptitiously recording song ideas on my phone. Orestes and Sooyoung are on their computers. Sometimes I wonder if they feel a similar amazement at the strange coalescences that landed us in the same room, back on tour all these years later.

By now we've gathered for practice weekends in Calgary, Vancouver, New York, and Seoul—on so many levels it's amazing to be able to type that phrase—and hanging out is remarkably comfortable, and our roles are growing familiar. I'm the worrier, and handle logistics. Sooyoung is cool—medium cool, not hipster cool—and reserved. Orestes is the most genial, and almost always upbeat, and that part is new. Still, tonight this room is very quiet, because it takes us a few drinks, at least, to really start talking. If this were some sitting-room drama on the BBC, a grandfather clock solemnly sounding its hushed
bongs
would be all you could hear.

Orestes looks up from his laptop: “Did we talk before we had computers?”

I say, “No. We didn't talk. Except for me, so I always thought I was talking too much.”

He says, “You were.”

So I give him a bit of a look and say, “Well,
someone
had to talk.”

(Sooyoung, gazing into his computer, says nothing at all.)

But tonight, after all these years, it's okay. Soon we'll head to the pub. On our way out, we'll squeeze past the half wall of stacked boxes in the entry hall that contain the T-shirts, records, and CDs we'll sell at our shows. Matthew picked up the van today. Tomorrow we'll get back in it for our three shows on the Continent—in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany—then three more in England. It's unclear how much longer this reunion will go on, or even if it
will
go on, since we haven't discussed it. Though an hour ago Orestes mentioned the prospect of playing the Primavera festival in Spain in June, and started thinking out loud about playing Brazil, where none of our bands have ever performed. In response, Sooyoung said nothing. (To be fair, neither did I.) But Orestes's ideas aren't nuts. You can do almost anything in this culture, if you have any sort of following, and one superfan in Brazil could set up shows in São Paulo and Rio, once we found said superfan. But just because we could doesn't mean we should, because playing to twenty-five people in Brazil would mean losing thousands of dollars. I know the real reason why Orestes brought those shows up: he doesn't want this to end. Neither do I. Though Sooyoung is mulish at the prospect of long practices, I'm ready to spend eight hours each day rehearsing, as is Orestes. This is
fun
. I find myself smiling a lot during practice—lasting, daffy, face-splitting grins. The buzz these songs still provide, even if many were written before I could drink legally. (If our songs were people, all of them could drink legally now, too.) Orestes and I have talked about how we both keep finding new nuances in the music. I'm finally nailing the parts that I've heard in my head forever but that never sounded right when I tried to play them. “Big Pining” had been a staple of our live sets even before our first album came out, but not until these rehearsals did I really figure out how to play the bridge. But in deference to Sooyoung's definitively reclaiming Most Reluctant Member status, neither Orestes nor I have discussed any of this with him. Although we know Sooyoung is getting an itch to write songs again. As am I. Maybe there is another record to make, after all.

FORTY HOURS LATER WE'RE IN A VAN FULL OF GEAR CRUISING
up the A27 in the Netherlands after crossing the border from Belgium, passing flat, grassy fields that, even on this cold and rainy December day, are an alarmingly bright green, bisected by neatly cut irrigation ditches in which still water shimmers. Last night we played Brussels. Matthew is driving, no one is talking, and I'm in the middle row, alone with my secret: I'm as happy as I've been in years. I could go from show to show forever. Simple scenes on this featureless highway shine with beauty. Sheep graze. A farmer plods along the roadside, leading a horse draped with a maroon blanket to ward off the chill.

We arrived at the club last night later than we should have, which drives me insane even when it's not the first show of the tour. (I've had nightmares about missing soundcheck since I was a teenager.) Ancienne Belgique, which everyone calls the AB, is so huge and complicated that it doesn't take someone as confused as Spinal Tap or Ozzy Osbourne to get lost going from the loading dock to the stage. Luckily the club had painted color-coded lines in the hallways—trail markers—and kind and capable men instantly appeared to get us and our gear to the stage and set up. As Orestes started assembling his kit and Sooyoung and I shoved amps and cabinets into place, Matthew started his system check, for which he mouths wordless noises into mikes and checks the PA's output against an app on his iPhone, seeking frequencies that either feed back or sound too prominent in the room, which he'll then tweak on the soundboard. Matthew is from Dallas but lacks any regional accent, is a music nerd through and through—he's doing this tour for love, not money, so he's cutting us a great deal—and is stocky, sandy-haired, and always clad in the road-dog uniform of loose jeans and a hoodie. He's cool-headed and very thorough, which are major virtues for someone who does what he does. He has also toured Europe enough to toggle fearlessly between driving on the left and right sides of the road.

After soundcheck an in-house mess hall served dinner. The backstage was spacious and quiet—I'd forgotten how peaceful clubs are during off-hours—and included an excellent private bathroom with its own shower. Welcome back to touring Europe, boys. I learned that Sooyoung had showered by blundering in and glimpsing his bare ass as he toweled off. If you're in a touring band on our level, you're all but guaranteed to see one another naked, but it had been a while. All other inevitable road intimacies, like sharing beds with your bandmates and seeing them cry, also grow less common as you age.

Just before showtime—the room was filling nicely, I saw, relieved—I began my routine: check an iPhone photo to make sure my pedal and amp settings haven't changed since soundcheck. Tune the black Les Paul. Tune the red Les Paul. Tune the black Les Paul again, because I use it for our first songs. Thwack the muffled strings to make sure the pedals and amp are working, recheck looping pedal settings, insert extra picks into the microphone clip, and head backstage, even if only for a minute or two. It took me years to understand certain things about performance, but by now I know:
Never walk onstage alone
. Or wait up there, after checking your rig, for the rest of your band to join you. (Only acceptable exception: if someone's starting the show with a solo piece.) Walking on together as a group looks so much tighter than if musicians straggle on individually.

Some nights things just feel off and every verse is a trudge uphill, and then you start anticipating what might go wrong, fearing that each downstroke will invite disaster, which makes fuck-ups far more likely. Some nights you know everything will be all right from the first note. We opened the show with a long version of “Dragoon,” the ten-minute song from our last album,
Ben Hur
, and during the intro I jammed my guitar hard up against the speaker cabinet, to have the feedback come up just right, and the notes melted into feedback and hung in the air with perfect correctness, and I felt the way a surfer must feel after he catches a wave at the right moment and knows all he has to do is stay upright and let it carry him home.

In Brussels the first few rows—they're the only ones you can really see with stage lights shining in your eyes—were almost all guys, many bulky and fortyish. (That Soundgarden
Louder Than Love
tour shirt one very enthused dude wore definitely fit better back when he bought it.) There were, thankfully, some cute girls up front, too, including one thirtyish black-haired fan in a skirt and white boots, who bounced up and down by my side of the stage. She stayed there for the entire show. I locked eyes with her a few times, until she looked down. At one point my slide accidentally bounced offstage—I have to get rid of it very quickly between the introduction and the verse of “Motor,” and the only way to do so is to fling it off my left ring finger—and afterward, while I stood tuning for the next song, she placed it at my feet. Obedient. I liked that.

In sum—no shit—the best show I'd played with this band, ever. Which I needed, after the show we played in Tokyo a month earlier.

Guitarists constantly struggle with their instruments, and the procession of knobs and devices and cords and amps and speakers required to transmit sound to the audience. Tube amps sound different each night. Dying batteries change how your pedals behave. My Les Paul is heavy enough to push your shoulder blade a few inches south, if you wear it long enough, and is solid enough to crack open a skull, but it's still a fickle and finicky assemblage of wood, and changes in temperature and humidity knock it hopelessly out of tune. The collective body heat of a crowd drastically alters any room's weather, and the extremes of cold and depressurization on long plane flights can affect guitar necks and make them impossible to tune, which is exactly what happened when I flew to Japan.

I'll spare you the technical explanation, in part because I'm not sure I understand it myself, but when a guitar's neck is screwed up, it doesn't just go out of tune—anomalies occur up and down the fretboard that defy logic. So it was that at soundcheck in Tokyo the notes I struck on the third fret were wildly sharp, while notes on those
open
strings were perfectly in tune. Through some strange magic, this was happening on both guitars, and as luck would have it, in several songs I play delicate, quiet passages around the third fret. I've flown with guitars forever, and always take precautions: detuning each string one full step, loosely packing underwear or a T-shirt around the headstock as padding and talisman. Never before had anything like this occurred. I soundchecked in a quietly mounting panic, knowing that as soon as we were done I'd have to break out precision screwdrivers and diddle with the string saddles and intonation, trying whatever I could to coax the open string and the third fret closer in tune. But the problems remained, and I was left to await showtime with jangling nerves. I knew our set would suck, and it would be my fault, because my tuning was a mess.

I was mistaken. So many
other
things went wrong, too.

Different countries use different voltages—Japan runs on 100 volts while America uses 120—and I forgot to run my looping pedal through a voltage transformer, resulting in a momentary blinding flash that toasted the pedal and spread the homey scent of electrical fire throughout the club. My amp kept cutting out because, I thought, low-frequency vibrations were shaking the speaker cable loose. A stagehand kept leaping toward my amp mid-song—this country treats touring musicians ridiculously well—to help, but her English was bad and my Japanese doesn't exist, and of course it was deafeningly loud onstage, so very quickly I was barking at her in frustration. An asshole thing for me to do, and I'd also made a wrong diagnosis: even after she helped me switch amps, the sound kept dropping out.

Then my guitar strap came off mid-song, forcing me to play pancaked on my back while the same kind stagehand frantically tried to reattach it. It is a bad feeling to be prone onstage, staring straight up into the stage lights, horribly aware of the crowd, while strange hands fumble about your shoulder and waist. Though not as bad as it felt when the strap came off again a song or two later. I even got completely lost, somehow, during “Motor,” a staple of our live set since we'd written it, and a song that, by now, I should be able to play in a coma.

Katoman, the Tokyo promoter who put on our show and the kind of guy legendary enough to be known by one name worldwide, stood by my side of the stage, looking more and more bewildered as the night went on.

Near the end of the set Sooyoung got on the mike to deadpan that we needed a new guitarist. Not a great thing to hear from the guy who once kicked me out of the band.