Your Band Sucks (25 page)

Big smile. Big hug. “Aren't you excited?” she asked.

“No. I'm completely out of my fucking mind,” I told her.

Backstage at Butlins was a holding pen, all cement and steel, as cold and echoing as the bowels of some great, hideous arena in the American Midwest, not that I'd know from experience. Block-printed band names were taped to dressing room doors above the legend “Fire door—keep shut.” (So British, all that lowercase.) The three of us had to stand to fit comfortably in ours. A few mirrors took up one wall, all artifacts, with round bulbs running around their borders, the kind seen only in movies. These made me smile: showbiz! Cases of bottled water and skunky lukewarm Peroni and Corona. And no cell phone reception, but that was fine. It was time to shut off the rest of the world.

I stretched the new guitar strings, and tuned and retuned. Sooyoung fiddled with a camera. Orestes languorously laid into his warmup. Normally steady before a show, tonight he turned oddly obnoxious backstage, referring loudly to Cults—the band playing before us, whom we hadn't yet met—as
CAHHHNNTS
, in a fake English accent. But he calmed as soon as his sticks started moving on the shallow white Formica shelf beneath the showbiz mirrors. Always slightly mesmerizing, that mantra. Or at least it gave us something to look at and listen to:
Rat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat-a-tat-a . . .

We congratulated Cults after their set when they passed us backstage, though in truth we couldn't hear anything in our dressing room. Once onstage, I started to tune one guitar again but got no reading on the digital tuner at my feet.
Oh, Christ
. Then I noticed I wasn't plugged in. The lighting woman sauntered over to ask what we wanted. “More blues and whites than reds,” I told her, glad to be asked. Reds make a stage look smeary. Blues and whites look sharp and distinct.

Sets are staggered among the different rooms at ATP, so there's a stretch of dead time in each venue after every performance, and the crowd quickly filed out after Cults' set. Thirty minutes to showtime, and we were setting up to a distressingly empty room that could hold a couple thousand people. Twenty minutes to showtime: still empty. Fifteen minutes to showtime: empty but for twenty diehards pressed up against the barrier separating them from the stage, and maybe twenty more people scattered elsewhere in the room.
I don't care
, I told myself, and continued the preshow ritual: check the tuning on my guitars again, thwack the muffled strings, recheck amp and pedal settings. I jammed a few picks into the microphone clip and went back to the dressing room for the last ten minutes, resigned to play to a lonely crowd in a huge hall. Orestes's girlfriend, Rosi, was there with her camera.
Click. Click.
That and Orestes's
rat-a-tat-tat
ing drumsticks were the only sounds. Then I heard a familiar voice and looked up to see Laurel in the doorway, clutching a camera, a big smile on her face, flashing all of us a thumbs-up. For a long moment I stared at her blankly, lost in thought.

Then: showtime. Sooyoung and I walked down that chilly hallway, through the stage door and onto the stage lit a crystalline blue, passing the stagehands and the gear, and only then did we see that somehow—somehow—the room had filled.

Grim-faced bouncers in orange shirts settled into position on either side of the stage. Sooyoung grabbed his bass. Scattered applause. I hefted the black Les Paul—the one detuned to D—settled the strap onto my left shoulder, flicked the standby switch on the Hiwatt, tapped on the guitar a few times to get a drone going, turned to face the crowd, then hit the three opening notes to “Dragoon” and spun around to belly up to the speaker stack, guitar body pressed hard against the top speaker cabinet, the notes hanging in the air just so.

Sooyoung—deadpan and still, as he always was onstage—glanced my way. We nodded, hit the C-to-D change that ends the opening riff, then I shoved the guitar hard against the speaker cabinet again, this time slowly running it up and around the edge. A gratuitous and totally phallic move, and I will never tire of it. Also a showy way to keep the guitar up against the cabinet and let sound waves and sheer volume make the three bottom strings vibrate a flawless, endless open D chord, all fifths and octaves. We let that chord roar for a while.

Three more notes, ending on a ringing, unresolved interval, and Orestes bounded onstage to shouts and cheers, settled on the drum stool, turned my way, mouthed “One-two,” and we all slammed into the next three notes, and after the last I wheeled to face my amp, gripped the guitar with both hands and raised it overhead, the neck pointing straight up, shaking it furiously, catching a feedback note that shook along, exquisitely in sync—
Yessssssss
—and I saw Orestes looking hungry and intent, and I instantly knew he'd take us wherever we needed to go.

I was holding on to myself so tightly through “Dragoon”—the song has several different tempos, many gradations of soft and loud, and those delicate parts for which I forever fear being out of tune—that I ended the song out of breath, even though I hadn't run around at all, and during the set I understood that I'd played better shows on the tour. But I also understood that it didn't matter, because the event took over. The looks on some faces in the front row were so intense that glancing at them felt like getting shocked. The guys from Macedonia, standing directly in front of Sooyoung, hopped up and down, singing along with every song, eyes closed, faces contorted—watching them made me feel I was intruding. Chavez's Clay Tarver once told me about the difference between pretend shows and real shows. At a pretend show the crowd is sluggish and the band has to supply all the energy, while at a real show the audience provides the juice. This was a real show. An energy current whipped around the room without the least resistance: sound to crowd, crowd to us, amplify and repeat. There's a sheer sexual power when you fill a huge room with glorious, massive noise, playing through a guitar rig that behaves exactly as you want it. There's a magical feeling when you believe—no, when you
know
—you can wave your hands or a guitar at the amp and the electrons inside instantly respond. Even after all these years it's still the closest feeling to God that I know. And every time I got the tiniest taste of it, I understood why so many willingly ruin their lives for it.

After “Sea of Pearls”—likely our most baby-splitting compromise between Sooyoung's pop sense and my secret wish to go metal—and thank-you-good-night, we ambled backstage. (Something else it took me years to learn: exit all stages
slowly
, savoring.) I grabbed another beer, took a piss, and when I returned to the stage, the room was empty again but for stagehands and spent cups and smells. Then someone called out, and I saw Bob and Carrie Weston standing alone in the middle of the room, huge smiles, Bob flashing a thumbs-up. Like I said, in indie rock almost no one will tell you that you sucked, especially friends. But my heart still leapt out of my chest a little at that sight.

After 4 a.m. our crew that night—us and Rosi, Battles and Ian's fiancée, Kate, Nathan and Madeleine from Cults, our friends Pedje and Anya, all our chemistries still blazing with post-performance highs—ended up at one of Battles' apartments, where Pedje methodically broke out excellent bread, geeky cheese, a case of natural wine, and the entire side of a smoked salmon. To plastic knives—the only ones around—salmon skin may as well be barbed wire, so soon we just yanked off unruly chunks, mashed them onto hunks of bread, and shoved the whole mess mouthward. I watched the fish and cheese sweat in the dim and crowded room, knowing exactly how gross it would smell in the morning and how much grosser it would smell with a severe hangover, toward which each of us was sprinting. Cults had a 6 a.m. van call for their three-hour drive to Heathrow. Their tour manager was a classic British road dog, bald and soft-bellied in a loose gray hoodie, who showed up precisely five minutes early to shepherd them out. Being escorted from the afterparty to the van that takes you straight to the airport is rock-star stuff. But I was unbelievably grateful not to be them.

Were there drugs at ATP? There had to be, though, except for a little pot, I saw none. A few women working for a well-known record label offered us E. But entering the Decemberian gloom of London while coming down hard and short on serotonin would make any man suicidal, and we declined. (One undernoticed reason for indie rock anhedonia: it's almost impossible to explore rock's druggy sideshows when touring without a road crew. There's too much crap to do each day.) I'm sure some colorful, rock festival-y things happened that weekend. The chilly morning after our show I saw muddy footprints—as in, from someone's bare feet—describing a winding path on the walkways. Guess someone had an interesting night.

***

OUR EUROPEAN TOUR ENDED IN LONDON, OPENING FOR HOT
Snakes at the Garage, a show more addendum than a climax. The opening-band problem is that you don't play to your crowd. The appeal is that you play to people who otherwise wouldn't see you, but converting new fans is useless for an old band reuniting for just a few shows. Anyway, we were never an easy opening band—too weird to go well with aggressive bands, too aggressive to go well with weird bands, and definitely a sore thumb for something as straightforward as Hot Snakes. As I hit the first notes of the show, a good-looking woman standing by my side of the stage winced and went for her ears, eyebrows knitting together in dismay.
How dare you,
I thought. I moved to the lip of the stage—an actual stage, six feet tall; there was real hierarchy in standing on it—and stared straight through her eyes for several minutes as I played. Towering above her, with a guitar and amplification on my side, so it was not a very fair fight.

But halfway into “Dragoon” I realized my guitar had gone slightly out of tune. A very bad thing to discover when five minutes remain in a song. Then Orestes had some problems, which never happens. People talked through the quiet parts. Everything I said between songs sounded rushed, and even though I knew it did, I couldn't slow myself down. At the end of our last song I went hip to hip with the amp stack, making big Leatherface motions with the guitar, and when I threw it down in front of the amp, I destroyed a patch cord. Better that than breaking another guitar, I guess.

Bartenders at the Garage pour bottles of beer into plastic cups—having spent time among drunk Brits, I endorse any policy that separates them from potential weapons—so after the show I crunched my way across a huge dance floor calf-deep in crushed and empty cups to chat with a few fans still sticking around, like Phil. Phil was about forty, but it was his first time seeing us, he explained, because when we'd last toured Britain, his parents wouldn't let him go. That cracked me up. He snapped a pic of us together and begged us to return. “I hope your parents let you come next time, too,” I told him, pleased he'd set up the punchline so perfectly.

Our headline show in London the night before, at the Lexington—that would have made the better ending. Though that evening didn't start out so well. Andrew Male from
MOJO
was there and began his interview by asking a perfunctory question about reuniting, to which Sooyoung matter-of-factly replied, “For the record, I was against it.” Which would have been the lead quote, were I writing the article. But I wasn't, and luckily, when the piece was published, it wasn't.

The Lexington is tiny, and the show was oversold, and there was a ludicrous volume restriction of 101 decibels. (I can
burp
louder than that.) Backstage was yet another dingy room in yellowed paint with cleaning supplies on open shelves, walls and ceiling displaying endless Magic Markered dicks and balls, monkeys with mysteriously enormous testicles, and baroque instructions concerning what to do with all the genitalia. But the opening bands, Former Utopia and smallgang, were the crew we'd gone to pubs with each night in London, and the show became a homecoming to a city we'd never really bonded with before. When the club opened the doors, one of the first entrants bounded up to the merch booth to confess how anxious
he
felt. The room was so excruciatingly well lit that from the stage you could see the face of everyone in the audience, which is always nerve-racking, But everyone was pulling so hard for us, we could have crapped our pants and it would have been fine. This was a Monday night, and some people told us they were calling in sick tomorrow, because they'd driven 250 miles from Liverpool or 300 miles from Newcastle. The Lexington is an excellent whiskey bar, and people stuck around to drink until very late. Just before closing time someone clapped me on the back in the men's room and stuck out a hand to shake
while I stood at a urinal, peeing.

More than anything, I want to remember meeting Allan, who, like most everyone else there, was burly and bearded and balding and fortyish. Allan, though, came with a minder. He has a severe seizure disorder, typically experiences several each day, and lives at an assisted-living facility. He's also a huge Bitch Magnet fan, and even though loud music triggers his episodes, he insisted he absolutely had to see our show, and whoever decides such things finally consented. He had several seizures during our set, he told me afterward, a huge post-show grin on his face. Then his smile widened and he added, “So, when people say that your music is
convulsive . . .”

Hearts, Allan. You made it all worth it.