Your Band Sucks (26 page)

N
oon in Tokyo. Late April 2012, but it feels like March: partly cloudy, quite windy, a tinge of winter you can't ignore. Sooyoung and I stand on a paved expanse outside the Museum of Maritime Science, a six-story building shaped like an ocean liner. We're at the Kaikoo Popwave Festival, during our second run through Asia. Batcave is onstage, proving there's no metal like old metal. The members of Batcave—dear God! what a name!—are all middle-aged, with waistlines that would make any Hell's Angel proud. Before their set we watched them rip open beers backstage, a move wholly unremarkable were it not for the fact that everyone else was still eating breakfast.

We're on next. Set time: 1:30. Sooyoung has recovered amazingly from another epic night out. (I started falling asleep at the bar around two—thank you, jet lag—and went back to the hotel.) He was late and semi-responsive for van call and breakfasted on a microwaved cup of convenience-store noodle soup as we sped to the festival. To approximate something David Chang once said, in Tokyo even the shitty food is great, and you can throw together a shockingly good meal from prepared foods available at any 7-11 or Lawson's. I still winced at Sooyoung's choice, but it worked, and he's identifiably human again. Today, thankfully, won't be like that day in Seoul last fall when his bedroom door was still closed at noon and Orestes and I thought he might still be out from the night before. Then my phone rang, and I heard Sooyoung croak, “I can't move,” and I got all Florence Nightingale and brought him water and a fistful of Advil, which got him well enough to rise and lead us to a restaurant known for steaming bowls of a rejuvenative chicken-and-ginseng soup.

The thing about outdoor festivals isn't just that you sometimes play at lunchtime in weather that begs for a sweater, and maybe mittens, too. Playing outside, broadly speaking, sucks. Sound dissipates no matter how huge the speaker rig is, so you never attain the good sonic density common to any half-decent club. At Kaikoo we are playing on the festival's Grand Master stage, and after seeing Batcave, I start to grasp the retirement-community overtone to “Grand Master.” On top of everything, Orestes is brutally sick. Bedridden our entire time in Tokyo, wracked by fever and chills and cramps and shakes. I'd stopped by his hotel room every few hours with water and medication, and to monitor his general condition. Before the set I ply him with bananas: easy on the stomach! calories! potassium!

When Batcave lumbers offstage, our friend Carl, who speaks fluent Japanese, hears someone compliment a Batcaver on his band, to which Batcave guy says, “
Burutaru desu
,” which translates to “It is brutal,” a phrase that immediately enters our lexicon. (“How's the pizza?” “
Burutaru desu
.”) Our songs seem slow onstage, which made me crazy when I was twenty and still does now. But we get through the set. Decent crowd, subpar performance. Though it is miraculous that Orestes can play at all, let alone as solidly as he does. At our previous Tokyo show he was even sicker, and I told him backstage that he'd carried me for many shows and tonight I'd carry him, so I stayed close to him onstage, jumping up and down, locking eyes, urging him along. I had to do something to get the energy level up, so when a photographer was shooting me at the end of one song, I charged right at him, jumping off the stage—still playing—making extravagant faces into his lens, licking his cheek when I finally caught up with him. He kept clicking like mad as he backpedaled. (I wish I could find him now and see those photos.) Tokyo is one of my favorite cities, and I love playing there, but for us it feels cursed. We played three shows there during our reunion, and not one went well. At least at Kaikoo the guy who'd interviewed me after I'd smashed my guitar the last time we were in town showed up at our merch booth and handed me a DVD of that interview. I thanked him—and discovered much later that he'd missed recording the actual guitar-smash.

***

I ALMOST PULLED THE PLUG ON THIS ASIAN TOUR. SETTING IT
up was an unusually large pain in the ass, and I had to absorb almost all of the ass-pain. The costs were brutal, and there was no way to avoid losing thousands of dollars. But we had a cash cushion left over from Europe, and eventually the choice became binary: go on tour, or go to work for two weeks. Not a hard call when framed like that. Even less so when framed like this: We're old. When else would we do this? So we got ambitious. Maybe too ambitious: Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, and those two shows in Tokyo. A tour in which we had to clear passport control and customs in a new country every day, with lies about why we were visiting, since most countries demand work permits for performers. A frisson of tension always came with crossing borders, especially since I was lugging my guitars in two enormous flight cases that kept getting mistaken for something in which you'd stash an assault rifle. Most smaller bands half-sneak across borders this way, but everyone knew at least one that had been denied entry into some country or other. Two bands I know—Red Scare and Storm & Stress—got turned away from Canada. (
Canada
. That's gotta sting.) For their first Japanese tour in the nineties, Tortoise learned about work permits only when authorities at Narita Airport wouldn't let them into the country—so they flew to Seoul, did the paperwork at the American embassy, secured the permits, and made it into Japan without missing a single show. I'm really glad I never had to deal with anything like that after an endless flight from America to Tokyo.

Orestes and I arrived at Singapore's Changi Airport in early April, mildly deranged after flying roughly twenty hours, for a few days' practice and our first show. How nice an airport is Changi? There's a fucking
swimming pool
atop Terminal One. Singapore is hot and equatorial. Also, basically an upscale outdoor shopping mall extrapolated to an entire country. Much of it looks like it was built in the eighties. These parts are considered historic. (I'm joking. Somewhat.) Everything works. Sit-down restaurants are exorbitant, since almost every ingredient is imported, but hawker centers are crammed with small stalls purveying cheap and variegated Asian grub, the stuff of food bloggers' wet dreams, and Orestes and I gorged ourselves in them daily.

I'd found a practice space called Four Tones—a reference to Mandarin pronunciation, I learned—and reserved time well in advance of our arrival by corresponding with someone who signed e-mails THE WALL. All caps. We found Four Tones on a surprisingly sketchy block. (“Sketchy” in Singapore is relative, but there was no mistaking the prostitutional vibe there and in an often abandoned bar just downstairs from Four Tones.) In person The Wall was a friendly, wavy-haired Malay in his late twenties or early thirties, neither hulking nor freakishly tall. His feet splayed in the way of people who are barefoot all the time: Four Tones is a shoe-free practice space. You stepped out of your sneakers in the hallway and padded into your carpeted rehearsal room, and when you glanced down during rehearsal, you saw your stupid socked feet alongside your effects pedals and suddenly felt twelve again, in a friend's fancy suburban basement rec room—the friend whose parents were humorless hard-asses and banned footwear in their new-carpet-smelling house.

That sight didn't make you feel as if you were grasping pure power with both hands, and the gear at Four Tones was semi-functional and sounded terrible, but things still clicked once we started rehearsing. In our first reunion shows Sooyoung wore his bass higher on his body than he did our first time around, because some sense memory made him wear it as high as the guitar he played in Seam. But you don't strum a bass gently, all wrist, as you can a guitar. In Singapore he adjusted his strap, shifting his bass maybe three inches lower, a minor change that made a huge difference. Now he got his shoulder into every downstroke and started playing with much more muscle and authority, and despite the bad amps and toy drums and overall sock-rock vibe, we sounded
good
. Noticeably better than we had in Europe.

During the day Sooyoung went to work at his company's office. He invited us to stop by, and we met his staff, though he generally kept the band a secret, and I don't know how many of them really knew why we were there. Orestes and I stayed in an apartment complex near Fort Canning Park, popular with expat European and American families, where we sort of worked, too, on our laptops, but lunch took a huge bite out of our afternoons, and we spent a lot of time lounging around the giant outdoor pool, sometimes catching each other's gaze and cracking up. Our first time around hadn't been anything like this.

Each morning at our apartment building, everyone crammed into the too-small breakfast room and attacked a free buffet until everything was gone. Once, still reeking of booze and fried food and the very late night before—the kind of morning when you feel the need to apologize for your appearance, if not your scent—I squeezed into the tiny elevator alongside a fresh-faced American family, whose young children regarded me with one glance and instinctively moved closer to their parents.

Sorry, folks. We came to Singapore for rock. You remember rock, don't you, ma'am? Though, who knows, it may be gone by the time your kids grow up.

The Singapore show was at the Home Club, which sits in a mall across from a cement river channel, or maybe it was just a ditch to catch the runoff from heavy rainstorms. We'd never played in a mall before, but in Singapore it kind of made sense. There we met Phil, an Australian superfan who'd told us through Facebook that he was burning a lifetime's worth of frequent-flier miles to make the show.
(Great to meet you, Phil. I hope we don't suck.)
The club had concrete walls and concrete floors and concrete steps leading up to the stage, which is not exactly the zenith of acoustic design. But after our set we came offstage, looked at one another, and realized no one had made any mistakes. Nothing had gone wrong at all. The strange dawning hit all of us at the same time: we'd probably just played our best show ever. A young band called Amateur Takes Control opened and played incredibly elaborate instrumentals. Each guitarist had a pedal board maybe three feet square, as jammed as a city parking lot with effects boxes. As he'd done at our show in Seoul, Sooyoung enlisted someone from their band to play bass on our encore—on this tour the Hard-Ons' one great song, “All Set to Go”—and then he watched us all from the audience. In this case, being drafted last-minute to play on a song you've never heard sounds much more intimidating than it actually was, because “All Set to Go” is a single two-chord progression, endlessly repeated, and after Sooyoung big-brothered this guy onstage and handed him his bass, I taught him the song in roughly fifteen seconds:

It's four bars of straight eighth notes on A: da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.

And then four bars of straight eighth notes on D: da da da da etc.

Got that? Great. Just keep repeating it.

It's a hard song to screw up, especially if you can play as well as any member of Amateur Takes Control.

Afterward we went to a large private room in a karaoke joint, where an endless procession of new arrivals meant that, soon enough, there was nowhere to sit and not many places to stand. Platters of fried chicken (excellent) and bottles of whiskey (cheap) kept appearing. Eventually I kept a full plastic cup of whiskey nearby at all times so Sooyoung's wife, Fiona, wouldn't refill it and insist I drink more. Certain details are fuzzy, but I remember singing “Hungry Like the Wolf” with her. And that at one point Sooyoung tried to get me to sing something but I kept refusing, and when he tried to force the mike on me, we got into a weird, shovey standoff for a few seconds. What was
that
about?

***

NOTE TO MIDDLE-AGED TOURING BANDS: IN HONG KONG, PAY
whatever is necessary to avoid guesthouses and hostels like ours, on a crowded, commercial strip in Tsim Sha Tsui. Imagine a grimy building that takes up an entire city block on all four sides, so crammed with people and stuff and activity and everything that, unfortunately, the only word to use is “teeming” and the only thing to say is that a Wes Anderson fantasia played out within its walls, endlessly. The building was centered on a courtyard, across which residents hung laundry. To get to the elevator, you passed through a long and dense arcade of small, grubby shops until you found travelers lined up, waiting beside their giant backpacks. At each floor, as you ascended in the lift, people streamed on and off, clutching their microcosm of everything: guys rolling handtrucks stacked with bags of cement mix, women carrying countless plastic sacks, people staggering under statuary. After a few floors you wouldn't be surprised to see someone ride in on a motorcycle.

To get to our tiny room, you traversed an interior hallway, passing a few more “hostels”—a few equally tiny rooms off other obscure hallway passages—keyed open a door that led into a narrow passageway, and
then
opened the first door on the right. When we first walked that narrow passage, we squeezed past a woman eating soup on a tiny shelf next to our door. When we came back that night, after the show and drinks, the same woman was sleeping peacefully and remarkably compactly on that same shelf. Our room was just big enough to hold a bunk bed and a single, and it made you want to avoid the shower and keep your socks on at all times. I was all for being budget-conscious on a tour already destined to lose money, but on the way to the show I made a reservation at the Holiday Inn across the street for our second night. Rooms there were done up in slightly stomach-turning eighties tones of peach and beige and marbled brown, and a night cost something like $250, but it felt like money spent very wisely. Johns and hookers met in the parking lot. You'd see a dolled-up woman leaning against a wall. A few minutes later she'd be gone, replaced by some ferrety-looking and fidgety guy. Waiting. Though probably not for long.