Your Band Sucks (27 page)

Our show was at a venue far more punk rock than I'd ever been, one called Hidden Agenda, tucked away on a high floor in an anonymous building in a deeply industrial part of town. There was some kind of auto shop on the ground floor, though the totally stripped Smart car skeleton out front made me wonder about its legitimacy. Filmmakers who seek the dystopia that looming gray cityscapes signify would do well to shoot in this neighborhood on a cloudy day. Or any day. I'm not sure sunlight ever made it to street level there. I mean:
Burutaru desu
.

Hidden Agenda regularly butted heads with local authorities over real or perceived infractions, the latest of which meant the club couldn't serve alcohol. We snuck some in, but I winced to think what that ruling would do to turnout. One guy in the audience had flown in from Taiwan, though someone else had to explain that to us, because he didn't speak any English. He just stood there nodding during that conversation, and I hope our translator got across how thrilling and crazy that was to us. Another showed up with an original copy of our first record—from our self-released first pressing of a thousand—wanting autographs. Amazing to see how that record ended up so far from home.

But we were already tour-weary and dispirited, even on our day off, when Orestes and I roamed the city while Sooyoung traveled for work. We did manage to eat well, an overweening concern of all bands, and ours in particular: an amazing meal at Mak's Noodles—delightful dense and springy noodles, finer than angel hair—where the waiters were so actively unpleasant it was hilarious. On Sooyoung's recommendation Orestes and I also went to a Korean place in Kowloon: Won Pung Won. At first the badass
halumni
—Korean grandmas—running the joint treated us indifferently. Then Orestes spoke to them in Korean—ever the language savant, he picked up quite a bit in our five days in Seoul—and it became a glorious meal. Afterward Orestes and I each did the inevitable asshole-American-tourist thing and took pics of a sign we liked, which he spotted emblazoned on an awning:

FOOK KIU MANSION.

***

I'D NEVER PLAYED AT A VENUE WHERE LIZARDS CRAWL THE
walls until we played the saGuijo Café in Manila. A bar in the tropics, with a loose division between indoors and outdoors. We spent just enough time in Manila to begin to appreciate its size and troubles: the air is smoggy enough to hurt, traffic jams are epic and constant, and the people under the elevated expressway aren't just hanging out—they live there. But saGuijo is in Makati, on a side street where you wouldn't expect to find it, and it was quiet around the club. Before the show I walked the neighborhood, past scenes stolen from someone's imagining of how a place like this might look: Guys hanging out on white plastic chairs, obscured by the night, nursing beers. One grilling meat in the street, in front of a satay stand. Sleepy open-air bars where a few solitary figures sat, slouching in front of their drinks. A woman sobbing quietly into a pay phone. A few hundred meters ahead, in the main street, taxis drifted past. The air still felt hot and wet but with a welcoming hint of a breeze. Night, and its great sense of relief, had descended. The only things missing were dogs lolling, half-conscious, in the street or chasing each other around the venue's microscopic dirt yard, where we drank cold cans of San Miguel with the audience after the show.

Inside the club there was a huge Virgin Mary mural—a punk rock club, perhaps, but nonetheless one in a Catholic country—and an old Caballero skate deck, under glass. (Sooyoung photographed the latter. I went for the former.) A tiny blue drum kit with
SAGUIJO
emblazoned on the top of the kick drum and
SUPPORT PINOY ROCK
just below it, which is how I learned that Pinoy = Filipino. The stage, too, was tiny, and during the set I stood close enough to Sooyoung to do the homoerotic back-to-back thing for the first time since sophomore year in college. But the beer was ice cold and dirt cheap, and the audience was thrilled, and one of the other bands, Wilderness, was one of the best bands that opened for us anywhere, ever. Wilderness—what a lovely and fitting name they chose—are an eight-piece, three of whom drum or play percussion. I imagine every review of them will inevitably include the word “tribal,” because there are congas and a kind of primal swampy, pounding repetitiveness. They spilled over the edges of the stage and into the audience, playing a sort of shake-your-ass psych that, I thought, was rooted in Filipino or Polynesian records from the sixties and seventies that I suddenly needed to find
right now
. After the show their percussionist Pat Ing pressed a CD in a handpainted and cracked case into my hands. “Made with love,” she said, smiling, and refused my money. People smiled in Manila. A relief, after Hong Kong.

***

IF YOU'RE LUCKY, WHEN YOU'RE A BAND FAR FROM HOME, A
de facto ambassador and chaperone materializes and takes you in. In Manila it was Diego Castillo, who plays guitar in Sandwich. He took us out for
sisig
—fried pig's face—one night. (He also arranged for friends to bring us a sack full of
balut
—fertilized duck eggs—after dinner, but sadly we were too stuffed to try any.) In his apartment he played us a bunch of local funk and hard rock from the seventies, and I wish I'd taken notes. He drove us around in his new Honda, playing American indie stuff from the nineties and aughts that even I hadn't heard. Diego loved a certain strain of sappy indie rock—minimal, soft to loud, heart on the sleeve, pop sweetening sprinkled over the top. A part of me likes it, too, in very small doses, but it's primarily nostalgia for a particular time of my life, because I generally find both that music and that part of me weak and despicable. A group of old friends you forsook, after they disappointed you too many times, or the sad boy you no longer wish to be, alone in his room with his record player, his one true friend.

The living room in Diego's apartment was dominated by his massive wall of records, and there he told us how much effort it took for him to track down music on small American independent labels in the pre-Internet nineties. He had to find addresses for the record labels, scrounge in Manila for American cash to send to those labels, pen an appropriately obsequious letter, throw in extra cash for shipping, and cross his fingers, because not everyone sent records in return. Like all collections, his was built laboriously, and with an antlike determination, just more so than almost anyone else's. It was easy to get disgusted with this little indie world: its incestuousness, its essential fecklessness, the way it always crumbled when you most needed it to be solid. But then you would run into people who still held on to its artifacts for dear life. And in 2012—years after these records were made, and probably years after rock last really mattered—I found myself standing in front of a wall of such records in Diego's apartment, eight and a half thousand miles from home, shaking my head. Because people actually cared. People really worked
for this stuff. They did whatever it took to track down your message in a bottle. And then they held on to it, throughout all these years.

T
hen you're standing outside a locked hotel room at 3 a.m., without a key and naked but for a pair of briefs, and as much as you might wish for another solution, there's really only one.

Luckily the elevator was empty when it arrived, and after it chimed and sighed to a stop in the lobby, I marched toward the front desk, trying to act dignified and business-casual about everything.

When the guy on duty looked up, he didn't even blink. Just stood, poker-faced, waiting. “The less said about this the better,” I told him, “but I've locked myself out of room 1012.”

He nodded and called the bellman.

This was during a practice weekend in Calgary in September 2011, and I'd gone barhopping with Orestes after rehearsal. He's twice my size and can drink like an elephant, but no night with him had ever ended this stupidly. I mean, after our last stop I was drunk enough to lose the willpower required to keep a slurriness out of my voice. But not
that
drunk. Still, when I woke needing to pee and walked through the heavy door to the right, it slammed shut behind me, and I could see, even without my glasses, that things were not right. But understanding the problem was a very gradual process. I knocked on the door and called through the crack at the bottom. Neither of which did any good, because I was the only person staying in the room. Or had been, before I became the only person standing in the hallway.

In the elevator back up to my floor, the very young bellman asked me how my night was going. “Really good until about five minutes ago,” I said. He nodded, we arrived, and he used his magic key card to get me back into my room.
Thank god I didn't have a hard-on,
I thought, and settled back beneath the covers.

During and after any rock-related travel during the eighties and nineties, I only needed to blink a few times after waking up to remember where I was. Now travel left me all harebrained and sleepwalky. One night in late April 2012, back home after two weeks of shows in Asia, suffering from jetlag and a bad case of the bends from a rough reentry into workaday life, I went to bed at nine. Our last hotel room in Tokyo had wedged the three of us into another space barely big enough for the beds, and I was grateful to be back in my own room. But just after 10:30 I bolted upright, panicked with the realization that I went to bed
sans
underwear and fearing that my bandmates would be freaked out in the morning when they saw me with my man-parts dangling. Even though neither bandmate was in my bedroom. Or the rest of the apartment. Or even in America, because both had returned to their homes in
entirely different countries
. But somehow that didn't register at all. I looked around the room, which I didn't recognize. Laurel was still watching TV in the living room, so she wasn't there to remind me that the tour was over. I saw a door with a hint of light behind it and cracked it open. A bathroom. Finally I remembered: home. I opened a drawer, grabbed a pair of underwear, and—triumphant!—went back to bed.

A few days earlier I staggered onto my flight home from Tokyo, utterly spent, bit off a chunk of a Xanax, shoved in earplugs, and crashed for about eight hours. But I woke up halfway through, in sudden terror because I didn't know where our gear was, and it took a good thirty seconds to figure it out.

Sleep aids had something to do with this, though I used only Xanax to beat jetlag, never Ambien, which, as many people have discovered, can be quasi-hallucinogenic. All the flying had something to do with it, too. On van tours you can feel every mile accumulate, which keeps you somewhat situated geographically, but up in the air it's easier to lose the thread. Still, sometime during our yearlong reunion I started to think that going crazy on tour was not just part of the deal but sort of the entire point. To go purely beast for days on end, running on adrenaline and anxiety and fear and volume and power. To be absolutely immoderate for a while. A middle-aged man is so rarely permitted to get so
glandular
, to throw himself to the point of derangement into the ups and downs of any situation and reach the state where it's not merely acceptable but even expected to be walking the streets, head down, jabbering to yourself, still reeling from the previous night's hangover, jonesing openly for the next onstage fix, praying that the madness ends quickly, hoping it lasts forever. As I found myself doing in London and New York and Seattle and Tokyo and San Francisco and Hong Kong and, well, everywhere, basically. Peak crazy was often set off by incredibly minor complications and always came during the afternoon scramble just before we entered the tunnel and its familiar rhythm. Thus the Three O'Clocks, which gripped me while dashing around London just before an early dusk, hours before the last show of the tour: constantly forgetting to look the wrong way when crossing the street so cars scared the shit out of me and vice versa, trying to take direction from the sound guy by text to find the precise obscure connecting cable his computer required to record the show. The Three O'Clocks came while I was standing on the sidewalk in Seoul alongside all the gear, searching desperately for a taxicab that refused to appear, running late for the first show of our reunion, for which I was not at all certain the band was ready. Nervous that my back would lock up again, as it had two days ago out of nowhere, for the first time ever. Come to think of it, my back seized up just as we arrived for an afternoon rehearsal, which started around . . .

The Three O'Clocks hit in Manila's Ninoy Aquino airport, when I was exhausted because the operator had called three hours early for my wake-up call and I'd barely slept, before or after, and the fucking Wi-Fi wasn't working, and there were a million things I needed to check, and the show in Manila had been terribly promoted, and I had just learned that Sooyoung would miss soundcheck in Tokyo. The Three O'Clocks in New York: racing around the city, trying to finish every idiot errand before soundcheck as traffic thickened and slowed, each extra minute making the eventual arrival at the club exponentially later. And that moment a day or two later, standing in the middle of the street, both guitar cases leaning against my shins and both middle fingers raised, screaming, “Fuck you!” at the top of my lungs, over and over, at a taxi disappearing down the street, because the driver refused to take us to the airport. One afternoon I walked around Tokyo—one of my favorite things to do in the world—with nothing more strenuous to accomplish than to find a pair of sneakers, and I felt some bolus of horror rise for no reason whatsoever. I stopped and checked the phone: five minutes after three.

One day on tour in Asia, feeling exhausted and very Three O'Clocky, I skyped with Laurel. She sometimes gets booze-induced insomnia, and thought I might, too, so she asked, “Are you drinking?”

“How could I
possibly
get through this without drinking?” I demanded.

***

SOMETIMES I'D GET A TEXT LIKE THIS FROM ORESTES:

Easy there. We're in the subway.

So then I'd have to reply:

Why “easy there”?

He'd text back:

Because I know you.

Point taken. Or, as the tension rose just before a tour, I'd get an e-mail from him:

All I need is for you to stay out of jail for another two weeks.

Yeah. I think I can manage that. Can you, Orestes? Can you keep the beast in the cage until then?

But the real problems started after a tour, when you still hadn't rehinged and readjusted to civilian life. Recovering from anything—illness, drinking, the annual dalliance with mushrooms or E or coke—takes longer when you're older, and post-tour whiplash, too, was now far more savage. Several days after returning from our second Asian tour, badly sleep-deprived and depressed, I caught myself thinking,
There has to be something more than moping around the house, waiting for a socially acceptable hour to start drinking.
The latest version of a very old jam: nothing felt nearly as good as music. Everything else seemed so watery and pale. The rock hangover in full flower, a condition characterized by fatigue, malaise, difficulty concentrating, and an overweening desire to do it all again. I braced for depression to descend a few days after each tour ended, in the way that weekend ecstasy freaks gird themselves for the Tuesday blues. You returned to reality with your endorphins tapped out and your pleasure centers suddenly and stubbornly resistant to milder buzzes. Sleep patterns stayed upside down for weeks. And no one understood what you were feeling unless they'd been there, too.

Yes, the buzz of performance was as strong as ever. But what was the price—in time, in attention, in money? And where would it lead? With each leg the reunion seemed less like an art project than a drug problem. Being in a band whose members lived in three different countries was complicated enough, and we were all already chin-deep in full-time commitments demanding adult-sized chunks of attention: families, real jobs, lives. You only play that first round of reunions once, after which audiences and pay envelopes almost always get thinner. And we weren't about to do this as cynically as the Pixies: cashing a decade's worth of reunion-tour checks while having written exactly one new song. Though we, of course, hadn't even written
that
.

So we were doing it for the same reason a dog licks its balls: because we could. For the fun of it, and it was great fun. For the experience and the weirdness of it. Turn any of that down? Never. I'd say it would take a toll, but the truth was, in many ways, it already had.

***

WHAT DO YOU HEAR WHEN THERE'S NOTHING TO HEAR? SERIOUSLY
. I want to know what that's like, for normal people, because the decades spent playing in bands and going to shows are permanently inscribed in my middle ear. My ears stay noisy, even through the most profound hush, and constantly send certain tones to my brain. Why are old musicians never alone? Tinnitus! Our ears never stop ringing, thanks to how we've damaged the tiny hair cells in the ear that transmit sound, from sonic overexposure. A pretty steady A plays in my left ear—makes sense where that drone settled, I guess, since I was obsessed for years with that huge, droning one-note chord, played across multiple octaves and multiple strings—while a more variable note rings in the other. I live in the city and wear earplugs when I sleep, and when I wake in the quiet of the morning, the tinnitus is most noticeable and my right ear is doing its auditory roulette. Sometimes that ear oscillates between two tones, a full step or so apart from each other. Sometimes there's a main drone and another quieter tone or two, seemingly somewhere off in the distance. Once I woke to it quietly playing something like a seventies synth sample-and-hold solo of randomized notes. Which sounds like complete madness, I know, but it was actually sort of cool.

A few years ago I started noticing that I needed to lean in, really far, to hear anything at noisy restaurants or bars. A meal or a drink in such places now means I shred my vocal cords, especially if Laurel isn't there to remind me, gently or not, that I'm shouting. But sometimes that's what it takes to hear myself. It's also why my voice sounds so Jewy and nasal: I hear myself much better when I push it from my adenoids and sinuses. I know it sounds better, and causes far less vocal strain, if I project from my diaphragm—but then I don't really
hear
it.

Not good. So I went to an audiologist: Dr. Andrew Resnick, a guitarist who specializes in treating musicians. He asked whether I had trouble hearing—left ear, right ear, both ears? (In places with background noise, both.) Ringing in my ears? (Yes. But it doesn't bother me too much.) How many hours a week did I listen to music on headphones? (Maybe four.) Did I have a history of exposure to loud noise? (Heh. Yes. Lots.)

He pointed me toward a soundproof booth—so old-school it could have come from a movie about the golden age of radio—and directed me to strap on headphones. The room was dead quiet. The never-ending orchestra in my ears wasn't.
This won't work,
I thought nervously,
I'll never hear anything over this ringing
. He ran a series of tones, low to high, quiet and quieter, until they began to fade beneath my constant din. Then I heard the kind of background noise you'd hear at a restaurant or cocktail party, and the doctor played voices against it, fiddling with the volume until the conversation disappeared into the clatter.

There it goes,
I thought,
for all us aging punkers
.

***

MUSIC IS FOREVER, IF YOU TURN IT UP LOUD ENOUGH, AND,
viewed from the perch of middle age, it seems absolutely inevitable that most older musicians would have fucked-up ears. It's hard to describe this without invoking sexual terms like “penetration” and
“
insertion,” because we all wanted to get deeply inside the music and have it deeply inside us. When Mudhoney's Mark Arm was in junior high, he'd put on a favorite record, turn the stereo all the way up, and plant an ear directly against a speaker.

Wait.
What?

“I was trying to get the most out of it,” he explained.

But I understood. When Bitch Magnet was starting out, I liked leaning my forehead on my cranked-up amp when I played, because I loved how that sent vibrations straight into my skull. Mid-song during early practices, I sometimes stuck my head in Orestes's bass drum. Proximity to extreme sound produces interesting physical sensations, though they're not always pleasant. During Bitch Magnet's last European tour, I ended “Big Pining” each night by getting within inches of my speaker cabinet to produce feedback. But many times, instead of hearing a distorted chord melt into a pure single note, my rented rig instead produced incredibly piercing shrieks and squeals: microphonic feedback, an entirely different beast. These sudden blasts of high treble, so loud and at such close range, made me stumble, dizzied, and sometimes I felt myself gag, as if I were having a sudden attack of vertigo or had otherwise briefly deranged the intricate whorls of inner-ear plumbing that govern balance. Onstage while touring with Panthers, Justin Chearno recalled, “I stood next to the crash cymbal, and our drummer fucking hammered it. I saw white multiple times, just from the sound.”