Your Band Sucks (5 page)

So young

To be loose

And on her own

I wasn't born to sing, but I could carry a tune. Chris and I did the male-bonding back-to-back onstage thing, which we briefly considered, for some reason, to be the
ne plus ultra
of performance. Like the band, the crowd played along, as if they found it plausible, and that was more than enough.

Come on down

To my place

Woman . . .

I finished the song and stepped offstage, back into the crowd, glowing and flushed with adrenaline. Even now, more than a quarter-century later, I can still feel it. A needle finding a vein, and something new coursing through my bloodstream: the first rush of performance, the first hint of being in a band onstage. This was just a Saturday night party at a small college. Nothing remotely rock about the setting: a bulbous seventies TV suspended from the ceiling just behind the band, cinder-block walls painted beige, dull gray ceramic tile floors, truly horrible blue and green polyester curtain partially obscured by the dimmed lights. But a moment like this doesn't have to happen at a stadium. Or in a bigger club in a bigger city, where famous punk rock bands played. Or in a legendary, beloved tiny shithole like CBGB or the Exit or the Rat. It could happen in your own backyard. No. The
whole point
was for the epiphany and the enlightenment to happen in your own backyard, among friends and the faces that you knew. This thing was spreading, and when it reached your town and you saw bands being bands, writing their own material, driving tired-looking generic vans from show to show, you realized:
I can do this, too.
No matter where you were. Everything else followed from that dawning.

I'd spent much of that year trying to talk my friends into starting a band, but now I was as hot and desperate as a high schooler who's been dry-humping his girlfriend all night. I had to do this.

Much more important: I now knew anyone could.

I
t made sense, our starting a band. Linc and I got geeky about the same music and had similar suburban upbringings. Above all, Linc was my best friend, and in my late teens I still hadn't gotten over what I took to be the mythology surrounding the Replacements: a band is your gang, your drinking buddies, your best friends. (It wasn't until much later that I tired of Paul Westerberg's sappiness and learned that the Replacements weren't best friends. Not even close.) But Linc didn't play an instrument, so I spent most of freshman year talking him into learning to play drums. Finding the drummer is always the biggest problem. Demand far exceeds supply, because a drum set is a much bigger commitment than a guitar, and because parents prefer living with instruments that don't sound like a car crash. Drums are also the hardest instrument to master, since drummers generally always have both hands and both feet going, often doing vastly different things with each.

I had it all worked out: I'd play guitar and sing. Linc on drums, once he learned how. My other best friend, Roger, a classically trained pianist from Newt Gingrich's congressional district in Georgia, who got me into AC/DC and was still parting his shaggy brown hair in the middle, would also play guitar. Doug, an earnest and strapping hardcore kid with a soft spot for Dylan, who neatly rolled up the sleeves of the flannel shirts he wore each day, would play bass, because he owned one, along with the saddest and weakest bass amp I ever heard.

Everyone agreed. Sometimes that happens. We also agreed on a name, which, unfortunately, was Ribbons of Flesh. That summer between our freshman and sophomore years, Linc bought a drum set and started practicing. Doug, who lived twenty minutes from me in New Jersey, claimed he'd been practicing, too, though after we played in his parents' basement I had a hard time believing him. Roger promised to bring his guitar and amp with him when school started. We'd already played together a bit, so I wasn't worried about him. When I returned to Oberlin in late August, I brought along my lousy Peavey T-60 guitar and lousy Peavey Bandit amp, and presto: a band.

But we didn't have songs. Or a songwriter. I contributed one surf instrumental and one deeply embarrassing attempt at heartfelt guitar pop, which hinged on the brutally overused open D−to−open G chord change. (You gotta be Malcolm Young to make that sound good.) None of us knew how to start a band. None of us knew that a tentative, underpracticed rhythm section wouldn't work in a loud rock band, for the same reason that structural engineers advise against building houses on unstable ground. None of us knew how to meld two guitars into a coherent-sounding whole. And we believed that the correct way to practice was (a) on a weekend night, (b) after plenty of pizza and beer, and (c) as loudly as humanly possible. On a good night, given a running start and a strong push downhill, we could make it through Judas Priest's “Living After Midnight” before collapsing in a spent heap. Though I couldn't play the guitar solo. Or any other guitar solo.

There is no easy alchemy that just creates a credible rock band, and credible rock songs, once you throw together four friends, some gear, and a lot of cheap beer. We knew rock didn't require virtuosity—that's straight from Punk Rock 101—but we didn't know the crucial corollary: you still needed to do something interesting with your instruments. Volume was great and powerful and necessary, but it made communicating during our practices hard, and we needed to communicate a lot, since we generally couldn't play the same parts at the same time.

At least we understood what we were trying to do: be in a loud, sloppy punk rock band. In many places in the mid-eighties you'd suffer through desperately trying to get this across to someone who wanted to play Springsteen or Poison covers. And at least some of us knew how to play our instruments. Previous generations started bands before they knew how. Or before they owned any equipment. David Yow, the singer for Scratch Acid and the Jesus Lizard, formed his first band, Toxic Shock, with his best friend in Austin around 1980. “We saw in the paper there was this syndrome called Toxic Shock,” he told me. “And immediately we said, ‘That's the name of our band. Now all we gotta do is find somebody who can play instruments.'” For about a year Toxic Shock existed as a name on a series of confrontational flyers, some of which showed up years later in art books. “We would just make posters that said,
TOXIC SHOCK: FUCK YOU,
and draw a picture of a woman pulling a tampon out of her pussy, and plaster them all over campus,” Yow recalled, so a local publication referred to them as a “poster band.” Mr. Epp and the Calculations was another poster band, formed by a teenage Mark Arm in 1980, years before Green River and Mudhoney. Since they were, you know, in a band, Arm and another member split the cost of a cheap pawnshop guitar. “We didn't know how to tune it,” Arm admitted and then corrected himself: “We didn't know what tuning
was
.”

We knew what tuning was. But we didn't have a tuner. Ever been at a show where the guitarist starts checking his tuning at full volume? Add a lot of cluelessness, multiply that guitarist by two, and you have a pretty good idea of what our rehearsals sounded like.

LATE IN MY FRESHMAN YEAR I STARTED NOTICING AN ASIAN
guy around campus. He was skinny, had big, round wire-rimmed glasses, and generally wore oversized white T-shirts, jeans, and black Chuck Taylors. Even before I saw him with Hüsker Dü's first album tucked under his arm, something about him registered on my punk rock sonar. He knew some of my friends—Oberlin is a small place—and eventually Sooyoung Park and I met and started bonding over music. He was a math major, had a show on WOBC, played bass in a campus pop band called Tall Neighbors. Like me, he was very nerdy, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Sooyoung also had a hardcore band called Easter Trauma back home in Charleston, West Virginia, and one of their songs, which he wrote and I loved, got some airplay on WOBC. He was writing others, too, but when he showed them to Tall Neighbors, they plainly didn't fit.

Tall Neighbors fell apart in the fall of our sophomore year, an event that seemed to throw Sooyoung and me together. He found me in the campus library soon afterward, and though we weren't saying much, both of us grinned foolishly, and he was sitting there like he'd already moved in, because—I don't think we even needed to say it out loud—
we were starting a band.
One that already had a bunch of songs, written by someone who had been in a real band that played real shows opening for bands whose names I recognized. (Albeit ones no one listens to today, like DOA and Social Unrest.)

Not until I wrote that paragraph did I realize that Sooyoung effectively poached me from my own band, and yet I was happy about it.

It was incredibly important to me that Sooyoung had been in a hardcore band, because I desperately wanted to play really fast. So I was disappointed when, at our first practice, I met Sooyoung's drummer friend, Jay, a brilliant political science major who was sleeping with the high-strung politica
who ran WOBC, a tough chick with long brown hair and a doll's giant blue eyes. I quickly learned to steer clear of arguing with him, not just because he made mincemeat of any opposing view but because great mounds of spit bubbled from the corners of his mouth when he got worked up, and he got very worked up over politics. The bigger problems were that he was a hippie and a Deadhead and smoked pot. I hated pot with a convert's zeal, having quit at college, and despised the Dead. Worse, Jay couldn't play fast. But there were barely any other drummers on campus. Also, that WOBC connection couldn't hurt.

Sooyoung had a set's worth of songs, so all we had to do was learn them and rehearse. Which we did. To the chagrin of Ribbons of Flesh, I started channeling all my ardor into this new band, and Linc and Doug, sensing that I thought they needed summer school, started practicing on their own. But by then I was already gone. I don't remember if we ever had a real conversation about my leaving, and it's possible we never did. (Already I was learning the finer points of indie rock passive aggression.)

We named our new band while Sooyoung and I sat at the radio station with a few friends contemplating a flyer announcing our first show, which lay on a table amid a bunch of discarded paste-on letters. The flyer was finished, except for the blank space where the band name belonged. But no matter how long we stared at it, nothing appeared. Someone started talking about a particularly good-looking DJ at the station, a guy who had fabulous success with women. I mumbled a bad attempt at a joke that involved calling him a bitch magnet, a bit of some Southern slang I'd learned. Sooyoung started cracking up and gasped, “That's it!” and then he was pasting letters on the flyer.

We got shit
forever
for that name. When our records were reissued in 2011, a couple of reviewers claimed that it was a key reason we never got the recognition they thought we deserved. I know now that it's a bad idea to choose a name that lets people easily dismiss you as not being serious, or that makes them laugh or do a spit-take. (Vomit Launch's second album,
Exiled Sandwich
, is pretty great—a lovely, all-over-the-place artifact from people who'd just learned to play together—but good luck explaining that to someone who doesn't already know that.) All I can say in our defense is that Sooyoung and I were
teenagers
. We weren't really thinking about the long term.

***

IF YOU WERE IN A BAND AT OBERLIN AND BURNING TO PERFORM
, you spent the beginning of each week searching for someone planning a party that weekend and then worked on them to let your band play it. Then you tried to rent one of the few PAs on campus, for vocals. That part was politically tricky, since the guys who did have PAs generally played in bands that you didn't want playing at your party, so often you borrowed one or (ideally) two bass amps and ran the vocal mikes through those instead. Before each gig Sooyoung and I would spend hours constructing and copying flyers and taping them up all over campus. He was very good with X-ACTO knives and photocopiers, both necessary tools in 1986. He knew that Oberlin's art library had the best copy machine in town, and that the town copy shop stocked multiple colors of copier ink, and you could swap out these different colors and rerun flyers through the machine for interesting effects. My favorite early Bitch Magnet flyer has an image copied in blue and then red ink, on green paper, with a blown-up black typewriter font announcing the particulars.

My other favorite flyer—which totally cracked me up when Sooyoung showed it to me—was a brilliant deadpan joke, and spelled out, over and over again, in white block lettering against a jet-black background, a song title from the Thrown Ups' most recent single. Being disgusted that everyone around you was doing it wrong—as I was in high school—was always a good reason to start a band. But it was still hilarious to see it expressed as baldly as this:

YOUR BAND SUCKS

You set up and played in living rooms. You set up and played in dorm lounges. You set up and played in spare bedrooms. You set up and played in actual bedrooms. I sent my mom a photo of Bitch Magnet playing in a kitchen, crammed in alongside the refrigerator and stove. What Fell? appeared with us that night and thought through that setting more carefully: before they started performing, they put freshly mixed batter in the oven, and after their last song, they served warm cake.

I cannot sufficiently thank the people who, after the barest introductions, helped us become a less-bad band by letting us play in their homes, and tolerated us—well, me—flinging their way full cups of beer, or, on the night Sooyoung and I suddenly decided in mid-song to strip down to our underwear, articles of clothing. (We each arrived at that decision spontaneously, or, rather, it just sort of happened, but perhaps presciently Sooyoung kicked off our set that night by cheerfully informing everyone they'd be really sorry they stuck around to see us.) If I were them and they were me, I doubt I'd have been as generous.

I'd get as cranky as a quitting smoker if a couple of weekends went by without a show, because, really, what else was there to do?
Study?
Days were better spent daydreaming about the next party we'd play, or cueing up tapes Sooyoung made of his newest song sketches and working on them until they were ready to play live. There was the crackle of possibility in each new cassette Sooyoung shared, in each new step forward every song suggested, and when you're just getting started, each morsel of progress rocks you like a revelation. Hunched up against a hallway wall in Sooyoung's dorm, squinting in that awful institutional combination of fluorescent light and deep shadow, we sat chatting while Sooyoung noodled on his bass and suddenly started to repeat a riff that made me whip my head around. “What's that?” I demanded. The part to a new song, he explained, and repeated it over and over again, looking away, nodding in time, eyes half open, bass slung low: cool but quietly pleased with himself.

I remember listening to a tape of an early show at the library with Jay, passing one set of headphones back and forth, flashing teeth at each other like Cheshire cats, alit with the joy of playback. But Jay, it was clear, wasn't obsessed like Sooyoung and me. He was also playing in another band at Oberlin with two of his best friends. They were all long-haired, unabashedly hippie, and jammed onstage a lot, so I hated them. Named, for some unfathomable reason, Boo Boo Kitty, they once got a gig on the same night as a Bitch Magnet show. When Jay opted to play with Boo Boo Kitty, Sooyoung and I borrowed What Fell?'s drummer, Noah.

Shortly afterward Sooyoung dropped by where I lived and, on his way out, paused to ask, “Do you think Jay is holding us back?”

Yes, I agreed, but in the end our slutting around with other drummers made the decision for us. Sooyoung and I had also recorded a ten-song Bitch Magnet cassette—our first—with a seriously good drummer he knew in West Virginia, who played in an actual hardcore band. (
He
could play fast.) Jay was pissed about the recording and pissed about the show we had played without him, and during an outraged lunch at a campus dining hall, he quit.