Your Band Sucks (8 page)

***

AS IT OFTEN HAPPENED, OUR BOSTON SHOW WAS ACTUALLY
in Cambridge, at the Middle East, a tiny room just off Central Square with surprisingly good sound. Billy Ruane, a local legend who booked shows there, had tracked us down and set it up. “Local legend” is, of course, a terrible and overused term, but anyone from Boston—even anyone in a band that came through Boston—will testify that he deserved it. Billy combed his hair up, wore loafers with no socks, and looked exactly like a drunk preppie, which is what he was. He had the pinkish skin you see on Irish guys who don't really need to shave. I always picture him in a partially buttoned white shirt, shirttail out, long before that was a common look, under a blazer or a brownish knee-length overcoat. One term was so frequently, and accurately, applied to his appearance that, were you to type his name into Google, I half expect autofill would offer up “billy ruane disheveled.” Billy was notorious for jumping around at shows in an exuberant, flailing way, and I highly recommend that you go to YouTube and watch him dance. I was told there was family money, and a lot of it. Much later I learned that his dad had done well enough to warrant being described as an investor-slash-philanthropist. Billy's day job was guarding rare books at Harvard's Widener Library—really—but he lived to drink and go to shows and movies every night.

Sooyoung and I drove straight to Orestes's apartment, laughed and hugged him at the door, lugged our gear up a few flights of stairs to the sweltering attic where he kept his drums, stripped off our shirts—that again, but it was just too damn hot—set up as quickly as we could, and started ripping through our songs. We hadn't played together for several weeks, so having these guys behind me again felt like holding a jackhammer between my legs. After we'd slammed through a few songs, Sooyoung had to stop. He was laughing too hard to play, because it was so much fun, maybe more fun than ever, and it sounded even better than it ever had before. Afterward Orestes, who could drink like a camel, got us started on a mostly full bottle of tequila in his currently favored rugby-guy fashion: pour the booze and ginger ale into a rocks glass, cover the glass with a towel, place your hand on top, slam the glass on a countertop, then slurp down the foam just after the BOOM of impact. I weighed maybe 130 pounds, and I doubt that Sooyoung weighed more, but the three of us drank until the bottle was empty. Then we went to visit some friends, but neither Sooyoung nor I were much good for conversation that night.

Everything about Boston was new to Sooyoung and me: its neighborhoods of shingled Queen Annes and corner spas, its myriad insularities and strangenesses (like calling convenience stores
spas
), the omnipresence of college radio. In 1988 it was almost without question the American city that had built the best infrastructure for underground rock bands. There were a shocking number of great record stores for a town its size, like Newbury Comics and Mystery Train and In Your Ear, all of them encyclopedic about the latest stuff. Giveaway magazines like
The Noise
and
Boston Rock
focused on local bands, and college radio stations at Harvard and MIT and Emerson and pretty much every other school obsessively followed this music. Boston was the only city where bands made “radio tapes,” cassette-only demos you passed off to local stations. They got airplay—in some cases, lots of airplay—and because people actually listened to these stations, every local band made them. The stores and stations and clubs and media that supported Boston bands, most of which were unknown anywhere else, fed off one another and created an ecosystem sufficiently self-reinforcing to make Billy Ruane and other superfans, like the wannabe impresario known as the Count, into something approaching local celebrities.

You needed the right kind of eyes to find bands like us in virtually every other American city, but the line between underground and mainstream was much more permeable in Boston. (The city was unusually European in that respect.) Though it may have been a bit too comfortable being a band in an affluent, welcoming college town. Once you separated out the city's hardcore scene, Boston circa 1988 was breeding lots of unthrilling guitar pop—Salem 66, Big Dipper, Scruffy the Cat, Blake Babies, Dumptruck—and many Boston bands lacked the sense of opposition, the chip on the shoulder, that fueled the psyches and ambitions and music of bands everywhere else. A different strain of Boston Disease took root in Austin, Texas, where it was so easy for weirdo musicians to scrape by on local gigs, local kudos, and part-time jobs that, in the late eighties, many of its more ambitious musicians fled to New York and Chicago. If you asked why, many said the same thing: they feared they'd just coast in Austin forever.

At the Middle East we played with a band fronted by Kenny Chambers, the guitarist in Moving Targets, one of the few bands everyone in Bitch Magnet really liked. That night, though, Kenny sang for a band that did Stooges covers, billed as “The (Fucking) Stooges.” Evan Dando, long before he was a heartthrob and longer before he did too many drugs, was on the bill, too, performing a solo set of Eagles covers, which he sang while drumming, Don Henley−style. Apparently jokey cover bands were a thing in Boston. Kenny came over and chatted with us while we devoured a spread of Middle Eastern grub from the restaurant next door, and acted like he'd heard of us, thrilling the fanboy in me. We met the Harvard radio DJ before the show, too, and when she realized it was us, her eyes widened and her hand fluttered up to cover her open mouth, and I thought,
Shit—someone's actually excited to meet us
.

My hangover from the tequila had practically paralyzed me, and I was barely back to being human by showtime. There were a few technical fuckups that night, and I probably broke a string or two, because that's what always happened, but the crowd was excited—there
was
a crowd, for once—and it rubbed off on us, and it became a great night.

I soon started a brief dalliance with the Harvard radio DJ. When I stayed with her when we played her hometown of Youngstown in early September, or when she came to visit me at Oberlin one weekend thereafter, I stole her Grim Reaper T-shirt—the laughably awful metal band, not the guy who kills everyone—which I would wear onstage into the twenty-first century. I had to steal it. I still have it today. It's an absolutely perfect artifact. Not just because it brilliantly encapsulates the idiocy of most eighties metal, but because it's a reminder of how easily dreams of big-time commercial success could curdle. Black-light poster colors of purple and bright yellow, silk-screened onto the deep black of a half-polyester fabric. The front depicts a skeleton in a hooded cloak in a jail cell, bony hands curling around a prison bar and smoke seeping from ol' Grim's open mouth, over the legend
LUST FOR FREEDOM
. The back displays a soul-crushing litany of fifth- and sixth-tier markets through which the band death-marched for over six weeks in 1987, towns known only to their residents, places no band ever wants to see on its itinerary: Cookstown, New Jersey. Pasadena, Maryland. Salina, Kansas. Papillion, Nebraska. Lawton, Oklahoma. Some years later our friends in Codeine crossed paths on tour with an obscure Seattle band called Sweet Water as Sweet Water flogged an instantly forgotten major-label album and slogged through their version of this tour. In the lyrics for Codeine's “Loss Leader,” you hear that band's story: alone on the road, utterly abandoned by their record label and everyone else, all but left to die alongside some obscure highway, as the song sadly repeats, far from home, far from home.

In 1988 you couldn't imagine the sorry fate of a band like Sweet Water, which lived in the right zip code to get scooped up in the post-Nirvana major-label feeding frenzy. Nor could the fate be foretold of an oddball band we met in Chicago that summer, with whom we'd soon play shows in Ohio. They had few fans, performed their strange, tough, and beautiful songs while wearing elaborate velvet and lamé suits, and in general acted as if they alone were in on a colossal joke. Urge Overkill's guitarist, Nate Kaatrud, and its bassist, Ed Roeser, both came from small towns in Minnesota, though both seemed far too weird and knowing for it: rightly or wrongly, I always sensed some savvy lurking beneath their generally dazed and stoney mien. Nate was a rare lady-killer in our midst, tall, rail-thin and angular, with sharply turned cheekbones and giant blue eyes. Rock-star looks, in the sense that rock stars often have odd and exaggerated features. He was a talented graphic artist, though he was too lazy to do much with said skill. He improvised absurd asides in any situation. Once, in Pittsburgh, we watched a confused drunk wallow on the sidewalk outside the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern—the sort of old dive bar that got colonized by punk kids putting on shows, to the bafflement of the native clientele. When the guy unzipped his fly and started reaching within, Nate immediately urged, “No, no, no, no. Let's keep Li'l Elvis in Graceland.” If he liked your set, he wouldn't come up and say “great show” or any such standard nonsense, but he'd fix you with a bug-eyed stare and enthuse, “You smoked my butt!” People often thought Nate led the band, since he played guitar and was the most charismatic. But Ed sang most of their songs, while playing rock-solid and tuneful bass, and I secretly liked him better. He looked nothing like a rock star: short, chunky, with long hair that went stringy, not lank like Nate's. He often seemed bewildered, but if you knew how to listen, something ultraperceptive lurked in his observations. Like this: “You've got to waste a lot of fucking time to come up with something like Urge Overkill.”

***

IT FEELS APPROPRIATE TO END THIS CHAPTER THIS WAY.

On October 26, 2010, a friend found Billy Ruane slumped in front of his computer, dead of a heart attack. He was fifty-two. All his zaniness and alcoholism were eventually recognized as symptoms of bipolar disorder. He'd been in and out of treatment, was by all accounts very casual about taking his meds, and in general never took proper care of himself. I last saw him at a Wipers show at New York's Irving Plaza in the late nineties. He was dancing his spastic Snoopy dance in front of the stage, as he always did, and though it had been years since we'd spoken, and though in fact we barely knew each other, when I tapped his shoulder, he recognized me, grabbed my cheeks, and kissed me on the lips. I miss him.

Mike McMackin recorded Bitch Magnet's second album,
Umber,
and a few songs on our last album,
Ben Hur
, as well as all of Codeine's records and a bunch of others, including Poster Children's major-label debut,
Tool of the Man
. He wisely established himself in another line of work long before the nuclear winter descended upon the music biz.

Poster Children signed to Warner Brothers. After five years and three albums they left the label, intact and with a recording studio they'd bought with money saved from their advances. Their time on a major label left them more independent, an outcome that basically never happened to anyone else. They remained an active touring band until Rose and her husband, Poster Children's singer and guitarist, Rick Valentin, had their first child, in late 2003.

A reunited Sweet Water toured with Stone Temple Pilots in 2008, so I guess their endless suffering continued into another millennium.

And, lest anyone from a mildly obscure indie rock band feel special about being asked to reunite years after they broke up—well, Grim Reaper got back together in the twenty-first century, too.

On second thought, it feels appropriate to end this chapter
this
way.

S
chool years have a particular rhythm, but the rhythm I moved to during my senior year had remarkably little to do with college. I lived from show to show. I went to my classes, more or less. But mostly less, and when I did, I often stopped paying attention, hid behind my long hair, bent over my desk and started scrawling song titles and lyric fragments in the margins of my notebooks. I got a B+ on one final exam, and under my grade the professor wrote, “You seem to have done very well for someone who barely came to class. Congratulations,” and suggested that it might have been nice if I'd actually spoken up on those times I did show up. There were maybe ten students in that class. It wasn't easy to hide and stay mute in such a setting, though somehow I managed.

But how could you bother with school or classes if crate after crate of new records arrived at the radio station each day, and if you played in a band? I kept devouring fanzines. Now they contained reviews of
Star Booty
. The British music weeklies, back then surprisingly and annoyingly influential in Europe and even in America, loved the record and wrote, in their typically overheated prose, comments like “A great and necessary thing, every angst-ridden adolescent's crystal ball.” (Uh-huh.) “Bitch Magnet
worry
. Theirs is a seared, skinless sensibility, pricked by anger, fear and self-reproach. Bitch Magnet
want back in
.” (I laughed then, but now think: pretty dead-on. For me, at least.) You learned fast that people heard much different things in your music than what you knew, or thought, was there. One guy in Germany compared
Star Booty's
horrifyingly bad guitar sound to Hendrix. More than one writer from Europe saw Ohio in our mailing address and imagined us as hulking, crazed, glue-sniffing rural American freaks. They clearly had no clue what kind of kids went to Oberlin.

We printed a thousand copies of
Star Booty,
which sold out almost immediately, and labels in America and Europe started calling and writing. Sooyoung and I paged through record contracts while sitting outside the basement smoking lounge in the campus library. I ran up WOBC's phone bill, talking to one label in the Netherlands and another in London called Shigaku. We eventually signed with Shigaku, the European home of Moving Targets, the Replacements, and Live Skull, because they offered us a $2,500 advance for the European rights to our next album. Though in true indie rock fashion, Shigaku went bankrupt about a year later, without ever paying us a dime in royalties.

Orestes still lived in Boston with his girlfriend, but he was also seeing a woman at Oberlin, and it was nothing to get him to hop in his truck and drive twelve or fourteen hours to practice and play a party or a show. The good part about living seven hundred miles from him, as anyone who's gone through the honeymoon phase of a long-distance relationship knows, was that every meeting was a reunion and every occasion a genuine
occasion
, joyous and hilarious. The bad part was that we spent little time together, and the miles separating us nagged at me.

Sooyoung, meanwhile, was cranking out a new song every week or two, it seemed, each sounding huger than the last. (Many of them ended up on our second album,
Umber
.) One fading, college-boy-angsty afternoon, on one of the last days of September, he turned up at my converted-attic rental—one that shouldn't have been an apartment at all, with too-low slanting ceilings and a kitchen jammed into a space far too small—with the makings of “Americruiser,” a slow and understated song with terse, spoken vocals that somehow captured all that I felt at that moment. It wasn't the vocals or the lyrics. It was everything taken together: the slow procession of the song, its loud, wordless chorus, as much what it hinted but held back as what it described. You spend so much time searching for music that names your unnameables—the hard stuff, the millions of shadings beyond “I love you” or “I hate you” or “I'm angry” or “I've been mistreated” or “I will give up everything I know for this moment of abandon” or “I'm scared but I don't know why”—and here was this guy at my school,
in my band
, nonchalantly reaching into some inaccessible recess of my brain. I remember thanking him—thanking him!—for capturing what I couldn't quite put into words.

That fall we also started playing “Motor,” which eventually became the first song on
Umber
. Shortly after Sooyoung gave me a rough version of the song on cassette, a brand-new guitar slide materialized, taped to my mailbox at school.
An honorarium for you
, the note explained, in Sooyoung's neat, tight handwriting. He wanted me to use it during the intro. A brilliant idea, and I started smearing abstract slide guitar over Sooyoung's crashing, distorted bass chords and Orestes's bastardized Dixieland snare rolls. Sometimes you know right away a song is a great leap forward, and “Motor” so exploded me with joy that for a while, whenever we played it live, excitement ran so far ahead of me that I often couldn't play it correctly. Sometimes I'd end up on the floor at its ending, pelvic-thrusting with each chord flourish, wondering afterward,
Where did that come from?
It made me want to jump high enough to bang my head through the ceiling. It made me want to run with it through a brick wall. It made me want to set my guitar on fire, and maybe myself, too.

We played weekend shows as often as possible—at clubs, not campus parties—and put together a mini-tour of the Northeast during fall break. None of us owned a vehicle big enough to haul all of us and our gear, so Sooyoung and I would throw our amps and my guitar and his bass into the backseat and trunk of my car, and Orestes would jam his drums into his Isuzu Trooper, and we'd meet at wherever we were playing. I craved all the rituals of being in a band, but so many were lost to us: no late-night drives together, no shared drama of arrival, no drowsy late-afternoon stretches of highway under a waning sun. Our distance meant that much of our communication took place during nighttime phone calls, or asides in the school library, never with the three of us together. I realized that any two of us could fashion a noose for the other, quietly and out of sight, without anyone needing to fake his body language and smile and be all
No, what are you talking about? Everything's fine.
Trios often devolve into two against one. I wondered if Orestes worried about that.

More often, though, I thrilled to the social set now opening up to us, a web of associations and friends formed around this music, the bands you met and with whom you played shows. Names on the backs of records moved into your address book. Phone pals became real pals. In the summer I'd adored the “Craig Olive” single by Honor Role, another brainy and aggressive band from an unexpected place—Richmond, Virginia—that broke apart rock music and reassembled it in an interesting way. A few weeks later I was on the phone with their brilliant guitarist, Pen Rollings, setting up a show in Pittsburgh, barely able to believe my luck. I don't know if you could call it a
movement
, but all over America outcasts were finding one another with delight and relief even while many of us—myself included—still sometimes nursed a very high school fear of rejection. Justin Chearno, a guitarist and bassist who's passed through a record store's worth of bands (including Unrest, Pitchblende, Turing Machine, and Panthers), neatly encapsulated that social anxiety: “I was like, ‘God, I hope this crowd accepts me. Because if these people don't, then I'm fucked.'” I knew exactly what he meant.

Anyone within fifty yards could see that the music and the excitement were leading me around by the glands, because I was not at all shy about showing how hopped-up it made me. Nor could I have hidden it if I tried. (To steal a line from Hunter S. Thompson, my nerves were pretty close to the surface and everything registered.) But Sooyoung and Orestes were as reserved as I was hyper. Sooyoung, an unusually expressionless front man, preferred recording to performing. While Orestes loved playing in any context, he despised clubs and wasn't much charmed by those who congregated within them. The one of us who worked hardest onstage, he especially hated the fog of secondhand smoke in which bands invariably performed. Before shows I bounced around the club, chatting up musicians and fans and new friends, while Orestes sat dead-eyed and bored backstage, if there even was a backstage, clutching his sticks, clearly uncomfortable, refusing any booze until after the show, eventually stirring to warm up with some fundamentals, the basic movements drummers drill as calisthenics. Neither he nor Sooyoung had much patience with the schmoozers who worked for labels, and since it appeared I knew how to talk to them, I generally drew the short straw and dealt with them. But I didn't mind. I wanted to know everyone.

We played a bunch of shows with Bastro, the band formed by Squirrel Bait's guitarist David Grubbs and—ill advisedly—a drum machine, but then Grubbs and bassist Clark Johnson recruited a friend of ours at Oberlin named John McEntire to play drums, and they got really great. Complicated, super smart, oddly chorded and in odd meters, played at blinding speed—what Grubbs did with his bizarrely tuned metallic-pink Tele was unlike anything else I'd heard before, or, for that matter, have heard since. We played together just after we both released our first records, and our shows routinely drew twenty-five people, but each time I saw them I thought,
Christ, this is one of the best bands in the world, and no one knows it.
The way they—forgive the tired term—rocked, without having the slightest thing to do with “rock.” How they provided a purely visceral rush while still being so musically advanced and so thoroughly bent.

Another Squirrel Bait offshoot was far more mysterious, right down to the name: Slint. A quartet led by two extremely taciturn guys, Britt Walford and Brian McMahan, whose inside references were so intricate they seemed almost like a form of idioglossia. In 1988 we got a tape of a nine-song record,
Tweez
, before it became an LP the following year. Its songs were named after each band member's parents (and one of their dogs), and they all sounded tweaked and slightly metallic and often swung—in the jazz sense—in a way very few others in our underground could. The vocals were occasional, incidental, and sometimes started to tell stories without ever really finishing them. When the album came out, the cover was a simple black-and-white shot of a Saab Turbo—with
SLINT
going where the
SAAB
was and
TWEEZ
replacing
TURBO
, and very little information appeared on the back or the insert. I cannot overemphasize how thrilling and absolutely unique it sounded or—and this is the part that gets lost today when people talk about that band—the oddball humor underneath it all. Bitch Magnet went crazy for
Tweez
. I listened to it every day. A cassette of it turned up in a photo we used for the insert to
Umber
. In 1988 almost no one in the world had heard of them, but that just fed the intoxicating feeling that you and your friends knew secrets no one else did.

The thing I most treasured about this time was that you kept stumbling over set after set of smart misfits playing amazing, fully realized music that sounded like nothing else. All the town weirdos were suddenly in bands. Some, like Slint, were making records
while they were still teenagers
that would age as well as those made by distant rock gods like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. In the rest of the world hair metal was king, and its bands—Warrant, Winger, Poison—ruled the radio and MTV, selling upbeat party-time bullshit in which the guy always got the girl and all underdogs triumphed over their adversaries by the third verse, if not sooner. The bands in our underground, like those that inspired them, told stories that didn't fit into such narrow schematics. No other music so accurately evoked the black hole of self-loathing, and the power you could find within it, as “Nothing” by Negative Approach or “Black Coffee” by Black Flag. No mainstream artist drew such precise lines between us and them as Saint Vitus did in the embittered, extended middle finger of “Born Too Late,” or as ferociously as Minor Threat's “Filler,” or with the naked anguish of Hüsker Dü's “Whatever.” If our bands didn't invent writing about the absolute abasement of romantic despair and loneliness—Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and Crazy Horse's “I Don't Want to Talk About It” came first, after all—nothing on the radio or MTV or any major label expressed it as clearly and starkly as American Music Club's “Blue and Grey Shirt” or “Laughingstock.” Our bands even nailed standard rock topics better than anyone else around: the aimlessness of American youth, like Meat Puppets' “Lost,” or the joy of libido and an open road, like Urge Overkill's “Faroutski.”

And the lyrics weren't even the important part. Not when Sonic Youth and Slint and Slovenly reached heights of gorgeousness and mystery that almost never had anything to do with what they
said
. Rather, it was how they
sounded
, even on records made as cheaply and quickly as possible in studios held together with duct tape. Songs were finally liberated from verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Bands everywhere made incredibly evocative albums, like
Tweez
or
EVOL
or Die Kreuzen's
October File,
that sounded like nothing that ever came before them. Other musicians realized you could strip the exciting parts off metal's carcass—loud distorted riffs, relentless rhythm sections—and make them into something else. Something better. Very few bands playing metal in 1987 ever set their instruments and amps to “crush/kill/destroy” as effectively as the instrumental Dutch band Gore did on
Mean Man's Dream
—an album recorded live in the studio, with no overdubs, which no straight-up metal band in the eighties would ever have the balls to do.