by Jon Fine
The cafeteria was briefly remade into something else—the lunch tables hauled away and a couple of makeshift stages quickly assembled at opposite ends of the room. In a major concession to atmosphere the blazing fluorescent overhead lights were turned off. If you squinted, it kind of looked like a club. It would do. It had to, anyway. Then the bands nervously took the stage and played other bands’ songs. Oftentimes the same other bands’ songs. One night, during that odd interval when Quiet Riot was briefly the biggest band in the world, three different bands covered “Metal Health.”
Rapid Fire impressed me. Or at least their guitar solos did. The witless commercial-metal version: finger sprints, really, dashing up and down blues scales as fast and as smoothly as possible. The sheer speed lit up something in my brain. As much as I professed to detest metal, at home I’d shut the door to my room, plug my lousy Peavey guitar into my lousy Peavey amp—both bought with bar mitzvah money—and see how quickly I could run through scales, too. (In sum: not fast enough.) Then Scufl would play the Cars’ “Touch and Go,” and suddenly everyone in the room was singing along and reaching up to mime the “I touched your star” part, as if that lyric was about a star in the sky and not, you know, a vagina. I joined in while secretly glancing at the preposterously hot girl I was crushing on, wholly without hope, who was nice enough to befriend me, though nothing more. Michelle was half-Asian, half-Italian, absolutely Jesus Christ she’s beautiful. I wore oversized glasses with lenses so thick they distorted my face, a halfhearted Jew-fro, and braces. I cringed when I looked into mirrors and was mutely grateful for our long phone calls. For any flakes of her attention, really. At this battle of the bands, she was all tarted up, hotter than a heartache, and, unlike everyone else, she didn’t sing along, just nodded her head and languidly chewed gum in time with the music, a hand on her hip. Grown men have gone to jail for less. I looked at her and thought, as overwrought as any teen, She does not know this entire moment is about her, even though girls that pretty usually do.
Everything about these nights was totally Tinkertoys, and I knew it even then. But knowing it didn’t stop how crazy and excited and bottled-up and absolutely unable to express it I felt, so uncomfortable in my skin it may as well have itched, crazy from the crowd and the guitars and the amps and the drums and the girls and that girl especially. I thought, maybe I could start a band to impress her. No. Wait. This is better. Maybe I could start a band with her. I’d see her a lot more then, right? We actually tried this, though she wanted to sing a bunch of Pat Benatar songs for which I couldn’t even feign interest, and in any event I couldn’t play the solos fast enough. And I hadn’t yet realized that you started a band not to get the girl but because you couldn’t get the girl. To channel all the horrible churning, surging feelings—the goddamned unmanageable desire and anger and other emotions you couldn’t name, you could never understand, and that nonetheless never left you alone. A band might make them into something other than what you seethed over endlessly, or what you whacked off to behind a locked bathroom door.
***
I DID MOST OF MY GROWING UP IN WARREN, NEW JERSEY, about an hour west of Manhattan, in the kind of development common to comfortable suburbs erected in the late sixties and seventies, and the one good thing I can say about my hometown is that it gave you time and space to dream. The houses kept a respectful distance from one another. There were woods with tall trees, and great expanses of lawns. We lived well off any main road, and the surrounding streets were very lightly trafficked. Cars floated by slowly, gently, kids wriggling and bouncing in the backseat. You could ride your bike for hours, dazed and drifting, seeing no other humans, utterly and gloriously alone. The gears on your ten-speed made a nasal, narcotic clicking when you stopped pedaling, and there was a song in that sound. You achieved a minor cinematography coasting down the street, a slow pan past the trees through which you glimpsed your neighbors’ houses. Though no one would want to make a movie out of this.
Other boys my age lived in the neighborhood, and though we sometimes played endless games of two-on-two baseball during the longest days of summer, I spent a lot of time alone, riding my bike on the quiet roads or reading and poring over baseball statistics in my room. Middle-class American childhood was not yet a relentlessly scheduled sequence of commitments, and you had lots of time for idle dreaming. So much stillness and quiet. So little around that you could spend all day inside yourself, as confused and whimpering as it may have been in there. You had no sense of a “we”—the thought that people like you did, in fact, exist and you hadn’t spun off, alone, into some solitary and forgotten corner of the cosmos—but you knew where the “I” was.
We moved into that neighborhood when I was four and my older brother, Neil, was ten. After we had our housewarming party, I remember asking my dad if we were really going to live here, because it was so much bigger than the downstairs rental in which we’d lived before. There was a two-car garage and an acre and a half of tall trees. Neil and I now had our own bedrooms. The low-ceilinged basement had more square footage than our entire old apartment, and down there Neil and I somehow managed to play baseball and basketball. It was a big leap for my dad, an only child whose father repaired watches and whose mother ground out ridiculously long workweeks as a back-office clerk on Wall Street to put him through Columbia and med school. For years the three of them lived with my dad’s maternal grandparents in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, but when he was thirty-six, he was able to move his pretty wife and two smart sons into the kind of house every Jewish mother wishes for her son the doctor, and my grandmother is a Jewish mother right down to the homemade chicken soup.
My mom grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, on a hilly and cobblestoned street near Isham Park, in a top-floor three-bedroom duplex that, if it’s been left untouched, is someone’s dream apartment today. Her dad ended a long career with the city’s Board of Education as the assistant superintendent overseeing all of Brooklyn’s high schools. That may scan as “hack,” but that wasn’t my grandfather: the squib the New York Times ran when he died in 1993 said, accurately, that he was known for developing interesting educational programs. My mom’s mother, to whom she was closer, died of leukemia when my mom was sixteen and away at summer camp. (Typing that sentence brings home, again, the horror she surely felt.) She and my dad started dating at that camp. Their courtship survived those summers, as well as the commute once the two of them were back home—Flatbush to the north end of Manhattan is a ninety-minute subway ride, if you’re lucky. She ended up at Barnard and he at Columbia, and they got married just before she turned twenty. After graduating from Barnard, and before my parents moved to New Jersey, she taught fifth grade at Manhattan’s PS 122. Today it’s a famous performance space, but her stories made the East Village of the early sixties sound like wartime Beirut with worse parenting. She gave up teaching to raise my brother and me and became a librarian once I started grade school. She was the family disciplinarian and had a temper that terrified me whenever it blew. I’m sometimes a hothead, too. Hi, Mom!
Everyone in my house was so much older and talked so fast about things I didn’t understand that at the dinner table I felt several crucial seconds behind each exchange, head-swiveling as the conversation bounced between my parents and my big brother, a few beats too slow to follow the ball in some Ping-Pong competition. Like a lot of youngest children, I craved much more attention than I got. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem—the baby of his family, too—once told me that being the youngest and feeling ignored or left to your own devices can leave you with a tight core of stubbornness about whatever you wanted to do: All those years you abandoned me to dream this up in my room, and now you’re telling me I can’t? Fuck you. I knew exactly what he meant.
My brother is one of my best friends today, but the six years between us is a huge gap when you’re children, something I learned over and over again when I would galumph after Neil
and his friends to be rejected, or grudgingly tolerated. Like a lot of Jewish kids from the Northeast, Neil and I went to summer camp for two months each summer, amid hills and trees and soccer and softball fields and basketball and tennis courts semicircling a mile-wide lake. Neil had gone to that camp for years and was kind of a big deal there when I arrived for my first summer. The annoying thing about him was that, early on, he mastered never looking like he was trying very hard, and he possessed the remove and equilibrium older siblings sometimes have. Whereas I always felt like I was belly flopping around school and camp and our hometown, socially leprous, barely getting by. (He did especially well with girls at camp, unlike me, about which I remain incredibly bitter.) Sometimes when grown-ups who knew him—teachers, coaches, counselors at camp—made the connection between us, they would light up, and I’d stupidly stew on this, feeling too insubstantial to cast a shadow, visible only as an adjunct to someone more memorable who’d passed through before. My mom’s response was, better that than dread flashing across their faces, a sentiment with which I didn’t necessarily agree.
Then, when I was eleven, in 1979, Neil went off to college, and suddenly it was only me and my parents in that big suburban house, and the seventies turned into the eighties just as I started getting bored with Little League and youth soccer and baseball cards and, restless, started searching Creem and Rolling Stone and High Times for some new excitement. There was a symphony of crickets’ and cicadas’ drones on summer nights—when I go back to visit my parents now, I’m surprised how loud it gets—but nothing else going on after dark, which was the whole problem. There was no culture that didn’t come from a television, a radio, or the malls’ movie theaters and record stores, and they all had such narrow ideas of what they could present.
I mean, if I’d grown up in an earlier era, maybe I could sing some paean to radio, the magic appliance through which you received secret transmissions from your true home planet, the best friend with whom you huddled in the dark, etc., but good God was radio awful in the eighties. Tears for Fears. Debbie Gibson. Billy Idol. George Thorogood. Genesis, after Peter Gabriel left, and Phil Collins’s entire solo career. Corey Hart, the poor man’s Bryan Adams in new wave sunglasses, while Bryan Adams was a poor man’s John Cougar Mellencamp, as if just being John Cougar Mellencamp weren’t brutal enough. Things were so bad we tried to get excited about John Fogerty’s first album in like ten years, even though any chemistry textbook was more exciting and contained no writing as horrendous as the lyrics to “Centerfield.” Survivor. Fucking Starship. Journey played on an endless loop, and no one acted like it was funny or weird. Howard Jones had a huge hit with “Things Can Only Get Better,” and no one called him out for lying. During one surpassingly strange fifteen or eighteen months, the ghastly and bouncy Men at Work was the biggest band in the world. Even the “quality” rock bands—those adored by critical consensus, like Bruce Springsteen and U2—were as wearying as algebra. Dog-faced with sincerity. Groaning with sanctimony. Their endless, applause-seeking urge to do the right thing. The great secret history of music, the stuff with some substance to it—Stooges, Suicide, Leonard Cohen, Can and Guru Guru and NEU! and the entirety of krautrock, Funkadelic, Blue Cheer, Albert Ayler, Magma, Wire, King Crimson, Joy Division, all the great mutant offshoots of disco, punk, hardcore, and psych—was so far out of reach in my suburb it might as well have been buried on Mars. Before breaking up in 1983, Mission of Burma had been desperately setting off signal flares up in Boston, where they practically invented the template for brainy and aggressive underground bands that’s still followed today: unusual song structures; melodic and powerful bass; distorted guitar serving more as sonic sculpture than mere notes and chords; relentless off-center drumming. But the local college radio playlists were still choked with synthy new wave and British imports, so, as with everything else going on with an entire founding generation of American punk rock, we had no way of knowing.
Nor did anyone at any of our battles of the bands in 1983 know about a few oddballs in rural Washington who toggled between hardcore and slowed-down Sabbath riffs and called themselves Melvins. Nor that, in Minneapolis, Hüsker Dü was readying Zen Arcade, the double album that would win them the maximum attention the mainstream could bestow upon a super fast, super distorted punk rock band. (Of course they’d eventually end up in Rolling Stone: their buried pop hooks made them the one noisy and aggressive band R.E.M. fans could like.) Wipers had been playing in Portland, Oregon, for years, ditto the Meat Puppets in Phoenix and Naked Raygun in Chicago. An unstable agglomeration of smart kids and party-jock types in Louisville, Kentucky, were playing in a band called Squirrelbait Youth—they hadn’t yet chopped off the last word in their name, or recorded the two albums that are still rightly cherished today. Sonic Youth lived and practiced thirty-five miles from my high school. They’d released two EPs and a full-length album by the end of my junior year, but no one around me had any idea. Metal was huge in my hometown, but only the weak and flashy kind—Judas Priest and Quiet Riot. Slayer and Metallica and Voivod and a zillion others were already reordering the entire genre, but no one I sold pot to knew anything about them. Things weren’t necessarily better for those lucky enough to grow up in cities, where many key people in bands were still considered complete weirdos. Sometimes even to the other weirdos. “I always thought [Wipers front man] Greg Sage was a cancer patient,” Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of the label SST, told me. “He had tufts of hair missing, and what was there was white. He was too old to look like a punk rocker. So you assumed he was a patient.”
In 1983, when I was fifteen, a friend’s older brother brought a cassette to summer camp with Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks on one side and Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables on the other. I grabbed it and never gave it back, and it pretty much got me through the following year. It took me forever to find the first New York Dolls album. Once I did, I played the hell out of it. Over time it grew less interesting, especially once that band became the model for a junkie-Stonesy subgenre that still really annoys me. But I’d heard them described as being a generation too early for punk rock, and in high school I was desperate for any kind of different. I didn’t hear any Stooges songs other than “I Wanna Be Your Dog” until college. All their records were out of print everywhere, and if Iggy was far from deification in the early eighties, no one in the world cared the tiniest bit about Ron and Scott Asheton. In the absence of any guidance, you developed your own strategies. Growing up in Peoria, Illinois, years before he formed Tortoise, Doug McCombs would go to the local record store and buy the albums with the weirdest covers. In that way, he explained, he quickly found records by Wire, the Stranglers, Television, and X. Then again, he also bought the first Pearl Harbor and the Explosions record, so, you know, crapshoot. It could have been worse. In Manchester, Iowa, where Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 bassist Anne Eickelberg grew up, the record store was a couple of bins in the hardware store.
***
THERE WAS ONLY ONE OTHER LOCAL VENUE BESIDES THE BATTLES of the bands. Every June my hometown held a fair called Expo Warren, with carnival games and rides, all trucked in and assembled on the fields where the Little League played, and an outdoor stage. Expo Warren brought a lovely boardwalk seediness to our town. Greasy traveling carnies collected tickets and thunked rides into life—and they really were greasy, since futzing with their machinery smeared their hands with oily black gunk, which came off when they thoughtlessly wiped sweat off their faces or slapped away mosquitoes. The midway was full of bad fried food and games with cheap stuffed-animal prizes. Entire stalls sold nothing but those small rectangular mirrors with band logos emblazoned on them. (It took me fifteen years to realize you were supposed to chop up coke on them.) School was finally out. Night came on slowly, swollen with summertime. One year I snuck into the woods past the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Roundup with a bunch of other kids to smoke joints rolled in strawberry-flavored rolling papers. That and the cotton
candy dust drifting in the air—I can taste it all right now.
When it came to music, though, Expo Warren couldn’t even match a battle of the bands’ after-hours-at-the-mall atmosphere. And we couldn’t help but notice, even through the fog of adolescence and whatever cigarettes and bad weed and cheap, sweet booze we scrounged. One evening the band consisted of one guy with a guitar and a practice amp struggling through some Kiss songs. (To steal the old joke: He played “Rock and Roll All Nite,” and “Rock and Roll All Nite” lost.) Another time some chubby guys with mustaches came onstage, looking like accountants and seemingly much older than us, which probably meant they were thirty. The lead mustache stepped up to the microphone and announced, “Hello, everyone. We’re the Electrons!” and the band launched into “White Wedding.” They got through the introduction, but when the first verse began, that guy moved back to the mike and sang, “White Weddinnnnnnggggggg! I don’t know the lyrics!” Why none of us watching ever got the urge already common in places near and far to say, “Fuck them, we can do it better”—well, I have no idea.
Some of this is hard to remember. I smoked a great deal of pot back then, but that’s not why I don’t remember, because I have very clear memories of being extraordinarily stoned through many gorgeous and horrific events. Rather, hormones and throbbing teenage anxieties created their own amnesia. Simple interactions and conversations often, and out of nowhere, transformed into hostility and sometimes even violence and the blurring, yappy chaos of an overcrowded dog run, albeit one with fists and flung bottles. One night my best friends, Andy and Mike, and I were driving around aimlessly, Mike kept his bright lights on a little too long, and a guy we drove behind went white hot with rage. He trailed us all the way to Andy’s house—into which Andy quickly disappeared—and charged out of his car, looking for a fight. Mike stood absolutely silent and motionless while this guy screamed and shoved and fake-lunged at him. Mike didn’t talk or fight back, which completely baffled this guy. Finally he screamed that if Mike ever wanted to fight, Mike knew what car he drove, and stomped off. (People actually said things like “If you wanna fight, you know my car!”) I watched, stoned and paranoid, from the backseat, bewildered and overmatched, as always, by aggressive male display. No fucking way was I getting out.