by Jon Fine
There’s always that guy. Not in big cities. Not even in places like Chapel Hill. But in the places where that guy is so psyched that your band has come through, because nothing happens there.
And it’s always the Sun Ra movie. I’ve seen the Sun Ra movie at least eight times.
—Scott DeSimon, bassist, Pitchblende and Turing Machine
Timing is everything, even in punk rock, and starting in the latter half of the eighties, it became much easier for weird bands to do band things: play shows, make records, go on tour. The hows and whys that had been so elusive just a few years earlier were now shared through surprisingly effective samizdat and word-of-mouth networks. The bands that had done the most in a previous generation to start wiring those networks together were Black Flag and Dead Kennedys. (I am compelled to note that I still love the former; the latter, not so much.) They were the first underground bands to not just play shows on the other side of America—both were from California, and Dead Kennedys made it to New York first, in late 1979—but to tour nationally, and do so steadily, because they made a crucial conceptual leap: they decided that playing in a band was their job and started doing it all the time. What they faced and overcame in the process—Black Flag, in particular, a story probably best told by Henry Rollins in his memoir, Get in the Van—is rather mind-boggling. But these bands, and others, made it clear you could do it yourselves, and put particular clubs and cities on the map, and helped audiences grow accustomed to different kinds of music—first hardcore, then everything else.
Though touring early on often meant a diet of disappointment. “I remember playing in Cleveland” in the early eighties, recalled Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller, whose band broke up just before key connections in the independent network were soldered into place. “These two girls came up and said, ‘Wow! You guys did “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver.” That’s such a cool song! We’ll be at the show tonight.’ We thought, We’re golden. After the first song, the audience is against the far wall. By the third song, there’s zero response. Then we start taunting the audience, and there’s still no response. We play ‘Revolver,’ and there’s no response. Then the next band comes on, and people dance. Then we play our second set, and there’s no response.” And, as Miller explains, even when it started to get better for bands, it didn’t really get better: “The second time we were in San Francisco, after [Burma’s landmark 1982 album] Vs. had come out, I think there were like two hundred people there. A day later we played Los Angeles, and there were like twelve people in the club. You’d go from thinking, Wow! We are finally cool! to Oh, right. We aren’t cool.”
Even in the late eighties we all still played music far different from what most people expected, and club owners and soundmen would occasionally freak out over, say, how loud you were. Or you might run into a sound guy like the one at Cedars in Youngstown, Ohio, apparently badly in thrall to U2, who put a bizarre delay effect on my guitar until I demanded he stop. Nor were low-level rock clubs back then particularly concerned about Better Business Bureau−esque ethics. A pal in a fairly well-known band played a show in a decent-sized city, met the owner in the office afterward, and asked for the band’s guarantee. Then the owner opened a desk drawer and casually gestured toward the gun he kept there, and my pal decided to forgo that night’s wages.
But every touring band had stories like that. In a different and smaller city the dead-calm club owner wore a sharp silver suit and was said to be mobbed-up and to carry a gun, and when it looked as if his promoter might stiff us, I told him that he ran a really nice club and it would be a shame if word got around that he didn’t pay bands. (Crazily enough, this tactic worked.) Because after a couple of passes through America and Europe, states and countries stopped being flat maps in the dogeared road atlas we kept stashed between the front seats of the van and became three-dimensional, with memory and incident and images and the people we met: Newport, Kentucky, where the amazing hillbilly speed-metal drummer in the opening band looked twelve but was twenty-four; Cincinnati, where everyone played a bar called Sudsy Malone’s that contained a Laundromat and where, in 1993, a guy tried to pick me up; London, Ontario, where the sole hot girl at the afterparty kept squealing that hearing the Stooges made her come, but her boyfriend was way too drunk to take advantage of this information; Brixton, where we stayed in London, where someone broke into the van and made off with most of our gear and merch; Athens, Ohio, where we played a dirt-floored and underheated venue in January until the cops shut us down for being too loud; the small town in Austria where we cut the set short because the PA malfunctioned and the crowd seemed menacing and I’m still not sure if I really heard anti-Semitic mutterings or was just paranoid; Osijek, Yugoslavia, where the primitively Xeroxed gig flyer advertised GUITAR FLAME NOISE, and where we didn’t spend enough time with the lovely guy who’d set up our shows there: a budding minister of culture, who understood everything about music and art, was endlessly curious about both, and managed to find us a bottle of Jim Beam in a broken, barely post-Soviet state that used a currency that lost all value as soon as you left the country. Before we left he gave us his address, painstakingly writing YUGOSLAVIA in capital letters at the bottom, before observing with a shrug, Of course there won’t be a Yugoslavia in a year, and he was right.
You learned fast that doing it yourself applied to many more things than calling clubs to book your band and pressing your own records. “We played the Khyber Pass in Philadelphia in 1994 and stayed with [longtime local promoter] Brian Dilworth,” remembered Andrew Beaujon, the front man for Eggs. Dilworth lived in an industrial, isolated, possibly unsafe part of town, where, luckily, there was a fenced-off lot in which Eggs could park their van. When the band arrived, though, cars were arranged in a way that left no space big enough for them. So Brian turned and told everyone, All right, guys. There’s like thirty people here. We’re gonna pick up one of these cars and move it. And they did. Or you might arrive at an Elks Lodge in Louisville for your first punk rock show, as Jeremy DeVine did long before he became the founder and owner of the Temporary Residence Ltd. label, and find people hammering together scavenged two-by-fours and wood planks to build a stage because the Elks Lodge didn’t have one. (And, as soon as that show was over, they broke down and discarded what they’d built.)
Still, as the eighties became the nineties, the bigger battles had been won. A network of clubs spread across America, and a far nicer one traversed Europe. Many important American underground bands could barely scrape together a hundred fans for hometown shows, but the British music weeklies Melody Maker, NME, and Sounds wrote about them extensively—as did major press outlets on the Continent—and much bigger crowds greeted them when they toured overseas, at clubs that treated them far better, with ample food and beer backstage, and real meals after soundcheck. There promoters put bands up in actual hotel rooms. (Not in England, though. Because promoters knew you were going to play London no matter what? Because there were different touring economics? Because the Continent has always valued artists and culture more? I still don’t know why.) Eventually endless tours by third- and fourth-rate American bands exhausted European audiences, and their appetite for this music collapsed in the mid-nineties. Until then, though, Europe was our yellow brick road. Orestes would have been happy only touring Europe and never playing the States again, and his was not a unique opinion.
But it wasn’t mine. I liked touring America as much as I liked touring overseas. Because I liked everything about this thing of ours.
To pinch something that Elizabeth Elmore—who led the bands Sarge and the Reputation—once told me, I loved the surprise of each day on the road. I loved waking up in the morning not knowing what the night would bring. Or that, five or ten or twenty years later, I might still be in touch with someone I met at that show.
I liked plotting weekends just as Scott DeSimon described: scanning mileage charts in the back of a road atlas to see how far you could drive and sti
ll make it home in time for work on Monday morning. I liked it when, driving southeast on a Sunday after playing Boston with Vineland the night before, stuck in traffic but not unhappily, our bassist asked where we’d play next, and I rolled the idea around for a moment and declared, “Richmond and Pittsburgh,” and a few weekends later, we did.
I liked the long, empty highway spaces: the zen boredom of the generic American interstate, the lulling rhythm of the ride, the continuous forward motion. I liked being anywhere in a vehicle groaning from a full load of gear, on stretches of highway in West Virginia or Michigan or even Iowa, where the major roads almost always intersect at ninety-degree angles, on which you made long, straight drives through endless flat landscapes. I liked the giant standing irrigation rigs alongside the road in the fields of Indiana, those metal spiders the size of football fields. I liked how being stopped in traffic at a forgettable bridge in Delaware could be transformed into an event by a startling sunset.
I liked the voices you heard on college radio stations while driving on the interstate, for the ten or fifteen minutes before static buried them. They sounded like people you could know. No. They sounded like people you did know, and since some invisible connective tissue joined us, in a sense you did. I liked hearing my friends’ bands on the radio in unexpected places. I liked hearing my own band on the radio in unexpected places, even though it didn’t happen much.
I liked arriving at a club in the late afternoon, the few people in the hushed beer-and-cigarette-smelling room only starting to yawn and stretch into another day. (Even if the first thing that always happened was that everyone in the van employed subtle machinations so as not to get stuck with finding parking for an oversized vehicle with inadequate rearview mirrors in a city during rush hour. Unless it was a club that had parking spaces set aside. But it almost never was.) I liked the ritual of pulling up to the curb, inert bodies groaning into motion again, unthunking the van’s back door, disassembling the gear puzzle one more time: the procession of speaker cabinets, drum cases, amp heads, drum stands wrapped in blankets, guitar cases, boxes of merch, everyone’s duffel bags, toolboxes or milk crates stuffed with cords and distortion pedals, everyone’s backpacks or briefcases. Walking past the manager adding up figures from the night before or hauling cases of beer and the sound guy wearily uncoiling speaker cables and setting out mike stands as you hefted everything onstage: the drummer rebuilding his kit, everyone else reassembling their rigs, staring off into space while the sound guy miked the amps and drums and trudged back to the soundboard to start the soundcheck—kick drum, snare drum, toms, hi-hat, then the entire drum kit. (I stood in the middle of the club for this part, because a good drum sound was crucial, but I also loved watching good drummers rip.) Then the bass, then the guitars, then the vocal mikes, then a song or two. I liked chatting with club owners I saw more than once—Dan Dougan at Stache’s in Columbus, Bruce Finkelman at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, Peter Weening at the Vera in the Netherlands. I liked Louise Parnassa, who managed CBGB, even though whenever you called the club, she always seemed to be in a very foul mood, because a couple of times I think I made her laugh. Her phone manner and growl made me picture a stooped, chain-smoking sixty-year-old, so it was a shock to meet her and discover she was not only around my age but also pretty cute—long hair, smoky eyes, a knowing smirk—even after spending all those hours in that lightless cave.
I liked how our rehearsal room smelled of old amp tubes heating up. I liked the staticky way the PA crackled into life after you flipped its switch. I liked the ancient and unbelievably crude graffiti in the hallways where we practiced, especially the extraordinarily specific screed that instructed “you, the faggot,” to suck diarrhea from a fat black man’s asshole, with a straw, so that “he doesn’t even have to push.” (The detail that shot it into the stratosphere, I thought, was using the word fat.) I liked having a nodding acquaintance with Ronald Shannon Jackson, the ultra-badass drummer who’d played with Albert Ayler and who practiced down the hall. I liked how, whenever we loaded in our gear at three in the morning after a show, we’d hear him drumming to what sounded like a CD playing backward while a thick scent of pot drifted toward us. I liked knowing I could go to the practice space late at night if I needed to, because sometimes I needed to, when it was my only friend. I liked how Sundays were practice day, so starting with whatever show I attended Friday night, it was basically all rock until Monday morning.
I liked—no, I loved—my guitar rig, once I figured it out: a Gibson Les Paul Custom, or a Yamaha SG-2000, each with a Seymour Duncan JB pickup in the bridge position, into a Rat distortion pedal and a four-input Hiwatt Custom 100 amp going into a jet-black custom-made speaker cabinet that weighed more than I did, which we nicknamed the Beast. I liked reading about weird seventies guitars and amps and effects and trying to track them down, long before the Internet indexed everything and bargains disappeared. (I don’t like remembering the crazy deals I missed out on while broke, like the gorgeous sixties Fender Jazzmaster on sale in Cleveland for four hundred bucks in 1991. Today it would cost four grand, at least.) I liked discovering a once-grand music store that lasted for decades in Newark, even as the surrounding neighborhood grew deserted and scary, and rooting through its boxes of old effects pedals, panning for gold, for something old and obscure that still worked or could be fixed. I liked finding an original and unused Orange head from the seventies there and buying it for slightly more than $300 in 1989, because with it I achieved my favorite guitar sound on record—the power chords on Bitch Magnet’s “Ducks and Drakes”—and because that amp still sounds great today. I liked the tiny adjustments I learned to make to my guitars, like tweaking intonation and replacing pickups, because this work was profoundly calming.
I liked handwriting the set list each night, and I liked identifying songs by shorthand or in-jokes so no one in the front rows could know what was coming. I liked being onstage, even if, for many years, I wasn’t quite sure what to do once I was up there and remembered so little of it afterward. Not because I went into a trance, or because I walked onstage into a dream that made no sense once I woke up, or because the excitement created a blur in which only a few moments registered, like images glimpsed while riding a roller coaster, though every show was its own roller coaster. But because everything that happened up there vanished once the music stopped, lost in the stage lights and the adrenaline and the confusion from surfing so many currents at the same time: the songs, the sound, the volume, the crowd, the tiny changes bandmates made onstage, the parts I improvised every night. I liked having long, curly hair to hide behind when a show was going bad, and to fling around when it was going well.
I liked how some people in the crowd watched with real intent while you were just setting up. I liked how diehard fans planted themselves by the lip of the stage for all the opening bands and grimly held that position all night, never leaving to pee or grab a beer. I liked finding that guy—or was it having that guy find us?—in Columbia, South Carolina; or Worcester, Massachusetts; or Savannah, Georgia; or Eugene, Oregon. The smaller towns could surprise you. The first time Bitch Magnet arrived in Morgantown, West Virginia, we had no idea what to expect—and we found a packed room, and when we played, more people stage-dove than at any show I ever played, anywhere. I booked Morgantown on every possible tour thereafter. The shows were always good, though the local economy was always depressed, so the crowd was too broke to buy much merch. But pretty much everyone there had weed, if that was your thing. (Though by then, alas, it wasn’t my thing.)
I liked staring into the eyes of random people in the audience until they looked away. I liked alternating coffee and beer before the show on the nights I was tired. I liked drinking two beers, no more, before the set, but I also liked the nights when I drank one or two too many and was a little looser and sloppier onstage. I liked how playing in a band was license to talk to anyone at the club. I liked working the merch table just after the show—wired, sweating,
hollering—because how could you not like meeting people there and hearing them say, in sometimes stammery syntax, how much your band meant to them. I liked meeting the biggest music nerds in each town and hearing about the good local bands, even if those bands weren’t always as good as you wanted. I liked having a backstage to escape to, even if backstage itself was often a shithole. (People fucked on those sagging, cigarette-pocked couches that stank of armpits and stale grief? Yes. They did.) I liked the club at the end of the night, after everyone had left, because I liked knowing the arc of a full day there and not just the brief interval its customers saw.
I liked how being on tour moved you in a perfect counter-rhythm to the nine-to-five world: your adrenaline rose when it ebbed for those at work and peaked after they went to bed. I liked how unmoored, how far out from shore, you were after a few weeks on tour. The minor insanities of your day-to-day: the fast food and cheap beer, the cumulative fatigue and hangover, the rising preshow tension and its ecstatic onstage release, the ringing ears, the squalor in the van and the houses where you crashed. I liked the drug-dealer feeling you got on tour from carrying a bag containing thousands and thousands of dollars in cash, sometimes in a jumbled rainbow of many different currencies. I liked learning that the smell of American money is like sour wood and sweat, gamy and slightly sick-making, which you didn’t know until you kept a lot in a very tight space. I liked hearing other bands’ disgusting, tragic, and hilarious road stories, the strange things each band did, like how members of A Minor Forest would shove dozens of slices of steam-table pizza from all-you-can-eat joints into a shoulder bag, dump them on the dashboard of their van, and survive off them for the next several days, or how they’d buy twenty or more breakfast tacos from Tamale House every time they played Austin and do the same thing. (“They would stay pretty well,” their drummer, Andee Connors, assured me.)