Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  I wanted to stay on the road forever: Sell the house sell the car sell the kids find someone else forget it I’m never coming back, not that I had any of those things to sell or anyone to not come back to. I hated how each tour eventually deposited you, without mercy, at work on Monday morning after you barely made it back home a few hours earlier, blinking bloodshot eyes at the bright fluorescent lights, feeling abandoned and far from love.

  I liked the eight or ten or fifteen fanzines I read religiously, and the excitement I felt when they irregularly appeared. I liked See Hear, the all-zine store in a basement on New York’s East Seventh Street. I liked that I could make it there and back during lunch hour from the small architecture firm where I worked my first job after college, from late ’89 until the following fall, when I quit to tour America and Europe with Bitch Magnet. It was the only thing I liked about that job.

  I liked cassettes—demo tapes, mix tapes—their covers made from colored markers and collages on photocopy machines. These were perhaps the defining relics of this culture’s handmade ethos, and today they exist almost entirely as pure objects, since only diehards like me kept their tape decks. I liked the tapes and letters that would arrive at the band’s post office box from fans with whom we’d traded addresses while on the road. I liked opening that PO box with a sense of anticipation that I never felt when opening the mailbox at my apartment, and I didn’t even mind waiting in the achingly slow line to pick up packages sent there.

  I liked dubbing cassettes of my band and sending them to labels, along with a self-addressed postcard, on which they sometimes responded. I liked staying late at work to make flyers for upcoming shows on the office copy machine, and I liked carefully carrying home thick stacks of them, still warm and smelling of ink and chemicals. I even sort of liked mixing wheat paste and water in a bucket until it reached a disturbingly semenlike consistency, and hanging flyers all over the East Village at night back when you could do that without getting arrested. I liked how a few Vineland flyers stayed up for years in some nooks along First Avenue.

  I liked walking around on weekend days, searching for sights or an association or a scrap of an overheard conversation from which I could squeeze a line or two, a seed for a song, like the homeless guy shaving the other homeless guy in a doorway, who turned up in the Vineland song “Archetype.” I liked staying up all night with people I just met. I liked—and was always awed and moved—when people in each new city adopted you for a few hours or a day, took care of you, showed you around, showed you cool stuff you didn’t know. I liked the intensity that attached itself to those relationships, and your condensed togethernesses whenever you met on the road or in each other’s hometown. I liked hosting other members of our tribe in my city and taking them to my circuit of dive bars, record stores, and cheap restaurants. I liked meeting people whose records I knew. I liked the way people reflected where they grew up and where they lived—Seattle, Cleveland, Richmond, Charlotte, Austin—as well as our commonalities that transcended origins and accents. I liked learning local slang in one region and introducing it to another—“dookie” for “shit,” years before Green Day stole it; “dodgy” for “unreliable”; “wheef” for “pot.” (Wheef came about when we almost certainly misheard something said by Urge Overkill’s Ed Roeser, but we liked saying bad wheef way too much to drop it.) I liked coming back from Europe with a few affectations that let those who could hear the dog whistle know where you’d been: a phrase in German, some new British slang, a taste for a cigarette hard to find in the States, like the red-pack Gauloises Blondes one friend bought by the carton from the duty-free after every tour. I liked leaving graffiti for friends in other bands backstage at clubs in Europe: LYLE HYSEN: CALL YOUR MOTHER. BRITT AND BRIAN: MAKE SURE YOUR VAN HAS SEATBELTS.

  I liked the way all this effectively organized and structured my life. I liked that we all found this way to stay young, well into our twenties at first, and then well beyond. I liked believing that we knew something most everyone else didn’t. I liked believing that this culture was going to change music. I liked believing that it would last forever. Because, for a while, that was easy to believe.

  Why We Never Smiled Onstage

  Late one weeknight in the late nineties I sat in a bar in Chicago with Damon Che, the drummer for Don Caballero, the instrumental quartet for which I briefly played guitar. Broke full-time musicians hold a few trump cards, and we were playing one: nights were our days, we had nowhere to go in the morning, so tonight we’d stay out forever. We nursed our drinks, savoring the practically empty room and the quiet settling over the city.

  Damon is an enormously talented drummer and guitarist, but often it seems his primary skill is burning bridges. To cite just one example, while on tour with Bellini in 2002, he quit the band onstage in Georgia, loaded his gear into the van, and drove home alone, leaving all the other members stranded. This was especially bad form since two of the three remaining Bellini members live in Sicily. So, yes, Damon has a bad temper. When I first practiced with Don Cab, witnessing his rages was unsettling, since he’s around six foot three and his head is roughly the size of my torso. (The other members of the band were so inured to such displays they looked bored whenever he erupted, an affect I soon imitated.)

  Still, Damon had spent practically every sentient moment since grade school thinking about music or playing it or both. However enormous a pain in the ass he could be, he came up with stuff, on drums and guitar, that no one else in the world could. He also had an autodidact’s unique perceptions of music, and of any other culture that interested him. This last part made him a very good person to get slowly drunk with after midnight on a Tuesday, and as we did we got to talking about a musician we knew. We both liked him and all, but Damon, like me, was pretty whatever about his band. They were really great guys, but “really great guys” is the absolute kiss of death if it’s the first thing you say about a band.

  Damon’s beef was that the band was unrelentingly modest, in the manner of many at that time: understated, too shy for grand gestures, and whatever color they applied stayed very much within the lines. But this was the interesting thing. He didn’t say the band sucked. He said that he didn’t understand it. He wanted to know: why would anyone aim for something so plainly unambitious?

  Exactly, I thought. Both of us wanted something more from music than mere entertainment. Something much more than merely cerebral, “cerebral” being a very easy fallback for a subgenre that practically required a college diploma from its participants. Too much music, we knew, only tickled the surface and never explored the vast untapped areas that were just sitting there. I liked playing music that came from the head, guts, and crotch. Anything else was pointless. If you weren’t going for power—or just to be really weird, or to do something that hadn’t already been done a thousand times, or something big—I didn’t understand why, either. We had such powerful weapons in hand—guitars, distortion, drums, amps, volume—so why charge toward such a small hill? Cormac McCarthy voiced the literary version of this idea back when he gave his first interview in 1992: “A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange,” he said. They weren’t dealing with life-and-death issues, and McCarthy didn’t see the point in writing about anything else.

  I wanted to play, and hear, music that was physically involving. I wanted sound to physically affect the audience. I wanted it loud enough to feel it. Some people want a song to speak to them. I wanted to disappear into the sound. I know, I know, I’m supposed to say that you can’t crescendo at 125 decibels all the time, and there’s supposed to be that blend of light and shade, as Jimmy Page famously wanted for Led Zeppelin. But screw that. Because some of my favorite records, like Minor Threat’s first 7̋s or Slayer’s Reign in Blood or Prong’s Primitive Origins, do nothing but amp up every moment to the absolute max.

  Bland bands had always popped up in American indie rock, but as the eighties turned into the nineties, such bands—watered-
down, polite, average—were getting harder and harder to ignore. In the fall of 1992 I walked out of CBGB, utterly bored by a hotly hyped band from Chicago. I didn’t see the point of the Smashing Pumpkins, and nothing I heard later by them changed my mind. They struck me as middling arena rock crafted with some slightly different ingredients: better guitar sounds and heavier distortion, basically. I didn’t mind the arena-sized ambitions, which you could sense even then. I minded how dull it all was. Even before then, I remember my heart sinking when the Pixies started getting big: there was so much else going on that was so much more interesting. This was what people were going for?

  But I still don’t think I’m explaining this properly.

  If I could reach through these words, grab your throat, and squeeze until you struggled to breathe—would you understand me then?

  If I played you a song and the final chord in each verse crashed upon you like a piano falling from a skyscraper, as it does in Fucked Up’s “Crooked Head”—would you understand me then?

  If the drummer drags the beat with his kick drum, sending the sensation to your reptile brain that rolls your eyeballs toward the back of your head, if the guitarist’s overtones are so intense you start seeing angels, if the singer screams not like every other singer has screamed since the dawn of time but instead surfaces the terror and dread that you spend your entire waking life trying to tamp down—

  Would you understand me then?

  Then maybe you can understand everything that a well-crafted, essentially polite rock song can never express.

  ***

  SOME PERFORMERS ARE DESPERATE TO BE LOVED. THEY WANT to ingratiate. They’re part of a long tradition that encompasses vaudeville—though I’m sure it was around before then—and most performers in musicals. In her prime Liza Minnelli was likely its apotheosis. A slightly more recent example is Ozzy Osbourne, who performs as if his life depends on an audience clapping along—save Tinkerbell! but more metal!—and who’s been screaming onstage, since the earliest Black Sabbath shows, “We love you ALL!” over and over again, a boyfriend saying he loves you so you have to say you love him back. Aside from the Clash’s sanctimony and overall Springsteen tendencies, another reason I never liked them was that Joe Strummer struck me as an overly needy front guy. He wanted agreement. He wanted approval. (And Joe was no Liza when it came to working it.) Bands playing the softer styles of indie rock were generally ingratiators. Salem 66, the jangly Boston band, showed up on one album cover dressed up and hanging out around a dining room table, in what appears to be the aftermath of a dinner party. But “Hey! come join! civilized fun!” is always a questionable idea to telegraph with your cover art, unless you want people to associate your record with brunch.

  Other performers want to dominate, like Beyoncé and Madonna and James Brown and Black Flag and Miles Davis and Swans. They don’t want to be loved, though they may be happy being worshipped. They aren’t solicitous of an audience. They’re there to overwhelm. Another kind of performer, like Sonic Youth in their prime, plays as if the audience isn’t even present. Performing, for them, is like breathing, or drinking coffee: natural and very cool, in the sense of “removed.” But you have to be really good at that sort of detachment to make it work.

  I liked the natural approach. But onstage I wanted to dominate. I didn’t want to see smiles in the audience. I wanted to see people looking slightly stunned, as if something very large had just struck them and they were trying to calculate whether that collision was very bad or very good. I wanted awe, not affection. I didn’t even need applause. Sparse and tentative clapping was enough, if the crowd seemed sufficiently concussed and they were still slowly processing what had happened. (Though hearing screams was always pretty great.) Bitch Magnet played the Kaikoo festival in Tokyo in 2012, and we ended our set with “Sea of Pearls,” a fairly poppy song by our standards. Halfway through it I saw a woman in the front row smiling and wagging her head to the beat from side to side, back and forth, back and forth. I immediately thought, Shit, ugh, failure. Pop songs—songs that ingratiate—elicit this blandly pleasant side-to-side bop. Songs that hit harder make an audience snap heads up and down: the headbanger’s response. That’s what I wanted to see.

  When friends and family who hadn’t spent years obsessing over punk rock saw my bands play, they almost always mentioned one thing: we didn’t smile onstage. They found that puzzling. But not smiling made perfect sense to us. For one thing, we were playing fairly complicated and athletic music, which required concentration. But there was more to it than that. You smile when you’re nervous. You smile while on a bad date. You smile during excruciating job interviews. You smile greeting the relatives you hate. But you don’t smile when you come, when you cross the finish line after running a marathon, when a good Samaritan pulls you from the surf onto wet sand, rescued, when the firemen save your house from burning down, or when the surgeon, in his scrubs, trudges to the waiting room to tell you that everything turned out fine.

  In February 1986 I saw Hüsker Dü headline the Phantasy in Cleveland. They were touring behind Flip Your Wig, a fairly toned-down record, but the night was strictly old-school Hüskers: all the songs sped up, running into each other without pause, at an ungodly volume. The show was basically one giant, continuous grinding sound, like a truck dumping a load of large rocks. Sometimes I thought I recognized a lyric. Down front, where I stood, was too chaotic and unformed to warrant being called a pit. As the show went on, row after row of the old-school bolted-in theater seats—the classic red velour ones that snap upright when you stand—got destroyed. The entire night swung wildly between ecstasy and absolute terror, and at any moment it was impossible to tell which pole you’d be flung to next. Sometimes I think I’d have to survive another car wreck to feel that way again. I don’t know what to call that sensation, though I desperately hope I have it a few more times before I die. Whatever it was, it didn’t make me smile. But I didn’t go to punk rock shows for fun. I needed something that, for just a moment, got its hands around everything too complicated and intense for language. I didn’t want anything happy, and I hadn’t for a very long time.

  One night when I was sixteen, stoned and sitting in a friend’s borrowed beige Chrysler outside a convenience store, a pal bolted from the front seat to chat up a girl he knew. I watched the entire conversation, and she seemed really happy. She smiled the entire time, big enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes. Her eyes shone in the parking lot lights, and inasmuch as eyes can laugh, hers did. It was winter and the windows were closed, so I couldn’t hear anything, but she cocked her head back and forth whenever she spoke and looked like she punctuated everything with a little giggle. She was really cute, too. And I hated her. I hated her because she was happy and I wasn’t, and back then I thought if you were happy, you had to be an idiot. I thought, She doesn’t know how important it is to hate something. She doesn’t know the joy of being hated and hating back. She doesn’t know the power of being hated and having nothing to lose. She doesn’t know what it’s like when it’s February and you don’t have a Valentine, because you never have a Valentine, and the sky’s been a giant bruise for weeks, and the streets run with slush, and everyone is shuffling through their midwinter light-deprived catatonia, but you know you have a secret, shining like a newly formed sun—this determination to get back at everyone—and it not only keeps you moving but you catch yourself thinking, I don’t care if it’s never summer again, I have all the wattage I need.

  No. She didn’t know any of that. Nor the buried-deep, hot nuggets of self-hatred that feeling fed on. Nor the moments of sudden violence common to male adolescence.

  A few months later I went on a first date with the freshman girl with new-wave hair in my French class. Sarah. She lived in Millington, a town more rural than mine, in a big old house atop a hill, which you reached by following a series of short dirt roads. I picked her up one night after spring rains had made them muddy. I pulled out
of one intersection a little too fast and sprayed some mud on the car behind me. Or at least that’s what the guys in that car were screaming when they pulled up beside us at the next stop sign.

  Mistake number one: I poked my head out my window to see why they were yelling. One of them snatched the eyeglasses right off my face. Mistake number two: I got out of the car.

  As with sex or performance, the particulars of physical confrontations are blurry afterward, and in this case they were particularly blurry because I couldn’t see anything. But very soon after I got out of the car, I was mopping mud off their car with my denim jacket. Then these guys—swarming and jabbering, stinking like hyenas—started throwing me onto the filthy hood, hard enough to send me scudding up and onto the windshield. After a few rounds of this, they tore off my T-shirt, shoved my glasses into my hand, and drove off, laughing and hollering. Happy first date, punker!

  I ended up wearing Sarah’s sweatshirt that night, and later she taught me how to French kiss, or, rather, I guessed correctly enough, and we became a thing, and for the next few months we rubbed against each other and stuck our hands inside each other’s pants at every possible opportunity, thrilling to the headspins of teenage desire. But what I remember most isn’t that, lovely as it was, and it was very lovely. What I remember is how I just accepted what happened that night. How I didn’t really fight back.

  You carry that knowledge with you every day, and then you’re supposed to go home, turn on MTV, and watch the fucking Romantics?

  That’s why I didn’t smile onstage.

  On these stages, in these crowds—here, at last, was the arena in which anger and sadism and revenge and submission finally all made sense. When I was onstage, I wanted to destroy. But when I was in the audience, I wanted to be shoved around by how bands sounded and what they played.