Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  We tried to find the cheapest place with topless dancers. Not the best strategy if one wants a good show. To his enduring credit, a googly-eyed Doctor Rock posed the same question to all the barkers who stood by the entrances: “Is it decadent?” (A question we all found profoundly amusing. Also kind of the right one to ask!) We finally found a suitable one—by which I mean the cheapest one—and paid the minimal fee. Each of us entered his own booth, a wall opened, and we found ourselves looking into a giant round room, staring directly into one another’s open booths, while a tall blonde gyrated and shimmied without any enthusiasm. She asked where we were from, and the guitarist from the other band said, in the flattest American-news-anchor accent possible, that we were all English. The absolute highlight was when she straightened up, pointed at her chest, and, apparently seriously, pronounced, “Tits.” The show ended after that, and Doctor Rock trotted off to explore the sights.

  The rest of us went to another club, which had a sloped and polished painted-concrete floor, like a roller rink or skate park, and was about as big. Immediately two or three blond German girls, nude but for high heels, descended upon me, and one tried to strike up a conversation.

  Attractive Naked Blond Girl: Hello! Where are you from?

  Me: Um. New York.

  ANBG: Would you like to come with me to a private room?

  Me: No. [Exit.]

  Doctor Rock, meanwhile, was enormously complicating his evening by forgetting the name and address of our hotel, then spending all night trying to find it. At one point he went to a police station with this sad story. I was interested in hearing how Hamburg’s constabularies responded, once they stopped laughing. But after seeing an exhausted and angry-eyed Doctor Rock glaring at the rest of us over breakfast—he managed to find his way back just as we started eating—I thought it better not to ask.

  I could say that Doctor Rock drank a lot, but it would be more accurate to say that if he was awake, he was drinking. We played a shitty show in Innsbruck—literally shitty, in an absolutely freezing room in a squat that was home to a pack of dogs that left scattered frozen clusters of droppings everywhere. As disheartening as that sight was, it was nowhere near as disheartening as what happened when the heat finally went on and the room filled: the poop unfroze, mingled with the snow on everyone’s shoes, and was tracked everywhere until the entire floor was sloppy with a thin, foul-smelling muck. Before the show Doctor Rock drank a beer while flying around on someone’s skateboard. He hit a patch of frozen dog shit, or something, and took a pretty serious tumble. But he didn’t let go of his beer bottle—interestingly—and he landed on it, opening a nasty gash. I saw him howl and flail a bloody hand and immediately thought, Tour over. But Tanco, our unflappable Dutch driver/tour manager/Doctor Rock minder, wrapped it neatly in gauze and tape, and within minutes Doctor Rock was relating and reenacting his accident to a crowd of new friends.

  He did not appear to require sleep. He was awake when we went to bed and awake when we woke up. Sometimes he would doze in the van during the day, then suddenly sit up, reach for a beer, and down it.

  He seemed to find a woman at every show. In Austria (or Germany, or Switzerland, I really don’t remember), one stuck around in the van for a few days. She must have hoped for a better time than what we showed her, because, if I understood correctly, she had put her job in danger by coming along. Had I spoken to her at all, I might be able to tell her story now.

  Long van rides lead young men to hash out theories, and on this tour we started wondering whether Germany was so uptight because its men scorned cunnilingus. One morning in Karlsruhe or Kassel or Bremen or Dortmund, outside our hotel, following an impressive make-out/mauling session with the previous night’s conquest outside our idling van, Doctor Rock described how he had gone down on her the night before, making her softly exclaim in wonderment, “What are you doing?” We all developed the theory, but Doctor Rock did the actual lab work. Credit him for that, I guess.

  Some of this was kind of funny and made for great stories, even if the day-to-day sucked, as it inevitably does when you live with someone who’s always in character. The complications came from realizing that the joke-doll version of Doctor Rock was easier to deal with than the talented and disgruntled drummer who was ill-suited for our band. Encouraging him by chuckling at the cartoon had queasy moral aspects, even if, to paraphrase Orwell’s brilliant quote, he was quite happy to let his face grow to fit the mask. I kept him at arm’s length and laughed at his excesses because it was the easiest thing to do. Not my most shining moment. It never occurred to me to say, Hey, what’s up? Maybe it’s time to slow down. Anyway, the general codes of the road dictate that someone has to be found unconscious with a needle in his arm to warrant an intervention, or to be so fucked up he or she starts ruining shows. Doctor Rock never did that. Which is not to say that his metally flourishes were working or welcome.

  The last show of the tour was in the Netherlands on the next-to-last day of 1990, and the following night there was a huge New Year’s Eve party in the well-appointed squat where we stayed. (On this tour I learned that no country did squats as well as the Dutch.) I stayed in my room, reading fanzines, watching TV. I was worn out, feeling shy, also sad that this was the end. Doctor Rock, of course, was roaming the halls but had divined that our host had a small cache of speed, and every half hour or so he asked sweetly for another hit.

  You don’t want to see someone you know acting like this, but the tour was over, as was the band, and we were finally going home. Well, most of us were. Doctor Rock had received a vague offer to drum with an expat American guitarist of minor renown. Perhaps some caution light should have flashed, since he found said guitarist hanging out with a clearly junked-out opening band one night, but, whatever, he was no longer our problem. He planned to stay at the squat for a few days and then . . . well, we didn’t know and we didn’t ask, because Doctor Rock was finally off our hands.

  An article in a British fanzine, written just after Sooyoung and I limped home, closed with the image of Doctor Rock riding toward the horizon, heading deeper and deeper into some rock fantasy, until he disappeared from sight.

  The reality was different. A few days after I got back to the States, while licking wounds at my parents’ comfortable and massively un-punk-rock house—unemployed, band over, no clue what to do next, sitting with them each night at the dinner table, joining them uneasily in front of the TV afterward—the phone rang. It was Doctor Rock’s dad, an extremely gentle white-haired academic, who had some questions.

  Among them: “Now, Jon. I have to ask you something. And I understand if you feel you can’t betray a friend. But was my son having problems with drugs when he was in Europe?”

  No, I said. But he was drinking heavily. (I didn’t bother mentioning the speed.)

  “Well, if it was just drinking . . .” his dad started to say, but I didn’t want to give him any false sense of relief. It wasn’t that I gave a shit about Doctor Rock. I was basically hoping I’d never see him again. But his parents were so kind when we stayed with them on tour. I also sensed that his dad had made this call before, and that thought made me squeeze my eyes shut.

  No, I said. He was drinking heavily. Really, really heavily.

  Meanwhile, Doctor Rock’s girlfriend, understandably upset that he was, you know, not coming home, called my girlfriend, whom I’d made the mistake of telling many things I assumed she’d keep in confidence. (Getting through that tour required a lot of venting.) But when Doctor Rock’s girlfriend called her, she shared what I’d recounted of his multivarious dalliances, and afterward told me about this discussion. Like me, my girlfriend also went to Oberlin. Unlike me, she was still influenced by the most excruciating aspects of the school’s exhausting leftydom. She argued that sisterhood prevented her from lying or shading the truth when asked about Doctor Rock’s faithfulness. I pointed out that she had betrayed my confidences, and by doing so screwed me
and some other people as well. But by then scorekeeping was moot.

  Doctor Rock’s parents contrived a way to bring him back home, though I don’t recall how. They didn’t inform him that, upon arrival, he was going straight to rehab. Though they did tell me.

  Before we flew to Europe, he had left his car in my parents’ driveway, and it fell to me to pick him up at the airport. He’d already gotten an earful from his girlfriend, so: awkward. But he was nowhere near the asshole that he had every right to be. In fact, he was almost cheerful. Or at least he, like me, desperately did not want any kind of scene, and he, like me, just wanted to get on with what was left of his life. I did not bring up any touchy topics. (I was happy being pretty Midwestern-indirect about everything myself.) He stayed at my parents’ house just long enough to shower, while I reflected upon the shitstorm awaiting him, and then he hopped in his car and disappeared in the direction of the interstate. He left as cheerfully as he came in, even though he also talked about what he thought was coming—that he would have some serious explaining to do when got back home.

  But he had no idea what was coming. A few weeks later I got a letter from rehab.

  “I’m sorry to be writing this, but anger must be vented,” it began in seething and tiny handwriting. It went on from there to denounce my betrayal, my disingenuousness, and my eternal complaining while on that last tour. (Right on all counts, by the way.) I stewed for a couple weeks, feeling guilty, again, that I’d tacitly encouraged his worst instincts. Finally I sent a few perfunctory sentences conceding certain points while asserting that he had no one to blame but himself.

  I couldn’t help it. You couldn’t have helped it, either. Something about rehab forces clichés out of everyone.

  This note crossed in the mail with a sunnier, blame-accepting letter from a clean, sober, and steadier Doctor Rock. What a shitty time we had all along trying to communicate. We couldn’t even time apologies and accusations correctly. Our correspondence dwindled to nothing after that. I got a postcard from him about a year later, gently, cheerfully—Midwesternly—chiding me for not sending him live tapes of the European tour. He ended up in a band we knew, but left after one album. I ran into him on the road in the mid-nineties, while I was on tour with Vineland, and we had an awkward conversation. Like many dreamers and seekers, he ended up out West, where he spent years drumming for a show in Las Vegas. He’s married now, with kids.

  ***

  I DIDN’T SPEAK WITH HIM AGAIN UNTIL LATE 2013. FUNNILY enough, after completing a PhD in music, he taught university classes in pop music: he really was Doctor Rock. I’d told him I was writing this book and wanted to talk about our time playing together. I wanted him to take some shots at me, fair being fair and all, but no matter how much I prompted, he demurred. I didn’t expect the conversation to be easy, but it was clear that I was ripping off many old scabs, and the way he wallowed in apology was hard to hear.

  I asked: What happened in Europe?

  “I fucked everything up. Isn’t that what this is about? I was the guy who fucked it all up.”

  No, I said. That’s not what this is about. What happened?

  “I was having the time of my life. I’d never experienced anything so amazing.” I’d forgotten that, despite all those years of playing in bands, he’d never really gone on tour before. “I imploded. I didn’t know how to handle how cool it was. At the end I just didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want it to end.”

  Clay Tarver, the guitarist from Bullet LaVolta and Chavez, once told me that going on tour is so much fun it makes you crazy. I love this line, because as soon as he said it, I knew what he meant. It sort of happened to me, early on. It definitely happened to Doctor Rock.

  In retrospect, I said, there was no way to replace Orestes. No one else would have worked. (I’ve successfully replaced drummers in other bands, but it’s really hard to swap out a musician in a trio. Though neither Sooyoung nor I knew that.)

  Doctor Rock said that he loved the band and thought we sounded great together. He asked over and over again if I would make him the villain when I told this part of the story. I told him I wouldn’t.

  Did I?

  Or is the villain the guy who encouraged his worst instincts, talked shit about him behind his back, dropped the dime on his on-tour indiscretions—and then wrote about almost all of it in a fucking book?

  ***

  DOCTOR ROCK, DOCTOR ROCK, YOU ASS PAIN, YOU OF THE dubious aesthetics and wince-inducing ideas, you who helped sink one of my most cherished bands, you who in so many ways needlessly complicated my life—well, you were completely right about a few things. Many of us indie rockers knew nothing about pleasure back then. The band you joined certainly didn’t. We didn’t drink much. Smoking pot made my heart race from nameless dread, and anything harder than pot was unthinkable. We didn’t fuck nearly as much as we should have. We didn’t even dance.

  And you know what else? I wish that I, too, cut loose, went mad, drank beyond the point of knowing anything, accepted any pill or powder that floated my way. I mean: I was twenty-two and touring in a rock band. It wasn’t like I had to wake up and go to work in the morning. I wish that I, too, ripped the tights off young, giggling German women and tongued them until they experienced the ultimate pleasure. But something held me back. Something that, for good or ill, I had and you didn’t. The fix and rush of the music was enough for me. The hormonal thrill of being inside it, instead of watching from the crowd. You and I both chased a buzz we were powerless to resist. It just wasn’t the same one.

  Jonathan Richman Has Ruined Rock for Another Generation

  In 1994 or 1995 a band from Providence called Small Factory played in Manhattan at Brownies, and for some reason I went to the show. The drummer, Phoebe, was inept, and wrinkled her nose and made a funny face every time the band went slightly out of time, and they went out of time a lot. The guitarist, Dave, looked thirty-five, at least, but the entire band dressed like they were eight—bowl haircuts, stripey T-shirts—and acted like they were six. Their songs sucked, and they couldn’t do a single interesting thing with their instruments. But—and this was the worst part—it didn’t matter. The crowd was there to love the band, no matter what, and have the band love them back. A cuddle party, not a rock show.

  Cities change. Even cities that, like Indie Rock USA, are just a state of mind. A very naïve form of twee pop had started going around, like a flu, and was afflicting many along the Eastern Seaboard. (Ultimately, the best-known bands that had a foot or two in this scene were Belle and Sebastian and the Magnetic Fields.) This all started in Olympia, Washington, with Beat Happening, with whom, strangely enough, Bitch Magnet once played at the CBGB Record Canteen. Beat Happening basically purveyed a more sexualized and arch version of Jonathan Richman—he’s been doing nasal and childlike since the seventies—largely because their front guy, Calvin Johnson, had tons of charisma and wit. (I still wasn’t a fan, though I always liked the oral-sex reference near the end of “Indian Summer.”) Still, in the early nineties the consummate observer/superfan of our underground Nils Bernstein—who later ran publicity for Matador and Sub Pop—was prescient enough to make a few batches of T-shirts that declared in bold type: CALVIN JOHNSON HAS RUINED ROCK FOR AN ENTIRE GENERATION. As many bands influenced by Joy Division oversimplified a brilliant band into much bad minor-key goth, the post−Beat Happening stuff was much like Small Factory: bowl haircuts, stripey shirts, smiley faces, utterly bereft of sexuality. Summer camp after grade school, minus the aggression. D.C.’s Tsunami, which started the Simple Machines label and, like Beat Happening, established themselves as a maypole band for this kind of stuff, actually sang the line “You say punk rock means asshole. I say punk rock means cuddle.” (Actually: no, not at all. Punk rock means—pick one—self-determined or self-sufficient or individual or steadfast in the face of opposition, not asshole, and definitely not cuddle. But you already knew that,
right?)

  Blandness became an aesthetic. Tempos strolled, never grinding, never speeding. Little was heavy, and even less was interesting, amid this bunch of shaggy-dog bands wanting to nuzzle you and a crowd seemingly eager to regress to childhood. Had eBay existed, prices for Archies and 1910 Fruitgum Company records would have skyrocketed. I was desperate not to grow up, too, but I thought the point was to be forever twenty-one, not a kindergartner. I liked adulthood, and most trappings of adulthood, like drinking and sex and living on my own. I hated all these bands, and I especially hated that they were starting to shove aside the music I liked most. In his book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad identified a fear of sexuality—an unwillingness to embrace the complications that come with any of it, straight or gay—at the heart of the indie pop childishness. I just saw the childishness. What was the point?

  ***

  THINK OF THE KICK DRUM/SNARE DRUM INTRO TO JUDAS Priest’s “Living after Midnight”:

  Boom-CHA boom-boom CHA, boom-CHA boom-boom CHA

  Boom-CHA boom-boom CHA, boom-CHA boom-boom CHA

  Now count the beats by finding the pulse—the steady heartbeat beneath it all: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. A textbook example of rock in standard 4/4 time—four beats per measure, with the snare drum emphasizing the second and fourth beat.

  Now think of the main piano riff for Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”:

  Bum-BAH, bum-BAH, bum-BAH

  Bum-BAH, bum-BAH, bum-BAH

  and count this one out, too: 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5. Five beats per measure, with accents in different places, most notably on the last two beats of the measure. Now count out the main instrumental riff in Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill.” You’ll find it’s in seven.