Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  When I mention odd time signatures or odd meters, I mean fives, sevens, and elevens. In rock they were generally the domain of prog-rock eggheads like Rush and King Crimson—I mean this in the best possible sense of “prog-rock eggheads,” since I actually like both—though Led Zeppelin was confident enough to play around with them, too: much of “Four Sticks” is in five, and “The Ocean” gets into fifteen. Occasionally they turned up in bona fide pop hits. Like “Solsbury Hill,” Pink Floyd’s “Money” is in seven, and with “Hey Ya!” Outkast somehow created an infectious and danceable song with verses in eleven. (For purposes of keeping this bit short, I’m using few examples, but aspiring time-signature geeks are directed to Crimson, Meshuggah, and Voivod for more advanced study.)

  What I liked about odd time signatures, once Bitch Magnet and bands we liked started messing around with them, was how they made songs swing and groove in different ways—it was still rock and all that, but the feel was deeper, darker, more complex. Switching time signatures when you go from the verse to the chorus or from the verse to the bridge—Rush does this lots; to cite just one example, much of “Red Barchetta” is in 4/4, but the guitar solo and the subsequent refrain of one main riff slip into seven—was a gentle way of throwing in a subtle emphasis, or throwing off a listener’s equilibrium in a way that always interested me. It can, of course become a contrivance. In the mid-nineties a bunch of bands had all these lurching, awkward songs because they were trying so damn hard to turn riffs that wanted to be in 4/4 into seven or five. And I got to the point in Vineland where a song didn’t feel quite right unless it had two different time signatures, if not more.

  When you’re cocooned within a cultural bubble, you might start mistaking your circle of friends for a broader reality. You might start believing that whatever obscure thing you treasure most—like, say, rock played in odd time signatures—is about to take over the world, and you might believe that that thing will therefore thrive forever. Beatniks did. Hippies did. I couldn’t stand either, but I, too, believed that the revolution was here and my side would win. Because you have to, right? You have to believe, even when the world throws so little love your way, because you have to find some way to get out of bed in the morning. Losing candidates do it every election. The star pitcher on the last-place team does it. And you—you work your crap job every day for nine hours, where someone shoots you a nasty look during each personal phone call, so tonight you can fill a dirty plastic bucket with that disgusting comelike cornstarch solution and dodge cops while plastering flyers all over the East Village until 2 a.m. Are you gonna do that if you think you’re doomed to fail?

  In the mid-nineties I could rattle off names of many bands that worked the specific angles I most cherished: those odd time signatures, odd guitar tunings, heavy, largely instrumental. Caspar Brötzmann Massaker. Slovenly. Wider. Gore. Slint. Bastro. Breadwinner. Voivod. Don Caballero. Pitchblende. There were likeminded people everywhere, or so I thought, because we all found one another at the same shows. In real life there weren’t that many fans of this music—only those really deeply into it will recognize most of those names—because few normal people care enough to spend time parsing which measure is in five and which is in seven. The guys interested in details like that—and they were almost all guys, most of whom wore glasses and reveled in finally finding nerd athletics at which they could excel—were frequently musicians, or they quickly became musicians, since the membrane between fan and performer was so porous. This was one of the greatest things about this culture, but it’s a problem when your only fans are the other musicians on the bill each night. Though you might not notice that it’s a problem if you’re spending too much time inside your bubble, where it’s too easy to disappear up your own asshole, and be fully convinced that the rest of the world will soon join you up there. One friend at college who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was shocked when Reagan won in a landslide in 1984. Everyone she knew voted for Mondale, so how could Reagan have won? Precisely the trap into which we were falling. “You’re in the studio,” explained Turing Machine’s Justin Chearno. “You’ve only listened to your five songs for two weeks, and when you’re done, you really think, We’ve created this new thing called music, and the world is going to hear this thing, and it’s going to change their lives, and Saturday Night Live is next. You just get so caught up. Then when nothing happens, you’re like, ‘Oh. Right.’”

  Life in Indie Rock, USA, wasn’t what I’d cracked it up to be. What had started out as free and welcoming ended up becoming as rigid and rule-bound as everything I’d hoped it would replace. (I was totally part of the problem, having been completely doctrinaire about music since forever.) “There was a lot of ‘you’re doing it wrong,’” recalled James Murphy, who drummed in Pony and Speedking long before he started LCD Soundsystem. Entering this world, he said, was like “your parents saying, ‘You’re gonna leave the farm. We’re going to send you to this really good school.’ And you’re like, ‘I am so excited!’ Then you get there, and everyone’s like, ‘What kind of shoes are those? Oh. The country kid thinks they’re cool.’” And since everyone in indie rock thought of themselves as a precious little snowflake, many claimed a uniqueness that was hard to square with the facts. “I used to get into all these fights with bands,” Murphy recalled. “They’d all be like, ‘I don’t listen to anything. I listen to Edith Piaf,’ and I’d be like, ‘But you sound like Slint! You don’t sing cabaret music! You’re playing a guitar that’s tuned funny in seven!’”

  We weren’t the only ones growing disillusioned. “There’s this notion that indie rock has this intelligence. I think it was the opposite. More like know-nothingism,” Andy Cohen, the guitarist from Silkworm, remembered. “Most of these bands were terrible, and they couldn’t even play their instruments, in a bad way—not like how the Sex Pistols couldn’t play their instruments, in a good way. Most bands were unambitious, and couldn’t even execute their shitty little ambition.” What bothered Cohen most was exactly what bothered me at that Small Factory show: laziness and low expectations. “You don’t go to that famous opera house in Milan and suck and not hear about it. You go to the Apollo and you suck, you get knifed. But if you were in an indie rock band in the nineties and you sucked, you’d do well if you had the right friends.”

  The mainstream still sucked, but you always knew it would. Now our thing was starting to suck, too. Suddenly the weirdos—all right, my weirdos—were no longer winning, even in our little underground. “Indie rock became a genre of music, and it was very jangly and poppy,” said Juan MacLean, a founder of Six Finger Satellite, who’s now a renowned dance music artist and DJ. “That’s why I quit. I grew up with hardcore, and then the Butthole Surfers. It seemed like their goal was to fuck with as many people as possible. I loved that. And I was so angry that indie rock became like what I actively rebelled against in the first place.”

  Lots of bands playing our circuit were only half a step from the mainstream—remember that the Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, the Pixies, and Beck all started on indie labels—and in the wake of platinum and gold records from Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Helmet, major-label reps drew targets on most every middling band with a soupçon of indie cred. Things got so strange that those reps also signed some bands that were actually oddball enough for me, among them San Diegan eccentrics Three Mile Pilot and the all-instrumental Pell Mell. (Those bands’ major-label records died a very quick death, of course.) College radio veterans and guys from punk rock bands ended up on staff at Atlantic or Sony or Geffen, the token young people told to go out to their favorite hangouts and find the next big thing. The bands they courted received some version of The Spiel, often at fancy restaurant dinners attended by label execs and their flunkies. Ted Leo fronted Chisel and then Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, so his career has spanned multiple commercial booms for indie bands, and he’s heard The Spiel in a few different decades. He recalled it like this: You guys are doing something great. We want y
ou to have a home where you can make the records you want to make and have the funding to do it.

  Further conversation, of course, revealed that reality in the big leagues wouldn’t necessarily fit that frame. You might be told that the drummer or bassist or even the entire rest of the band had to go. When Sebadoh went to record Harmacy in 1995, Lou Barlow was pulled aside by someone on the project, who told him, “If you want this to be a big hit, you gotta get rid of your drummer. And you gotta do it now.” (It’s important to underscore here that its technical wobbliness was part of Sebadoh’s package, much like the Pogues’ drunkenness or Motorhead’s facial warts.) “I knew he was right,” Lou recalled. “And I knew I couldn’t fire my friend in order to make a more dynamic, post-Nirvana-sounding record.” To his credit, he didn’t. And Harmacy didn’t sell like Nevermind. But hardly anything did.

  The tally of indie bands broken on the shoals of major-label indifference is, frankly, far too long to get into here, but in time everyone had friends in bands like Die Kreuzen or Walt Mink or Tad who had very detailed and unhappy stories. Among the recurring themes: the guy who signed us got fired and suddenly no one returned our phone calls; the guy at the label strung us along with teases and promises for over a year and then didn’t sign us and we finally broke up from frustration and inertia; the release date of our record kept getting pushed back until we finally broke up; we got dropped right after they released our record.

  Even some bands that seemed primed to succeed crapped out. Urge Overkill had their look and concept extraordinarily well thought out. Their cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” gave them a star turn on the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. For their 1993 major-label debut, Saturation, they had the full promotional power of Geffen’s machinery behind them: significant commercial radio airplay, a tour with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and a video for “Sister Havana” that ended up in MTV’s Buzz Bin, back when that all but guaranteed you’d soon hang a gold or platinum record on your wall. To date Saturation has sold about 270,000 copies. A total that would have any indie label freaking out with joy. But for a band in the nineties that received a full-on major-label push, that figure is flat-out disappointing. “The people spoke,” Urge’s Ed Roeser told me. “It didn’t work out.” To employ the gentlest form of understatement, drink and drugs became a problem, and the band’s dark and underbaked follow-up, 1995’s Exit the Dragon, tanked. Urge had played a glamourpuss-rock-star shtick for laughs pretty much since they started, but now it looked like they could no longer tell which parts were a joke and which weren’t, which even Ed admits now. He quit, and the band fell apart—or vice versa—and fell apart in the worst way. Many fans never forgave them for leaving for more-monied pastures. Smarter ones just questioned the wisdom of their tactics. “They probably would have been a much more successful huge rock band if they hadn’t been trying so hard to be a successful huge rock band,” said Tortoise’s Doug McCombs.

  As for me, after indie pop triumphed and virtually all indie-to-major signings failed, I ended up getting into the continuum of sludgy hard rock bands that ran from Blue Cheer to Saint Vitus and Melvins to Kyuss and Sleep, the most recent examples of which were being described with the unfortunate term “stoner rock.” In these bands I found the physicality and visceralness I no longer found among my indie brethren. Unfortunately I also found a decided Doctor Rock-ness to many of the musicians. Dave Sherman, then the bassist in Spirit Caravan, once told me he was calling his new band Earthride, “because we’re all just”—here he paused, looking off into space, before concluding—“riding the earth.” Then he described the art he wanted on the cover of Earthride’s first album, a blond woman straddling the earth, at which point he started demonstrating that image. (I’d love to be able to say that album—whose cover features no such blonde—is pretty great. But it isn’t.) By then I’d abandoned many of my indie rock prejudices, but I just couldn’t hang with how these guys defaulted to standard party-time rock modes. Nor how, once you got past the best of this breed, quality declined so precipitously. Nor how, for many of them, punk rock never happened. Also, theirs was a different tribe. Outsiders, yes, but bikers, not nerds. No way I’d ever pass for one of them, even with my long hair.

  ***

  AROUND 2003 TED LEO MET WITH ANOTHER MAJOR-LABEL A&R guy, who had a slightly different spiel: “We want to think of you as another Bruce Springsteen. You’ve got a life here with us.” Afterward Ted went directly to an interview with a twentysomething magazine writer and mentioned what he’d just been told.

  Ted said that writer told him, “‘I gotta tell you, from the perspective of a lot of your fans, we’d be really bummed if you signed to a major label.’ And initially I was like, ‘Fuck you. That’s not for you to decide.’ But my other reaction was practical.” He now understood that the A&R guy feeding him those lines could well be gone in a few months, and Ted knew no one else at that label. And he realized something else: “They’re not going to make me into a star. I was thirty-three or thirty-four, writing political pop songs. That’s not the equation for hits. And I’m going to lose half my existing audience? That sounds like a loser of a move.” Ted’s very smart on the challenges that middle-aged indie rockers face—Google any recent interview he’s given for proof—but even he had to watch a generation of indie bands fail on major labels before reaching that conclusion.

  “Reasonable Ending”: This itinerary is a key prop for the next chapter.

  Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and Your Shitty Band That No One Likes

  All bands fail.

  —Joe Carducci, former co-owner of SST Records, author of Rock and the Pop Narcotic

  Some bands fail more spectacularly than others, and some fail very quietly, with no witnesses. But that failure doesn’t feel quiet if you’re in such a band and you find yourself confronting something tougher than the general outcastness of playing weird music: blank stares from those who actually like weird music. I don’t mean “no widespread recognition” or “no pots full of money.” I mean nothing. No labels putting out your music. No fans coming to your shows. Because there are no fans.

  If you’ve played in bands or spent any time within the social swirl surrounding music, you’re familiar with the interested titter or two that typically greet a band’s first few shows. That ripple of recognition is an amazing feeling when your band is new, and thrilling in its potential. At those first shows you come onstage and see the crowd moving toward you through the darkness. The stage lights are shining in your eyes, so you can’t make out any faces, but you still sense the curiosity and eagerness in those bodies. The problem arises when it’s three or four years later and your band has silently glided past new and kind of interesting and is now familiar and unbeloved. Your friends make excuses for not coming to your shows. You play to empty rooms, and the songs feel like cardboard, and you stand onstage atop unsteady legs, avoiding the eyes of anyone still watching. (Often all we had was conviction. When that went, what else was left?) But you still have to act like you believe, even though the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that no one else does, and that evidence gradually gnaws a hole in you. Once your band lands here, there’s never a late-career comeback. There’s no rock band equivalent to The Rookie. You’re dead. The only question is when you’ll realize it, too.

  Peter Prescott was the youngest member of Mission of Burma, and at a very tender age he saw terms like “legendary” applied to his band. Nothing else he did in music—he played in Volcano Suns, Kustomized, and the Peer Group, among others—made such an impact, though, to be fair, not much else did. But he told me a very cool thing: “I’d be kind of bummed out if I didn’t experience the more modest pleasure of being in a scrappy little messed-up band that thirty people in each city care about.” I’m grateful I experienced that, too. The problem is when that’s your audience and most of them drift away.

  I started Vineland in late 1991. Bitch Magnet had been a trio, so this would
be a quartet: two guitars, very loud, songs built around alternate tunings and odd time signatures, very aggressive and, for lack of a better term, very rock. Riffs but no big major-key singalong choruses. By then the tyranny of vocals exhausted me—it still does sometimes—so in this band the singing would be understated, primarily spoken, fighting to be heard above the band. Having learned a lesson from getting booted out of Bitch Magnet, I made myself the key man: songwriter and singer. Since I was going to be so annoying about vocals, it made sense to just take the bullet. Also, the last thing you ever want to do is audition frontmen. David Lee Roth is great in Van Halen, but you do not want to live with that every day. (Evidently neither did they.)

  Vineland lasted four and a half years. We released two singles and appeared on one Australian compilation and one Spanish compilation. If you, too, perceive something uniquely heartbreaking about the phrase “appeared on one Australian compilation and one Spanish compilation,” well, imagine applying it to your own band. We also recorded two unreleased albums—or, to be more precise, we recorded one album and then rerecorded much of it with a new rhythm section a year and a half later. We toured America three times, going as far west as Kansas City, as far east as Boston, as far north as Minneapolis, and as far south as Savannah. We played lots of weekend shows clustered in cities within a day’s drive from New York. The bubble of mild enthusiasm—I mean this in highly relative terms—that greeted us when we formed quickly dissipated. We didn’t hear a whisper from anyone in Europe, that dream fulfiller of every loud indie band, no matter whom we barraged with tapes. At no point was any serious record label seriously interested, unless you count the nice postcard Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop sent us. (I don’t.) We went through four drummers and five bassists, even more if you count people who filled in for one or two shows. For the last few years I was the only original member. Our longest—and final—tour, in 1996, lasted for a month. By then maybe fifteen or twenty people turned out for our hometown shows. In other cities, even less. Beyond the numbers, a dead feeling hung over those rooms. Twenty-five people in Cedar Rapids on a Tuesday night is fine, if you can feel their excitement, and you always can when it’s there. On our best nights we’d draw forty or fifty souls, mostly friends and friends of friends, who’d shake my hand afterward and say something tactful, obligation weighing them down like a heavy coat. All the people who were there wished they weren’t.