by Jon Fine
I didn’t share this with Zack. It’s rather overblown to equate the heartbreak of your band’s failure to the heartbreak of someone convinced he’ll be the next president—and who spent all his time trying to convince everyone else that he would be the next president—but then finds out, very quickly and very definitively, that he never will. But this is how I feel about Vineland, and how I imagine Zack feels about Freshkills. One day I’ll get over it. I’ll let you know when it happens.
I Was Wrong
But I’m not telling the whole story. Because I missed so much of it while it happened.
I keep saying our world was ascetic, boring, so not-like-rock. So little sex. So few drugs harder than pot. Sometimes I saw this wasn’t quite true.
In the mid-nineties a friend who played in a band in Los Angeles visited New York every few months and we’d hit the bars. He liked to get losing-your-language drunk. After a certain hour, if you heard him on the phone, you’d think he was drooling. That drunk. But just before that he’d suggest, then demand, that we find some coke. I had no idea how, and always tried to change the subject, but even in a strange city he could parse any room within five minutes: I can’t get coke here, I can only get E, let’s go. Then he’d tell me about the threesome he had with an icy blonde and a male friend, whom, he insisted on assuring me, he did not touch at all, not even once, during said encounter. But that was L.A. Not New York. Here we dressed badly and burrowed inward. Here we so rarely acted on what we wanted. Our fuel was unfulfilled desire, channeled elsewhere. Right?
Or maybe I wasn’t understanding what was really going on around me. One night I was out late in the East Village, getting drunk with a woman who was also a musician. Pale-skinned, giant eyes, she was everyone’s crush, and I felt fortunate to be there with her and a woman she knew. After the bartender announced last call, we walked toward an apartment, tightly pressed together, with me in the middle. At least that’s how I remember it.
When we arrived, the musician—let’s call her Maroon—sent her friend upstairs and pulled me aside to chat on the street corner. The look on her face suggested she knew secrets and felt far more confident than I did. A confusing conversation, out there at a quarter to four. Confusing to me, at least. Maroon asked me, half-smiling and looking sideways, to come upstairs for a while and then leave. So she’s hitting on me, I thought. She recently broke up with her boyfriend—someone I knew, who was also in a band, of course—and I wanted to know if fooling around with me was some rebound or revenge move. I started in on Are you doing this because of him? Looking important and off into the distance, for effect. Taxis drowsed their way up First Avenue, beyond an overflowing orange garbage can. No one else was around.
Then her face rearranged into bewilderment and (I thought) a mocking grin. Maybe you saw this coming, but I didn’t: Maroon was after her friend, not me.
Then why did she want me upstairs at all? I didn’t ask, because I was humiliated that I had misunderstood her, and still felt like I misunderstood what might happen next. I followed her upstairs, gulped half a beer, ran out the door. She protested that I shouldn’t go, but it didn’t sound sincere. I ran past that garbage can, hailed a cab—a luxury in those days—and headed to my practice space, where I grabbed my guitar, turned my amp way up, closed my eyes, and played until long after sunrise.
Looking back now, I think: threesome. You fucked up. But I still don’t know. Do you?
It wasn’t that no one got laid on tour. Once in Detroit, late at night after the show, a musician disappeared to make a quick phone call, came back chuckling, and said he was leaving to visit his cousin. Everyone else rolled their eyes. Because, they knew, he had cousins across the country. All of them women, all of whom he only saw late at night, all of them unknown to his live-in girlfriend.
My friend from L.A. wasn’t the only one who wanted serious drugs. Eventually I realized why the first drummer in a band that would later get famous was so often dazed and distant and falling asleep, even at shows and parties. Or why I once ran into him as he walked west from Avenue C and he laughed and said he was out of money. Sometimes at night I ran into Jim or Travis, which are not their names, when their blue eyes looked especially beautiful. For a long time I didn’t know why: dope had erased their pupils. I last saw Travis one Sunday night around eleven as he packed up his drums. He’d found someone to buy them right then. It was a classic, gorgeous old kit from the sixties. Ludwig, maybe, or Gretsch. He might have gotten a hundred bucks. Far less than they were worth, but I think the buyer sensed that it was a distress sale.
One of these guys overdosed and died. Another records himself reading poetry and posts it online. Heroin is very bad for you.
In Six Finger Satellite’s early days, half the band were junkies. Even on tour. Which, by the way: crazy. How can you feed a habit when your band makes two hundred bucks a night? For one thing, their drummer Rick Pelletier told me, someone was FedExing dope to them as they traveled the country. (Important to note: Rick was not one of the junkies.) “We’d go to some mom-and-pop indie record store and say, ‘Is there a package here for Six Finger Satellite?’” Rick said. “The unknowing counter person would say, ‘Yes, there is.’ It was filled with drugs. Which would then be taken very quickly.”
“Quickly you resort to stealing,” admitted Juan MacLean, who was one of the addicts. “Even from the other guys in the band. J. [Six Finger’s singer J. Ryan] caught me breaking into his apartment.” J. was also one of Juan’s closest friends. Previously Juan admitted to a different technique to solving a different dope-on-the-road problem: when faced with border crossings, he hid his drugs in his bandmates’ suitcases. Anyway, Six Finger was on tour, had just played a show, and they all were bunking at some punk rock house. Late that night or early the next morning, a resident did dope and turned blue. Panic. “Someone wanted to call 911. I said, You’re not calling,” said Juan. “I remember unplugging the phone.” Luckily that resident lived. When Six Finger Satellite got back from that tour, the other guys dropped off Juan and the other junkie, fired them both, and told them never to contact the rest of the band again. Juan went to rehab and got clean, which is why he’s still making records. The other guy didn’t. He died.
Not everybody was in the monastery. Many of us had a crooked-grinning, slippery side and locked ourselves in bathrooms or snuck over to Avenue D when no one was looking. And, really, it was okay, because you could convince yourself that everybody did it. Everybody needed their cousins. Everybody wanted a taste of something sweet before turning out the light in their tiny rooms, and a dollar brownie or a carrot juice from the corner deli wasn’t doing it anymore.
I knew you could get by on crumbs while living this life, as long as sometimes a woman’s in your room at 4 a.m., or a few bartenders or baristas or taco stand employees slide you free drinks and food, or, occasionally, an excited fan stops you on the street. These made up for the times you checked the bank account on the first of the month, rent due, and saw you had $97, made up for wearing the same shabby clothes for years, made up for buying canned tuna only when it went on sale. You’d be amazed how sustaining those little moments were. You could live off any of them for another week, easy. Until they stopped happening.
I thought music alone could feed us forever, but it turned out to be too slender a diet. I thought we were about opposition. I thought this was us and them—them being the big-time music biz and commercial radio. I thought we were supposed to keep fighting. But how long could you accept your half-assed lot of being fanzine-famous—no, just fanzine-known—and kind of starving? Was this why the standard indie rock emotional response was to duck your head, avert eye contact, not admit to wanting anything—because you were never going to get it? Were twee bands here because adulthood meant adult desires that the world would never satisfy?
I saw more and more bands in which no one onstage seemed to be trying. They looked like they didn’t give a shit, and not i
n the interesting way: the way a waiter at an indifferent café at 4 p.m. doesn’t give a shit. I’d see them and think, Why are you doing this? One night I saw Helium when Mary Timony played with her then-boyfriend Ash from Polvo. I loved Helium’s early records, and Timony’s track record offers plenty of evidence that she’s a serious badass. But live, that night, the two of them were so sleepy and uninvolved I was like, Christ, you two. Take a nap. They both seemed exhausted—in the sense of having nothing left to offer—and absolutely without joy, or vitality, or sex, or much of anything, really. I went to see Bugskull—excited, because I adored their singles—and watched the singer shamble through the set, simpering, unable to meet the audience’s eyes. He kept telescoping his head into his shoulders, like a turtle; he kept shrinking back from the microphone and the lip of the stage. I left disgusted. Couldn’t anyone pretend to believe a tiny bit in what they were doing? Move beyond the rut of modesty and understatement that we stuck with so long it became its own cliché? After ten or fifteen years all our indie rock modesty and seriousness only meant: no pleasure. Not much hope. No fun at all. A sameness had descended on a culture once so sprawling and uncategorizable. So remind me again: why were we here?
I found myself thinking, I wish I could quit. I’d have money in the bank. Wouldn’t be pissed off all the time. Life would be easier, I knew, if I could just fucking stop. But I couldn’t. Even after Vineland fell apart. “I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but there are times when it feels like an affliction. A terminal illness. You’re never going to get rid of it,” Tim Midyett, the bassist from Silkworm, once told me.
I couldn’t let go. Not yet, anyway. I wore the same T-shirts over and over again. The same flannel shirts until they frayed off my back. And suddenly you were in your thirties. You hadn’t worked at a real job in years, unlike your old pals from college. Some of them still made a fuss over your band and sometimes came out to see you play. (At least on weekends. Not many made it out during the week anymore.) To them, you were interesting. Maybe even famous-ish. But they were married. Some had kids. Jobs became careers. Meanwhile, you knew some things they didn’t. Your record sales had plateaued, or were shrinking. Your crowds and guarantees weren’t getting bigger. You played the same clubs in Berlin or Minneapolis or San Francisco or Dublin each tour, and each time you saw the same faces. Aging faces. Suddenly the crowd was older. (Were you, too? It dawned on you: yes.) You’d stare out at the crowd and think, Maybe this is as big as it gets. Or Maybe a few years ago was as big as it gets. You still swore up and down you’d never sign to a major label, but this wasn’t exactly a choice. They stopped being interested a long time ago. If they ever were. So what the fuck do you do?
No, really. What the fuck do you do?
***
BY THE MID-NINETIES THINKING FELLERS UNION LOCAL 282 had been around almost a decade. They’d released four impressively sprawling and idiosyncratic albums on Matador. A fervent fanbase adored them. They got reams of great press. They also played the same clubs each tour, and they toured a lot, and were all well into their thirties, surviving on a band salary that peaked at seven hundred bucks a month. Then, in 1995, they got an offer to tour with the dreadful band Live, back when Live was one of the biggest bands in the world. According to their bassist Anne Eickelberg, this is how that went:
We kept saying, “We want to tour with bigger bands. Let’s get more exposure.” People kept coming up with really insane things. Like “You want to tour with Toad the Wet Sprocket?” Where does that even come from? Then: Live. We didn’t know who Live were. But then we were like, let’s just do it.
It was a full tour. Twenty-something shows across the country. Secondary markets, mostly. Total test of character, because the audiences fucking despised us. We got stuff thrown at us all the time. Kids just screaming, “You suck!” for a whole set. Sometimes it was like a high that you could ride, because it was just so ridiculous. In his tour diary Brian [Hageman, her bandmate] said something like “We’re standing there looking like their fucking mom and dad, and we’re the obstacle between them and Live, so they’re really, really angry about it.” But you’d be done super early, go back to catering, have really amazing food, have people move all your shit for you. Play a half-hour set and get paid a lot of money.
It was great fodder for future conversations. We played an outdoor venue in Knoxville, and after our set one guy in Live nonchalantly came up to me and said, “I cracked the window on the tour bus. You guys sounded all right.” Another day he breezed up to us in catering, shoved Billboard at us, and pointed, so we could see that Live’s record had reached number one: “Just showing this to you because I can.” We were also there to see the delivery of their matching robes, which had the album logo on them.
But we knew within a couple days: there’s no way we could ever do this. We’re too weird. We’re not right. This will not happen.
Other bands found that the world had stopped caring. Mudhoney’s third album on Warner Brothers, Tomorrow Hit Today, came out in 1998, and sold roughly a tenth as many copies as their earlier records. Sebadoh released The Sebadoh in 1999 to what Lou Barlow describes as the open disdain of their label, Sub Pop. It sold a fraction of the band’s previous releases, and Sebadoh toured in front of a rapidly disappearing audience. “Our last show in that cycle,” Barlow recalled, “was playing to like twenty-five people at the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas. A place we had sold out a year before.” The Gypsy Tea Room’s capacity? Approximately seven hundred. Barlow now shrugs, “I just thought, Message received.”
Meanwhile, the real estate and stock market boom during President Clinton’s second term reshaped the American city. Which is a dry and academic way to say that, as happens to every generation, cheap neighborhoods became unaffordable as demand kicked in for real estate in the places we helped gentrify. Beginning in 1992, Unrest’s Mark Robinson lived in a house about five miles from Washington, D.C., at 715 North Wakefield Street in Arlington, Virginia, and ran his label Teen-Beat from there, too. He and some fellow musicians rented it for virtually nothing. Andrew Beaujon of Eggs recalls paying $234 a month, a bargain good enough to overlook the rats that lived there, too. Eventually the landlord offered-slash-demanded: buy this house for $135,000. Which, for the residents, might as well have been three million bucks. (At its peak, Robinson said, Unrest was a full-time job for its members and paid them twelve grand a year. In Beaujon’s highest-grossing year as a more or less full-time musician, he made about $9,000.)
The denizens of Teen-Beat House were evicted at the end of August 1998. The house sold for $160,000 the next month, sold again for $381,000 in July 1999, and in 2005 sold for $857,000. In other words, the featureless, poorly maintained, and frankly unattractive group house where underemployed indie rockers dodged rats is now probably a million-dollar home. The same happened in neighborhoods we all could afford in the nineties: Silver Lake in Los Angeles, the Mission in San Francisco, the East Village and Lower East Side of Manhattan, Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village in Chicago. As always, artists and musicians didn’t leave those cities en masse. They got pushed to other neighborhoods, or Philadelphia. But losing your cheap foothold in your chosen city tends to inspire reflection.
“I got kicked out of Teen-Beat House and moved to a much more expensive house,” Robinson said. “A lot of record stores were closing or had already closed. It seemed like the whole thing was disappearing.” He moved to Boston, took his first full-time job, got married, and essentially closed the book on being an active touring musician. Among the bands we knew, stories like his played out endlessly. In 1996 Thinking Fellers quit touring. “I just felt like I was on this accelerating train, and I better jump off pretty soon and learn how to do stuff that could help me stay alive,” Eickelberg said. Sooyoung’s band Seam released their final album in 1998 and broke up in 2000. “I was a math major,” said an ever-succinct Sooyoung. “The numbers didn’t add up.” Orestes left Walt Mink in early 1997, after the band
got dropped by its second major label. Disgusted, he quit music, packed up his gorgeous wine-red Yamaha drum kit we both loved, enrolled in the University of Arizona, and began working toward a masters in engineering.
***
THEN IT WAS 2000. I WAS THIRTY-TWO. I STARTED DETUNING my guitars to C—lower means heavier—but wasn’t sure what else to do with them. I had no band. I had no job. I lived in Williamsburg in a third-floor walk-up apartment filthy from years of grime and neglect, a baked-in filthiness you couldn’t scrub away. My living room was eye level with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. (Some people who live very near a highway will tell you the road sounds eventually become a soothing white noise, like the ocean, or a summer breeze through leafy trees. They’re wrong.) At night a fast-moving stream of red brake lights zipped past, so close that, when the wind was right, you could spit from the living room onto passing cars. When trucks passed, the entire building trembled. An endless stream of soot crept past the decaying window frames, whether the windows were open or shut, and settled on the floors, blackening socks and feet. The only sink was in the kitchen, so you brushed your teeth over unwashed dishes. I watched mice hang out across from the desk where I attempted to eke out a living as a freelance writer. They huddled beneath the radiator, bobbing up and down as they breathed, staring at me. I stared back. Some afternoons that was it. That was all that went on in the apartment.
I never thought I had good game with women, but a few had sex with me after seeing this place, so maybe it was better than I thought.
Manhattan was unrecognizable. Cell phones sprouted out of everyone’s right hand, except mine. Back in Brooklyn, my musician friends got their first decent jobs, started spending $200 on jeans, and knew all the new restaurants. What I spent on clothes each year was enough for a couple new pairs of black Levi’s—505s, thirty bucks at Canal Jean—and band T-shirts I bought at shows. No one else still wore black jeans, and mine were all a little too baggy and caught in the no-man’s-land between “still black” and “nicely faded.” My hand-me-down dresser was packed with ill-fitting extra-large T-shirts. The size we all bought in the eighties and early nineties because why? I refused to cut my thinning hair. I had great hair in my twenties—those long, springy curls that went halfway down my back. I grew it out when I went—in my mind, at least—from loserdom to belongingness. I thought it made me cool. I thought it made me attractive. But the top was getting sparse, and the look was getting very Ben Franklin. In my bad clothes, in my bad hair, I thought, Where was my tribe? I felt homeless. And was coming close to dressing the part.