Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  One afternoon in the spring of 2000, looking forward to celebrating a friend’s birthday that night, I realized that I was out of money. I lived from check to check, but sometimes they came late. There was, basically, nothing in the bank or in my wallet. I called my girlfriend Anne Marie at work for a very unpleasant conversation. I’m glad I don’t remember it. But that weekend she sat me down at the rickety, stained kitchen table wedged next to the radiator, a pad in one hand and a pen in the other, and demanded to know my debts and income. The latter was pretty bad. This was when I would labor a week on a lengthy music piece for an alternative weekly, which would pay about a hundred and fifty bucks. (If I was lucky, I resold it and earned another hundred.)

  The debts were much worse. Close to twenty grand on credit cards, with interest rates approaching 20 percent. Also a four-figure sum I owed to the IRS.

  Anne Marie stared at me from across the table. A tiny Filipina who worked at a sports magazine, she’d gotten a late start in journalism, but she was ambitious and worked harder and longer than anyone else I’d met. She knew a bit about music, and my being a musician once made me more interesting than the other guys pursuing her. We fell madly in bed with each other, as the saying goes, she essentially moved in before we knew each other at all, and we had lots of sex, until we didn’t.

  She had such a beautiful face, but there was no love left in her eyes and it was hard to meet her gaze. When I looked down, I saw the stained tabletop and the sheet of paper with her neat columns of numbers.

  Sometimes you see exactly who you are. I was no better off than any embittered sad-sack rock guy working for the one record store in his small town, the guy with receding hair and a belly that hung over his jeans a little more each day. The guy who had essentially stopped trying.

  It was time to give in. The cost of living like this was way too high.

  The first day of my first real job in a very long time was June 6, 2000, when I started working as a reporter for a magazine called Advertising Age. Anne Marie was so plainly happy about this that it felt good being around her again, judging from the few photos taken of us that summer. She and I didn’t last through autumn. (Sometimes it’s only a few months from “you’re the best thing that ever happened to me” to “I don’t want to do this anymore,” but that’s another story.) But by then I had a steady paycheck, something to do, and somewhere to go every day. What a surprise to discover how comforting that routine could be. I had been fired six and a half weeks into my last real job, and while that memory and the nerves every new employee experiences sometimes soured my stomach and kept me up at night, soon I felt the everyday satisfactions of doing a job well enough: a small sense of mastery, an understanding of what was required, a degree of confidence that you could do it. The relief of having found a place. A few months into that job, I started another band.

  I was alone again, but the early aughts were a very good time to be single in New York. It was time to try hedonism for a change.

  This Is Me, I’m Dancing, and I Like It

  Maybe this part starts in the small living room with a stage where the pirate radio station put on shows. An illegal and unpermitted venue in the middle of a quiet block in Brooklyn, above which a movie-set view of the Williamsburg Bridge loomed. A gargoyle hung from the building’s façade. To enter, you walked up a narrow staircase that squeaked and groaned until you arrived in a compact but perfect space, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet. Getting in cost about five bucks. The lights were dim, and all the walls were white. I don’t know who built the stage, but it was elevated, framed by a proscenium, and looked absolutely natural up against the front window, as if it had been there forever. There were a couple of street-sized plastic trash cans filled with ice, bearing bodega beers on sale for a buck or two. The lighting was low and, like everything else there, effortless. Shows happened here for years. Very strange bands played. Women in the audience churned their hips like washing machines to whatever crazy, noisy destruction was onstage. You had to load in your gear up that flight of stairs, but even so it was one of my favorite places to play, anywhere. I wish I had some photos, because it still feels like we dreamed it.

  Or maybe it starts at Rubulad, the very long-running party that, by the time I went, had moved to the enormous Brooklyn basement of a grimy and unremarkable building across from the bridge. If “basement” sounds close and claustrophobic, then I’m not expressing the scale correctly. Imagine a gymnasium. Maybe even two. Parties at Rubulad sprawled into many rooms, and outdoors, and onto a tar-papered roof. The dance floor was as big as a basketball court. Just past it was the room where you could buy a green-gray goop with resiny black flecks said to be absinthe, which was still illegal, and gave you a drunk mingled with the whizzing feeling you got from E and hangovers that made your entire face hurt. In another room there were pot brownies.

  But maybe it starts in the side hallway to Plant Bar, its de facto backstage, amid stacks of Sheetrock and plywood and piled-up refuse, where friends drank and sometimes broke laws governing the possession and use of certain substances.

  If you knew where to look in the first years of this century, New York was full of places where all rules were suspended. It was a great gift to be permitted a second adolescence here, at the last possible moment, while I was in my early thirties: still young enough to have both a real job and the stamina to arrange each week around nightlife. (It was also the last era in which you could hide being in a band from everyone at work.) A real-er job meant that you had a bit more coin, and in 2000 you could live really well in Williamsburg on a thirty-year-old’s creative-class salary—with your own apartment, nights out in bars and restaurants, ample street parking for your beater used car—as the neighborhood offered up its last gasps of wildness. There was no better place to stage your last years of being single. Musician pals were suddenly DJs, and dance floors filled with women grinding into you—a miracle after decades spent in sexless and body-denying indie rock. The discovery that dance music was body music, wasn’t always twee and poppy, and could be as visceral and reptile brain−based as heavy metal. The realization that there was nothing wrong with pleasure. A huge relief, after over fifteen years in an underground that seemed entirely uninterested in it, where bands felt that the correct thing to do, when a song became popular or even liked, was to stop playing it live. My bands did that. My friends’ bands did that. We loved doing it—being what a pal once called a band that doesn’t give you what you want. Around 2000, though, a different New York. A different culture. A different audience, younger and incredibly adventurous, all of whom dressed way better than the record-store clerks who set the fashion template for my generation. (Another revelation: jeans that fit.)

  A band like Black Dice—so abstract as to approximate musique concrète, whose performances reliably exceeded 120 decibels—routinely drew hundreds to gigs at one-off semi-legal spaces on the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick or Greenpoint and Queens. Music that was “difficult”—which generally means “not at all song-based”—coexisted with the joy-seeking you’d expect to find among postgraduate art kids who discovered drugs and underused warehouse spaces big enough for circuses. Parties lasted past sunrise, so deep in the boroughs’ underpopulated industrial outskirts that you sometimes saw rabbits or raccoons dashing down the streets.

  Like all lovely collisions between art and music in New York, that time is now over. But it lasted far longer than I ever thought possible. Some reading this will argue that these days were far removed from Williamsburg’s true wild years, when the neighborhood was desolate, wholly inhospitable to outsiders, legitimately lawless, and dirt-cheap, which I believe means you could get by without having any sort of job. They’re probably right. But how about we just talk about the neighborhood bar that openly sold cocaine?

  Which some genius named Kokie’s Place.

  Where some genius hung out an awning that read KOKIE’S PLACE, an awning that presided, in fadin
g glory, over an increasingly well-trafficked stretch of Berry Street. I first heard about Kokie’s at a rooftop party in 1999. Three of us went the following Saturday night. (I left first, around 7:30 the next morning.) Chatter claimed it had been named for the coquí tree frog found in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Kokie’s—no one used the second word—sold $2 mini-bottles of Budweiser, those tiny seven-ouncers you can disappear in a gulp without even trying. Two giant yellow Igloo coolers filled with ice water sat on either side of the bar. Call me crazy, but I felt that more profit was generated in the “DJ booth,” where a “DJ”—always a very large man who did not appear to enjoy his work—would open the door, accept your twenty, and palm off a tiny clear or blue plastic bag. Crucially, Kokie’s also provided a curtained-off area in the back room for snarfling up the goods, though “curtained-off” sounds fancier than what it was: a framed-out closet behind a shower curtain or a stained baby blanket. A bouncer—also very large and unhappy—controlled access. Five or six people could cram in there, if you really smushed into each other, and you did, getting all up in some stranger’s space as if in a packed subway car, your face inches from theirs, both of you with a housekey halfway up a nostril and snuffling like warthogs. Interesting conversations were struck up here, and interesting connections forged. A friend still swears he once did bumps alongside a mother and her daughter. Such moments were part of Kokie’s charm, though these were secondary to the charm of Kokie’s openly selling cheap cocaine.

  What tickles me to this day is how the large, unhappy bouncers got extremely agitated if you did coke in the bathroom, instead of in the closet in the back room, and threw you out tout de suite if they caught you. This made Kokie’s something like the exact obverse of every other bar in the city. As the mornings wore on, condensation beaded on the oozy paint—a kind I seem to see only in south Williamsburg, which always looks sticky—that covered Kokie’s walls, in dark reds and urinary yellows. Two small windows in the front room were always tightly shuttered, although if you got right up next to them, you saw daylight around the edges, because it was eight in the morning and you’d been there for six hours.

  The consensus was that Kokie’s sold horrifyingly bad coke, but whatever it was, it worked. Once you got past the lengthy catalog of implied threats that its unsmiling staffers broadcast, everyone at Kokie’s was happy, social, beaming. Sweating Latinas danced endlessly to whatever music was playing. (Allegedly a live salsa band performed in the early evenings and on Sunday afternoons, but I never saw it. It’s a point of pride that I never went to Kokie’s for brunch or dinner.) Strangers talked to one another. Lord Jesus, did they talk. Management kept the lights low—mercifully—but not so low that, after 4 or 5 a.m., you could avoid noticing that the lips of the person chattering at you were ringed with dried spittle. But I got very quiet, very internal, when doing coke. I liked listening to my pulse pounding in my ears, and running the tip of my tongue over my front teeth to determine how numb they were. Those two data points, I believed, provided highly accurate readings of exactly How High I Was At That Moment, and whether or not it was time to queue up again for the curtained room.

  My first night there I met a wiry Latino I will call Orlando, who had a thin mustache, long hair, and mournful eyes. He wore a wifebeater, a few thin gold chains, and a straight-brimmed Yankees cap. He did his coke off a black Bic-pen cap, after bending the last sixteenth of an inch of its thin plastic tongue to make a mini coke scoop. It looked like he knew what he was doing, and I was impressed. But Orlando was generally worried, and as the night wore on he got worse. I tried talking to him about it, but communication was difficult. I was coked up and very terse, and he seemed able to discuss only two things:

  1.various unnamed people who were very unfriendly, and

  2.that they would beat the absolute shit out of you if you displeased them.

  Or that’s what I think he was discussing. He never quite completed his sentences:

  Orlando: Man, they, you know, they just . . . [Shakes head.]

  Me: I know. Yeah. I know. I know. [Runs tongue over front teeth. Eyes dart.]

  Orlando: And if they don’t like you, man, they just . . . [Shakes head. Looks down.]

  Me: [Nodding quickly.] Yeah. Yeah. [I jerk my head toward the coke closet, because there’s no line. Orlando, my friend, and I slip behind the curtain. My friend offers a bump off his key. Orlando shakes his head and goes back to his pen cap, still worried.]

  You might suspect that terrible things routinely happened at Kokie’s, but people understood the parameters and obeyed, perhaps because plenty of muscle was in view. Kokie’s had been around since the eighties and lasted a preposterously long time even after becoming commonly known among the hipster sets in several cities. It existed just before smartphones and social networks became ubiquitous, although, Jesus, I can’t imagine that the bouncers would have countenanced customers playing with iPhones. (I don’t recall seeing a cell phone in use there, ever, and sure as hell never touched mine.) Newcomers kept showing up each weekend—stifling gleeful giggles upon entering—and word spread. Soon local publications like Time Out New York and New York Press ran unmistakable veiled references to it. I think I saw Kokie’s named outright in a review somewhere that concluded with a sentence along the lines of “I hope it never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever closes.” Though it did, of course. A bar called the Levee now stands in its place.

  Under no circumstances will I suggest that it’s a good idea to do drugs, and—oh, God, I can’t say that, who am I kidding? Even if I have good friends who lost years to drugs and almost died. This time was a useful way station, one that helped clear out bad feelings and old habits. It changed the way I walked. It was very not-indie-rock in spirit, in its hedonism and in its moral indefensibility. As a friend of mine says, when you buy coke, you’re never more than two people removed from the guy with the machine gun. But moral indefensibility was the point. As was realizing, sometimes, I needed my cousins, too. Though I’m glad all this happened during my early thirties, after I’d had years of therapy and developed a decent sense of myself, and not ten or fifteen years earlier, when I knew much less. I don’t know if I would have come and gone so quickly had I known about Kokie’s then.

  ***

  EVERY STORY IN NEW YORK CITY IS A REAL ESTATE STORY, AND everything I could tell you about what we saw and did in the Brooklyn that’s now considered “Brooklyn” is how much of it took place within cracks in the pavement. Illegal or forgotten spaces, like Kokie’s or the pirate radio station or warehouses in areas blissfully ignored by all authorities, where something strange and free arose. If you knew how to look, great treasures still lurked in plain sight. I rented a practice space in a narrow warren of basement practice spaces. At our entrance the staircase leading up was covered with plywood and padlocked shut to prevent us lowly musicians from wandering through the building. But the skinny and cunning among us found we could slide through the stairway bars, so we did, and held secret Fourth of July gatherings up on the roof, because it was a tall building one block from the water with an absolutely clear view of the fireworks over the East River. We stood there, slightly stoned, sipping beers, underneath the brilliant display, in the glory of a quiet, private space amid a mad celebration. The last street whores of north-side Williamsburg—a brutally low rung of the trade—worked this block well into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Neighborhood rumors claimed that their clients were truckers and Hasids. Also on that block, for a few weeks or maybe even months, a cracked-out guy spent evenings shadowboxing beneath a streetlight across the street as we walked by, hefting our guitar cases, or loaded out for gigs. Some nights he chalked graffiti onto the sidewalk and pavement, bragging about himself, the great boxing champion. All stuck around even as the gentrifying forces of new construction and rising rents kept marching in, faster and faster. In the summers you saw skin and flesh and skimpy summer dresses and short shorts every
where, nipples visible beneath tank tops, and it was wonderful, it was awful, the heat was relentless, you felt every breath in your crotch. I remember one white-trash-themed party, the dancing grindy and pelvic and plainly voracious. I thought, again, Good god, why didn’t we dance in the nineties? Boys left the dance floor with hard-ons straining their jeans. A haze of desire hung in the air. I heard someone say he was waiting for everyone to start fucking so he could go jack off in the corner. I wasn’t single, and my girlfriend was out of town, but I walked home alone, quickly, sweating, ablaze with desire, feasting on the images. Once home, I left the lights off, got into bed, pounded on myself, and went to sleep in my hot, under-air-conditioned apartment, the window fan roaring by my head.

  It wasn’t all happy faces, and dancing to lose yourself, and the wonderment of a new New York opening its arms and legs. A tightly coiled angry kid still remained in me. But even he could learn new tricks. A different way to be with music. The epiphany of a crowded dance floor: a mosh pit’s much more fun if girls are there, too. And once again there was a great and simple happiness in playing guitar. I returned to standard tuning—E-A-D-G-B-E—and I’d been away from it for so long that it, too, had become new again. At night I rented movies—the strangest stuff I could find, or the Herzog or Kurosawa classics I hadn’t seen—popped them into the VCR I could finally afford, watched them on the TV that sat directly on my linoleum floor, leaned back on my scavenged couch, and moved my hands around my guitar, playing as abstractedly as possible, responding only to the images, hoping to get to parts unknown.