by Jon Fine
A few days earlier I staggered onto my flight home from Tokyo, utterly spent, bit off a chunk of a Xanax, shoved in earplugs, and crashed for about eight hours. But I woke up halfway through, in sudden terror because I didn’t know where our gear was, and it took a good thirty seconds to figure it out.
Sleep aids had something to do with this, though I used only Xanax to beat jetlag, never Ambien, which, as many people have discovered, can be quasi-hallucinogenic. All the flying had something to do with it, too. On van tours you can feel every mile accumulate, which keeps you somewhat situated geographically, but up in the air it’s easier to lose the thread. Still, sometime during our yearlong reunion I started to think that going crazy on tour was not just part of the deal but sort of the entire point. To go purely beast for days on end, running on adrenaline and anxiety and fear and volume and power. To be absolutely immoderate for a while. A middle-aged man is so rarely permitted to get so glandular, to throw himself to the point of derangement into the ups and downs of any situation and reach the state where it’s not merely acceptable but even expected to be walking the streets, head down, jabbering to yourself, still reeling from the previous night’s hangover, jonesing openly for the next onstage fix, praying that the madness ends quickly, hoping it lasts forever. As I found myself doing in London and New York and Seattle and Tokyo and San Francisco and Hong Kong and, well, everywhere, basically. Peak crazy was often set off by incredibly minor complications and always came during the afternoon scramble just before we entered the tunnel and its familiar rhythm. Thus the Three O’Clocks, which gripped me while dashing around London just before an early dusk, hours before the last show of the tour: constantly forgetting to look the wrong way when crossing the street so cars scared the shit out of me and vice versa, trying to take direction from the sound guy by text to find the precise obscure connecting cable his computer required to record the show. The Three O’Clocks came while I was standing on the sidewalk in Seoul alongside all the gear, searching desperately for a taxicab that refused to appear, running late for the first show of our reunion, for which I was not at all certain the band was ready. Nervous that my back would lock up again, as it had two days ago out of nowhere, for the first time ever. Come to think of it, my back seized up just as we arrived for an afternoon rehearsal, which started around . . .
The Three O’Clocks hit in Manila’s Ninoy Aquino airport, when I was exhausted because the operator had called three hours early for my wake-up call and I’d barely slept, before or after, and the fucking Wi-Fi wasn’t working, and there were a million things I needed to check, and the show in Manila had been terribly promoted, and I had just learned that Sooyoung would miss soundcheck in Tokyo. The Three O’Clocks in New York: racing around the city, trying to finish every idiot errand before soundcheck as traffic thickened and slowed, each extra minute making the eventual arrival at the club exponentially later. And that moment a day or two later, standing in the middle of the street, both guitar cases leaning against my shins and both middle fingers raised, screaming, “Fuck you!” at the top of my lungs, over and over, at a taxi disappearing down the street, because the driver refused to take us to the airport. One afternoon I walked around Tokyo—one of my favorite things to do in the world—with nothing more strenuous to accomplish than to find a pair of sneakers, and I felt some bolus of horror rise for no reason whatsoever. I stopped and checked the phone: five minutes after three.
One day on tour in Asia, feeling exhausted and very Three O’Clocky, I skyped with Laurel. She sometimes gets booze-induced insomnia, and thought I might, too, so she asked, “Are you drinking?”
“How could I possibly get through this without drinking?” I demanded.
***
SOMETIMES I’D GET A TEXT LIKE THIS FROM ORESTES:
Easy there. We’re in the subway.
So then I’d have to reply:
Why “easy there”?
He’d text back:
Because I know you.
Point taken. Or, as the tension rose just before a tour, I’d get an e-mail from him:
All I need is for you to stay out of jail for another two weeks.
Yeah. I think I can manage that. Can you, Orestes? Can you keep the beast in the cage until then?
But the real problems started after a tour, when you still hadn’t rehinged and readjusted to civilian life. Recovering from anything—illness, drinking, the annual dalliance with mushrooms or E or coke—takes longer when you’re older, and post-tour whiplash, too, was now far more savage. Several days after returning from our second Asian tour, badly sleep-deprived and depressed, I caught myself thinking, There has to be something more than moping around the house, waiting for a socially acceptable hour to start drinking. The latest version of a very old jam: nothing felt nearly as good as music. Everything else seemed so watery and pale. The rock hangover in full flower, a condition characterized by fatigue, malaise, difficulty concentrating, and an overweening desire to do it all again. I braced for depression to descend a few days after each tour ended, in the way that weekend ecstasy freaks gird themselves for the Tuesday blues. You returned to reality with your endorphins tapped out and your pleasure centers suddenly and stubbornly resistant to milder buzzes. Sleep patterns stayed upside down for weeks. And no one understood what you were feeling unless they’d been there, too.
Yes, the buzz of performance was as strong as ever. But what was the price—in time, in attention, in money? And where would it lead? With each leg the reunion seemed less like an art project than a drug problem. Being in a band whose members lived in three different countries was complicated enough, and we were all already chin-deep in full-time commitments demanding adult-sized chunks of attention: families, real jobs, lives. You only play that first round of reunions once, after which audiences and pay envelopes almost always get thinner. And we weren’t about to do this as cynically as the Pixies: cashing a decade’s worth of reunion-tour checks while having written exactly one new song. Though we, of course, hadn’t even written that.
So we were doing it for the same reason a dog licks its balls: because we could. For the fun of it, and it was great fun. For the experience and the weirdness of it. Turn any of that down? Never. I’d say it would take a toll, but the truth was, in many ways, it already had.
***
WHAT DO YOU HEAR WHEN THERE’S NOTHING TO HEAR? SERIOUSLY. I want to know what that’s like, for normal people, because the decades spent playing in bands and going to shows are permanently inscribed in my middle ear. My ears stay noisy, even through the most profound hush, and constantly send certain tones to my brain. Why are old musicians never alone? Tinnitus! Our ears never stop ringing, thanks to how we’ve damaged the tiny hair cells in the ear that transmit sound, from sonic overexposure. A pretty steady A plays in my left ear—makes sense where that drone settled, I guess, since I was obsessed for years with that huge, droning one-note chord, played across multiple octaves and multiple strings—while a more variable note rings in the other. I live in the city and wear earplugs when I sleep, and when I wake in the quiet of the morning, the tinnitus is most noticeable and my right ear is doing its auditory roulette. Sometimes that ear oscillates between two tones, a full step or so apart from each other. Sometimes there’s a main drone and another quieter tone or two, seemingly somewhere off in the distance. Once I woke to it quietly playing something like a seventies synth sample-and-hold solo of randomized notes. Which sounds like complete madness, I know, but it was actually sort of cool.
A few years ago I started noticing that I needed to lean in, really far, to hear anything at noisy restaurants or bars. A meal or a drink in such places now means I shred my vocal cords, especially if Laurel isn’t there to remind me, gently or not, that I’m shouting. But sometimes that’s what it takes to hear myself. It’s also why my voice sounds so Jewy and nasal: I hear myself much better when I push it from my adenoids and sinuses. I know it sounds better, and causes
far less vocal strain, if I project from my diaphragm—but then I don’t really hear it.
Not good. So I went to an audiologist: Dr. Andrew Resnick, a guitarist who specializes in treating musicians. He asked whether I had trouble hearing—left ear, right ear, both ears? (In places with background noise, both.) Ringing in my ears? (Yes. But it doesn’t bother me too much.) How many hours a week did I listen to music on headphones? (Maybe four.) Did I have a history of exposure to loud noise? (Heh. Yes. Lots.)
He pointed me toward a soundproof booth—so old-school it could have come from a movie about the golden age of radio—and directed me to strap on headphones. The room was dead quiet. The never-ending orchestra in my ears wasn’t. This won’t work, I thought nervously, I’ll never hear anything over this ringing. He ran a series of tones, low to high, quiet and quieter, until they began to fade beneath my constant din. Then I heard the kind of background noise you’d hear at a restaurant or cocktail party, and the doctor played voices against it, fiddling with the volume until the conversation disappeared into the clatter.
There it goes, I thought, for all us aging punkers.
***
MUSIC IS FOREVER, IF YOU TURN IT UP LOUD ENOUGH, AND, viewed from the perch of middle age, it seems absolutely inevitable that most older musicians would have fucked-up ears. It’s hard to describe this without invoking sexual terms like “penetration” and “insertion,” because we all wanted to get deeply inside the music and have it deeply inside us. When Mudhoney’s Mark Arm was in junior high, he’d put on a favorite record, turn the stereo all the way up, and plant an ear directly against a speaker.
Wait. What?
“I was trying to get the most out of it,” he explained.
But I understood. When Bitch Magnet was starting out, I liked leaning my forehead on my cranked-up amp when I played, because I loved how that sent vibrations straight into my skull. Mid-song during early practices, I sometimes stuck my head in Orestes’s bass drum. Proximity to extreme sound produces interesting physical sensations, though they’re not always pleasant. During Bitch Magnet’s last European tour, I ended “Big Pining” each night by getting within inches of my speaker cabinet to produce feedback. But many times, instead of hearing a distorted chord melt into a pure single note, my rented rig instead produced incredibly piercing shrieks and squeals: microphonic feedback, an entirely different beast. These sudden blasts of high treble, so loud and at such close range, made me stumble, dizzied, and sometimes I felt myself gag, as if I were having a sudden attack of vertigo or had otherwise briefly deranged the intricate whorls of inner-ear plumbing that govern balance. Onstage while touring with Panthers, Justin Chearno recalled, “I stood next to the crash cymbal, and our drummer fucking hammered it. I saw white multiple times, just from the sound.”
“All my life I’ve been interested in the idea of getting overwhelmed by sound,” Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller said. “Even when I was in ninth grade I would stand right in front of the amps and just do feedback for hours. Varying the sounds of the world exploding really appealed to me. It’s pretty reasonable I would get tinnitus.”
Was Roger wearing earplugs back then? Of course not. Nor was Justin when his drummer was bashing the crash cymbal, nor was I on that European tour or at many of the several thousand shows I attended or played. We all wanted sound to be a physical as well as aural phenomenon. To feel it. LOUD, like 120 decibels. Like a jet engine in a small room. To quote the band NME:
Louder than hell is what we are
You say that we take it just too damn far
You can’t understand a thing that we say
But we don’t care, it’s the way that we play
We play loud
Louder than hell
Fucking loud
Louder than hell.
Yes. Exactly. Thus, the ears go first. More specifically, your ability to hear silence goes first. “We were in Italy, and some guy took us to the forest,” Andee Connors from A Minor Forest recalled. But no soothing sounds of nature awaited him. “All I could hear was this high-pitched whine. I had a total panic attack. I bought earplugs the next day.” Though the damage, of course, had already been done.
In 2013 Laura Ballance quit touring with Superchunk—the band she’d played bass for since 1990—because of mounting hearing loss and increased sensitivity to loud noise. “I can’t hear that well, and I’m always saying, ‘What? What?’” she told me. “Then all of a sudden I’ll be like, ‘Stop yelling!’” And an audiologist once told David Yow that many people with hearing aids heard trebly frequencies better than Yow did—when they took their hearing aids out.
We were all chasing abandon—animal, grunting, feral abandon—and our ears were the route of administration for something that filled the body as well as the head. Did we have any notion that losing silence might be the price of admission? Not really. Even though, as early as the eighties, Pete Townshend was warning everyone within earshot (sorry) that they, too, could end up deaf. I’m surprised at how many of us don’t have severe hearing problems, given how loud we all routinely worked and the hundreds of shows we attended that were just massacres of volume. But you have no idea how good it felt, playing the music you centered your life on that loud. It made the air seem suffused with electricity. It lit you up like a city at night. People in thrall to a lesser rush end up turning tricks to afford it. Chasing ours made us slam onto our guitar or bass or the drum kit harder, push voices into higher and higher registers, scream longer, jump higher. Messing up our ears was one obvious outcome, but there was other cumulative wear and tear: we attacked our instruments and music with so much more aggression than, well, pretty much anyone else. (Look at how gently, how politely, dullards like Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler play their guitars.) Many of us also developed various chronic injuries, from hurling ourselves and our bodies at the music as hard as we could, over and over again, until our knees or backs or elbows or necks told us, Now stop. When James Murphy drummed in his old band Pony, he recounted matter-of-factly, “I used to throw up at every gig. I played with marching sticks”—which are very heavy—“and I had no efficiency of movement, and I would just play until I barfed.”
In general, talking to middle-aged drummers is often like talking to old wrestlers or stuntmen. “I’ve probably broken the front knuckle on my left hand—which constantly hits the edge of the snare drum—thirty or forty times,” said Andee Connors. “I’d split it open every show, and there’d be blood all over.” Over time he developed a large floating bone chip on his left index finger, which now restricts movement. A Minor Forest toured again in 2014, and after many shows, Andee posted on Facebook fresh pictures of that bloody and brutalized finger.
“I’ve got carpal tunnel in both wrists. I’ve got a pinched nerve in one elbow. My hands often go numb when we’re playing,” said Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters, running down his list. Dan recently had his ears checked. It will surprise no one that the doctor told him to get hearing aids immediately. Another common drummer injury is epicondylitis, or tennis elbow, which can sometimes get so bad that it requires surgery, as it did for Six Finger Satellite’s Rick Pelletier.
Rock has always been a contact sport. Patti Smith once broke her neck when she spun herself offstage. When Frank Zappa was in the Mothers of Invention, he was pushed into an orchestra pit, and broke his neck so badly that, at first, his bandmates thought he was dead. Imprecise pyrotechnics set Metallica’s James Hetfield and Michael Jackson on fire. Our freak accidents were different. Void’s extremely gymnastic singer, John Weiffenbach, destroyed his knee—blew out his ACL—in the middle of one show, forcing a quick visit to an emergency room. David Yow made a habit of diving into the crowd, which didn’t always work out so well. “My longest-lasting injury—I call them by the city where they happened—is my ‘St. Louis,’” from the early nineties, he recalled. “I got thrown back on the stage by the crowd, and I couldn’t catch my f
all. I landed right on my spine, right about where your belt goes. The next day I could barely walk, and it’s been a problem ever since.”
I know from experience it was a desire to transcend, as well as a fundamental masochism, that led us to dive into crowds and contort our bodies until they broke: This is how crazy you, the audience, make me, and this is how far I will go for you. So can we now, in middle age, learn how to perform in less joint-destroying ways? Not really. Though you knew your creaking body couldn’t take much more, and you made so many promises to it, once it was showtime the old excitement kicked in, and like a weak ex-lover you went right back to the exact same fucking thing that hurt you. “Before you start playing, it just feels ridiculous and impossible that you will be jumping up and down at any point,” said Laura Ballance, whose knees are battered from doing just that. “But then it happens. You just can’t help it.” She also has arthritis in her neck from headbanging her way through two decades of Superchunk shows. “I’ve been advised that I should not be doing that,” she said. “But I still do.”