by Jon Fine
Sooyoung’s parents showed up, and I handed his dad a beer and two pairs of earplugs. Then, still playing host, I gave earplugs to Rose, my ex-girlfriend Martha, and my old friend Zoe. Martha and Zoe had been best friends at Oberlin and still seemed to be. I imagined such a thing was easier in Chicago than in New York or Los Angeles or London, cities where the currents of life and work dragged you into deeper and deeper water, so when you finally paused to look, all the people you’d known were dots on the horizon, paddling away from you, toward some other distant shore. I don’t know if this is actually true of Chicago, but it’s always been easy for me to idealize it as the road not taken.
The openers, Electric Hawk, were crushing and relentless and right up my alley: a very loud instrumental trio, all rock solid on their instruments, performing music at once elemental and complex. When they finished their set, Orestes and I paused alongside one of the awkwardly placed sets of steps. I scanned the room and said, “Good turnout.” But he shook his head and replied, “No, it isn’t,” and he was right. Empty Bottle’s capacity is four hundred. Only a couple hundred people were there. Said it before, but I’ll say it again: when dealing with nightlife aimed at thirty- and fortysomethings, one has to accept that life complications can interfere with the best of intentions. I certainly did. But it still stung. It made me think, again, that we weren’t good enough or important enough or whatever enough to get everyone off their couches. Still invisible. A too-secret handshake.
What Jeremy had implied—and what I’d suspected—at the beginning of the reunion, I now knew was true: we weren’t going to get any bigger. I knew that we were out of step with this decade, in so many ways. To cite just one reason, the way we mixed our records was utterly unsuited for today. Too much ultra-low end, for starters. We also often avoided using compression on our records, because we wanted as wide as possible a range of soft and loud. Ultra-compressed production crushes those dynamics and makes EVERYTHING SOUND LOUDER. It’s no coincidence it came into vogue in the twenty-first century, because ultra-compressed recordings sound good—or, more accurately, less bad—on the tiny cheap speakers in earbuds and computers and smartphones. Which is how most everyone hears music today. After our first reunion show in Japan, I went drinking with Katoman, and he told me he’d been thinking for days about how no current bands sounded like Bitch Magnet. He meant it as a compliment, and I was moved. But later I understood the secondary edge to that observation, one that cut in a far less complimentary way. “Unique today” could also mean “a relic from a time now gone.”
When the familiar stomach rumbling came on, as it had for every reunion show, I looked for a moment toward the backstage bathroom, but there wasn’t enough time. Twenty-five years since I started doing this, but with this band showtime still gave me the bowels of a coke fiend, drugs in hand, waiting. But then we were onstage, where it was dark and loud, and the crowd was crazy, or as crazy as a crowd of record nerds our age ever get. As with all the best shows, all I registered was snapshots. Boys and girls—well, men and women—headbanging down front, a few even pounding their fists on the stage. This night I played the closing solo in “Navajo Ace” and a certain end-of-verse flourish in “Sea of Pearls” just right. I don’t think I’d ever played either entirely correctly before. And though I knew all along I was leaving all this, and there was something sad about that, nothing felt sad about the show. It felt correct. It felt complete. The proper finale to a very peculiar midlife foray.
One last night at the merch stand. It seemed that everyone who came bought something. In some cases, many things. My right back pocket held a burrito-sized wad of cash, until it grew too big to fit and I had to palm it like a small basketball. When I did the final tour accounting, I saw that, thanks to Rose and Chicago, we had turned a tiny profit in America after all.
The next day I drove over to see my old friend Bryan, the general manager of the mini-chain Reckless Records. Another musician was there, who’d also come to the show. He thanked me. Told me that his bucket list was now one item shorter. He also said he was surprised that certain people weren’t there. I smiled, nodded, said: Me, too.
But no. No. I won’t complain. It was beautiful. Nearly everyone in that crowd had a story. The ex-drummer from Hum—the same one who, in the nineties, tormented me every time our paths crossed with endless questions about Orestes—had driven three hundred miles from southern Indiana. The guitarist in Hum came up from Champaign. One guy came from Minneapolis; one woman, all the way from Los Angeles. An entire contingent drove from Louisville. Someone from St. Louis. Rose came from Bloomington, Illinois, which meant a two-hour drive to and from the show, followed by an early wakeup to teach her morning classes at the university. People we had met years ago in Pittsburgh, in New York, at school, in Europe. Looks of deep gratitude in familiar eyes, now set into older faces. A look that, I hope, was mirrored in mine.
***
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE TOUR, VERY FEW PEOPLE I spoke with believed we’d really played our final shows. But I was not among them.
Bitch Magnet wasn’t a band whose reunion would blossom into a second career, as had happened for bigger bands like Dinosaur Jr. or Mission of Burma or the fucking Pixies.
Bitch Magnet wasn’t the kind of band for which a new generation of young fans would crowd into clubs.
With the possible exception of Orestes, none of us was that interested in keeping this going.
Though Bitch Magnet was the kind of band in which, during our year and a half of reunion rehearsals and shows, Sooyoung and I each wooed Orestes for new projects that excluded the other.
And we never even mentioned those projects to each other.
***
WE WERE STAYING WITH SOOYOUNG’S PARENTS IN CHICAGO, in their two apartments in a Gold Coast building. That company they started so many years ago in Charlotte, the one they’d worked so hard to build, had done very well. The three of us drank beer in the guest apartment until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Someone woke me just after 7 a.m., and I went to my room.
I woke about three hours later, and, checking the circuits—weary eyes, bearable headache, no epic nausea—decided they were intact enough. Sooyoung’s mom had thoughtfully left a basket of sweet rolls and muffins on the dining room table, around which the sun streamed in, beautifully if a bit painfully. Orestes had an early-afternoon flight home and already had his bags neatly stacked in the hallway, and Sooyoung, who’d slept in the other apartment, materialized to say goodbye.
I insisted that his dad take a few last pictures. Who knew when we’d be in the same room again?
Sooyoung and I both look pretty rough in those shots. We were facing the windows, and sunshine was a hard thing to take.
Then Orestes’s phone rang: his cab was waiting outside. Sooyoung and I helped him hump his bags to the curb. Cars were speeding by, and we stood there, blinking in the sunlight. Always a little awkward, these goodbyes.
I hugged Orestes after maneuvering around his enormous pecs and traps and shoulders. In that clinch I managed to mutter, “We did it.” Sooyoung and Orestes hugged, Orestes climbed in the backseat, and then he was gone.
I knew Sooyoung and Orestes’s new band, Bored Spies, had recorded a single a few months ago, and in the upcoming year they’d play shows in America and Europe and Asia. Sooyoung and I had never talked about that before, and we didn’t now. Instead, Sooyoung announced he was going back to bed.
Well, this was it.
What to say? We hugged, and once we stepped back from each other, I repeated what I’d told Orestes: “We did it.”
Sooyoung nodded, smiling through his exhaustion. “And we did it right.”
Maybe we had.
He suggested that Laurel and I come meet him and Fiona for a vacation in Indonesia sometime. I said, sure.
I quickly hustled in and out of the shower, taking care to keep the tidy bathroom a
s neat as it was. Sooyoung’s dad appeared with a luggage cart, and after I loaded it, we wheeled it into the elevator and to the garage, where I hefted my bags and our merch boxes into the trunk of his car and carefully placed the guitar cases on the immaculate tan leather backseat. Then we headed east on Lakeshore Drive toward downtown. Sooyoung’s dad had aged well. Still trim, with a good head of hair. He and his wife had been incredibly welcoming, and I was moved by their kindness. Twenty-five summers ago, when Sooyoung and I fled Charlotte for Atlanta, I’d left their home under much worse circumstances. I rarely sit on the kind of soft leather found in expensive cars, and I gratefully sank into my seat and looked toward the lake.
A winter-bright morning. December weather in October. A day where the wind turned your face red and whipped up whitecaps and real waves. You could imagine, briefly, that this was the shoreline of some sea. A few clouds scudded quickly in and out of sight. We arrived at my hotel, where I shook hands with Sooyoung’s dad, thanking him once more, and followed a bellman into the hotel.
My room had amazing eighties wall switches for the lights and TV, with one button actually marked MOOD LIGHTING. State of the art, for the Atari age. It would take time to figure it all out. But I took the elevator to a great room downstairs, ordered tea, opened my laptop, and started writing.
The cement tones of downtown Chicago outside the window. Grand, but terribly monochromatic. A sad pile of pumpkins in a courtyard provided the only natural color. No place could underscore the late-autumn feelings of finale better than Chicago. Portlandia for this kind of music. Where there was an endless procession of bands like ours. As such, it was our culture’s best argument for careful what you wish for. Nerdy, earnest boys, dressing badly, trying desperately to rewrite the rules of rock—and generally failing, often egregiously. I was always just one left turn from ending up here and being a part of it, too. I always resisted, and shit-talked and belittled this city instead. And yet, while I stayed in Chicago after we played the Bottle, people I hadn’t spoken to in years showed me around, bought me drinks, waved me into their shows for free, refused to let me eat any meal alone. This town took me in whenever I showed up. I always forgot that part.
I HAVEN’T YET MENTIONED HOW THE BUILD, PEAK, AND afterglow of any performance and tour is much more visible today. Preshow chatter on Facebook and Twitter is an effective early-alert system, so you can sense how much interest is building. (I knew, for instance, that Hong Kong would be bad, that Singapore would be pretty good, and that London and Tokyo and New York would be really good.) And, after each show, there would be a day or so of Twitter and Facebook comments before the crowd flitted on to the next thing.
It always hurt a bit, watching the vapor trail of any tour’s final show fade. You knew that it was inevitable, but that didn’t make the absence of chatter and noise and anticipation and showtime feel any better. Chicago’s traces would disappear, too. But they had a longer half-life than most, and while they were still fresh, I marveled over the kind things people posted online.
Like this, from Jay Ryan, who played bass for Dianogah:
Went to the Empty Bottle last night to see Bitch Magnet, a band whom I’ve loved for roughly 20 years, but whom I’d never seen before, as they broke up before I found them. They reunited for a handful of shows, and this was one of the best concerts I’d ever been to, ever. Insanely tight, especially for a bunch of old guys. The experience was only improved by being surrounded by friends I don’t see nearly often enough, most of whom have made music which has been heavily influenced by this band.
Especially for a bunch of old guys?
Oh, the hell with it. He’s right.
And this is where the story ends. A strange little band, oddly and briefly reunited two decades after it broke up. Kings of a few small clubhouses for a few more nights. Living a modest dream. But sometimes that’s enough.
Almost nothing I’d hoped for twenty-five years ago had happened. The weirdos hadn’t taken over. Our bands hadn’t changed the world, or destroyed the big, bad major labels. (That was the Internet’s job.) Or even changed the mainstream much. I’m not even going to get into how almost all of the places we most treasured, where we found each other and where we gathered—record stores, bookstores, mom-and-pop music shops, the dive bars and venues we all knew—long ago vanished. But believing that this culture’s significance depends on fulfilling any ancient grandiose expectation is missing the point. Because, despite everything that happened and everything that didn’t, we carved out—and nurtured and maintained—a place for bands like us.
Sometimes that’s enough, too.
Sometimes.
And today, after all these years, when rock music means so much less than it once did, weird bands as different as Tortoise and Battles and Fucked Up and Swans and Shellac still play and thrive. In some cases, even make a living from music alone. A framework—a touring circuit and a culture—still stands for new generations of musicians like us. I haven’t been paying attention, but I can feel them all out there, as the ocean feels the phases of the moon. As I can feel all those I’ve known forever who are still at it, like Ted Leo, Lightning Bolt, Yo La Tengo, the Ex, Will Oldham, Melvins, the Sea and Cake, Mudhoney, Uzeda . . . There are too many to list, and that’s a small victory, too. I don’t love all those bands, but that’s not important. What’s important is this: they’re the people I recognized, long ago. The ones who made me realize I wasn’t alone. Maybe they recognized me, too.
And sometimes that’s enough.
No. It is enough. That’s the happy ending. One far better than any of us ever dreamed, back when we crouched beside our parents’ stereos, peeling shrink-wrap off the first record we bought by the Stooges or Wire or Black Flag or Hüsker Dü. Lonely, ignored, maybe even hated, but suddenly strangely excited.
“I ended up in a band that has a really small following. People with gigantic record collections. Who have socially maladapted lives because of their love for music,” Mission of Burma’s Clint Conley once told me. “But those are the people I wanted.”
Those are the people I wanted, too.
Because those are the people we are.
Epilogue: Staying Off the Bus
After our second Asian tour I stayed in Tokyo and booked myself into a fancy hotel for two nights. It was exorbitant, even after I found a crazily discounted rate, and not in the slightest bit punk rock. But I couldn’t resist going grand after the madness and bruisings of this tour. All of which started receding as the cabbie, dressed in a suit and white gloves, sprang from the right-side driver’s seat and began Tetris-ing my gear and luggage into the minuscule trunk and backseat.
I settled in and gave him the name of my hotel. Soon we passed the O-East, where we’d played the night before last, and a few moments after that we left behind the parts of Shibuya that light up like a pinball machine every night, garishly, blaringly, neon-soaked.
An overcast day in April, under a weak and tired sun. Only barely spring. Our friends here told us we’d just missed the cherry blossoms. But we always just miss the cherry blossoms, I thought. Combining touring and tourism never really works out.
The VIP wristband from yesterday’s festival was still on my wrist, and my body was a catalog of ache and malady. Half of my back was balled up and crying: in your mid-forties, wearing heavy guitars night after night messes you up. My feet and calves still throbbed from all that bouncing up and down onstage. A small constellation of angry-looking blood blisters dotted my right forearm, friction welts from up-and-downing too hard on my guitar. I clicked my teeth together, testing, and felt jolts of pain. During the encore in Singapore—was that ten days ago?—I lunged toward Sooyoung’s bass, trying to bite the strings, but missed, and my top front teeth smashed into the pickguard instead. They hurt like hell the next morning, and I checked them in mirrors for the rest of the tour, convinced they’d start turning black, but they didn’t. On top of everything, J
esus, was I fried. Exhausted and place-shifted. Returning to the hotel the night before around 4 a.m., I asked the desk attendant for my room key, by number, in approximate Japanese. Roku zero roku. But then unfathomably added s’il vous plaît?
I lolled against the white lace draped across the backseat to watch the order and correctness of Tokyo rolling by. The harmony of a thoughtfully designed city, especially on a quiet Sunday. When we arrived at the hotel, the driver pushed his magic button, and my door eased open. A small crowd of employees descended, all wearing suits. One asked the name on my reservation, two muscled the bags and guitars out of the car and onto a large luggage cart, and a fourth, speaking fluent unaccented English, escorted me in, through the entrance and into the teak-walled elevators that opened out into a grand vaulted space of the lobby bar and indoor bamboo garden. This was the kind of hotel where, once you stepped into the lobby, all the noise of the day falls away, submerging you in a deep, delicious, calming hush, a very expensive quiet for which I’ll forever be a sucker, and never more so than after the strung-out extremes of a tour like this one. Every detail here was so thought-out that in the hallways the ceiling fixtures cast perfectly symmetrical round pools of light on the carpet. Ridiculous. But I loved it. As it was ridiculous I could even be here—that fortune had smiled on me so brightly that I could come to Asia for a wholly improbable ongoing reunion of my teenage punk rock band, and afterward sleep two nights in such a setting.