Your Band Sucks (24 page)

When we finished, I dashed backstage and blurted apologies to Orestes and Sooyoung. Despite everything, the crowd was still cheering. “What do you want to do?” asked Sooyoung. I said we should play our encores. Big mistake. When we finished, I jammed my guitar down on its stand and lurched backstage. From there I saw people staring strangely at my side of the stage, some clicking away on camera phones. Then Katoman dashed over, looking sheepish, and told me to check out my guitar.

It had fallen from the stand and now lay on the stage, its headstock split right down the middle. I took one look and thought:
Unfixable.
Second thought:
What the fuck?
I never knew guitars could crack like that. I wasn't even upset. On a night like this? It made perfect sense.

The crowd cleared out to an upstairs bar. I made my way to the stagehand I'd berated, iPhone in hand, translator app on. I punched in things like
I APOLOGIZE
,
I WAS VERY RUDE
,
I AM SO SORRY
. She nodded, smiled, pulled out her own phone, tapped onto it, and showed a screen saying,
PLEASE
COME BACK AND PLAY
AGAIN NEXT YEAR.

I choked up a little. Sometimes you don't deserve the kind things people say.

I forced myself to join everyone at the bar. It's one thing, after a show, if people slap you on the back and thank you. It's another thing if they fumble for a polite way to say you stunk. It's another thing entirely if they fix you with a look of grave sympathy, put a hand on your shoulder, and say, “Man, I'm
really
sorry about that.” That hadn't happened in a very long time.

Then a thought occurred to me. I slipped downstairs to the stage, grabbed the busted guitar, and jogged back up to the bar. Sliding sideways through the crowd, I strode toward an empty patch of floor, held the guitar up as high as I could, and waved it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

This was my gorgeous cherry sunburst Yamaha SG 3000. Shaped like a Gibson SG—those lovely symmetrical dual cutaways—but built like a Les Paul, from a thick slab of mahogany and a thinner maple cap. I'd bought it in 1993, just before a Vineland tour. A true seventies relic, this Yamaha. It had a brass block built into its body, which allegedly enhanced its sustain. I loved it, though it weighed a freaking ton. My Les Paul weighs more than ten pounds, and the Yamaha was heavier still.

But when I started slamming it into the floor, it came apart as easily as a toothpick.

People really like it when you smash a guitar. Here they howled and scrambled for smartphones and started snatching up the big pieces. In a blink or two only a few scattered matchsticks remained. A longhair who'd stood up front all night, headbanging through the entire show, immediately pounced on the body, which was more or less intact. His friend grabbed the strap and immediately improvised a properly knotted tie from it. Two guys came up to me with stray chunks and Sharpies, wanting autographs on the wreckage. (I obliged.)

Isn't it a common impulse to want to smash something to bits? Some agitation in the basal ganglia, the bit of our brains where we're no better than snakes, that place beyond the reach of words. Sometimes demolishing everything at the end of a show seems like the only proper finale. A very severe form of punctuation. Though I'd generally pictured it happening after a
good
show, like a very definitive last word.

The Yamaha was the third guitar I'd destroyed, but only the first
intentionally
demolished. Early on in Bitch Magnet we ended our sets with “Cantaloupe,” a song whose ending always begged me to throw my guitar around. Which is how I broke my Peavey T-60—the one accessorized with stickers of shitty hardcore bands and Garbage Pail Kids and blood and the bitten-off logo from a can of Carling's Black Label—at the end of our first show at CBGB in 1987. We recorded that show, and that version of “Cantaloupe” ended up on
Star Booty
, and at the very end of it you can hear the guitar disintegrate, the feedback detuning a few half steps, after the neck snapped and the strings went slack.

The second was somewhere in Germany in late 1990, on the tour with Doctor Rock when all my gear was stolen, after which I paid an inflated British price for a Gibson SG from the sixties. Damn thing was
way
too delicate. I cracked its neck one night during the mildest bit of onstage roughhousing. At least it was fixable. I broke another guitar while recording
Star Booty
. Simple idiot luck: picked up the guitar by its strap, the strap slipped, the guitar fell, headstock cracked on a ceramic-tile floor, and then dangled like an unstrung marionette. Done. Though it probably didn't help that I started bashing it into said floor afterward.

After I annihilated the guitar in Tokyo and stood idly snapping the last few long bits, one guy cornered me with a video camera, asking why I'd done it. I told him it was the least I could do. That Tokyo, and my bandmates, deserved better. I told him I saw how the headstock had split and knew there was no way it could be brought back to life.

I didn't mention that I'd kind of been waiting forever to do it. I also didn't tell him that the comedown of a shitty performance sometimes involves a pit of self-loathing so black and relentless that only an explosion can make it go away. I broke my hand once, punching a wall after a bad Vineland show in Pittsburgh, and it wasn't the first time I'd bruised and bloodied knuckles that way.

At least, in Tokyo, I didn't do that.

***

BUT IN THE VAN SPEEDING THROUGH THE NETHERLANDS, ALL
that feels very far away. Even the way the night ended in Brussels was perfect. When we got to the hotel after the show, the desk clerk slid our keys at us, attached to a sheet of paper with
MAGNET, BITCH
scrawled at the top. I always loved it when that happened.

But what's better is that I could breathe again. The fears were gone. We're all back within the roar I've been hearing in my head since I was a teenager, and it sounds exactly as it should. Even after all these years. Alone in the middle row of the van, I have the rare feeling that everything is going to be fine. We can play as well as we ever did.

Hell, maybe we can even play better.

A
tour is a parallel world in which all citizens basically only talk about rock, and once we got back on the road after being away so long, I started struggling through those conversations. Despite those decades feeding an encyclopedic knowledge of all current bands, I'd stopped following music obsessively and now knew so little about what was going on. At least I wasn't the only one who wasn't keeping up. When I mentioned to Sooyoung that someone from
MOJO
, the very smart British music magazine, would interview us in London, he looked at me blankly and asked, “What's
MOJO
?”

Then we saw our old friends Superchunk play La Scala in London. They encored with “Slack Motherfucker,” and the crowd sang along, so loud you couldn't hear the band. Because Superchunk, surprisingly,
weren't
loud. Clubs now posted and enforced volume restrictions. Our first time around, almost none did. (When I heard in the nineties that New York's Bowery Ballroom insisted that bands not exceed a certain decibel count, I was outraged, and vowed my bands would never play there. Of course, Bowery Ballroom never asked.)

Onstage, Superchunk dressed more or less exactly as I remembered. I'd gone onstage in jeans and T-shirts since I was a teenager, but this tour I knew I just couldn't anymore. I couldn't stand looking like something dragged from the attic, dusted off, and sent out to play, slightly moth-eaten around the edges. Also, the ridiculous T-shirts in which I'd always performed—a Thompson Twins shirt silkscreened with garish new wave peaches, pinks, and blues; a three-quarter-sleeve 1981 Rolling Stones tour jersey featuring some giant serpent belipped with their logo; the blue-green one proclaiming,
GOD BLESS DETROIT, RO
CK & ROLL CAPITOL OF E
ARTH;
that Grim Reaper shitty-cities tour shirt—were now fashion clichés, often seen stretched across the chests of models and starlets. For the Bitch Magnet reunion tour I wore my favorite white oxford button-downs onstage: Thom Browne. Super-slim, perfect fit, and look great rumpled, which means they travel well. (I quickly got over the fact that the younger me would totally snarl at the thought of wearing such a shirt.) And tight pants, because I'm short, have no hair, and skinny's all I got. I wanted to wear a suit jacket, too, but people who've tried that assured me: bad idea. I'd
shvitz
; it would restrict movement and look misshapen and lumpy mashed under my guitar strap.

This time around I also had to learn to keep my head still when I played. As much as I had a stage presence on our early tours, it was built on whipping my long hair around, which is why several old friends asked if I planned to wear a wig for these shows. (Ha-ha. Thanks, dicks.) That long hair made headbanging dramatic—because it made almost anything you did onstage look dramatic, a curtain of curls waggling back and forth, amplifying every gesture and movement. But when you're bald, headbanging doesn't look good. It looks like convulsions. Before this round of shows I sometimes practiced while looking in a mirror—a pro-rock vanity move I forever found repugnant—trying to unlearn old instincts to telegraph each chord, tempo change, or dramatic downstroke with a quick headsnap:
Stop twitching!

Also, we decided it was cool for wives and girlfriends to come along. In the past I was always against allowing spouses or equivalents in the van. Not because tours are don't-ask-don't-tell trips for dudes—the no-mates rule held for tours I did with women bandmates, too, because I wanted tours to be band-only bonding experiences, and I didn't want any outsiders in the van making musicians peel off from the rest of the gang or, worse, introducing their own emotional valences and complications. Band chemistry is delicate in the best of times. Now, though? Why not? And we thought it would be nice to have our women witness this weirdness, too.

We still played primarily to overly intense guys in glasses, all of whom are still clad in familiar clothing: Chuck Taylors or cheap low-rise Adidas, band T-shirts, formless jeans, a flannel or hoodie. But at least the gender breakdowns were now often better than the brutal ninety-ten ratio we routinely experienced when we were an active band. Though some nights it was worse. I knew there were women at our headline show in London, but you wouldn't from the photos. At our show in Cologne I sat at our merch table, across from the entrance, watching the people stream in. The first hundred attendees were all guys. By the end of the night I think there were five women, one of whom booked the show. If success is playing to a crowd that looks exactly like me, Cologne was our best show ever—but it
was
a great crowd, even if, during the set, we couldn't make our blood run redder by eyeballing the women in the audience. And we were absolutely mobbed at the merch booth afterward, because our merch sales were suddenly twenty times better than they'd ever been. At some shows basically everyone who showed up bought something, sometimes also asking us for autographs for their kids.

What got me thinking, though, was that there weren't many younger fans at our European and American shows. After the show in Brussels one did ask me a question about
Umber
. I did some quick math and realized he was two when that record came out. Then I met the gray-haired guy who explained he'd loved us forever but had to sit for much of the show, because he had bad feet.

And here comes the part about How the Internet Has Changed It All. Everything is recorded now, and all of it is visible, because shows get posted to YouTube almost immediately. (The one song I fucked up badly always went online first.
Always
.) Online translation engines helped me through minimalist Twitter conversations with fans in Asia, and with my apology to that kind stagehand in Tokyo. We dealt with nine different currencies during an eighteen-month-long reunion and quickly developed an iron-lung-like dependency on the exchange rate site and app xe.com. And you saw all reviews immediately. In the old days it took months to see the coverage of overseas shows, if you saw it at all. The day after our show in Brussels—the one that made me so happy—we read one review that contended that Sooyoung's performance slipped up at times, and quoted his backstage observation that relearning the songs had been hard. Also: e-mail, not faxes and transoceanic phone calls! Twitter and Facebook interactions with fans! Cell phones, so no more desperate searches for rest stops or gas stations when you were lost! Though you were never lost anymore, thanks to GPS and Google Maps! And in America you no longer worried about the cost of long-distance calls—so touring bands no longer had to use stolen credit cards or phone phreakers' red boxes! Thank you. Moving on.

Were we different, too? I wasn't sure. In 1990, after a riot of a show in Belgium or the Netherlands or Germany, I ended up at our hotel bar with a gaggle of fans, still wound up from the performance. I naturally vibrated at a very high frequency back then, so I'm hanging out, animated and wired even at that advanced hour, doing the thing where you talk with your hands, because, you know,
Jewish
, and a woman—Ellen—nodded seriously after I unleashed some spiel and said, in a thick accent, quite carefully and quite out of nowhere, “You know, you are really like—ehhhhhh—Woody Allen?”

So I wasn't getting laid by anyone that night.

Twenty-one years later she and her husband saw us in Brussels. After the show I ducked away from the merch table to talk to her. This time she said, “You guys were great tonight. And you seem much more relaxed than you were in 1990.”

Low bar, Ellen. But thanks.

***

AND YET SO MUCH REMAINED THE SAME. ON TOUR YOU FUNCTIONED
effectively on half as much sleep and twice as much drinking. You had four or five beers each night before you
really
started drinking. You didn't tolerate the long dead stretches in the van, you welcomed them and their crucial salve to sanity: hours of quiet with no demands beyond simple forward motion. You woke, dazed from a nap in the van, no longer concerned about whether this landmarkless stretch of highway was in Austria or Germany or Belgium or the Netherlands, because you finally understood that, in that moment, it didn't really matter at all.

After playing our three shows in Europe, we arrived at the Butlins holiday camp in Minehead for All Tomorrow's Parties in full-on tour mode. Getting there, of course, was a particularly British nightmare: sliding through an ink-black night and pouring rain, the sky seemingly six inches above the roof of the van, and a series of towns one can legitimately call “villages,” with roads slightly too small for a van. Matthew scraped overgrown hedges and narrowly evaded ancient stone roadside walls. If I'd driven, at least one mirror would be lying on the side of the road somewhere, if not a bumper and door, too. We pulled into Butlins just as the festival was starting on a Friday night, and immediately beached in an impressive clot of traffic at the check-in. My room key came taped to a piece of paper that had Stuart Braithwaite's name crossed out and mine in its place, leaving me terrified for days that I'd bump into a naked member of Mogwai stepping out of the shower.

A festival has its own momentum, and if you arrive late and road-weary, it can be hard to catch up. That night I saw the last fifteen seconds of Wild Flag—nothing but some feedback squalls and Mary Timony muttering “Thanks”—and left annoyed that I didn't see more. Mini-gangs of fortyish, anorak-clad overgrown indie kids, mostly British, were everywhere, and all seemed to know each other. They moved from building to building, happy and chatting and hunching against the wind and rain. It felt like attending someone else's college reunion. Albeit a very efficient one. Bands started their sets on time at ATP, which was great, unless you were sluggish and a step behind, as I was. Luckily I came across a gaggle of friends—the guys in Battles and a bunch of mutual pals, all of us joined later that evening by Laurel—which was enormously comforting, because there were something like six thousand people there, and fans were already coming up to us:
We
came from Macedonia to see you. I came from Dubai to see you. I came from Australia to see you
.

The only possible response, which I found myself repeating over and over, was “Wow. Thanks. I hope we don't suck.”

That scene in
Body Heat
when Mickey Rourke does the there's-fifty-ways-to-fuck-up-any-decent-crime thing? There's at least as many ways to fuck up onstage. (See: Tokyo.) By the time I was in Coptic Light I no longer suffered from preshow nerves. But here they were again, as bad as ever: the undefinable floating deep dread that
something would go wrong
, terribly wrong, and then the horrible shaming sense of failure would descend. A feeling made all the worse given how long I had waited for this show. The culmination of our reunion so far. The meal ticket that made it all happen, after all these years. Here.
Now
. At an off-season holiday camp on a cold coast of England, of all places. Amid several thousand people like us, whose existences I couldn't imagine when I was in high school, even though they'd all been out there, somewhere, stumbling upon records, wading each day through schoolmates' indifference or contempt, waiting for their lives to begin.

The day of a show flings you onto a conveyor belt and trundles you through the tunnel that leads inexorably to showtime: travel, arrival, unloading, soundcheck, dead time, doors open, onstage. But we woke up in Butlins on the day of our show, and I'd never played a festival before, so the rhythms were unfamiliar. I watched Battles and then Nissenenmondai destroy an early-afternoon crowd, but afterward bands washed over me without making any impression. A few times I choked up, realizing I'd never be able to tell Jerry Fuchs about any of this or hear him make fun of us for reuniting, as he surely would have, before coming to see us anyway.

At the merch booth we met a few more people who came a long way or said they'd been waiting a long time to see us.

I hope we don't suck. I hope we don't suck. I hope we don't suck.

The bands ate at a mess hall. A high school cafeteria, just about: an oversized kitchen, buffets of cold and hot foods in an underoccupied and giant institutional room. But this was our water cooler and green room, and I saw people I hadn't seen since college, and I loved it instantly. I found Bob Weston—bassist in Shellac, soundman for Mission of Burma, all-around excellent human—and his wife, Carrie. Pharoah Sanders sat at the head of another table; stupidly, I didn't introduce myself. Dinner was a blessing, a normal interval on a day in which I was gradually losing my mind. I mean, just
writing
this makes me nervous, bowels rumbling, like a junkie watching bubbles break the surface in the spoon.

For a while we thought All Tomorrow's Parties was going to be our first reunion show. Good God, what were we thinking?
Hey, let's play live for the first time in twenty-one years to our biggest crowd ever!
Bad idea. The stakes are way too high, and no matter how much you've played together beforehand in a practice space, you can't replicate showtime: confronting the fear, riding the adrenaline, understanding the spectacle of it, relating to your bandmates naturally while unnaturally being on display, dealing with the X factor any audience introduces. Onstage chemistry for the first reunion shows is always unstable and uncertain, and even the best performers can get pretty hinky about it. The Jesus Lizard's first reunion show was a headline slot at ATP, and David Yow, one of rock's most natural frontmen and the veteran of over a thousand shows, recalled, “I always get nervous before shows, but I was fucking
shaking
. I was so terrified.”

After I ate, I headed back to our apartment to grab my guitars and get ready. Change strings, take a dump, breathe—all the preshow essentials—and then I told Laurel I was leaving. The late nights and late mornings of ATP ran counter to her biorhythms, but she still ran with the rest of our crew and did gangbusters business whenever she worked the merch stand.