Your Band Sucks (4 page)

These guys, I remind you, were my best friends.

***

THERE HAD TO BE SOMETHING ELSE. BUT WHAT?

In junior high school I'd failed to convince one of the few guys even less cool than me to start playing bass, but prospects seemed better in high school. For one thing: I could now play bar chords. Andy was another smart underachiever (short version: I smoked pot daily and sold it ineptly; he had far worse grades), and he and I had similar taste. He had a Telecaster—even then I hated Teles, but whatever—and, like me, a lousy solid-state Peavey amp. We tried playing together, but whether we worked from sheet music or attempted to play by ear, it didn't work. A song as simple as R.E.M.'s “7 Chinese Brothers” completely eluded us. It wasn't until after I got to college that I learned about drone strings: playing two strings together, leaving one open, and working your way up and down the fretboard on the other. Once you know that, you can play “7 Chinese Brothers” in five minutes. But as with everything else, learning that in the suburbs in the eighties was a matter of groping blindly in the dark. I know, I know, it's a total
cliché to even bother pointing this out, but it's still true: life was much lonelier and more isolated without any entrée to interesting music and the people who flocked to it, without a band, and without any band culture. If you were surrounded by assholes hostile to the fact of your existence, it was easy to assume that everyone everywhere would be like that, for the rest of your life.
I
assumed that. No one could point me to a control group that proved that life could be different. No one like me knew it wasn't our fault. Or that there were even enough of
us
somewhere to create a bigger
our
, one that encompassed more people than the few freaks we hung out with.

But there were ten or fifteen or fifty kids like us in most high schools. There were a few hundred in every small city and thousands in each state. There were a hundred thousand or more in America and a few hundred thousand more worldwide. There was plenty of kindling. Something was about to happen.

P
ictures from the early days of any rock or art movement always display discordant details. No style has been codified, everyone looks too young, and a kind of aesthetic baby fat blurs many edges. Photos from Sex Pistols gigs show dudes in the crowd with mustaches and seventies hair. In shots from the early hippie days, there's always at least one guy with hair that wouldn't be out of place at IBM. So it was with indie rock when I first really discovered it upon arriving at Oberlin College in August 1985. What ultimately became a blend of hippie, punk, and hobo still had jarring touches of eighties MTV here and there: mushroom-shaped or asymmetric hair, boys in tight black shirts buttoned to the throat, boys who looked like they wanted really badly to be in the Cure. It wasn't even called “indie rock” back then. We generally stuck to “punk rock,” since it was hard to use a more common term du jour—“alternative”—with anything like a straight face.

Oberlin is a small, reasonably pretty college town situated within a landscape so featureless that a hill is an event. The closest major city is a forty-five-minute drive, and since that city is Cleveland, you kept your expectations low. The skies over the college were almost always gray as you passed the old stone buildings and crisscrossed the quad, shoulders hunched against the wind, hurrying down brick paths to get to the two-street town. (Oberlin has a unique microclimate, which is a polite way to say it rained all the time and stayed cold until early May.) Among us music freaks, the boys wore flannels and ripped jeans and plain white T-shirts—they were cheap, and available everywhere. Quite a few of the girls dressed like that, too, though those with good thrift-store instincts opted for secondhand dresses or skirts with dark tights. It was acceptable, and even desirable, for everything to be oversized and slouchy—a terrible idea today, but a common one when no manufacturer made jeans that actually fit. We were also big on discarded classic-rock concert T-shirts, picked up secondhand for a buck or less, decades before they went on sale at places like Barneys for hundreds of dollars. (The bassist in one campus band sometimes wore a perfectly faded black Pink Floyd tee, the one with the pig from
Animals
on the front. Today he could practically make a mortgage payment with it.) We all wore sneakers or combat boots or motorcycle boots. Long coats for most, and faded denim or army surplus jackets for the stonier types. The boys let their hair get shaggy or cut it very short, and never used any kind of product. The girls made more of an effort, dyeing theirs blond or black or burgundy. Many of us smoked. Cigarettes occupied your hands during those twenty years until smartphones were invented. That all this became a look, in the fashion sense, a few years later, after some Seattle bands got big—well, we found that hilarious. We dressed that way to
avoid
having a look.

Nestled outside a third-floor window in the student union building, a clock radio tuned to the campus station was almost always on. The sound cascaded down the building's sandstone front, beamed across an adjacent lawn, and bounced off the other nearby buildings, creating an unusual amplifying effect: from fifty or even a hundred yards away, you heard it loud and clear, as if it came through a set of speakers far bigger and better than any the station owned.

Steam clouds hung in the air over the campus power plant. Spring would come one day, we were sure of it.

Left to our own devices far from anywhere, with no adults around, none of us had any idea what we were doing. But there was also no one to say you were doing it wrong. Anyway, what were you supposed to take cues from in 1985? Commercial radio and MTV were wastelands. Many college radio stations were still content to play the overproduced and underwhelming major-label “alternative” bands of the time, like the Woodentops and China Crisis and Aztec Camera, bands no one liked then and no one remembers now. Once a year
Rolling Stone
would cover some other going-nowhere, penny-ante sort-of-subculture and the bands it spawned—the Paisley Underground and the Three O'Clock! Roots rockers like the BoDeans and the Del Fuegos! (The Del Fuegos got started at Oberlin; their frontman, Dan Zanes, now writes songs for well-bred toddlers.)
Those
records you could find everywhere. But you had to strain so hard to get even the teeniest buzz from them.

A very strong hippie streak persisted on campus. Deadheads and tie-dye were everywhere, as were men with ass-length hair, whom you'd see playing hacky sack on the quad. Hideous scarves and ponchos hand-knit by the oppressed indigenous peoples of Nicaragua, etc., passed for fashion statements, and people showed off by pronouncing “Nicaragua” with the correctly rolled “r.” I was still at an age when any hardcore band yapping about how much Reagan sucked sounded pretty good, but at Oberlin I got disgusted with lefty politics almost immediately. Still, I lucked out by ending up there, and one big reason was my freshman-year roommate, Linc, an extremely skinny, short-haired, pale-skinned music autodidact from suburban L.A. He was wearing a Meat Puppets T-shirt the day we moved in. He was clearly much cooler than me, but more important, he was much more
knowing
than me. He owned every record SST put out—I barely knew Black Flag; he was already over them—back when that signified something. Linc had heard everything I'd heard, everything I wanted to hear, and everything I didn't know I wanted to hear, had answers for almost every musical question I posed, and brought a few hundred carefully annotated cassettes with him to school.

The second reason I lucked out by attending Oberlin was its radio station, WOBC, staffed by music nuts and, in the classic sense of college radio, unformatted. (Too many college radio stations back then mimicked commercial radio, with programmers insisting that DJs choose among songs placed in “rotation.” That would
never
fly with the freaks of WOBC.) At station headquarters in the student union building, entire walk-in closets were stuffed floor to ceiling with old records—you could get lost in them for hours, and I often did—and a few mail crates overflowing with telltale square cardboard packages arrived each day. The college was continually pissed off at the radio station, because the collective weight of those records made the old floors sag, requiring regular reinforcement. I graduated in 1989, and I'm not sure the station even owned a CD player by the time I left.

WOBC's office had all the institutional charm of a military recruiting center, albeit with more smokers and fewer ashtrays. Everything in the control room appeared to be government-surplus gear from the fifties, if not earlier. The occasional giveaway poster from random bands like the Raunch Hands or the Reducers passed for decoration. Ceiling tiles were past yellowing and getting well into brown. Couches sagged and groaned when you sat on them, and smelled like an old man's flannel shirt. DJs coughed their colds into the decaying gray foam covering the on-air mike and made one another sick. A crescent of metal protruded from the giant black speaker in the lounge, on which someone had scrawled in white wax pencil:
THIS IS NOT AN
ASHTRAY YOU ASSHOLE
. I adored it all, spent every minute there I could, and, like everyone else, started with a weeknight 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. show.

WOBC was also a link, however tenuous, to the occasional concert in Cleveland. Early in my freshman year I won free tickets from the station to see the jangly Austin band Zeitgeist. It was a weeknight, and there were maybe twenty people at the club. But forget the music, which was mildly interesting at best. A friend, who earned my plus-one by borrowing a station wagon for the trip there, spent much of the night at the bar, hanging out with the woman who played second guitar for Zeitgeist, because here it wasn't arenas, backstage passes, and limousines, and there was hardly any barrier between performer and fan. You could know these people. A really important thing about this world, because your real influences were ultimately the people you
knew
: the friends with whom you hung out, went to shows, traded tapes, and talked endlessly about music.

Oberlin was just a few thousand kids, but it midwifed a shocking number of real bands that wrote and played their own material every weekend at dorm lounge parties and in off-campus living rooms amid the cornfields in our nowheresville. Flyers advertising upcoming shows fluttered from the overfilled bulletin boards in every public space. These bands got airplay on WOBC, on a kind of 8-track tape that DJs called “carts,” and they were the most important fact about this time and place, which is why I'm going to talk about one you've never heard of, called Pay the Man.

No one outside Oberlin knows about Pay the Man, because ultimately they never did anything. They moved to Boston at the end of my freshman year, but then the drummer left, and they couldn't replace him. Nothing they recorded was ever released. (They were supposed to do a four-song EP, “Gettin' the Juke,” on the long-defunct Cleveland label St. Valentine Records, but it never happened.) But they were genuinely good, and not “good” as in “acceptable to hear in a friend's basement” or “there's a halfway decent song on the cassette they guilt-sold to their friends.” “Good” as in, you would listen to them if they were from San Francisco or Spokane or Madison or Amsterdam, because their songs stuck with you and got bigger with repeated listening. You looked forward to their shows. I've been carrying a bunch of their songs for decades, first on cassettes, now on a computer, and those songs hold up, beyond the way they scratch an old itch. Each of the guys in Pay the Man played better than he needed to and was smarter than necessary. Most crucially, their drummer, Orestes Delatorre, was a
lot
better than he needed to be. Mike Billingsley wrote the tougher and darker songs and played a fretless bass. The guitarist, Chris Brokaw, played actual solos, and played them well. (Chris went on to a long career in music, playing with everyone from Thalia Zedek to Steve Wynn to Bedhead to Thurston Moore.) By the time I was at Oberlin they'd been together for three years, and though they still played some of their early, ultrafast songs, it was clear they had grown beyond them. Like a lot of bands from the mid-eighties, they had commonalities with Hüsker Dü and early Soul Asylum without sounding like either—that is, another band that started out playing hardcore, then grew out of it without totally forsaking it.

Aside from being really good, the guys in Pay the Man were also just
there
: walking to class, eating at the dining hall, hanging out at parties. I was generally too chickenshit to talk to any of them, though Chris went out of his way to be nice to me. He and Mike were as skinny as scarecrows, with long, straight high school stoner hair trailing down to the middle of their backs. Chris was a senior and an English major. I'd see him out and about, a bottle of Boone's Farm sometimes dangling from a pocket of his army jacket, and something about the whole literate stoner-rocker vibe made me think,
Jesus. Too cool
.

I didn't have much going on that freshman year. No girlfriend, quite shy, absolutely virginal. I slept through my morning classes, shared delivery pizzas each night with friends in my dorm, listened to WOBC nonstop, and spent all the money I'd saved from the previous summer and then some on records. I went to parties only if bands played, and I drank keg beer while waiting for Pay the Man or the Full Bodied Gents or What Fell? to start their set, then jumped and thrashed around when they did. It was a release. Also easier than trying to talk to girls.

Every local music culture needs a Pay the Man, the big-brother band that shows the way, the tentpole that holds everything up. It doesn't have to be a band everyone likes, but it has to be sturdy and compelling enough to be the main organizing principle and have enough going on to warrant being the center of attention. Fall became winter, and murmurs started among the music obsessives that Pay the Man were good enough to crack the national circuit. We could invite our normal pals out to see them, and they could like the band, too, even if for them seeing Pay the Man wasn't as huge as it was for me and my closest friends, those stalwarts at every show who could handle the crucial duty of holding my glasses when I went into the mosh pit.

But understand this: no one outside Oberlin knew Pay the Man. Maybe a hundred people—at most—on campus cared deeply about them. The campus cover band that played faithful versions of current hits routinely drew more people. But any touring musician who ever had an unexpectedly great Tuesday night in Champaign, Illinois, or Lawrence, Kansas, or Morgantown, West Virginia, knows that forty excited people is more than enough to make a show memorable, and a local circle of a hundred fans can easily sustain a band. My first spring at Oberlin, Pay the Man had a hit on WOBC, a song Chris wrote called “When We Were Young.” (At the time, the band's average age was twenty-one.) One warm night a few weeks before the school year ended, a few hundred beered-up college kids came to see Pay the Man play a party held in a sprawling sixties-era institutional dorm lounge. Winter was finally over, women were showing bare arms and legs again, and the crowd was rowdy and loud and enormously appreciative. At one point between songs Chris looked over to Mike and mouthed a delirious
WOW!
They played a long time that night.

I still have the set list from that show hanging in my bedroom at my parents' house, and sprinkled among the scrawled song titles are four oblique entries: C-1, C-2, C-3, and C-4—“C” as in “cover.” Near the end of the set, they began repeating the opening groove to “Hot Child in the City.” Mike struggled to sing the first verse and chorus, realized he didn't know the lyrics, and, still thumping out the bassline, stepped to the mike and asked if anyone else did.

Had it been an actual club with an actual stage, I wouldn't have. Had there been even a couple of monitors in front of the band, or something—anything—to delineate where
we
were supposed to stand and where
they
were, I wouldn't have. But I was only three feet away, stepped toward the band, grabbed the mike, and: