Your Band Sucks (7 page)

S
ooyoung drove and I rode shotgun, sneakers on the dashboard, my seat reclined as far as it could against the wall of guitars and amps in the backseat of my mom's blue Toyota Camry, as we listened to a tape I'd made from a bunch of new 7's and compilation tracks: Green River, Rapeman, Honor Role, and Spacemen 3's seventeen-minute-long cover of the 13th Floor Elevators' “Rollercoaster,” which no one else in Bitch Magnet liked at all. It was late August of 1988. We were on our way to our first show in Boston and savoring the last dregs of that lovely summer between junior and senior year. Orestes, who'd already graduated, was now living in Boston, working at a store that sold maps. Our first record,
Star Booty,
which we were putting out ourselves, would come out in a couple of weeks. In six months I'd turn twenty-one. Few things are as grand as being a young American male road-tripping on a glorious day in August, and I may even have realized this at the time.

A few hastily dubbed cassettes of
Star Booty
had drummed up enough interest to get us a gig and some college radio airplay in Boston. A DJ from Harvard's station wanted to interview us once we arrived. It wasn't that we were excited by these first tendrils of attention reaching our way because we thought they meant that untold treasures awaited—that we'd soon sell tons of records and that fleshpots were quivering and ready, throughout the nation, across the world. That wasn't it at all. We were excited because the fact of anyone, anywhere, listening was amazing. That we'd been invited to play in Boston, by some guy we didn't know and had never met, felt like someone had found our message in a bottle. And in a sense he had, given the crates of demo tapes and records that every big-city booking agent watched their weary mailman haul in each day.

In 1988 only a few mainstream outlets paid attention to our culture. (Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
was a rare perceptive observer at a major newspaper.) To most of the world this music was still hidden under rocks. But the biggest bands among us routinely drew several hundred people to their big-city shows and sold lots of records, too, though how many remained unknown, since virtually every indie label was fly-by-night, crooked, or mysterious about such data. (It was rumored that Hüsker Dü sold more than fifty thousand copies of
Zen Arcade
, which, pre-Nirvana, was a decent guess at what number represented the outer limits of the possible.) We were millions of miles from any of that, of course. But there were record labels interested in us. We'd turned down offers from a few after being warned off them, but getting a deal with one of the half-dozen half-decent independent labels was now thinkable. When we signed to one, we'd be advanced a couple thousand dollars, paid up front against future royalties, to make a record. Then the label would take over the scut work of getting it manufactured and distributed and promoting it to college radio stations, fanzines, and the college-radio trade outlets
CMJ
and
Rockpool
. Such minor forms of assistance sounded incredible, as did the fact that they seemed within reach. What I most wanted was to be known and respected—no,
adored
, I was far too hungry to settle for respect—by Fanzine USA and college radio and the people I most wanted to impress. My circle of friends, basically, times a few thousand. The people who loved music so much that they let it destroy their lives. And capacity crowds at the small clubs where we all gathered. Those were the most important stages in the world. To me, anyway.

No music freak from an analog generation really gets over the bond formed with the records they listened to over and over again, but this was when listening to this music always involved a series of physical and intimate transactions. The thrill of entering the record store that most people overlooked, the tactile sensation of carrying a fresh stack of records home, tucked under your arm, in crinkled square brown paper bags. In your room you slit the plastic wrap and inhaled the new-vinyl-and-cardboard smell before slipping the record from its sleeve—gently, bracing the hole in the center with your middle finger—and carefully laying it onto your turntable. All that time we all spent crouched and kneeling in front of tiny stereos, doing nothing but
listening
, and maybe staring at the album cover. Looking back, it seems so premillennial it may as well have been the Middle Ages, and all of us supplicants from another epoch. Knowing Bitch Magnet had even a chance to enter bloodstreams this way was deeply gratifying.

We had no idea whether anyone would come see us in Boston, though I sensed some minor excitement stirring, a hint or a tingle that the show wouldn't be like playing to five people in Youngstown, Ohio, or an empty room in Atlanta. But not even that mattered. Boston was a new city to us, and, new to the whole experience, we thrilled to each microdevelopment. Much later I asked Rose Marshack, the bassist in Poster Children, if she ever got dispirited by lousy shows or tiny audiences, and she got indignant at the very suggestion, insisting, “Every single show was exciting.” (Bear in mind that Poster Children toured nonstop for years and played close to a thousand shows.) It was an honor, she said, just to be able to throw your amps and drums and instruments in a van, drive for hours, and play, for any number of people, anywhere. In 1988 I believed this, too.

I looked out the window at the shimmer of a late-summer afternoon, the sun lighting each leaf while we sped through some placeless place in Connecticut or central Massachusetts. I probably lit a cigarette. We still smoked. That, too, was fun, that summer.

***

I'D LEARNED BY THEN HOW BEING IN A BAND ENTERED YOU
into a conspiracy against the rest of the world. Sooyoung and I would search for each other among the carrels where everyone studied in Oberlin's giant Brutalist library and motion each other into the badly lit stairways, all dark tile and raw concrete, to strategize our next moves: the next show, the next time we'd record, the flyers we needed to make, the gag Valentine's Day cards we sent out one year (a badly drawn heart crudely colored with a green or brown crayon on the front, the inside inscribed “Life is painful. Love, Bitch Magnet”), the insert designs for the cassettes we sold for a few bucks and sent out to labels, and our worries that Orestes might not be in as deep as we were. Whenever we called him, he always insisted he was, but he also made clear how much he hated talking on the phone, so often we were left only with his absence and his word. But if you were as desperate as I was for any sort of rock to stand on, that was good enough. Sooyoung spent spring semester of our junior year away from Oberlin in North Carolina, working for his family's business—the one he'd felt guilty leaving when we went to Atlanta—and we stayed in touch, mostly by letter. He wrote about the band, about being bored and lonely, made mordant jokes about the girls he had no luck with. The sort of stuff we didn't really talk about much and that came out more easily for him in lyrics and letters.

In June of '88, after junior year ended, we all drove to Chicago and spent two or three days remixing
Star Booty
with Steve Albini at a place in Evanston called Studiomedia—roughly the same amount of time a studio down the hall from ours took to finish the voiceovers for a single radio commercial for an obscure Midwestern pizza chain called Edwardo's. We recorded and mixed that record in three days that January at Oberlin's antiquated 8-track studio, for the grand total of three hundred bucks. One guitar track was recorded so ineptly it was barely audible over the tape hiss. Even after remixing,
Star Booty
is a very strange aural experience. The guitar tone is probably best described as “phlegmy,” and Orestes sounds as if he's hammering on a toy drum kit situated somewhere down the block, if not in an adjacent zip code. But it took a lot of work to get it even to that point.

While in Chicago we played our first show there, at Batteries Not Included—the long-shuttered club, not the more-recently-shuttered dildo-and-lubricant shop—with a forgettable band still suffering from major new-wave damage, called Birds at the End of the Road. Chicago was only about twenty minutes from becoming the epicenter of all indie culture and had already spawned a few generations of punk and post-hardcore bands, but its every practice space and studio was still thronged with asymmetric-haired hordes chasing implausible MTV-sized success. Their cluelessness was sort of heartbreaking, if you knew that their music was going out and another was coming in. Albini brought one or two pals to see us that night, so Batteries wasn't entirely empty. At one point during the show I tried to shit-talk some jokes about a local fanzine editor—one of the few who'd written about us so far—as if there were even enough of a crowd there to rile. Real rock-star stuff.

After we finished mixing, I drove to my parents' house in New Jersey and worked for a construction company, where I was the most despised member of a broadly disrespected cleanup crew. One day I was instructed to dig a sizable hole, roughly four feet square and about as deep. I finished the following afternoon and stood wiping off sweat and guzzling water while some slightly-higher-ups eyed what I'd done, conferred amongst themselves, then told me to refill the hole. But each night I came home to a to-do list for getting
Star Booty
pressed and released: shipping artwork to printers, listening to test pressings, sending cassettes to distributors to drum up orders, and taking out a bank loan of three thousand bucks to finance all the above. Back then I was programmed for overexcitement even more than I am now, and each day's progress and minor victories that Sooyoung and I reported to each other—One hundred records presold to a distributor in Chicago! Two hundred sold to another in Europe!—often left me revved too high to sleep, making me draggier and even more useless for the next day of work.

In July the band reconvened at a studio close to a very pre-Disney Times Square called Sound on Sound. Friends worked there, and we recorded some newer songs for free. Well, not quite free. If those songs ever turned up on a record, we would owe the studio its standard hourly fee. Sound on Sound's rates were industry standard—not at all cheap, in other words—and very soon we racked up some absolutely preposterous sum, probably over $5,000, which was more than we'd be advanced by any record company that might sign us. But we figured it was worth it to hear our newest songs in a more realized and recorded form. We were pretty excited about them.

Generally no band I've ever been in has had enough money to record. Which means there isn't nearly enough time in the studio, which means you eventually cave in to the reality of camping out there for several consecutive days to kamikaze straight through it, staying up as long as possible, sleeping only when absolutely unavoidable. Luckily if you provided Sound on Sound's head engineer, Mike McMackin—a beefy redhead with a curly mullet and a mustache at least a decade out of date—with a steady supply of forty-ouncers of Bud, he had an absolutely heroic ability to transcend human fatigue, even while calmly negotiating the peculiar dynamics of a young band made up of very disparate personalities: the skilled and unflappable rhythm section, and the marginally skilled and quite flappable guitarist, who was in meltdown mode because his crappy amp and cheap distortion pedals sounded cloudy and diffuse and lacked any impact whatsoever when recorded in such a pro and pristine setting.

Like a hospital, a recording studio is an artificially quiet and antiseptic environment. But its raison d'être is that of a casino: to insulate its inhabitants from any outside noise, light, or sense of time. Sound on Sound looked like the exact average of every such studio of the mid-eighties. The floors in the live rooms were a bright shade of oak. Its décor was like that of the new offices of a moderately successful insurance company: all beiges and grays, and absolutely unremarkable. As at every studio, a tattered pile of magazines—
Rolling Stone
and trade publications aimed at engineers and studio owners, the latter being effective sleeping aids—sat on a coffee table near the couch: band distractors. The coffee was horrifying, thick and sour from the eight or twelve hours it spent warming in the carafe, but you drank it anyway. The one female intern sat behind the reception desk, where the take-out menus were kept in a folder in the top drawer. God forbid, in the eighties, she should actually be allowed in the control room.

When no music is playing, the hush of any studio's control room is womblike and deeply comforting. (Though we four dudes kamikaze-ing through a sleep-deprived weekend gradually made that room smell as sharp as kimchee.) Sound on Sound's was tiny, but it neatly accommodated a truckload of outboard gear, the tape machines, and the pool-table-sized mixing desk, behind which the engineer or producer sat in a rolling chair. (An engineer recorded your band. A producer rewrote your songs and told you what to play. We learned the distinction after pissing off Albini by giving him a producer credit on the first pressing of
Star Booty
.) The band sat behind the engineer, the three of us snugly wedged onto the cokey
-
styled, blandly modern black leather sofa against the back wall.

After something like a day straight of being awake in the studio, following a full week's work with the construction crew and a mad dash to Manhattan, and after another round of guitar overdubs on “Big Pining,” I'd had enough and told everyone I needed to sleep. I flicked the light switches near the reception desk and collapsed onto a (beige) couch. A few hours later Orestes woke me to say he was leaving, that he had to get back to Boston. As he walked away I propped myself up on one elbow and blurted, “We're the best band in the world.”

He repeated it back at me, because we could still say something like that and believe it. Maybe I should have quit right then. No one knew who we were yet, but it could never get better than the certainty of that moment.