Our headline show in London the night before, at the Lexington-that would have made the better ending. Though that evening didn"t start out so well. Andrew Male from MOJO was there and began his interview by asking a perfunctory question about reuniting, to which Sooyoung matter-of-factly replied, "For the record, I was against it." Which would have been the lead quote, were I writing the article. But I wasn"t, and luckily, when the piece was published, it wasn"t.
The Lexington is tiny, and the show was oversold, and there was a ludicrous volume restriction of 101 decibels. (I can burp louder than that.) Backstage was yet another dingy room in yellowed paint with cleaning supplies on open shelves, walls and ceiling displaying endless Magic Markered d.i.c.ks and b.a.l.l.s, monkeys with mysteriously enormous t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, and baroque instructions concerning what to do with all the genitalia. But the opening bands, Former Utopia and smallgang, were the crew we"d gone to pubs with each night in London, and the show became a homecoming to a city we"d never really bonded with before. When the club opened the doors, one of the first entrants bounded up to the merch booth to confess how anxious he felt. The room was so excruciatingly well lit that from the stage you could see the face of everyone in the audience, which is always nerve-racking, But everyone was pulling so hard for us, we could have c.r.a.pped our pants and it would have been fine. This was a Monday night, and some people told us they were calling in sick tomorrow, because they"d driven 250 miles from Liverpool or 300 miles from Newcastle. The Lexington is an excellent whiskey bar, and people stuck around to drink until very late. Just before closing time someone clapped me on the back in the men"s room and stuck out a hand to shake while I stood at a urinal, peeing.
More than anything, I want to remember meeting Allan, who, like most everyone else there, was burly and bearded and balding and fortyish. Allan, though, came with a minder. He has a severe seizure disorder, typically experiences several each day, and lives at an a.s.sisted-living facility. He"s also a huge b.i.t.c.h Magnet fan, and even though loud music triggers his episodes, he insisted he absolutely had to see our show, and whoever decides such things finally consented. He had several seizures during our set, he told me afterward, a huge post-show grin on his face. Then his smile widened and he added, "So, when people say that your music is convulsive . . ."
Hearts, Allan. You made it all worth it.
Burutaru Desu.
Noon in Tokyo. Late April 2012, but it feels like March: partly cloudy, quite windy, a tinge of winter you can"t ignore. Sooyoung and I stand on a paved expanse outside the Museum of Maritime Science, a six-story building shaped like an ocean liner. We"re at the Kaikoo Popwave Festival, during our second run through Asia. Batcave is onstage, proving there"s no metal like old metal. The members of Batcave-dear G.o.d! what a name!-are all middle-aged, with waistlines that would make any h.e.l.l"s Angel proud. Before their set we watched them rip open beers backstage, a move wholly unremarkable were it not for the fact that everyone else was still eating breakfast.
We"re on next. Set time: 1:30. Sooyoung has recovered amazingly from another epic night out. (I started falling asleep at the bar around two-thank you, jet lag-and went back to the hotel.) He was late and semi-responsive for van call and breakfasted on a microwaved cup of convenience-store noodle soup as we sped to the festival. To approximate something David Chang once said, in Tokyo even the s.h.i.tty food is great, and you can throw together a shockingly good meal from prepared foods available at any 7-11 or Lawson"s. I still winced at Sooyoung"s choice, but it worked, and he"s identifiably human again. Today, thankfully, won"t be like that day in Seoul last fall when his bedroom door was still closed at noon and Orestes and I thought he might still be out from the night before. Then my phone rang, and I heard Sooyoung croak, "I can"t move," and I got all Florence Nightingale and brought him water and a fistful of Advil, which got him well enough to rise and lead us to a restaurant known for steaming bowls of a rejuvenative chicken-and-ginseng soup.
The thing about outdoor festivals isn"t just that you sometimes play at lunchtime in weather that begs for a sweater, and maybe mittens, too. Playing outside, broadly speaking, sucks. Sound dissipates no matter how huge the speaker rig is, so you never attain the good sonic density common to any half-decent club. At Kaikoo we are playing on the festival"s Grand Master stage, and after seeing Batcave, I start to grasp the retirement-community overtone to "Grand Master." On top of everything, Orestes is brutally sick. Bedridden our entire time in Tokyo, wracked by fever and chills and cramps and shakes. I"d stopped by his hotel room every few hours with water and medication, and to monitor his general condition. Before the set I ply him with bananas: easy on the stomach! calories! pota.s.sium!
When Batcave lumbers offstage, our friend Carl, who speaks fluent j.a.panese, hears someone compliment a Batcaver on his band, to which Batcave guy says, "Burutaru desu," which translates to "It is brutal," a phrase that immediately enters our lexicon. ("How"s the pizza?" "Burutaru desu.") Our songs seem slow onstage, which made me crazy when I was twenty and still does now. But we get through the set. Decent crowd, subpar performance. Though it is miraculous that Orestes can play at all, let alone as solidly as he does. At our previous Tokyo show he was even sicker, and I told him backstage that he"d carried me for many shows and tonight I"d carry him, so I stayed close to him onstage, jumping up and down, locking eyes, urging him along. I had to do something to get the energy level up, so when a photographer was shooting me at the end of one song, I charged right at him, jumping off the stage-still playing-making extravagant faces into his lens, licking his cheek when I finally caught up with him. He kept clicking like mad as he backpedaled. (I wish I could find him now and see those photos.) Tokyo is one of my favorite cities, and I love playing there, but for us it feels cursed. We played three shows there during our reunion, and not one went well. At least at Kaikoo the guy who"d interviewed me after I"d smashed my guitar the last time we were in town showed up at our merch booth and handed me a DVD of that interview. I thanked him-and discovered much later that he"d missed recording the actual guitar-smash.
I ALMOST PULLED THE PLUG ON THIS ASIAN TOUR. SETTING IT up was an unusually large pain in the a.s.s, and I had to absorb almost all of the a.s.s-pain. The costs were brutal, and there was no way to avoid losing thousands of dollars. But we had a cash cushion left over from Europe, and eventually the choice became binary: go on tour, or go to work for two weeks. Not a hard call when framed like that. Even less so when framed like this: We"re old. When else would we do this? So we got ambitious. Maybe too ambitious: Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, and those two shows in Tokyo. A tour in which we had to clear pa.s.sport control and customs in a new country every day, with lies about why we were visiting, since most countries demand work permits for performers. A frisson of tension always came with crossing borders, especially since I was lugging my guitars in two enormous flight cases that kept getting mistaken for something in which you"d stash an a.s.sault rifle. Most smaller bands half-sneak across borders this way, but everyone knew at least one that had been denied entry into some country or other. Two bands I know-Red Scare and Storm & Stress-got turned away from Canada. (Canada. That"s gotta sting.) For their first j.a.panese tour in the nineties, Tortoise learned about work permits only when authorities at Narita Airport wouldn"t let them into the country-so they flew to Seoul, did the paperwork at the American emba.s.sy, secured the permits, and made it into j.a.pan without missing a single show. I"m really glad I never had to deal with anything like that after an endless flight from America to Tokyo.
Orestes and I arrived at Singapore"s Changi Airport in early April, mildly deranged after flying roughly twenty hours, for a few days" practice and our first show. How nice an airport is Changi? There"s a f.u.c.king swimming pool atop Terminal One. Singapore is hot and equatorial. Also, basically an upscale outdoor shopping mall extrapolated to an entire country. Much of it looks like it was built in the eighties. These parts are considered historic. (I"m joking. Somewhat.) Everything works. Sit-down restaurants are exorbitant, since almost every ingredient is imported, but hawker centers are crammed with small stalls purveying cheap and variegated Asian grub, the stuff of food bloggers" wet dreams, and Orestes and I gorged ourselves in them daily.
I"d found a practice s.p.a.ce called Four Tones-a reference to Mandarin p.r.o.nunciation, I learned-and reserved time well in advance of our arrival by corresponding with someone who signed e-mails THE WALL. All caps. We found Four Tones on a surprisingly sketchy block. ("Sketchy" in Singapore is relative, but there was no mistaking the prost.i.tutional vibe there and in an often abandoned bar just downstairs from Four Tones.) In person The Wall was a friendly, wavy-haired Malay in his late twenties or early thirties, neither hulking nor freakishly tall. His feet splayed in the way of people who are barefoot all the time: Four Tones is a shoe-free practice s.p.a.ce. You stepped out of your sneakers in the hallway and padded into your carpeted rehearsal room, and when you glanced down during rehearsal, you saw your stupid socked feet alongside your effects pedals and suddenly felt twelve again, in a friend"s fancy suburban bas.e.m.e.nt rec room-the friend whose parents were humorless hard-a.s.ses and banned footwear in their new-carpet-smelling house.
That sight didn"t make you feel as if you were grasping pure power with both hands, and the gear at Four Tones was semi-functional and sounded terrible, but things still clicked once we started rehearsing. In our first reunion shows Sooyoung wore his ba.s.s higher on his body than he did our first time around, because some sense memory made him wear it as high as the guitar he played in Seam. But you don"t strum a ba.s.s gently, all wrist, as you can a guitar. In Singapore he adjusted his strap, shifting his ba.s.s maybe three inches lower, a minor change that made a huge difference. Now he got his shoulder into every downstroke and started playing with much more muscle and authority, and despite the bad amps and toy drums and overall sock-rock vibe, we sounded good. Noticeably better than we had in Europe.
During the day Sooyoung went to work at his company"s office. He invited us to stop by, and we met his staff, though he generally kept the band a secret, and I don"t know how many of them really knew why we were there. Orestes and I stayed in an apartment complex near Fort Canning Park, popular with expat European and American families, where we sort of worked, too, on our laptops, but lunch took a huge bite out of our afternoons, and we spent a lot of time lounging around the giant outdoor pool, sometimes catching each other"s gaze and cracking up. Our first time around hadn"t been anything like this.
Each morning at our apartment building, everyone crammed into the too-small breakfast room and attacked a free buffet until everything was gone. Once, still reeking of booze and fried food and the very late night before-the kind of morning when you feel the need to apologize for your appearance, if not your scent-I squeezed into the tiny elevator alongside a fresh-faced American family, whose young children regarded me with one glance and instinctively moved closer to their parents.
Sorry, folks. We came to Singapore for rock. You remember rock, don"t you, ma"am? Though, who knows, it may be gone by the time your kids grow up.
The Singapore show was at the Home Club, which sits in a mall across from a cement river channel, or maybe it was just a ditch to catch the runoff from heavy rainstorms. We"d never played in a mall before, but in Singapore it kind of made sense. There we met Phil, an Australian superfan who"d told us through Facebook that he was burning a lifetime"s worth of frequent-flier miles to make the show. (Great to meet you, Phil. I hope we don"t suck.) The club had concrete walls and concrete floors and concrete steps leading up to the stage, which is not exactly the zenith of acoustic design. But after our set we came offstage, looked at one another, and realized no one had made any mistakes. Nothing had gone wrong at all. The strange dawning hit all of us at the same time: we"d probably just played our best show ever. A young band called Amateur Takes Control opened and played incredibly elaborate instrumentals. Each guitarist had a pedal board maybe three feet square, as jammed as a city parking lot with effects boxes. As he"d done at our show in Seoul, Sooyoung enlisted someone from their band to play ba.s.s on our encore-on this tour the Hard-Ons" one great song, "All Set to Go"-and then he watched us all from the audience. In this case, being drafted last-minute to play on a song you"ve never heard sounds much more intimidating than it actually was, because "All Set to Go" is a single two-chord progression, endlessly repeated, and after Sooyoung big-brothered this guy onstage and handed him his ba.s.s, I taught him the song in roughly fifteen seconds: It"s four bars of straight eighth notes on A: da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.
And then four bars of straight eighth notes on D: da da da da etc.
Got that? Great. Just keep repeating it.
It"s a hard song to screw up, especially if you can play as well as any member of Amateur Takes Control.
Afterward we went to a large private room in a karaoke joint, where an endless procession of new arrivals meant that, soon enough, there was nowhere to sit and not many places to stand. Platters of fried chicken (excellent) and bottles of whiskey (cheap) kept appearing. Eventually I kept a full plastic cup of whiskey nearby at all times so Sooyoung"s wife, Fiona, wouldn"t refill it and insist I drink more. Certain details are fuzzy, but I remember singing "Hungry Like the Wolf" with her. And that at one point Sooyoung tried to get me to sing something but I kept refusing, and when he tried to force the mike on me, we got into a weird, shovey standoff for a few seconds. What was that about?
NOTE TO MIDDLE-AGED TOURING BANDS: IN HONG KONG, PAY whatever is necessary to avoid guesthouses and hostels like ours, on a crowded, commercial strip in Tsim Sha Tsui. Imagine a grimy building that takes up an entire city block on all four sides, so crammed with people and stuff and activity and everything that, unfortunately, the only word to use is "teeming" and the only thing to say is that a Wes Anderson fantasia played out within its walls, endlessly. The building was centered on a courtyard, across which residents hung laundry. To get to the elevator, you pa.s.sed through a long and dense arcade of small, grubby shops until you found travelers lined up, waiting beside their giant backpacks. At each floor, as you ascended in the lift, people streamed on and off, clutching their microcosm of everything: guys rolling handtrucks stacked with bags of cement mix, women carrying countless plastic sacks, people staggering under statuary. After a few floors you wouldn"t be surprised to see someone ride in on a motorcycle.
To get to our tiny room, you traversed an interior hallway, pa.s.sing a few more "hostels"-a few equally tiny rooms off other obscure hallway pa.s.sages-keyed open a door that led into a narrow pa.s.sageway, and then opened the first door on the right. When we first walked that narrow pa.s.sage, we squeezed past a woman eating soup on a tiny shelf next to our door. When we came back that night, after the show and drinks, the same woman was sleeping peacefully and remarkably compactly on that same shelf. Our room was just big enough to hold a bunk bed and a single, and it made you want to avoid the shower and keep your socks on at all times. I was all for being budget-conscious on a tour already destined to lose money, but on the way to the show I made a reservation at the Holiday Inn across the street for our second night. Rooms there were done up in slightly stomach-turning eighties tones of peach and beige and marbled brown, and a night cost something like $250, but it felt like money spent very wisely. Johns and hookers met in the parking lot. You"d see a dolled-up woman leaning against a wall. A few minutes later she"d be gone, replaced by some ferrety-looking and fidgety guy. Waiting. Though probably not for long.
Our show was at a venue far more punk rock than I"d ever been, one called Hidden Agenda, tucked away on a high floor in an anonymous building in a deeply industrial part of town. There was some kind of auto shop on the ground floor, though the totally stripped Smart car skeleton out front made me wonder about its legitimacy. Filmmakers who seek the dystopia that looming gray cityscapes signify would do well to shoot in this neighborhood on a cloudy day. Or any day. I"m not sure sunlight ever made it to street level there. I mean: Burutaru desu.
Hidden Agenda regularly b.u.t.ted heads with local authorities over real or perceived infractions, the latest of which meant the club couldn"t serve alcohol. We snuck some in, but I winced to think what that ruling would do to turnout. One guy in the audience had flown in from Taiwan, though someone else had to explain that to us, because he didn"t speak any English. He just stood there nodding during that conversation, and I hope our translator got across how thrilling and crazy that was to us. Another showed up with an original copy of our first record-from our self-released first pressing of a thousand-wanting autographs. Amazing to see how that record ended up so far from home.
But we were already tour-weary and dispirited, even on our day off, when Orestes and I roamed the city while Sooyoung traveled for work. We did manage to eat well, an overweening concern of all bands, and ours in particular: an amazing meal at Mak"s Noodles-delightful dense and springy noodles, finer than angel hair-where the waiters were so actively unpleasant it was hilarious. On Sooyoung"s recommendation Orestes and I also went to a Korean place in Kowloon: Won Pung Won. At first the bada.s.s halumni-Korean grandmas-running the joint treated us indifferently. Then Orestes spoke to them in Korean-ever the language savant, he picked up quite a bit in our five days in Seoul-and it became a glorious meal. Afterward Orestes and I each did the inevitable a.s.shole-American-tourist thing and took pics of a sign we liked, which he spotted emblazoned on an awning: f.o.o.k KIU MANSION.
I"D NEVER PLAYED AT A VENUE WHERE LIZARDS CRAWL THE walls until we played the saGuijo Cafe in Manila. A bar in the tropics, with a loose division between indoors and outdoors. We spent just enough time in Manila to begin to appreciate its size and troubles: the air is smoggy enough to hurt, traffic jams are epic and constant, and the people under the elevated expressway aren"t just hanging out-they live there. But saGuijo is in Makati, on a side street where you wouldn"t expect to find it, and it was quiet around the club. Before the show I walked the neighborhood, past scenes stolen from someone"s imagining of how a place like this might look: Guys hanging out on white plastic chairs, obscured by the night, nursing beers. One grilling meat in the street, in front of a satay stand. Sleepy open-air bars where a few solitary figures sat, slouching in front of their drinks. A woman sobbing quietly into a pay phone. A few hundred meters ahead, in the main street, taxis drifted past. The air still felt hot and wet but with a welcoming hint of a breeze. Night, and its great sense of relief, had descended. The only things missing were dogs lolling, half-conscious, in the street or chasing each other around the venue"s microscopic dirt yard, where we drank cold cans of San Miguel with the audience after the show.
Inside the club there was a huge Virgin Mary mural-a punk rock club, perhaps, but nonetheless one in a Catholic country-and an old Caballero skate deck, under gla.s.s. (Sooyoung photographed the latter. I went for the former.) A tiny blue drum kit with SAGUIJO emblazoned on the top of the kick drum and SUPPORT PINOY ROCK just below it, which is how I learned that Pinoy = Filipino. The stage, too, was tiny, and during the set I stood close enough to Sooyoung to do the h.o.m.oerotic back-to-back thing for the first time since soph.o.m.ore year in college. But the beer was ice cold and dirt cheap, and the audience was thrilled, and one of the other bands, Wilderness, was one of the best bands that opened for us anywhere, ever. Wilderness-what a lovely and fitting name they chose-are an eight-piece, three of whom drum or play percussion. I imagine every review of them will inevitably include the word "tribal," because there are congas and a kind of primal swampy, pounding repet.i.tiveness. They spilled over the edges of the stage and into the audience, playing a sort of shake-your-a.s.s psych that, I thought, was rooted in Filipino or Polynesian records from the sixties and seventies that I suddenly needed to find right now. After the show their percussionist Pat Ing pressed a CD in a handpainted and cracked case into my hands. "Made with love," she said, smiling, and refused my money. People smiled in Manila. A relief, after Hong Kong.
IF YOU"RE LUCKY, WHEN YOU"RE A BAND FAR FROM HOME, A de facto amba.s.sador and chaperone materializes and takes you in. In Manila it was Diego Castillo, who plays guitar in Sandwich. He took us out for sisig-fried pig"s face-one night. (He also arranged for friends to bring us a sack full of balut-fertilized duck eggs-after dinner, but sadly we were too stuffed to try any.) In his apartment he played us a bunch of local funk and hard rock from the seventies, and I wish I"d taken notes. He drove us around in his new Honda, playing American indie stuff from the nineties and aughts that even I hadn"t heard. Diego loved a certain strain of sappy indie rock-minimal, soft to loud, heart on the sleeve, pop sweetening sprinkled over the top. A part of me likes it, too, in very small doses, but it"s primarily nostalgia for a particular time of my life, because I generally find both that music and that part of me weak and despicable. A group of old friends you forsook, after they disappointed you too many times, or the sad boy you no longer wish to be, alone in his room with his record player, his one true friend.
The living room in Diego"s apartment was dominated by his ma.s.sive wall of records, and there he told us how much effort it took for him to track down music on small American independent labels in the pre-Internet nineties. He had to find addresses for the record labels, scrounge in Manila for American cash to send to those labels, pen an appropriately obsequious letter, throw in extra cash for shipping, and cross his fingers, because not everyone sent records in return. Like all collections, his was built laboriously, and with an antlike determination, just more so than almost anyone else"s. It was easy to get disgusted with this little indie world: its incestuousness, its essential f.e.c.klessness, the way it always crumbled when you most needed it to be solid. But then you would run into people who still held on to its artifacts for dear life. And in 2012-years after these records were made, and probably years after rock last really mattered-I found myself standing in front of a wall of such records in Diego"s apartment, eight and a half thousand miles from home, shaking my head. Because people actually cared. People really worked for this stuff. They did whatever it took to track down your message in a bottle. And then they held on to it, throughout all these years.
Many Thoughts About Underwear and Rock-Related Maladies.
Then you"re standing outside a locked hotel room at 3 a.m., without a key and naked but for a pair of briefs, and as much as you might wish for another solution, there"s really only one.
Luckily the elevator was empty when it arrived, and after it chimed and sighed to a stop in the lobby, I marched toward the front desk, trying to act dignified and business-casual about everything.
When the guy on duty looked up, he didn"t even blink. Just stood, poker-faced, waiting. "The less said about this the better," I told him, "but I"ve locked myself out of room 1012."
He nodded and called the bellman.
This was during a practice weekend in Calgary in September 2011, and I"d gone barhopping with Orestes after rehearsal. He"s twice my size and can drink like an elephant, but no night with him had ever ended this stupidly. I mean, after our last stop I was drunk enough to lose the willpower required to keep a slurriness out of my voice. But not that drunk. Still, when I woke needing to pee and walked through the heavy door to the right, it slammed shut behind me, and I could see, even without my gla.s.ses, that things were not right. But understanding the problem was a very gradual process. I knocked on the door and called through the crack at the bottom. Neither of which did any good, because I was the only person staying in the room. Or had been, before I became the only person standing in the hallway.
In the elevator back up to my floor, the very young bellman asked me how my night was going. "Really good until about five minutes ago," I said. He nodded, we arrived, and he used his magic key card to get me back into my room. Thank G.o.d I didn"t have a hard-on, I thought, and settled back beneath the covers.
During and after any rock-related travel during the eighties and nineties, I only needed to blink a few times after waking up to remember where I was. Now travel left me all harebrained and sleepwalky. One night in late April 2012, back home after two weeks of shows in Asia, suffering from jetlag and a bad case of the bends from a rough reentry into workaday life, I went to bed at nine. Our last hotel room in Tokyo had wedged the three of us into another s.p.a.ce barely big enough for the beds, and I was grateful to be back in my own room. But just after 10:30 I bolted upright, panicked with the realization that I went to bed sans underwear and fearing that my bandmates would be freaked out in the morning when they saw me with my man-parts dangling. Even though neither bandmate was in my bedroom. Or the rest of the apartment. Or even in America, because both had returned to their homes in entirely different countries. But somehow that didn"t register at all. I looked around the room, which I didn"t recognize. Laurel was still watching TV in the living room, so she wasn"t there to remind me that the tour was over. I saw a door with a hint of light behind it and cracked it open. A bathroom. Finally I remembered: home. I opened a drawer, grabbed a pair of underwear, and-triumphant!-went back to bed.
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 acc.u.mulate, 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 s.h.i.t 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. .h.i.t 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 f.u.c.king 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, "f.u.c.k 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 c.o.ke-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 b.a.l.l.s: 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 f.u.c.ked-up ears. It"s hard to describe this without invoking s.e.xual 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 ba.s.s drum. Proximity to extreme sound produces interesting physical sensations, though they"re not always pleasant. During b.i.t.c.h 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 f.u.c.king 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 h.e.l.l is what we are You say that we take it just too d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l f.u.c.king loud Louder than h.e.l.l.
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 ba.s.s 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 ma.s.sacres 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 ba.s.s 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 c.u.mulative 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 fall. 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 f.u.c.king 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."
Eventually, though, you just physically can"t play anymore, or at least play in a way that you"d recognize. In 2013 I asked Roger Miller, when he was sixty-one, how much longer he thought Burma could keep going, given the limitations of the mortal frame. "You grow older and either you figure out a way to do it or you don"t. If you sit at your computer, you get carpal tunnel. If you"re a football player, you get concussions." He shrugged. "And I"m not trying to be fatalistic or negative, but you"re gonna die anyway."
HERE IS WHERE I"M SUPPOSED TO SAY I"M SORRY. HERE IS WHERE I"m supposed to say I realized, too late, that we should be careful with guitars and amps and drums and earbuds. Here is where I"m supposed to say we must respect the delicate tissue that makes sense of the sounds around us. Here is where I should beg everyone, in simpering and cloying tones, to please teach the children to learn from our mistakes.
Screw it. I don"t regret a thing. Sure, I did some stupid stuff. (It doesn"t sound so great when you stick your head into a ba.s.s drum.) But everyone who did equally stupid stuff was transported to places most people will never know. The old athlete walks tenderly on his aching knees. My ears ring. And-along with Mark Arm and Dan Peters and Laura Ballance and Andee Connors and Roger Miller and G.o.d knows how many more-I can"t hear anything you"re saying in this noisy bar. But so what?
I ended up getting a relatively clean bill of health from the audiologist, though he found my left ear is weaker at picking up mid-range frequencies. Ear doctors sometimes call this a "noise notch," because it often appears among those steadily exposed to loud sound. (For many years of practice and performance, that ear was closest to my amplifier.) I was told that my hearing against background noise was actually pa.s.sable. Neither Laurel nor I believe this finding, for what it"s worth, and Dr. Resnick later conceded that real-world conditions are impossible to simulate. Still, that"s what his test showed.
Some months after my visit I called Dr. Resnick to interview him for an article in The Atlantic, and at the end of our conversation I asked him if he had worn earplugs when he was an active musician. "Ah," he said-and here he paused deliciously-"more often than not, no. I found it a little difficult to wear them while performing, especially if you"re doing any singing."
I guess he"ll understand, then, if we all keep treating our ears the way old drunks treat their livers, always wanting one last spree, always hoping, each time we play too loud, that they don"t go kablooey. Because, really. We"re just gonna quit?
When b.i.t.c.h Magnet played our reunion show in San Francisco, Andee Connors lent us a speaker cabinet, and we met him at his practice s.p.a.ce to grab it for soundcheck. As we drove up I saw him leaning against his truck, stooped over and plainly in pain. His back had gone out the day before, he told me. He has arthritis and related maladies, for which he blames his bad posture while drumming.
Andee"s new band, ImPeRiLs, opened for us that night, and when I ran into him backstage, he was clearly still hurting, bent over and wincing. It hurt your own back just to see him. Once onstage, though, he was gleeful, grinning, beaming, joyful, looking years younger. As long as you"re up there, you don"t feel a thing.
Goodnight to the Rock and Roll Era.
A Korean, a Mexican, and a Jew walked into a bar in Vancouver on a Sat.u.r.day night in late October 2012, not far from the weekend s.h.i.tshow of Gastown and the vacant-eyed junkies zombie-ing down Hastings, and, once the drinks were served, Sooyoung raised his gla.s.s. "I"m glad you guys talked me into this," he said. Tomorrow we would play Seattle, the first night of our American tour. But I took him to mean the entire reunion adventure.
I always liked touring in the fall. Cooler, clear days, night coming on earlier, breaking out sweaters and heavier jackets for the first time since March. Once, October meant fall break and bombing eastward on Route 80 in a rattling old American car full of gear with Sooyoung, en route to play New York and Boston, talking all the way about the future and the band. Not this time. We knew, going in, that these shows would be the end. That was the key to selling them to Sooyoung. We crammed as many shows as we could into the time each of us could carve from his schedule, and since the dates wound up being in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and two in New York, we had to fly to each one, as we had in Asia in April. Jimmy Page was really into how flying to each show injected urgency into touring, and you don"t need to travel on your band"s private jet to feel it, too. But I felt pangs of regret over losing one last time in the van and the sound of those tires turning on pavement, a music in itself, one long ago bound to this music in my mind.
There was symmetry and logic to ending the band after these shows in America, or there was once I got past the horrible, poignant, aching back-to-school-and-things-are-dying autumn-of-the-soul feeling I inevitably got at this time of year anyway, made worse by the looming conclusion to a very delayed extension of my early twenties. But I"d tired of the logistics and persuasion required to make it all happen: mapping itineraries, arranging transport and lodging, dealing with promoters and equipment rental. I"d tired of the complications a.s.sociated with disappearing from work for long stretches. I"d tired of how crazy the run-ups to touring were and how harsh the rock hangovers were afterward and the effects my mood swings had on the people around me. I"d even tired of a couple of the songs in our set. (Though only a couple.) After years and years of living with barely any structure at all, I"d discovered that the routines of marriage and adult life were strangely comforting, but there was little template for what would happen on the road, and that chaos-the sheer density of events jammed into such a short stretch of time-was still so seductive. The foreknowledge of each approaching tour took up much mental s.p.a.ce, tugged at me endlessly, and could never be properly explained to civilians. And describing the musician"s transition to normal life, once the touring is over, was even harder. "I don"t mean to make light, but I really would liken it to a soldier in active duty coming home," Rick Pelletier of Six Finger Satellite said. "Suddenly you"re a civilian. You have to act excited when you"re going out to dinner with friends." Even though you"re used to much stronger stuff at night.
Peter Mengede, who played guitar in Helmet and Handsome, portrayed homecoming in even starker terms: "You find yourself without that thing that you"ve been focused on, that you looked forward to, that you found satisfaction in, that got rid of all the horrible, ugly stuff inside you. All of a sudden you"re sitting at home. No band. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. It"s time to grow up and retrain yourself. Try to find a way into the real world. But then, once you do get in the real world, it is f.u.c.king boring. The work thing, apart from the money-it"s absolutely pointless. I"ve got a band now. It"s minor leagues. But it gives me something to do. Without that it would just be suburbs. It would just be f.u.c.king shopping malls, and getting on the train with all these f.u.c.king diabetics going out to buy a flat screen or Kentucky Fried."
The night after I returned from touring Europe in December 2011, I dragged my reluctant and severely sleep-deprived carca.s.s to a work-related event in a landmark building uptown. I didn"t want to go, but I thought, I have to get back to normal life. Even though the other life was still so present: severe fatigue, ringing ears, the sensations from the crowds and volume fading only slightly after traveling those thousands of miles. I walked in, confused from jetlag and feeling very out of place beneath the carved and gilded ceilings, so intricate that in my addled state they made me think of looking up at the circuitry underneath the s.p.a.ceship in Close Encounters. I grabbed a gla.s.s of wine off the first waiter"s tray I saw, tried to focus, ran into someone I knew, and casually asked what"s up. This person went into an excruciatingly detailed description of a something-something and then went into an equally colonoscopic a.n.a.lysis of a deal that something-something was considering. You know how you find yourself in a conversation and try to find the polite way to end it, or see someone over a person"s shoulder so you can disappear as quickly as possible, but can"t? That. The ennui and jetlag made me feel weightless. I looked up and imagined myself floating above this dazzling room. Quite a setting, this. Real nineteenth-century robber baron s.h.i.t. Old-money eccentric, incredibly ornate, even slightly deranged in its details. Everyone else here seemed so happy. But it was just people walking around. Some rock-damaged circuit in my brain kept asking, This is it? I was both bored and overmatched, feeling like I understood nothing outside the ritual of driving and load-in and setup and soundcheck, the tension of waiting for the venue to fill and the relief when it did, slowly at first and then very quickly. But this event, tonight? What was the point?
The people around me were good people, but they had no idea how wrung out I felt, how my head was still slightly blown off, how that feeling was fading, and while I knew far too well that it was a crazy and unsustainable way to live, especially now, I was still desperate to fan its dying embers. That I was slowly waking up from the dream, and the contours of everyday life were only starting to come into focus. The closeted husband can"t talk about his boy toy downtown. The functional junkie doesn"t tell co-workers about his weekend nodding off in a motel room amid needles and spoons and people he would normally never see in daylight. Those guys can only share those things with others who"ve been there themselves. There was no one like that here this night. Or on most other nights.