Here"s some money for your band.
VINELAND"S ENDGAME HAPPENED DURING THE WANING moon of that era in the nineties in which major labels were lunging spastically toward virtually any established indie band. Even though, by then, many signings had resulted in sales that were visible only with a microscope. Vineland or Freshkills numbers, albeit for giant entertainment corporations that expected six- or seven-figure sales. (The one record on Geffen by Hardvark-its drummer was Bob Rising, who"d formerly played in Poster Children and Sooyoung"s band Seam-sold 372 copies, according to Soundscan.) But there were still a few late fluke hits from bands we knew. Hum, from Champaign, was briefly all over the radio in 1995 with "Stars." Hum primarily played a pedestrian version of the this-is-the-soft-part/NOW-THIS-IS-THE-LOUD-PART thing, and their drummer had a huge thing for b.i.t.c.h Magnet. Vineland played a few shows with them, and the drummer invariably cornered me to ask incredibly picayune questions about Orestes"s drum gear and technique. That year, I"d drive over the Williamsburg Bridge to go drink at Max Fish on a Friday or Sat.u.r.day night, listening to the big FM rock station, and "Stars" would come on. The following Wednesday Vineland would play to a dozen people in a bas.e.m.e.nt in the very pres.e.x and the City Meatpacking District. Hum"s subsequent work went nowhere, but they still squeezed through one of the occasional wormholes in the musical universe and scored a hit big enough to sell a few hundred thousand records.
I didn"t want to be like Hum. I didn"t want the major-label deal. I didn"t want to be a rock star. I didn"t want to get rich. It was a drag to know that bands I didn"t like toured all the time and only returned to their hometowns, glamorously exhausted, to rest and drink and tell road stories until they all got in the van again-maybe even a f.u.c.king bus-for another six-week circuit around the United States or Canada or Europe. I wanted what I called just-enough. I wanted people to hear my band. I wanted to be known and respected. I didn"t want the tour bus. (I did want the van.) All I wanted was just-enough people buying our records, so there was just-enough of an audience to tour ambitiously. Just-enough was probably ten thousand to fifteen thousand people worldwide. Zack Lipez wrote that he wanted Freshkills to be Murder City Devils famous: successful enough to get by on touring seven months a year while bartending a few nights a week when he was at home. Needless to say, neither Freshkills nor Vineland had just-enough. Not even close.
EACH MORNING ON THAT LAST VINELAND TOUR, AS WE headed off to the next city, I saw a vanful of deflated faces and knew better than anyone that nothing would get better that day, or the day after that, or the following week. I started asking, "What, you expected this to be fun?" Often several times a day. Meanwhile, Jerry and Fred were becoming best friends, forming an impenetrably tight circle with its own inside references and van rituals inflicted on everyone else. One of them involved choosing a radio station and keeping it on until the signal faded. Fred and Jerry routinely sought out the worst cla.s.sic rock stations they could find and insisted on singing along to s.p.a.cehog"s "In the Meantime"-the noxious song of the moment-while playing it at top volume. I had a very low threshold for tolerating cla.s.sic rock, not to mention s.p.a.cehog. Which they both knew.
No boss ever experiences the workers" camaraderie. Though the boss at a real job gets certain perks, like making more money. In indie rock the boss loses the most. (As I did.) And it"s especially lonely to lead a band when Daddy can"t feed the family. One lunchtime or dinner, before playing the Bug Jar in Rochester-a venue so idiosyncratic that any band had to split itself up between two tiny stages-I sat alone while my bandmates chose a table across the room. There I marinated in bad vibes, thinking, They"re talking about me. I know they"re f.u.c.king talking about me. Over and over again. Couldn"t make it stop.
In Pittsburgh we played at a coffeehouse, opening for a ferocious and then-obscure trio from Portland called Sleater-Kinney. Someone wrote JON FINE IS A d.i.c.k on the wall in the women"s bathroom. That someone, I learned much later, was probably in my band. But the other indignities of that last tour weren"t colorful enough to make for funny stories, like the time Eggs" Andrew Beaujon, hung over and huddling miserably in his sleeping bag on a long van ride, puked into said sleeping bag. Or the time a barefoot Anne Eickelberg, the ba.s.sist in Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, stepped into a pile of fresh dog s.h.i.t while looking for the bathroom late one night while bunking at an unfamiliar house. Or the time, many years later, when, bereft of any other option, Fred was forced to s.h.i.t in his toolbox while stuck in traffic on a treeless highway during a solo tour. Nothing like that happened to us. And no matter how bad any tour was, you still spotted random dazzlements amid the vast strangenesses of America. In one rest-stop bathroom near Macon, Georgia, unbelievably detailed pre-Craigslist men-seeking-men graffiti instructed interested parties to show up in a specified location and "touch c.o.c.k" to signal interest. While on my way to dinner before the show in Richmond, I paused to light cigarettes for two grateful quadriplegics. And at our last show, in surpa.s.singly depressing Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts, the small crowd went bats.h.i.t. The kind of night in a small town where no one knows you but you make the most unlikely new fans, like a middle-aged auto repair shop owner who for some reason showed up, still wearing his work uniform. I"m sure that show sounded good-wound up tight, p.i.s.sed off and burning. Bands about to break up often do, if they channel the tensions correctly.
By then Fred had quit, after a blowup one night in Georgia, though he agreed to play the shows we"d already booked. A major complication, since he owned the van, and he and Jerry and I all still lived in the same loft. After Fred left, and one bad post-tour practice as a trio, Jerry called a band meeting, at which he very gently announced, "I don"t want to do this anymore."
I was d.i.c.king around with a ba.s.s, to relieve tension. So there it is, I thought. I put the ba.s.s down and said, "Me, too. How about you, Kylie?" Band over. It didn"t take five minutes. I probably went out for a beer afterward, alone. By then Fred and I were barely speaking, and I was ready to avoid Jerry for months. But he wouldn"t let me, and I loved him for it.
WAS VINELAND GOOD? I THOUGHT SO. AND ON THAT LAST tour we reached our peak. Each night onstage Fred and I threw all our frustrations into acts of musical pa.s.sive aggression that somehow worked. Besides our unspoken hostile amplifier standoff every night-I will turn down mine as soon as he turns down his-we each embellished our individual parts more and more without working said bits out with each other, without even listening to each other. Judging by the tape from one of our last shows, a skull-crushingly loud one at the Middle East in Boston, this worked much better than it should have, the songs constantly a.s.suming new shapes before quickly snapping back into the correct forms. But it"s no loss to humanity that the final Vineland alb.u.m remains unreleased, even if it"s the first full alb.u.m Jerry recorded. Once I could stand to listen to it again after he died, I was horrified at how snug a box I had forced his drumming into. Also, I hated my voice. My singing sounded thin and strangulated and nasal-a whine, not a growl-even after I had learned to breathe in time with the music onstage, to have enough air for each line and keep my rhythm in sync with the band. It felt weak, and I grew to despise it.
We"d built the band to my specifications. I wrote the songs, sang them, and had veto power over most aesthetic decisions. (Here I could fault myself for adding too much sentimentality and poppy touches, out of insecurity, but let"s set that aside for now.) I contacted clubs and labels. It didn"t happen for us. If we weren"t as good as the other bands I played in-it"s still hard to think this part through, but sometimes I suspect that"s really the story-and didn"t go as far as they did, any blame goes on me. I know I should be stoic and expect nothing from a band except the joy of the music. I know I should be thrilled I wrote a few songs for Vineland that I"ll sing to myself forever. But Vineland broke me. After we split up, it killed any desire to start a band, which had been my sole animating impulse since I was twelve. And while I still identified as a musician-what else could I be?-I lost much of my appet.i.te for playing music, and all my confidence. I went back to an anonymous cubicle job writing and editing a newsletter with a minuscule readership, halfheartedly played ba.s.s in Alger Hiss, and tried not to think about it too much.
I also realized something important, even if I wasn"t proud of it at all: there were people brave enough, and strong enough, to place all their bets on music, no matter what happened, and I was no longer one of them.
BUT I"VE BEEN DOING ALL THE TALKING, AND THE SUN IS SETTINGting over the Hudson, and Zack is just sitting here.
Zack? Are you heartbroken? Relieved?
"Both," he said, and then doesn"t talk about relief at all. "I"m heartbroken that n.o.body liked my band. I did it for nine years, and n.o.body liked my band.
"I"m not sad to be out of Freshkills," he continued. "I"m sad that n.o.body ever gave a s.h.i.t about any single f.u.c.king thing we ever did. It"s a constant sorrow. I"m going to take it to my grave."
True story: Walter Mondale ran into George McGovern not long after Mondale lost to Reagan in 1984. They had a lot in common. Two liberal senators from prairie states. Two candidates who lost forty-nine states to an aloof Republican opponent they plainly regarded as unworthy. Mondale asked McGovern, who was crushed by Nixon in 1972, "George, how long does it take to get over a big loss like this?" McGovern replied, "I"ll let you know when it happens." Ha-ha-though not really. McGovern repeated this line for the rest of his life, until he died, in 2012.
I didn"t share this with Zack. It"s rather overblown to equate the heartbreak of your band"s failure to the heartbreak of someone convinced he"ll be the next president-and who spent all his time trying to convince everyone else that he would be the next president-but then finds out, very quickly and very definitively, that he never will. But this is how I feel about Vineland, and how I imagine Zack feels about Freshkills. One day I"ll get over it. I"ll let you know when it happens.
I Was Wrong.
But I"m not telling the whole story. Because I missed so much of it while it happened.
I keep saying our world was ascetic, boring, so not-like-rock. So little s.e.x. So few drugs harder than pot. Sometimes I saw this wasn"t quite true.
In the mid-nineties a friend who played in a band in Los Angeles visited New York every few months and we"d hit the bars. He liked to get losing-your-language drunk. After a certain hour, if you heard him on the phone, you"d think he was drooling. That drunk. But just before that he"d suggest, then demand, that we find some c.o.ke. I had no idea how, and always tried to change the subject, but even in a strange city he could pa.r.s.e any room within five minutes: I can"t get c.o.ke here, I can only get E, let"s go. Then he"d tell me about the threesome he had with an icy blonde and a male friend, whom, he insisted on a.s.suring me, he did not touch at all, not even once, during said encounter. But that was L.A. Not New York. Here we dressed badly and burrowed inward. Here we so rarely acted on what we wanted. Our fuel was unfulfilled desire, channeled elsewhere. Right?
Or maybe I wasn"t understanding what was really going on around me. One night I was out late in the East Village, getting drunk with a woman who was also a musician. Pale-skinned, giant eyes, she was everyone"s crush, and I felt fortunate to be there with her and a woman she knew. After the bartender announced last call, we walked toward an apartment, tightly pressed together, with me in the middle. At least that"s how I remember it.
When we arrived, the musician-let"s call her Maroon-sent her friend upstairs and pulled me aside to chat on the street corner. The look on her face suggested she knew secrets and felt far more confident than I did. A confusing conversation, out there at a quarter to four. Confusing to me, at least. Maroon asked me, half-smiling and looking sideways, to come upstairs for a while and then leave. So she"s. .h.i.tting on me, I thought. She recently broke up with her boyfriend-someone I knew, who was also in a band, of course-and I wanted to know if fooling around with me was some rebound or revenge move. I started in on Are you doing this because of him? Looking important and off into the distance, for effect. Taxis drowsed their way up First Avenue, beyond an overflowing orange garbage can. No one else was around.
Then her face rearranged into bewilderment and (I thought) a mocking grin. Maybe you saw this coming, but I didn"t: Maroon was after her friend, not me.
Then why did she want me upstairs at all? I didn"t ask, because I was humiliated that I had misunderstood her, and still felt like I misunderstood what might happen next. I followed her upstairs, gulped half a beer, ran out the door. She protested that I shouldn"t go, but it didn"t sound sincere. I ran past that garbage can, hailed a cab-a luxury in those days-and headed to my practice s.p.a.ce, where I grabbed my guitar, turned my amp way up, closed my eyes, and played until long after sunrise.
Looking back now, I think: threesome. You f.u.c.ked up. But I still don"t know. Do you?
It wasn"t that no one got laid on tour. Once in Detroit, late at night after the show, a musician disappeared to make a quick phone call, came back chuckling, and said he was leaving to visit his cousin. Everyone else rolled their eyes. Because, they knew, he had cousins across the country. All of them women, all of whom he only saw late at night, all of them unknown to his live-in girlfriend.
My friend from L.A. wasn"t the only one who wanted serious drugs. Eventually I realized why the first drummer in a band that would later get famous was so often dazed and distant and falling asleep, even at shows and parties. Or why I once ran into him as he walked west from Avenue C and he laughed and said he was out of money. Sometimes at night I ran into Jim or Travis, which are not their names, when their blue eyes looked especially beautiful. For a long time I didn"t know why: dope had erased their pupils. I last saw Travis one Sunday night around eleven as he packed up his drums. He"d found someone to buy them right then. It was a cla.s.sic, gorgeous old kit from the sixties. Ludwig, maybe, or Gretsch. He might have gotten a hundred bucks. Far less than they were worth, but I think the buyer sensed that it was a distress sale.
One of these guys overdosed and died. Another records himself reading poetry and posts it online. Heroin is very bad for you.
In Six Finger Satellite"s early days, half the band were junkies. Even on tour. Which, by the way: crazy. How can you feed a habit when your band makes two hundred bucks a night? For one thing, their drummer Rick Pelletier told me, someone was FedExing dope to them as they traveled the country. (Important to note: Rick was not one of the junkies.) "We"d go to some mom-and-pop indie record store and say, "Is there a package here for Six Finger Satellite?"" Rick said. "The unknowing counter person would say, "Yes, there is." It was filled with drugs. Which would then be taken very quickly."
"Quickly you resort to stealing," admitted Juan MacLean, who was one of the addicts. "Even from the other guys in the band. J. [Six Finger"s singer J. Ryan] caught me breaking into his apartment." J. was also one of Juan"s closest friends. Previously Juan admitted to a different technique to solving a different dope-on-the-road problem: when faced with border crossings, he hid his drugs in his bandmates" suitcases. Anyway, Six Finger was on tour, had just played a show, and they all were bunking at some punk rock house. Late that night or early the next morning, a resident did dope and turned blue. Panic. "Someone wanted to call 911. I said, You"re not calling," said Juan. "I remember unplugging the phone." Luckily that resident lived. When Six Finger Satellite got back from that tour, the other guys dropped off Juan and the other junkie, fired them both, and told them never to contact the rest of the band again. Juan went to rehab and got clean, which is why he"s still making records. The other guy didn"t. He died.
Not everybody was in the monastery. Many of us had a crooked-grinning, slippery side and locked ourselves in bathrooms or snuck over to Avenue D when no one was looking. And, really, it was okay, because you could convince yourself that everybody did it. Everybody needed their cousins. Everybody wanted a taste of something sweet before turning out the light in their tiny rooms, and a dollar brownie or a carrot juice from the corner deli wasn"t doing it anymore.
I knew you could get by on crumbs while living this life, as long as sometimes a woman"s in your room at 4 a.m., or a few bartenders or baristas or taco stand employees slide you free drinks and food, or, occasionally, an excited fan stops you on the street. These made up for the times you checked the bank account on the first of the month, rent due, and saw you had $97, made up for wearing the same shabby clothes for years, made up for buying canned tuna only when it went on sale. You"d be amazed how sustaining those little moments were. You could live off any of them for another week, easy. Until they stopped happening.
I thought music alone could feed us forever, but it turned out to be too slender a diet. I thought we were about opposition. I thought this was us and them-them being the big-time music biz and commercial radio. I thought we were supposed to keep fighting. But how long could you accept your half-a.s.sed lot of being fanzine-famous-no, just fanzine-known-and kind of starving? Was this why the standard indie rock emotional response was to duck your head, avert eye contact, not admit to wanting anything-because you were never going to get it? Were twee bands here because adulthood meant adult desires that the world would never satisfy?
I saw more and more bands in which no one onstage seemed to be trying. They looked like they didn"t give a s.h.i.t, and not in the interesting way: the way a waiter at an indifferent cafe at 4 p.m. doesn"t give a s.h.i.t. I"d see them and think, Why are you doing this? One night I saw Helium when Mary Timony played with her then-boyfriend Ash from Polvo. I loved Helium"s early records, and Timony"s track record offers plenty of evidence that she"s a serious bada.s.s. But live, that night, the two of them were so sleepy and uninvolved I was like, Christ, you two. Take a nap. They both seemed exhausted-in the sense of having nothing left to offer-and absolutely without joy, or vitality, or s.e.x, or much of anything, really. I went to see Bugskull-excited, because I adored their singles-and watched the singer shamble through the set, simpering, unable to meet the audience"s eyes. He kept telescoping his head into his shoulders, like a turtle; he kept shrinking back from the microphone and the lip of the stage. I left disgusted. Couldn"t anyone pretend to believe a tiny bit in what they were doing? Move beyond the rut of modesty and understatement that we stuck with so long it became its own cliche? After ten or fifteen years all our indie rock modesty and seriousness only meant: no pleasure. Not much hope. No fun at all. A sameness had descended on a culture once so sprawling and uncategorizable. So remind me again: why were we here?
I found myself thinking, I wish I could quit. I"d have money in the bank. Wouldn"t be p.i.s.sed off all the time. Life would be easier, I knew, if I could just f.u.c.king stop. But I couldn"t. Even after Vineland fell apart. "I don"t mean to be melodramatic, but there are times when it feels like an affliction. A terminal illness. You"re never going to get rid of it," Tim Midyett, the ba.s.sist from Silkworm, once told me.
I couldn"t let go. Not yet, anyway. I wore the same T-shirts over and over again. The same flannel shirts until they frayed off my back. And suddenly you were in your thirties. You hadn"t worked at a real job in years, unlike your old pals from college. Some of them still made a fuss over your band and sometimes came out to see you play. (At least on weekends. Not many made it out during the week anymore.) To them, you were interesting. Maybe even famous-ish. But they were married. Some had kids. Jobs became careers. Meanwhile, you knew some things they didn"t. Your record sales had plateaued, or were shrinking. Your crowds and guarantees weren"t getting bigger. You played the same clubs in Berlin or Minneapolis or San Francisco or Dublin each tour, and each time you saw the same faces. Aging faces. Suddenly the crowd was older. (Were you, too? It dawned on you: yes.) You"d stare out at the crowd and think, Maybe this is as big as it gets. Or Maybe a few years ago was as big as it gets. You still swore up and down you"d never sign to a major label, but this wasn"t exactly a choice. They stopped being interested a long time ago. If they ever were. So what the f.u.c.k do you do?
No, really. What the f.u.c.k do you do?
BY THE MID-NINETIES THINKING FELLERS UNION LOCAL 282 had been around almost a decade. They"d released four impressively sprawling and idiosyncratic alb.u.ms on Matador. A fervent fanbase adored them. They got reams of great press. They also played the same clubs each tour, and they toured a lot, and were all well into their thirties, surviving on a band salary that peaked at seven hundred bucks a month. Then, in 1995, they got an offer to tour with the dreadful band Live, back when Live was one of the biggest bands in the world. According to their ba.s.sist Anne Eickelberg, this is how that went: We kept saying, "We want to tour with bigger bands. Let"s get more exposure." People kept coming up with really insane things. Like "You want to tour with Toad the Wet Sprocket?" Where does that even come from? Then: Live. We didn"t know who Live were. But then we were like, let"s just do it.
It was a full tour. Twenty-something shows across the country. Secondary markets, mostly. Total test of character, because the audiences f.u.c.king despised us. We got stuff thrown at us all the time. Kids just screaming, "You suck!" for a whole set. Sometimes it was like a high that you could ride, because it was just so ridiculous. In his tour diary Brian [Hageman, her bandmate] said something like "We"re standing there looking like their f.u.c.king mom and dad, and we"re the obstacle between them and Live, so they"re really, really angry about it." But you"d be done super early, go back to catering, have really amazing food, have people move all your s.h.i.t for you. Play a half-hour set and get paid a lot of money.
It was great fodder for future conversations. We played an outdoor venue in Knoxville, and after our set one guy in Live nonchalantly came up to me and said, "I cracked the window on the tour bus. You guys sounded all right." Another day he breezed up to us in catering, shoved Billboard at us, and pointed, so we could see that Live"s record had reached number one: "Just showing this to you because I can." We were also there to see the delivery of their matching robes, which had the alb.u.m logo on them.
But we knew within a couple days: there"s no way we could ever do this. We"re too weird. We"re not right. This will not happen.
Other bands found that the world had stopped caring. Mudhoney"s third alb.u.m on Warner Brothers, Tomorrow Hit Today, came out in 1998, and sold roughly a tenth as many copies as their earlier records. Sebadoh released The Sebadoh in 1999 to what Lou Barlow describes as the open disdain of their label, Sub Pop. It sold a fraction of the band"s previous releases, and Sebadoh toured in front of a rapidly disappearing audience. "Our last show in that cycle," Barlow recalled, "was playing to like twenty-five people at the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas. A place we had sold out a year before." The Gypsy Tea Room"s capacity? Approximately seven hundred. Barlow now shrugs, "I just thought, Message received."
Meanwhile, the real estate and stock market boom during President Clinton"s second term reshaped the American city. Which is a dry and academic way to say that, as happens to every generation, cheap neighborhoods became unaffordable as demand kicked in for real estate in the places we helped gentrify. Beginning in 1992, Unrest"s Mark Robinson lived in a house about five miles from Washington, D.C., at 715 North Wakefield Street in Arlington, Virginia, and ran his label Teen-Beat from there, too. He and some fellow musicians rented it for virtually nothing. Andrew Beaujon of Eggs recalls paying $234 a month, a bargain good enough to overlook the rats that lived there, too. Eventually the landlord offered-slash-demanded: buy this house for $135,000. Which, for the residents, might as well have been three million bucks. (At its peak, Robinson said, Unrest was a full-time job for its members and paid them twelve grand a year. In Beaujon"s highest-grossing year as a more or less full-time musician, he made about $9,000.) The denizens of Teen-Beat House were evicted at the end of August 1998. The house sold for $160,000 the next month, sold again for $381,000 in July 1999, and in 2005 sold for $857,000. In other words, the featureless, poorly maintained, and frankly unattractive group house where underemployed indie rockers dodged rats is now probably a million-dollar home. The same happened in neighborhoods we all could afford in the nineties: Silver Lake in Los Angeles, the Mission in San Francisco, the East Village and Lower East Side of Manhattan, Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village in Chicago. As always, artists and musicians didn"t leave those cities en ma.s.se. They got pushed to other neighborhoods, or Philadelphia. But losing your cheap foothold in your chosen city tends to inspire reflection.
"I got kicked out of Teen-Beat House and moved to a much more expensive house," Robinson said. "A lot of record stores were closing or had already closed. It seemed like the whole thing was disappearing." He moved to Boston, took his first full-time job, got married, and essentially closed the book on being an active touring musician. Among the bands we knew, stories like his played out endlessly. In 1996 Thinking Fellers quit touring. "I just felt like I was on this accelerating train, and I better jump off pretty soon and learn how to do stuff that could help me stay alive," Eickelberg said. Sooyoung"s band Seam released their final alb.u.m in 1998 and broke up in 2000. "I was a math major," said an ever-succinct Sooyoung. "The numbers didn"t add up." Orestes left Walt Mink in early 1997, after the band got dropped by its second major label. Disgusted, he quit music, packed up his gorgeous wine-red Yamaha drum kit we both loved, enrolled in the University of Arizona, and began working toward a masters in engineering.
THEN IT WAS 2000. I WAS THIRTY-TWO. I STARTED DETUNING my guitars to C-lower means heavier-but wasn"t sure what else to do with them. I had no band. I had no job. I lived in Williamsburg in a third-floor walk-up apartment filthy from years of grime and neglect, a baked-in filthiness you couldn"t scrub away. My living room was eye level with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. (Some people who live very near a highway will tell you the road sounds eventually become a soothing white noise, like the ocean, or a summer breeze through leafy trees. They"re wrong.) At night a fast-moving stream of red brake lights zipped past, so close that, when the wind was right, you could spit from the living room onto pa.s.sing cars. When trucks pa.s.sed, the entire building trembled. An endless stream of soot crept past the decaying window frames, whether the windows were open or shut, and settled on the floors, blackening socks and feet. The only sink was in the kitchen, so you brushed your teeth over unwashed dishes. I watched mice hang out across from the desk where I attempted to eke out a living as a freelance writer. They huddled beneath the radiator, bobbing up and down as they breathed, staring at me. I stared back. Some afternoons that was it. That was all that went on in the apartment.
I never thought I had good game with women, but a few had s.e.x with me after seeing this place, so maybe it was better than I thought.
Manhattan was unrecognizable. Cell phones sprouted out of everyone"s right hand, except mine. Back in Brooklyn, my musician friends got their first decent jobs, started spending $200 on jeans, and knew all the new restaurants. What I spent on clothes each year was enough for a couple new pairs of black Levi"s-505s, thirty bucks at Ca.n.a.l Jean-and band T-shirts I bought at shows. No one else still wore black jeans, and mine were all a little too baggy and caught in the no-man"s-land between "still black" and "nicely faded." My hand-me-down dresser was packed with ill-fitting extra-large T-shirts. The size we all bought in the eighties and early nineties because why? I refused to cut my thinning hair. I had great hair in my twenties-those long, springy curls that went halfway down my back. I grew it out when I went-in my mind, at least-from loserdom to belongingness. I thought it made me cool. I thought it made me attractive. But the top was getting spa.r.s.e, and the look was getting very Ben Franklin. In my bad clothes, in my bad hair, I thought, Where was my tribe? I felt homeless. And was coming close to dressing the part.
One afternoon in the spring of 2000, looking forward to celebrating a friend"s birthday that night, I realized that I was out of money. I lived from check to check, but sometimes they came late. There was, basically, nothing in the bank or in my wallet. I called my girlfriend Anne Marie at work for a very unpleasant conversation. I"m glad I don"t remember it. But that weekend she sat me down at the rickety, stained kitchen table wedged next to the radiator, a pad in one hand and a pen in the other, and demanded to know my debts and income. The latter was pretty bad. This was when I would labor a week on a lengthy music piece for an alternative weekly, which would pay about a hundred and fifty bucks. (If I was lucky, I resold it and earned another hundred.) The debts were much worse. Close to twenty grand on credit cards, with interest rates approaching 20 percent. Also a four-figure sum I owed to the IRS.
Anne Marie stared at me from across the table. A tiny Filipina who worked at a sports magazine, she"d gotten a late start in journalism, but she was ambitious and worked harder and longer than anyone else I"d met. She knew a bit about music, and my being a musician once made me more interesting than the other guys pursuing her. We fell madly in bed with each other, as the saying goes, she essentially moved in before we knew each other at all, and we had lots of s.e.x, until we didn"t.
She had such a beautiful face, but there was no love left in her eyes and it was hard to meet her gaze. When I looked down, I saw the stained tabletop and the sheet of paper with her neat columns of numbers.
Sometimes you see exactly who you are. I was no better off than any embittered sad-sack rock guy working for the one record store in his small town, the guy with receding hair and a belly that hung over his jeans a little more each day. The guy who had essentially stopped trying.
It was time to give in. The cost of living like this was way too high.
The first day of my first real job in a very long time was June 6, 2000, when I started working as a reporter for a magazine called Advertising Age. Anne Marie was so plainly happy about this that it felt good being around her again, judging from the few photos taken of us that summer. She and I didn"t last through autumn. (Sometimes it"s only a few months from "you"re the best thing that ever happened to me" to "I don"t want to do this anymore," but that"s another story.) But by then I had a steady paycheck, something to do, and somewhere to go every day. What a surprise to discover how comforting that routine could be. I had been fired six and a half weeks into my last real job, and while that memory and the nerves every new employee experiences sometimes soured my stomach and kept me up at night, soon I felt the everyday satisfactions of doing a job well enough: a small sense of mastery, an understanding of what was required, a degree of confidence that you could do it. The relief of having found a place. A few months into that job, I started another band.
I was alone again, but the early aughts were a very good time to be single in New York. It was time to try hedonism for a change.
This Is Me, I"m Dancing, and I Like It.
Maybe this part starts in the small living room with a stage where the pirate radio station put on shows. An illegal and unpermitted venue in the middle of a quiet block in Brooklyn, above which a movie-set view of the Williamsburg Bridge loomed. A gargoyle hung from the building"s faade. To enter, you walked up a narrow staircase that squeaked and groaned until you arrived in a compact but perfect s.p.a.ce, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet. Getting in cost about five bucks. The lights were dim, and all the walls were white. I don"t know who built the stage, but it was elevated, framed by a proscenium, and looked absolutely natural up against the front window, as if it had been there forever. There were a couple of street-sized plastic trash cans filled with ice, bearing bodega beers on sale for a buck or two. The lighting was low and, like everything else there, effortless. Shows happened here for years. Very strange bands played. Women in the audience churned their hips like washing machines to whatever crazy, noisy destruction was onstage. You had to load in your gear up that flight of stairs, but even so it was one of my favorite places to play, anywhere. I wish I had some photos, because it still feels like we dreamed it.
Or maybe it starts at Rubulad, the very long-running party that, by the time I went, had moved to the enormous Brooklyn bas.e.m.e.nt of a grimy and unremarkable building across from the bridge. If "bas.e.m.e.nt" sounds close and claustrophobic, then I"m not expressing the scale correctly. Imagine a gymnasium. Maybe even two. Parties at Rubulad sprawled into many rooms, and outdoors, and onto a tar-papered roof. The dance floor was as big as a basketball court. Just past it was the room where you could buy a green-gray goop with resiny black flecks said to be absinthe, which was still illegal, and gave you a drunk mingled with the whizzing feeling you got from E and hangovers that made your entire face hurt. In another room there were pot brownies.
But maybe it starts in the side hallway to Plant Bar, its de facto backstage, amid stacks of Sheetrock and plywood and piled-up refuse, where friends drank and sometimes broke laws governing the possession and use of certain substances.
If you knew where to look in the first years of this century, New York was full of places where all rules were suspended. It was a great gift to be permitted a second adolescence here, at the last possible moment, while I was in my early thirties: still young enough to have both a real job and the stamina to arrange each week around nightlife. (It was also the last era in which you could hide being in a band from everyone at work.) A real-er job meant that you had a bit more coin, and in 2000 you could live really well in Williamsburg on a thirty-year-old"s creative-cla.s.s salary-with your own apartment, nights out in bars and restaurants, ample street parking for your beater used car-as the neighborhood offered up its last gasps of wildness. There was no better place to stage your last years of being single. Musician pals were suddenly DJs, and dance floors filled with women grinding into you-a miracle after decades spent in s.e.xless and body-denying indie rock. The discovery that dance music was body music, wasn"t always twee and poppy, and could be as visceral and reptile brainbased as heavy metal. The realization that there was nothing wrong with pleasure. A huge relief, after over fifteen years in an underground that seemed entirely uninterested in it, where bands felt that the correct thing to do, when a song became popular or even liked, was to stop playing it live. My bands did that. My friends" bands did that. We loved doing it-being what a pal once called a band that doesn"t give you what you want. Around 2000, though, a different New York. A different culture. A different audience, younger and incredibly adventurous, all of whom dressed way better than the record-store clerks who set the fashion template for my generation. (Another revelation: jeans that fit.) A band like Black Dice-so abstract as to approximate musique concrete, whose performances reliably exceeded 120 decibels-routinely drew hundreds to gigs at one-off semi-legal s.p.a.ces on the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick or Greenpoint and Queens. Music that was "difficult"-which generally means "not at all song-based"-coexisted with the joy-seeking you"d expect to find among postgraduate art kids who discovered drugs and underused warehouse s.p.a.ces big enough for circuses. Parties lasted past sunrise, so deep in the boroughs" underpopulated industrial outskirts that you sometimes saw rabbits or racc.o.o.ns dashing down the streets.
Like all lovely collisions between art and music in New York, that time is now over. But it lasted far longer than I ever thought possible. Some reading this will argue that these days were far removed from Williamsburg"s true wild years, when the neighborhood was desolate, wholly inhospitable to outsiders, legitimately lawless, and dirt-cheap, which I believe means you could get by without having any sort of job. They"re probably right. But how about we just talk about the neighborhood bar that openly sold cocaine?
Which some genius named Kokie"s Place.
Where some genius hung out an awning that read KOKIE"S PLACE, an awning that presided, in fading glory, over an increasingly well-trafficked stretch of Berry Street. I first heard about Kokie"s at a rooftop party in 1999. Three of us went the following Sat.u.r.day night. (I left first, around 7:30 the next morning.) Chatter claimed it had been named for the coqu tree frog found in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Kokie"s-no one used the second word-sold $2 mini-bottles of Budweiser, those tiny seven-ouncers you can disappear in a gulp without even trying. Two giant yellow Igloo coolers filled with ice water sat on either side of the bar. Call me crazy, but I felt that more profit was generated in the "DJ booth," where a "DJ"-always a very large man who did not appear to enjoy his work-would open the door, accept your twenty, and palm off a tiny clear or blue plastic bag. Crucially, Kokie"s also provided a curtained-off area in the back room for snarfling up the goods, though "curtained-off" sounds fancier than what it was: a framed-out closet behind a shower curtain or a stained baby blanket. A bouncer-also very large and unhappy-controlled access. Five or six people could cram in there, if you really smushed into each other, and you did, getting all up in some stranger"s s.p.a.ce as if in a packed subway car, your face inches from theirs, both of you with a housekey halfway up a nostril and snuffling like warthogs. Interesting conversations were struck up here, and interesting connections forged. A friend still swears he once did b.u.mps alongside a mother and her daughter. Such moments were part of Kokie"s charm, though these were secondary to the charm of Kokie"s openly selling cheap cocaine.
What tickles me to this day is how the large, unhappy bouncers got extremely agitated if you did c.o.ke in the bathroom, instead of in the closet in the back room, and threw you out tout de suite if they caught you. This made Kokie"s something like the exact obverse of every other bar in the city. As the mornings wore on, condensation beaded on the oozy paint-a kind I seem to see only in south Williamsburg, which always looks sticky-that covered Kokie"s walls, in dark reds and urinary yellows. Two small windows in the front room were always tightly shuttered, although if you got right up next to them, you saw daylight around the edges, because it was eight in the morning and you"d been there for six hours.
The consensus was that Kokie"s sold horrifyingly bad c.o.ke, but whatever it was, it worked. Once you got past the lengthy catalog of implied threats that its unsmiling staffers broadcast, everyone at Kokie"s was happy, social, beaming. Sweating Latinas danced endlessly to whatever music was playing. (Allegedly a live salsa band performed in the early evenings and on Sunday afternoons, but I never saw it. It"s a point of pride that I never went to Kokie"s for brunch or dinner.) Strangers talked to one another. Lord Jesus, did they talk. Management kept the lights low-mercifully-but not so low that, after 4 or 5 a.m., you could avoid noticing that the lips of the person chattering at you were ringed with dried spittle. But I got very quiet, very internal, when doing c.o.ke. I liked listening to my pulse pounding in my ears, and running the tip of my tongue over my front teeth to determine how numb they were. Those two data points, I believed, provided highly accurate readings of exactly How High I Was At That Moment, and whether or not it was time to queue up again for the curtained room.
My first night there I met a wiry Latino I will call Orlando, who had a thin mustache, long hair, and mournful eyes. He wore a wifebeater, a few thin gold chains, and a straight-brimmed Yankees cap. He did his c.o.ke off a black Bic-pen cap, after bending the last sixteenth of an inch of its thin plastic tongue to make a mini c.o.ke scoop. It looked like he knew what he was doing, and I was impressed. But Orlando was generally worried, and as the night wore on he got worse. I tried talking to him about it, but communication was difficult. I was c.o.ked up and very terse, and he seemed able to discuss only two things: 1.various unnamed people who were very unfriendly, and 2.that they would beat the absolute s.h.i.t out of you if you displeased them.
Or that"s what I think he was discussing. He never quite completed his sentences: Orlando: Man, they, you know, they just . . . [Shakes head.]
Me: I know. Yeah. I know. I know. [Runs tongue over front teeth. Eyes dart.]
Orlando: And if they don"t like you, man, they just . . . [Shakes head. Looks down.]
Me: [Nodding quickly.] Yeah. Yeah. [I jerk my head toward the c.o.ke closet, because there"s no line. Orlando, my friend, and I slip behind the curtain. My friend offers a b.u.mp off his key. Orlando shakes his head and goes back to his pen cap, still worried.]
You might suspect that terrible things routinely happened at Kokie"s, but people understood the parameters and obeyed, perhaps because plenty of muscle was in view. Kokie"s had been around since the eighties and lasted a preposterously long time even after becoming commonly known among the hipster sets in several cities. It existed just before smartphones and social networks became ubiquitous, although, Jesus, I can"t imagine that the bouncers would have countenanced customers playing with iPhones. (I don"t recall seeing a cell phone in use there, ever, and sure as h.e.l.l never touched mine.) Newcomers kept showing up each weekend-stifling gleeful giggles upon entering-and word spread. Soon local publications like Time Out New York and New York Press ran unmistakable veiled references to it. I think I saw Kokie"s named outright in a review somewhere that concluded with a sentence along the lines of "I hope it never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever closes." Though it did, of course. A bar called the Levee now stands in its place.
Under no circ.u.mstances will I suggest that it"s a good idea to do drugs, and-oh, G.o.d, I can"t say that, who am I kidding? Even if I have good friends who lost years to drugs and almost died. This time was a useful way station, one that helped clear out bad feelings and old habits. It changed the way I walked. It was very not-indie-rock in spirit, in its hedonism and in its moral indefensibility. As a friend of mine says, when you buy c.o.ke, you"re never more than two people removed from the guy with the machine gun. But moral indefensibility was the point. As was realizing, sometimes, I needed my cousins, too. Though I"m glad all this happened during my early thirties, after I"d had years of therapy and developed a decent sense of myself, and not ten or fifteen years earlier, when I knew much less. I don"t know if I would have come and gone so quickly had I known about Kokie"s then.
EVERY STORY IN NEW YORK CITY IS A REAL ESTATE STORY, AND everything I could tell you about what we saw and did in the Brooklyn that"s now considered "Brooklyn" is how much of it took place within cracks in the pavement. Illegal or forgotten s.p.a.ces, like Kokie"s or the pirate radio station or warehouses in areas blissfully ignored by all authorities, where something strange and free arose. If you knew how to look, great treasures still lurked in plain sight. I rented a practice s.p.a.ce in a narrow warren of bas.e.m.e.nt practice s.p.a.ces. At our entrance the staircase leading up was covered with plywood and padlocked shut to prevent us lowly musicians from wandering through the building. But the skinny and cunning among us found we could slide through the stairway bars, so we did, and held secret Fourth of July gatherings up on the roof, because it was a tall building one block from the water with an absolutely clear view of the fireworks over the East River. We stood there, slightly stoned, sipping beers, underneath the brilliant display, in the glory of a quiet, private s.p.a.ce amid a mad celebration. The last street wh.o.r.es of north-side Williamsburg-a brutally low rung of the trade-worked this block well into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Neighborhood rumors claimed that their clients were truckers and Hasids. Also on that block, for a few weeks or maybe even months, a cracked-out guy spent evenings shadowboxing beneath a streetlight across the street as we walked by, hefting our guitar cases, or loaded out for gigs. Some nights he chalked graffiti onto the sidewalk and pavement, bragging about himself, the great boxing champion. All stuck around even as the gentrifying forces of new construction and rising rents kept marching in, faster and faster. In the summers you saw skin and flesh and skimpy summer dresses and short shorts everywhere, nipples visible beneath tank tops, and it was wonderful, it was awful, the heat was relentless, you felt every breath in your crotch. I remember one white-trash-themed party, the dancing grindy and pelvic and plainly voracious. I thought, again, Good G.o.d, why didn"t we dance in the nineties? Boys left the dance floor with hard-ons straining their jeans. A haze of desire hung in the air. I heard someone say he was waiting for everyone to start f.u.c.king so he could go jack off in the corner. I wasn"t single, and my girlfriend was out of town, but I walked home alone, quickly, sweating, ablaze with desire, feasting on the images. Once home, I left the lights off, got into bed, pounded on myself, and went to sleep in my hot, under-air-conditioned apartment, the window fan roaring by my head.
It wasn"t all happy faces, and dancing to lose yourself, and the wonderment of a new New York opening its arms and legs. A tightly coiled angry kid still remained in me. But even he could learn new tricks. A different way to be with music. The epiphany of a crowded dance floor: a mosh pit"s much more fun if girls are there, too. And once again there was a great and simple happiness in playing guitar. I returned to standard tuning-E-A-D-G-B-E-and I"d been away from it for so long that it, too, had become new again. At night I rented movies-the strangest stuff I could find, or the Herzog or Kurosawa cla.s.sics I hadn"t seen-popped them into the VCR I could finally afford, watched them on the TV that sat directly on my linoleum floor, leaned back on my scavenged couch, and moved my hands around my guitar, playing as abstractedly as possible, responding only to the images, hoping to get to parts unknown.
IN NOVEMBER 2000, WHILE b.u.mPING ALONGSIDE THE BEDFORD Avenue portion of the New York Marathon, I ran into my old friend Kevin Shea, an eccentric, ethereal dude and a very bent and powerful jazz drummer. He had just moved to New York with his girlfriend. He suggested we get together and play. I told him, sure, and did nothing. But Kevin kept calling.
A couple of weeks later I went to see some bands on a Friday night at another semi-legal venue and showed up wearing a Magma T-shirt. A guy named Jeff noticed and proceeded to talk my ear off about music.
Jeff Winterberg was short, scrawny, excitable, and funny. He knew his stuff, from hardcore to all manner of weird seventies prog. He, too, had played in bands-Antioch Arrow was the best known-and was an even bigger music nerd than me, which was saying something. A dim lightbulb went on as we spoke. I left with his phone number and e-mail address.
I called him that Sunday-it took him a long time to get to the phone because, he explained later, he was quite stoned-and told him I knew a drummer and we should all get together. He asked if he should bring a guitar or a ba.s.s. I hadn"t thought about it, and when I told him to bring either, he paused and said he"d bring the ba.s.s. On my way out the door, almost as an afterthought, I grabbed my looping pedal. We met at the rehearsal s.p.a.ce and plugged in. Kevin started pummeling one of his sideways, spasmlike drum solos-but it never ended. Jeff joined in with something fluid and note-y on the ba.s.s, and just like that I was playing a music I"d never played before. Looped and layered, extended solos, note-based, and not much chording. Very filigreed and very dense at the same time, without a single acknowledgment of standard rock structures. If this wasn"t what the MC5 meant when they talked about "free," it should have been.
After a half hour straight of playing purely nonlinear music that somehow held together, we stopped and stared at each other with dazed joy and disbelief: the kind of look your new girlfriend gives you when she realizes how good you are in bed. We took the name Coptic Light. We did not play easy music. There were no vocals, our songs often exceeded ten minutes, few parts repeated, and our drummer basically soloed the entire time. (As did our ba.s.sist and guitarist, come to think of it.) Also, we were really, really f.u.c.king loud. I often played through two half stacks, each powered by a four-input Hiwatt Custom 100-still my favorite amps, and absolute beasts for volume. Jeff constantly had to upgrade his ba.s.s rig just to be heard, and we blew out more speakers in our first couple of years than all my other bands combined.
Coptic Light let us all forget any rules of formatted music-that tyranny of leaving s.p.a.ce for the vocal line, and even the tyranny of verse and chorus. Ignoring every single rule felt magical, given how indie rock was now nothing if not rule-governed. I loved how it gave us license to be completely unreasonable aesthetically, so long as we all agreed. Our early years were the most fun I had playing music as a grown-up. I spent my days working at magazines, torturing blocks of text, and it was such a relief to come to the practice s.p.a.ce, set up, turn the lights down, and blast away at something having absolutely nothing to do with words or structure. To depend entirely, for a few hours, on the other side of my brain. Some nights the music gave me a buzz so strong that I wanted to leave my loops running, unplug my guitar, and pirouette. The long solos, which at last I could finally play, the open-ended lengths to many parts of our songs-I would have f.u.c.king hated Coptic Light when I was a hardcore kid, and that realization filled me with glee.
It was different now, being in a band. Having a serious job made twice-weekly practices challenging, though not impossible. (That tighter schedule also lent focus.) I liked Kevin and Jeff well enough, but it was clear we wouldn"t be best friends, and that was fine, too. I didn"t need my band to be my family and my gang anymore. I wanted Coptic Light to be a democracy, in part because being so busy at work kept me from taking over. For the first few years we taped every practice-literally taped, on ca.s.settes. Songwriting involved listening to everything we improvised and then-painstakingly, piecemeal-a.s.sembling bits to make rough song structures. In theory, a novel experiment. In practice, a huge pain, because anyone could veto anything, and did. Bands don"t really work when they"re communal endeavors. They require leaders. Veto equality exacerbated personality mismatches and led to friction-I"m sorry, "creative differences"-that eventually chafed badly. But I was now old enough, and settled enough, that my world didn"t depend solely on my band.
For a few years plenty happened to keep us interested. The American label No Quarter put out our CDs, as did Dot Line Circle in j.a.pan. We went to j.a.pan twice, which was a huge deal to us, as hardly anyone we knew toured there in the eighties and nineties. Those tours were pure delight-a country as sheer visual abstraction-and the crowds were more receptive to our very strange thing than they were back home. In Coptic Light"s last eighteen months we played more shows in Tokyo than in New York, where we primarily performed in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, often in those semi-legal, illegal, or temporary s.p.a.ces. That pirate radio station. An old garment factory, converted into an arts s.p.a.ce. The upstairs annex to a bar on Kent Avenue, which, according to neighborhood legend, was won by its owner in a poker game. The back room of an extremely sketchy dive bar. Trashed loft living rooms, in buildings that seemed minutes from the wrecking ball. Not every venue had a stage, so bands often set up on the floor, sometimes in the middle of the floor. Being surrounded by the crowd was thrilling, as it was thrilling to be doing something new, and to be around something new, as you moved deeper into your thirties.
We lasted until 2006, amid another good era for music in New York. Bands like LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture and !!! and Interpol got the most attention, but so much more excellence lurked below: Battles, Orthrelm, Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance, Turing Machine, Sightings, Zs, a million others. A pleasing jumble of everything mashed together in the practice-s.p.a.ce complex where most of us rehea.r.s.ed: krautrock, metal, art, dance beats, punk rock, synths. Doors opened, and spring breezes wafted in. One night a new, mostly vocal band opened for Coptic Light and Battles at North Six. All I knew was that a friend from a coffee shop sang and played guitar for them. He had a huge beard, a huge afro, and, I found out that night, a voice like an angel. Kyp Malone"s band TV on the Radio wouldn"t stay an opener for long.
It might have been my birthday. I don"t even know. But they gave me an E, and I went f.u.c.king crazy, and I had the best time ever. I came up on "Tomorrow Never Knows," which is my favorite childhood song. I open my eyes, and some really hot girl is grinding on me, and all my friends are cheering, and I"m like, "Why did I not do this all the time?" It made me realize, "I"m dancing. I know I"m on a drug, and I know the drug is lowering my inhibitions. But this is me, I"m dancing, and I like it." When it was over, I wasn"t like, "What did I do?" I was like, "This was f.u.c.king awesome." After that, I went dancing everywhere. I was comfortable for the first time ever.
-James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem, Pony, Speedking, co-founder of DFA Records NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAYS, VERY FEW PEOPLE ATTENDED the earliest DFA parties. The history books will likely get that part wrong. Though those history books will say-correctly-that those events started something: a party that became a label that became a thing and ultimately vaulted LCD Soundsystem into the Top Ten and onto the stage of a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Here"s what I remember: before one early DFA party a pal a.s.sembled a bulk order of ecstasy. He called E "the Amba.s.sador" and sent everyone an e-mail. Subject line: THE AMBa.s.sADOR"S KEYNOTE ADDRESS. It informed us that the Amba.s.sador would be speaking the following weekend; tickets were $25 and could be picked up at his apartment. I maneuvered into his cramped kitchen for mine and saw baggies full of pills piled on the table. It looked like a mobile narcotics lab. It looked like pictures from a pamphlet published in the seventies that warned parents about drugs. The phone kept ringing, and people came and went.
It was very good E. Later, at the party, a friend"s girlfriend pa.s.sed out for a bit, and I watched him halfheartedly fanning her face with a T-shirt or a towel while continuing an animated conversation in the opposite direction. Shortly afterward I was on the dance floor, and Sigue Sigue Sputnik"s "Love Missile F1-11" came on. A band, and a song, I always hated. But tonight it sounded insistent, speedy, early-digital: brilliant. And I thought, THIS IS THE GREATEST SONG OF ALL TIME!