Sometimes at a work-related gathering it comes out that I"ve played in bands for over twenty years, and that one of them recently reunited to perform in Europe and Asia and America. And necks inevitably straighten and heads tilt, and a fiftyish fund manager or lawyer or media executive or management consultant will ask the name of that band, and sometimes, as soon as I say "b.i.t.c.h Magnet," the gravity shifts, and any power of being this specimen-an actual rock musician who actually toured and put out actual records and CDs, back when people actually did that!-diminishes. You see it register, and then see mirth.
This is what it sounds like: What?
Oh.
Oh! Ohhhh! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
b.i.t.c.h Magnet? b.i.t.c.h? Magnet?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!
After all these years of playing music, and as a grown man now myself, I understand this reaction. b.i.t.c.h Magnet is kind of a silly name! But the person who laughs isn"t laughing like a pal who had also been a teenage punk rocker and, as such, laughs from knowing. This person who laughs doesn"t understand. This person who laughs is laughing because-briefly-this person feels superior. In Pa.s.sover seder terms, this is the son who doesn"t even know how to ask a question: What is this? As such, the Haggadah instructs us, he should be treated with patience.
But sometimes I feel like, enough already. And what I want to do more than anything is smile through my anger, maybe chuckling a little bit myself-Heh heh heh heh heh-then say to the person who laughs: I wish you"d seen, and heard, the amazing things I did because I was in bands.
I wish you"d seen, and heard, the amazing things I did because I spent all those years in punk rock clubs.
I"m sorry you never had a moment in which the dim candle flare of discovery suddenly became apparent to a few musicians locked away from the rest of the world in a soundproofed practice studio. Or a moment like the ones I glimpsed alone, at home in my tiny studio apartment in 1993 or 1994, kneeling on the carpet next to my 4-track-its red RECORD light blazing-singing quietly so the neighbors couldn"t hear, into a microphone clutched hard in both hands, suddenly dead certain, after groping blindly for hours, that I"d picked the lock and stepped through a doorway to a moment of pure glory.
I wish, at least once, you"d known how it felt when people pulled you aside urgently to tell you how much they loved your records. I wish you knew what it was like to stumble on a stage, stoned with exhaustion, congested and sluggish and woozy from a mid-tour flu, and then feel some switch flip, and take you from earthbound to flying. I wish you"d been there and we"d run around together in our little underground-punk rock or indie rock or whatever we called it-because it was, you should know, one of the more important cultural movements to happen in your lifetime.
It"s clear, though, you weren"t there, because you"re laughing about a f.u.c.king band name.
That"s why, laughing guy, we need to leave this party or dinner right now, rush back to my apartment, flick on the lights, fire up a computer . . . No. To really do this, I have to dig through boxes of old flyers and tour itineraries and clippings from music magazines that no longer exist, and fanzines made with the jarring look and terrible fonts from the earliest days of what was then called desktop publishing. And tell you about Wire and Stooges and This Heat and Mission of Burma. Wipers and Sleepers and Swans. About Melvins and Void and Green River and Meat Puppets, and how Black Flag got even better once they slowed down. Naked Raygun and feedtime and High Rise, and Laughing Hyenas and Scrawl. Die Kreuzen and Squirrel Bait and Honor Role. Drunks with Guns and My Dad Is Dead. Glenn Branca and Smashchords and Gore. About seeing b.u.t.thole Surfers and Boredoms and Suckdog and Caroliner, and Pavement with their first drummer and Live Skull with their last singer. Watching Sonic Youth on Night Music in 1989, and the Minutemen on MTV in 1985. About college radio and record stores, and how fanzine editors were either the quietest or most annoying people in town. About finding original Electro-Harmonix pedals and Moog synths and Travis Bean guitars, and Orange or Hiwatt or Ampeg amps long before eBay made all their prices skyrocket, thanks in part to how we sought them out and talked them up. Drinking at the Rainbow and Max Fish. Combing through the new-arrivals bin at Pier Platters and Oar Folk and Reckless and Olsson"s and Newbury Comics and Fallout and Aquarius and Amoeba and Wuxtry, and scanning the racks of fanzines at See Hear. About Homestead and SST and Touch and Go and Sub Pop and Drag City and Matador, of course, but also Amphetamine Reptile and Neutral and Rabid Cat and Treehouse and Ruthless and Reflex and 99 and Ecstatic Peace.
But whatever you do, laughing guy, please don"t start talking about your cousin who plays in a band, too! if that means he plays cla.s.sic rock covers in a bar sometimes, or in a "blues" band that performs in the gazebo in a town square once every summer. I don"t really expect you to know that we invented our music to destroy that stuff. But I"d still rather chop off a finger than take you up on your offer to introduce us so we can jam sometime.
And allow me to make this one nagging and exquisitely subtle point: your cousin and I do have a few things in common, having both spent time on the lowest rungs of the music business, a truth I cannot escape even if I believe in my aesthetic and spent my entire adult life scorning his.
And, yes, since you asked, you can find my band on Spotify and Pandora and iTunes and Amazon and YouTube.
Oh, and one last thing?
f.u.c.k you.
IN 1998, WHEN I WAS THIRTY AND BROKE, A GOOD FRIEND GOT married in Manhattan, at the kind of wedding romantics call magical: the vows were exchanged at the Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue, and the reception was held in a gilded s.p.a.ce nearby, where a few of us music freaks found each other. Though all the men wore suits and ties and all the women looked ravishing in evening dresses, we could still smell the subculture on each other.
One of us seemed slightly more off than the others: older than the rest of us, tall, quiet, wearing inst.i.tutional gla.s.ses and an ill-fitting suit, awkward-looking in an almost alarming way. His name was Ray. Somehow the subject of high school came up, and awkward Ray started talking.
"Man, I was the uncoolest kid in my high school," he began, and I immediately and uncharitably thought, Yeah, we could tell. But, he continued, after high school he joined a band, which toured and put out some records, and after years of that he finally thought he might be, at last, sort of cool. He attended a high school reunion, believing this music thing would make him less outcast. "But," he concluded, "you know what? No one cared. They all still thought I was the biggest loser there." Nods of agreement and murmurs of sympathy all around. I broke the subsequent silence by asking, "Hey, Ray, what was the name of your band?"
And Ray answered, "I was in a band called the Dead Kennedys."
Holy s.h.i.t! We"re talking to East Bay Ray!
I told him that if we"d had this conversation when I was sixteen, I would have just peed my pants. But set that aside, because no matter that you think what you"re doing with your band is the coolest thing in the world, no matter, Ray, that you are a founding member of one of the biggest and most important punk rock bands ever-the straight world will never understand a thing about it. Or care. As the world will be quick to remind you, should you ever fail to remember.
Hence the delicate dance in handling The Conversation when people in your normal workaday existence-the decent, interested people who have absolutely no idea about this world-find out about your alternate life as a musician. One smart strategy is simply to explain nothing. "I usually say, "We really like a lot of krautrock," and then they"re like, "huh?"" said Andrew Beaujon, the Eggs front man who now plays guitar in Talk It. "Once you share that with most people, they really don"t want to talk about it anymore." Make obscurity work for you: one of the first lessons in Indie Rock 101, still.
OUR FIRST AMERICAN SHOW WAS IN SEATTLE, ON A RAINY AND dreary Sunday in October, though perhaps all I need to say is "October in Seattle." It was the most lightly attended show of the tour, and by no means our best performance, but diehards still came out, and we saw several old friends, including Linc, my best pal from college, who flew in from Los Angeles. But I will forever cherish that show, because Mark Arm hopped onstage to sing our encore-Minor Threat"s "Filler"-and Jesus, did he peel the paint off the back wall. That show kept me buzzing through the night, into the next morning over breakfast, on the drive to the airport during which we did an interview with the Village Voice, and all the way through our flight to San Francisco and the rest of the day"s travel. No show that night. Laurel had already flown to San Francisco, where she helped organize a party. Our flight was late, and getting out of the airport took forever, and Laurel kept texting me about the party. I told her I was filthy-I was, not having showered since the show-and she texted back, PLEASE COME FILTHY, which honestly is the best and hottest sentence any woman ever communicated to me on tour, ever.
But, as with that event in New York just after I got back from Europe, I was still too present in the world I had just left. Scanning the room made me keenly aware that the previous night would be impossible to convey to anyone, so, fairly or not, I was disappointed immediately. Someone I know sidled over, sat near me, disgorged his update, asked me what was up, and went facedown into his phone before I even started talking.
Say what you will about annoying and oversensitive indie rockers: they never pulled s.h.i.t like that.
THE RICKSHAW STOP, WHERE WE WERE PLAYING IN SAN FRANCISCO, is (fortuitously) within walking distance of the food-nerd destination Zuni Cafe, but during dinner I realized I might miss Andee Connors"s new band, ImPeRiLs, who were playing first. When I called him in a panic, he said there was nothing he could do about their set time but reminded me, "You can do this. Not me." A realization dawned: Yes, sometimes a headliner can. I made another call, to the club, and pushed everyone"s set back fifteen minutes.
That kind of night: back among friends, and those who understood. There was even excellent wine backstage, sent by my winemaker pal Fred Scherrer, of Scherrer Vineyards. In case any of this sounds the least bit rock-starish, I manned the merch table with Laurel before the show, and, judging from the questions I fielded ("What time are they"-gesturing toward our records and CDs-"going on tonight?"), it was clear that few people realized I was actually part of "they." And, late into our set, I looked past the crowd toward the lit-up merch booth and saw Laurel sprawled out on a couch, asleep. Still, there is nothing wrong with being a king frog in a small pond, playing a real show for a few hundred people pouring off so much energy that all we had to do was feast on it and reflect it back to them. Halfway through the set, with people in the crowd yelling for different songs, I stepped up to the mike: "Hey, this is San Francisco, people. Can"t we come to some CON-SEN-SUS?" Sometimes you make jokes onstage just to amuse your own d.a.m.n self.
WHEN LAUREL WOKE IN OUR HOTEL ROOM THE MORNING after that show, she was exhausted and crabby. I wasn"t, though I"d slept much less, because the rhythms of the road made perfect sense to me. I also knew, as she did not, that sleep is postponable on tour. Sometimes for a very long time. But Laurel wasn"t getting that nightly performance rush-the touring musician"s crucial chemical advantage. I felt bad for her as I watched her stumble, half-awake, to throw on clothes and get coffee. But I also thought, The difference between you and me is that I can do this for weeks.
There was little time to reflect on that, though, because we had to dash immediately to the airport to drop off the rental car and fly to the next show in New York, and of course we ran late and of course missed the exit from the expressway, and of course I only remembered to detune my guitars while on the AirTrain, to the bewilderment of all the other pa.s.sengers, and of course we had to sprint while pushing a tottering baggage cart across the entire terminal before barely skidding to a stop in front of a wordless Orestes-whose expression nonetheless screamed, I"ve seen this too many times before. I turned my sleep-deprived, red-rimmed gaze toward him and demanded, "Isn"t this fun?" and he replied, without smiling, "No."
He was right, he was wrong, this was awful, it was tremendous. I was sick of Orestes-he and I spent practically every waking moment together on tour-and I was sick of Sooyoung, and I didn"t want to spend time apart from them. It had to end, and I wanted it to last forever.
At home in New York the next morning, I lazed in bed, d.i.c.king around with the mult.i.tudes of any band"s online communications: retweeting and replying to mentions and shoutouts on Twitter and on Facebook, answering texts and e-mails. There is a special room in h.e.l.l for people who send day-of-show texts asking, HEY, WHEN DO YOU GUYS GO ON TONIGHT? Especially if you"ve already told them. When my brother e-mailed asking that very question, I painstakingly tapped out a response gently reminding him to JESUS CHRIST LOOK UP OUR PREVIOUS f.u.c.kING E-MAIL EXCHANGE. Then a nasty burr of realization: the day was over. Orestes and I were guest-hosting a show on East Village Radio shortly, and, according to my calculations, we should have left twenty minutes ago to start the sprint to showtime.
f.u.c.k.
After that radio show, the day went like this: Pick up my 2002 Subaru Forester. Hand Orestes keys. Text Andy, the guitarist from Violent Bulls.h.i.t, to arrange pickup of his Marshall cabinet. Direct Orestes to my practice s.p.a.ce in Bushwick to pick up my amp. Dash up two flights to our room. Unlock the three locks on the door, marvel at the squalor, disa.s.semble the tangled boneyard of synths and amps and ba.s.ses and road cases and guitars and cords and amps and mike stands, locate my amp, realize that said amp in its road case weighs more than eighty pounds and is too bulky to carry. Drag it carefully down the stairs, hoping no rats appear, heft amp into car, jog over to Main Drag Music, next door to the practice s.p.a.ce, for just-in-case supplies: picks, strings, a long patch cord. Head to Temporary Residence headquarters to pick up more records and CDs. Text the entire staff-all three of them-begging for someone to meet us on the sidewalk with our stuff when we arrive. Alfie waits for us outside the office, we screech to a halt, jam records and CDs in car. Thanks, Alfie. Head to pick up the next batch of T-shirts at the absolute a.s.s end of Greenpoint, hard by Newtown Creek. Arrive and run into large warehouse building. Buzz the elevator. No response. Seconds, then several minutes, pa.s.s. Elevator finally appears, and the large Jamaican elevator guy runs me upstairs and-crucially, brilliantly-offers to hold the lift for me. Run into screenprinter"s s.p.a.ce and spot head guy Carl, whom I"d met back when we both had long hair. Carl hoists a box and hands it over. Ride back down in elevator, then dart to the car. Head to the Queens Midtown Tunnel but take several wrong turns, each of which gives me a minor heart attack. Then home, where Sooyoung calmly stands by the kitchen island, in front of his computer. It"s unclear whether he even noticed me burst into the room, sweating and panting. Orestes grabs a pair of shorts, still wet from the washing machine, pulls them on, and points a hair dryer at his crotch. I gather every merch box. Everyone moves much more languidly than I do, as always, but in time we"re on the way to Le Poisson Rouge. As we load in I eyeball the area where bands sell merch, calculate how people flow past it, see where the light is brightest, and cover the best place to set up with boxes of records and T-shirts. Location and real estate are crucial everywhere, but a little more so in New York.
Though it has a private s.h.i.tter, the dressing room is too small to accommodate two bands and everyone else who finds their way back here. After our soundcheck I come back to change strings, taking a seat across a low table from a guy I don"t recognize in a white b.u.t.ton-down shirt, who"s chatting with friends far too loudly for the room. He is impossible to ignore, and very quickly I decide I have to throw him out. A simple matter: Dude, I"m sorry. But this room is for bands, and you gotta go. Just before I can, he leaves. It would have been awkward if he hadn"t, because when the opening band, Moss Icon, starts their set, he strides onstage and starts singing.
My mom and dad come in from New Jersey. My brother and his wife, Sharlene, come, too, bringing my niece and nephew, Edie and Zeke. (It took a few e-mails to ensure that the club would let in a nine-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy, but in the end all goes so swimmingly I should have asked for drink tickets.) Poisson Rouge is a far more professional club than the s.h.i.tholes we typically play, and the staff kindly set aside a few tables for them in the seated section. I meet them all at the entrance, show them to the tables, and start to chat, but the club is filling, and I can"t ignore the tide pulling me back to the dressing room, which, when I return, is jammed with friends. The downside to knowing lots of musicians is that they all end up backstage. I have to change my shirt and briefly consider ducking into the bathroom but instead announce, "This is a dressing room. And I"m gonna take my clothes off."
When Moss Icon start their set, the dressing room empties but for Orestes, warming up, and his friend Mark, peacefully tapping on his phone. I take my preshow dump. I don"t know if calm is the right word, but I"m nearing the end of the tunnel without too much fear or excitement or tension. Moss Icon finishes, and once again I bound onstage to set up far too soon, before they have a chance to break down their gear. Another upside to the pro rock club experience: there is help. Stagehands in black T-shirts shove Moss Icon"s equipment to the side of the stage and grunt my cabinets into place. Matthew Barnhart is running sound for us on this tour, and I"d told him to play Rush"s "Red Barchetta" over the PA right after Moss Icon"s set, and when it begins, I walk through the club, air-drumming and miming guitar lines into some faces I know and some that I don"t. Maybe I"m more revved up than I think. When I b.u.mp into Moss Icon, I can"t stop throwing out overeffusive praise. I saw about thirty seconds of their set, tops.
I arrange two beers, two bottles of water, and our set list by my mike stand and set up my pedals. One extremely excited guy keeps shouting up at me while I tune the Les Pauls, but I keep a tight smile on my face, averting my gaze, saying nothing. A lot of people have come out tonight. I took pictures at soundcheck of the empty room and now snap two more from roughly the same angles. We"ll open with "Douglas Leader," a slow and quiet song Sooyoung starts with unaccompanied ba.s.s and vocals. Orestes and I will come onstage mid-song, just before the drums and guitar come in. I go to the farthest end of the stage, past the amps, to lurk and wait on the steps, guitar strapped on. A woman comes up to ask if I"m Orestes. I tell her I"m not. She says she knew him in fifth grade and hasn"t seen him in a very long time. I say: evidently. She says she has a guitar pick for me, which I"m too surprised to decline, hands me a flyer, and then starts describing the project detailed on the flyer, which is called . . . well, why mention it here? I thank her, though I don"t want to, and slide the pick and flyer between some speaker cabinets, marveling at her bra.s.s to pitch me while I stood onstage in a crowded club, thirty seconds before showtime.
I totally f.u.c.k up the solo in "Douglas Leader," thanks to some glitch in my setup, but the crowd is with us from the first note. They cheer loudly, shout when we launch into favorites, and stay dead silent during the quiet parts. We end with "Filler," this time drafting my friend Jay Green, who sings for Violent Bulls.h.i.t, on vocals. I drop my pick on one of its first chords and have to speed-strum the rest of it with my middle finger, convinced I"m flaying it to bits. Then my guitar strap breaks and there"s nothing to do but play the rest of the song on the ground. Someone gets a great photo of Jay bent over and screaming down at my head just before Jay shoves the mike into the face of someone in the front row, perfectly timed for the dude to yell out, "FILLER!" during the chorus. At the end of the song I toss my guitar skyward, catch it, then slam it pickup-side down atop my amp, more or less on beat. Good night.
At the merch booth Laurel rips open boxes of T-shirts and records and CDs and shoves shirts at people and loudly calls the name of someone who"s left his credit card. Edie is the first to appear, and I bend down to hug her, even though I"m a sweaty mess. I ask her if it was really loud, and when she says no, I make a mental note to ask Matthew why. Cl.u.s.ters of people stick around: old friends and old fans, people waiting to talk to us. Everyone is smiling, flushed, and sweaty from the happy, wrung-out feeling that follows a good show. Generally I prefer s.h.i.tholes to pro rock clubs, but tonight everything clicked. Though Poisson Rouge also took 15 percent of the merch sales, as its standard contract insists, which I could have done without.
We end up at a horrid bar nearby, in the no-man"s-land near NYU, with a bunch of people who went to the show, and stay for hours. I finally leave around 3:15 a.m., the taxi floats me home down trafficless streets, and I collapse into bed next to Laurel, home at last, stinking of drink and show sweat and my post-show halal-cart sandwich and everything else that had happened since I left our bedroom this morning.
WE PLAY BROOKLYN THE FOLLOWING NIGHT WITH VIOLENT Bulls.h.i.t and Turing Machine. Orestes and I again drive the Forester, jammed with gear, to the club. Idling at a stoplight near the Williamsburg Bridge while I"m staring at my phone-cranky from the flood of texts and e-mails, impatient because the light is still red-Orestes excitedly nudges me and nods at the next car over. At first I hear indeterminate thuds and muttering and a.s.sume it"s hip-hop. But the dude is blasting our song "Lookin" at the Devil." And headbanging. This has been a grouchy, hungover, and stressed-out day, but now we"re in a good mood all the way to the club.
The Knitting Factory is a s...o...b..x turned sideways, primarily composed of concrete. In terms of acoustics, that"s strike one and strike two. It"s painted a sickly, sticky-looking red that, now that I think about it, reminds me of Kokie"s walls circa 1999. (Strike three, for looks.) The club"s soundman, Bob, paces the room, wearing shorts and a face well-creased by rock and carousing, endlessly stressed out. He greets each request with a series of compulsive headshakes and dark mutterings about how impossible it is, then disappears and returns with whatever we need.
Before the show two guys wave me over to tell me they flew in from Atlanta for last night"s show and changed their flights to stick around for tonight"s. (I hope we don"t suck.) Jerry Fuchs"s younger brother, Adam, also came up from Georgia, and his sister, Erica, from North Carolina. Jerry should have seen this. I"m enormously touched that his siblings will. Besides its bad acoustics, the room is too shallow and the stage height is weirdly out of proportion with the s.p.a.ce, and it isn"t the best show of the tour. But somewhere during the loud part of "Ducks and Drakes," I close my eyes, turn my face up toward the stage lights, and behind my eyelids everything goes orange and I feel something I"ll never properly describe, and I can"t stop myself from laughing out loud, tickled by something, I"ll never know what. During the long sustained A after the first verse in "Valmead," I turn the feedbacking note down, bend down to gulp a beer, stand upright, turn my volume back up, then launch into the next bit, perfectly timed and on beat. From your perch inside the song, you imagine that its intervals sound staggeringly cool, though these little dramas are far too inside baseball for almost anyone else to notice.
Then an afterparty where a bunch of us DJ, and when that bar closes its doors and turns up the lights, we stay for one more drink. Afterward Sooyoung takes us to a place he knows in Koreatown that is still serving food and, perhaps more important, pitchers of beer. It"s not as if we"re celebrating and bro-hugging all over the place-that never was our style-but none of us wants any of these final nights to end. We get home around 6 a.m. That afternoon we fly to Chicago for our last show.
THAT FINAL SHOW BROUGHT US TO AN INCREDIBLY EXALTED and appropriate venue, by which I mean a s.h.i.thole made comfortable by years of familiarity. The Empty Bottle. The kind of place that every band, ever, has played at least once, and though I hadn"t been there in years, it was instantly familiar once we stepped inside. Smaller and grottier than I remembered, perhaps, but its essentials hadn"t changed at all. The couches backstage almost certainly hadn"t. The main interior color was black, stickers covered virtually every surface-different ones than in 1996, but honestly that felt like a minor detail-and the backstage bathroom was still a riot of multicolored graffiti. Quality bourbons were available now, since its crowd was getting older and transferring its musical connoisseurship to food and drink, as well as a very good selection of beer, for what struck a New Yorker as shockingly low prices. The club was still a clumsy hodgepodge of three oddly connected rooms, with steps awkwardly and randomly placed throughout. I almost tripped, spectacularly, while getting offstage, and another time getting to the strangely shaped stage, which is situated where two rooms meet in the corner of a capital L. Bands usually set up their drums in the middle of the stage, then everyone else struggles to figure out where they should place and point their amps. I set up stage left, as always. From there, I was told, the local consensus was to aim the amp toward the men"s room.
It was fitting that b.i.t.c.h Magnet would end here. We remixed our first alb.u.m and recorded much of our last alb.u.m in Chicago, and Sooyoung lived there for years in the nineties. Also, the old Chicago rule still held: no matter how bad any tour was going, as you slogged through whatever dead and depressing stretch in the Great Plains or topmost tier of the South, you hung on until Chicago. It was your second hometown. Where everyone knew your name and understood your decades of acc.u.mulated indie rock bulls.h.i.t.
I was unusually obsessed with selling merch, because I knew unless we had a huge crowd and sold a mountain of shirts and records and CDs, we"d lose money on the tour. I felt like a campaign manager who realizes, the night before Election Day, that his candidate needs a record turnout and a couple of other breaks to win. (And who doesn"t share this insight with the candidate-or Sooyoung and Orestes.) Rose Marshack, the Poster Children ba.s.sist and another old friend, showed up early. She may have offered, but it"s more likely I shamed or strong-armed her into running the merch table. Two people working merch is exponentially better than one, and-rock is s.e.xist-for mostly-male crowds, women often sell better than men. I kept barking idiotic Glengarry Glen Ross jokes at her. But they worked. Soon Rose, a deeply kind, modest, and mild-mannered Midwestern mom, was all but grabbing people by the ear as they pa.s.sed, demanding they buy something. One guy couldn"t decide between a gray shirt and a brown one. "You should buy both!" she shot back. He picked brown. Three minutes later he returned, wearing an embarra.s.sed grin, and bought the gray version, too.
Sooyoung"s parents showed up, and I handed his dad a beer and two pairs of earplugs. Then, still playing host, I gave earplugs to Rose, my ex-girlfriend Martha, and my old friend Zoe. Martha and Zoe had been best friends at Oberlin and still seemed to be. I imagined such a thing was easier in Chicago than in New York or Los Angeles or London, cities where the currents of life and work dragged you into deeper and deeper water, so when you finally paused to look, all the people you"d known were dots on the horizon, paddling away from you, toward some other distant sh.o.r.e. I don"t know if this is actually true of Chicago, but it"s always been easy for me to idealize it as the road not taken.
The openers, Electric Hawk, were crushing and relentless and right up my alley: a very loud instrumental trio, all rock solid on their instruments, performing music at once elemental and complex. When they finished their set, Orestes and I paused alongside one of the awkwardly placed sets of steps. I scanned the room and said, "Good turnout." But he shook his head and replied, "No, it isn"t," and he was right. Empty Bottle"s capacity is four hundred. Only a couple hundred people were there. Said it before, but I"ll say it again: when dealing with nightlife aimed at thirty- and fortysomethings, one has to accept that life complications can interfere with the best of intentions. I certainly did. But it still stung. It made me think, again, that we weren"t good enough or important enough or whatever enough to get everyone off their couches. Still invisible. A too-secret handshake.
What Jeremy had implied-and what I"d suspected-at the beginning of the reunion, I now knew was true: we weren"t going to get any bigger. I knew that we were out of step with this decade, in so many ways. To cite just one reason, the way we mixed our records was utterly unsuited for today. Too much ultra-low end, for starters. We also often avoided using compression on our records, because we wanted as wide as possible a range of soft and loud. Ultra-compressed production crushes those dynamics and makes EVERYTHING SOUND LOUDER. It"s no coincidence it came into vogue in the twenty-first century, because ultra-compressed recordings sound good-or, more accurately, less bad-on the tiny cheap speakers in earbuds and computers and smartphones. Which is how most everyone hears music today. After our first reunion show in j.a.pan, I went drinking with Katoman, and he told me he"d been thinking for days about how no current bands sounded like b.i.t.c.h Magnet. He meant it as a compliment, and I was moved. But later I understood the secondary edge to that observation, one that cut in a far less complimentary way. "Unique today" could also mean "a relic from a time now gone."
When the familiar stomach rumbling came on, as it had for every reunion show, I looked for a moment toward the backstage bathroom, but there wasn"t enough time. Twenty-five years since I started doing this, but with this band showtime still gave me the bowels of a c.o.ke fiend, drugs in hand, waiting. But then we were onstage, where it was dark and loud, and the crowd was crazy, or as crazy as a crowd of record nerds our age ever get. As with all the best shows, all I registered was snapshots. Boys and girls-well, men and women-headbanging down front, a few even pounding their fists on the stage. This night I played the closing solo in "Navajo Ace" and a certain end-of-verse flourish in "Sea of Pearls" just right. I don"t think I"d ever played either entirely correctly before. And though I knew all along I was leaving all this, and there was something sad about that, nothing felt sad about the show. It felt correct. It felt complete. The proper finale to a very peculiar midlife foray.
One last night at the merch stand. It seemed that everyone who came bought something. In some cases, many things. My right back pocket held a burrito-sized wad of cash, until it grew too big to fit and I had to palm it like a small basketball. When I did the final tour accounting, I saw that, thanks to Rose and Chicago, we had turned a tiny profit in America after all.
The next day I drove over to see my old friend Bryan, the general manager of the mini-chain Reckless Records. Another musician was there, who"d also come to the show. He thanked me. Told me that his bucket list was now one item shorter. He also said he was surprised that certain people weren"t there. I smiled, nodded, said: Me, too.
But no. No. I won"t complain. It was beautiful. Nearly everyone in that crowd had a story. The ex-drummer from Hum-the same one who, in the nineties, tormented me every time our paths crossed with endless questions about Orestes-had driven three hundred miles from southern Indiana. The guitarist in Hum came up from Champaign. One guy came from Minneapolis; one woman, all the way from Los Angeles. An entire contingent drove from Louisville. Someone from St. Louis. Rose came from Bloomington, Illinois, which meant a two-hour drive to and from the show, followed by an early wakeup to teach her morning cla.s.ses at the university. People we had met years ago in Pittsburgh, in New York, at school, in Europe. Looks of deep grat.i.tude in familiar eyes, now set into older faces. A look that, I hope, was mirrored in mine.
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE TOUR, VERY FEW PEOPLE I spoke with believed we"d really played our final shows. But I was not among them.
b.i.t.c.h Magnet wasn"t a band whose reunion would blossom into a second career, as had happened for bigger bands like Dinosaur Jr. or Mission of Burma or the f.u.c.king Pixies.
b.i.t.c.h Magnet wasn"t the kind of band for which a new generation of young fans would crowd into clubs.
With the possible exception of Orestes, none of us was that interested in keeping this going.
Though b.i.t.c.h Magnet was the kind of band in which, during our year and a half of reunion rehearsals and shows, Sooyoung and I each wooed Orestes for new projects that excluded the other.
And we never even mentioned those projects to each other.
WE WERE STAYING WITH SOOYOUNG"S PARENTS IN CHICAGO, in their two apartments in a Gold Coast building. That company they started so many years ago in Charlotte, the one they"d worked so hard to build, had done very well. The three of us drank beer in the guest apartment until I couldn"t keep my eyes open any longer. Someone woke me just after 7 a.m., and I went to my room.
I woke about three hours later, and, checking the circuits-weary eyes, bearable headache, no epic nausea-decided they were intact enough. Sooyoung"s mom had thoughtfully left a basket of sweet rolls and m.u.f.fins on the dining room table, around which the sun streamed in, beautifully if a bit painfully. Orestes had an early-afternoon flight home and already had his bags neatly stacked in the hallway, and Sooyoung, who"d slept in the other apartment, materialized to say goodbye.
I insisted that his dad take a few last pictures. Who knew when we"d be in the same room again?
Sooyoung and I both look pretty rough in those shots. We were facing the windows, and sunshine was a hard thing to take.
Then Orestes"s phone rang: his cab was waiting outside. Sooyoung and I helped him hump his bags to the curb. Cars were speeding by, and we stood there, blinking in the sunlight. Always a little awkward, these goodbyes.
I hugged Orestes after maneuvering around his enormous pecs and traps and shoulders. In that clinch I managed to mutter, "We did it." Sooyoung and Orestes hugged, Orestes climbed in the backseat, and then he was gone.
I knew Sooyoung and Orestes"s new band, Bored Spies, had recorded a single a few months ago, and in the upcoming year they"d play shows in America and Europe and Asia. Sooyoung and I had never talked about that before, and we didn"t now. Instead, Sooyoung announced he was going back to bed.
Well, this was it.
What to say? We hugged, and once we stepped back from each other, I repeated what I"d told Orestes: "We did it."
Sooyoung nodded, smiling through his exhaustion. "And we did it right."
Maybe we had.
He suggested that Laurel and I come meet him and Fiona for a vacation in Indonesia sometime. I said, sure.
I quickly hustled in and out of the shower, taking care to keep the tidy bathroom as neat as it was. Sooyoung"s dad appeared with a luggage cart, and after I loaded it, we wheeled it into the elevator and to the garage, where I hefted my bags and our merch boxes into the trunk of his car and carefully placed the guitar cases on the immaculate tan leather backseat. Then we headed east on Lakesh.o.r.e Drive toward downtown. Sooyoung"s dad had aged well. Still trim, with a good head of hair. He and his wife had been incredibly welcoming, and I was moved by their kindness. Twenty-five summers ago, when Sooyoung and I fled Charlotte for Atlanta, I"d left their home under much worse circ.u.mstances. I rarely sit on the kind of soft leather found in expensive cars, and I gratefully sank into my seat and looked toward the lake.
A winter-bright morning. December weather in October. A day where the wind turned your face red and whipped up whitecaps and real waves. You could imagine, briefly, that this was the sh.o.r.eline of some sea. A few clouds scudded quickly in and out of sight. We arrived at my hotel, where I shook hands with Sooyoung"s dad, thanking him once more, and followed a bellman into the hotel.
My room had amazing eighties wall switches for the lights and TV, with one b.u.t.ton actually marked MOOD LIGHTING. State of the art, for the Atari age. It would take time to figure it all out. But I took the elevator to a great room downstairs, ordered tea, opened my laptop, and started writing.
The cement tones of downtown Chicago outside the window. Grand, but terribly monochromatic. A sad pile of pumpkins in a courtyard provided the only natural color. No place could underscore the late-autumn feelings of finale better than Chicago. Portlandia for this kind of music. Where there was an endless procession of bands like ours. As such, it was our culture"s best argument for careful what you wish for. Nerdy, earnest boys, dressing badly, trying desperately to rewrite the rules of rock-and generally failing, often egregiously. I was always just one left turn from ending up here and being a part of it, too. I always resisted, and s.h.i.t-talked and belittled this city instead. And yet, while I stayed in Chicago after we played the Bottle, people I hadn"t spoken to in years showed me around, bought me drinks, waved me into their shows for free, refused to let me eat any meal alone. This town took me in whenever I showed up. I always forgot that part.
I HAVEN"T YET MENTIONED HOW THE BUILD, PEAK, AND afterglow of any performance and tour is much more visible today. Preshow chatter on Facebook and Twitter is an effective early-alert system, so you can sense how much interest is building. (I knew, for instance, that Hong Kong would be bad, that Singapore would be pretty good, and that London and Tokyo and New York would be really good.) And, after each show, there would be a day or so of Twitter and Facebook comments before the crowd flitted on to the next thing.
It always hurt a bit, watching the vapor trail of any tour"s final show fade. You knew that it was inevitable, but that didn"t make the absence of chatter and noise and antic.i.p.ation and showtime feel any better. Chicago"s traces would disappear, too. But they had a longer half-life than most, and while they were still fresh, I marveled over the kind things people posted online.
Like this, from Jay Ryan, who played ba.s.s for Dianogah: Went to the Empty Bottle last night to see b.i.t.c.h Magnet, a band whom I"ve loved for roughly 20 years, but whom I"d never seen before, as they broke up before I found them. They reunited for a handful of shows, and this was one of the best concerts I"d ever been to, ever. Insanely tight, especially for a bunch of old guys. The experience was only improved by being surrounded by friends I don"t see nearly often enough, most of whom have made music which has been heavily influenced by this band.
Especially for a bunch of old guys?
Oh, the h.e.l.l with it. He"s right.
And this is where the story ends. A strange little band, oddly and briefly reunited two decades after it broke up. Kings of a few small clubhouses for a few more nights. Living a modest dream. But sometimes that"s enough.
Almost nothing I"d hoped for twenty-five years ago had happened. The weirdos hadn"t taken over. Our bands hadn"t changed the world, or destroyed the big, bad major labels. (That was the Internet"s job.) Or even changed the mainstream much. I"m not even going to get into how almost all of the places we most treasured, where we found each other and where we gathered-record stores, bookstores, mom-and-pop music shops, the dive bars and venues we all knew-long ago vanished. But believing that this culture"s significance depends on fulfilling any ancient grandiose expectation is missing the point. Because, despite everything that happened and everything that didn"t, we carved out-and nurtured and maintained-a place for bands like us.
Sometimes that"s enough, too.
Sometimes.
And today, after all these years, when rock music means so much less than it once did, weird bands as different as Tortoise and Battles and f.u.c.ked Up and Swans and Sh.e.l.lac still play and thrive. In some cases, even make a living from music alone. A framework-a touring circuit and a culture-still stands for new generations of musicians like us. I haven"t been paying attention, but I can feel them all out there, as the ocean feels the phases of the moon. As I can feel all those I"ve known forever who are still at it, like Ted Leo, Lightning Bolt, Yo La Tengo, the Ex, Will Oldham, Melvins, the Sea and Cake, Mudhoney, Uzeda . . . There are too many to list, and that"s a small victory, too. I don"t love all those bands, but that"s not important. What"s important is this: they"re the people I recognized, long ago. The ones who made me realize I wasn"t alone. Maybe they recognized me, too.
And sometimes that"s enough.
No. It is enough. That"s the happy ending. One far better than any of us ever dreamed, back when we crouched beside our parents" stereos, peeling shrink-wrap off the first record we bought by the Stooges or Wire or Black Flag or Hsker D. Lonely, ignored, maybe even hated, but suddenly strangely excited.
"I ended up in a band that has a really small following. People with gigantic record collections. Who have socially maladapted lives because of their love for music," Mission of Burma"s Clint Conley once told me. "But those are the people I wanted."
Those are the people I wanted, too.