Your Band Sucks (16 page)

“I was having the time of my life. I'd never experienced anything so amazing.” I'd forgotten that, despite all those years of playing in bands, he'd never really gone on tour before. “I imploded. I didn't know how to handle how cool it was. At the end I just didn't want to go home. I didn't want to leave. I didn't want it to end.”

Clay Tarver, the guitarist from Bullet LaVolta and Chavez, once told me that going on tour is so much fun it makes you crazy. I love this line, because as soon as he said it, I knew what he meant. It sort of happened to me, early on. It definitely happened to Doctor Rock.

In retrospect, I said, there was no way to replace Orestes. No one else would have worked. (I've successfully replaced drummers in other bands, but it's really hard to swap out a musician in a trio. Though neither Sooyoung nor I knew that.)

Doctor Rock said that he loved the band and thought we sounded great together. He asked over and over again if I would make him the villain when I told this part of the story. I told him I wouldn't.

Did I?

Or is the villain the guy who encouraged his worst instincts, talked shit about him behind his back, dropped the dime on his on-tour indiscretions—and then wrote about almost all of it in a fucking book?

***

DOCTOR ROCK, DOCTOR ROCK, YOU ASS PAIN, YOU OF THE
dubious aesthetics and wince-inducing ideas, you who helped sink one of my most cherished bands, you who in so many ways needlessly complicated my life—well, you were completely right about a few things. Many of us indie rockers knew nothing about pleasure back then. The band you joined certainly didn't. We didn't drink much. Smoking pot made my heart race from nameless dread, and anything harder than pot was unthinkable. We didn't fuck nearly as much as we should have. We didn't even dance.

And you know what else? I wish that I, too, cut loose, went mad, drank beyond the point of knowing anything, accepted any pill or powder that floated my way. I mean: I was twenty-two and touring in a rock band. It wasn't like I had to wake up and go to work in the morning. I wish that I, too, ripped the tights off young, giggling German women and tongued them until they experienced the ultimate pleasure. But something held me back. Something that, for good or ill, I had and you didn't. The fix and rush of the music was enough for me. The hormonal thrill of being inside it, instead of watching from the crowd. You and I both chased a buzz we were powerless to resist. It just wasn't the same one.

I
n 1994 or 1995 a band from Providence called Small Factory played in Manhattan at Brownies, and for some reason I went to the show. The drummer, Phoebe, was inept, and wrinkled her nose and made a funny face every time the band went slightly out of time, and they went out of time a lot. The guitarist, Dave, looked thirty-five, at least, but the entire band dressed like they were eight—bowl haircuts, stripey T-shirts—and acted like they were six. Their songs sucked, and they couldn't do a single interesting thing with their instruments. But—and this was the worst part—
it didn't matter
. The crowd was there to love the band, no matter what, and have the band love them back. A cuddle party, not a rock show.

Cities change. Even cities that, like Indie Rock USA, are just a state of mind. A very naïve form of twee pop had started going around, like a flu, and was afflicting many along the Eastern Seaboard. (Ultimately, the best-known bands that had a foot or two in this scene were Belle and Sebastian and the Magnetic Fields.) This all started in Olympia, Washington, with Beat Happening, with whom, strangely enough, Bitch Magnet once played at the CBGB Record Canteen. Beat Happening basically purveyed a more sexualized and arch version of Jonathan Richman—he's been doing nasal and childlike since the seventies—largely because their front guy, Calvin Johnson, had tons of charisma and wit. (I still wasn't a fan, though I always liked the oral-sex reference near the end of “Indian Summer.”) Still, in the early nineties the consummate observer/superfan of our underground Nils Bernstein—who later ran publicity for Matador and Sub Pop—was prescient enough to make a few batches of T-shirts that declared in bold type:
CALVIN JOHNSON HAS RUINED RO
CK FOR AN ENTIRE GEN
ERATION
. As many bands influenced by Joy Division oversimplified a brilliant band into much bad minor-key goth, the post−Beat Happening stuff was much like Small Factory: bowl haircuts, stripey shirts, smiley faces, utterly bereft of sexuality. Summer camp after grade school, minus the aggression. D.C.'s Tsunami, which started the Simple Machines label and, like Beat Happening, established themselves as a maypole band for this kind of stuff, actually sang the line “You say punk rock means asshole. I say punk rock means cuddle.” (Actually: no, not at all. Punk rock means—pick one—
self-determined
or
self-sufficient
or
individual
or
steadfast in the face of opposition
, not
asshole
, and definitely not
cuddle
. But you already knew that, right?)

Blandness became an aesthetic. Tempos strolled, never grinding, never speeding. Little was heavy, and even less was interesting, amid this bunch of shaggy-dog bands wanting to nuzzle you and a crowd seemingly eager to regress to childhood. Had eBay existed, prices for Archies and 1910 Fruitgum Company records would have skyrocketed. I was desperate not to grow up, too, but I thought the point was to be forever twenty-one, not a kindergartner. I liked adulthood, and most trappings of adulthood, like drinking and sex and living on my own. I hated all these bands, and I especially hated that they were starting to shove aside the music I liked most. In his book
Our Band Could Be Your Life,
Michael Azerrad identified a fear of sexuality—an unwillingness to embrace the complications that come with any of it, straight or gay—at the heart of the indie pop childishness. I just saw the childishness. What was the point?

***

THINK OF THE KICK DRUM/SNARE DRUM INTRO TO JUDAS
Priest's “Living after Midnight”:

Boom-CHA boom-boom CHA, boom-CHA boom-boom CHA

Boom-CHA boom-boom CHA, boom-CHA boom-boom CHA

Now count the beats by finding the
pulse
—the steady heartbeat beneath it all: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. A textbook example of rock in standard 4/4 time—four beats per measure, with the snare drum emphasizing the second and fourth beat.

Now think of the main piano riff for Dave Brubeck's “Take Five”:

Bum-BAH, bum-BAH, bum-BAH

Bum-BAH, bum-BAH, bum-BAH

and count this one out, too: 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5. Five beats per measure, with accents in different places, most notably on the last two beats of the measure. Now count out the main instrumental riff in Peter Gabriel's “Solsbury Hill.” You'll find it's in seven.

When I mention odd time signatures or odd meters, I mean fives, sevens, and elevens. In rock they were generally the domain of prog-rock eggheads like Rush and King Crimson—I mean this in the best possible sense of “prog-rock eggheads,” since I actually like both—though Led Zeppelin was confident enough to play around with them, too: much of “Four Sticks” is in five, and “The Ocean” gets into fifteen. Occasionally they turned up in bona fide pop hits. Like “Solsbury Hill,” Pink Floyd's “Money” is in seven, and with “Hey Ya!” Outkast somehow created an infectious and danceable song with verses in eleven. (For purposes of keeping this bit short, I'm using few examples, but aspiring time-signature geeks are directed to Crimson, Meshuggah, and Voivod for more advanced study.)

What I liked about odd time signatures, once Bitch Magnet and bands we liked started messing around with them, was how they made songs swing and groove in different ways—it was still rock and all that, but the feel was deeper, darker, more complex. Switching time signatures when you go from the verse to the chorus or from the verse to the bridge—Rush does this lots; to cite just one example, much of “Red Barchetta” is in 4/4, but the guitar solo and the subsequent refrain of one main riff slip into seven—was a gentle way of throwing in a subtle emphasis, or throwing
off
a listener's equilibrium in a way that always interested me. It can, of course become a contrivance. In the mid-nineties a bunch of bands had all these lurching, awkward songs because they were trying so damn hard to turn riffs that wanted to be in 4/4 into seven or five. And I got to the point in Vineland where a song didn't feel quite right unless it had two different time signatures, if not more.

When you're cocooned within a cultural bubble, you might start mistaking your circle of friends for a broader reality. You might start believing that whatever obscure thing you treasure most—like, say, rock played in odd time signatures—is about to take over the world, and you might believe that that thing will therefore thrive forever. Beatniks did. Hippies did. I couldn't stand either, but I, too, believed that the revolution was here and my side would win. Because you have to, right? You have to
believe
, even when the world throws so little love your way, because you have to find some way to get out of bed in the morning. Losing candidates do it every election. The star pitcher on the last-place team does it. And you—you work your crap job every day for nine hours, where someone shoots you a nasty look during each personal phone call, so tonight you can fill a dirty plastic bucket with that disgusting comelike cornstarch solution and dodge cops while plastering flyers all over the East Village until 2 a.m. Are you gonna do that if you think you're doomed to fail?

In the mid-nineties I could rattle off names of many bands that worked the specific angles I most cherished: those odd time signatures, odd guitar tunings, heavy, largely instrumental. Caspar Brötzmann Massaker. Slovenly. Wider. Gore. Slint. Bastro. Breadwinner. Voivod. Don Caballero. Pitchblende. There were likeminded people everywhere, or so I thought, because we all found one another at the same shows. In real life there weren't that many fans of this music—only those really deeply into it will recognize most of those names—because few normal people care enough to spend time parsing which measure is in five and which is in seven. The guys interested in details like that—and they were almost all guys, most of whom wore glasses and reveled in finally finding nerd athletics at which they could excel—were frequently musicians, or they quickly became musicians, since the membrane between fan and performer was so porous. This was one of the greatest things about this culture, but it's a problem when your only fans are the other musicians on the bill each night. Though you might not
notice
that it's a problem if you're spending too much time inside your bubble, where it's too easy to disappear up your own asshole, and be fully convinced that the rest of the world will soon join you up there. One friend at college who lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side was shocked when Reagan won in a landslide in 1984. Everyone she knew voted for Mondale, so how could Reagan have won? Precisely the trap into which we were falling. “You're in the studio,” explained Turing Machine's Justin Chearno. “You've only listened to your five songs for two weeks, and when you're done, you really think
, We've created this new thing called music, and the world is going to hear this thing, and it's going to change their lives, and
Saturday Night Live
is next.
You just get so caught up. Then when nothing happens, you're like, ‘Oh. Right.'”

Life in Indie Rock, USA, wasn't what I'd cracked it up to be. What had started out as free and welcoming ended up becoming as rigid and rule-bound as everything I'd hoped it would replace. (I was totally part of the problem, having been completely doctrinaire about music since forever.) “There was a lot of ‘you're doing it wrong,'” recalled James Murphy, who drummed in Pony and Speedking long before he started LCD Soundsystem. Entering this world, he said, was like “your parents saying, ‘You're gonna leave the farm. We're going to send you to this really good school.' And you're like, ‘I am so excited!' Then you get there, and everyone's like, ‘What kind of shoes are
those
? Oh. The
country kid
thinks they're
cool
.'” And since everyone in indie rock thought of themselves as a precious little snowflake, many claimed a uniqueness that was hard to square with the facts. “I used to get into all these fights with bands,” Murphy recalled. “They'd all be like, ‘I don't listen to anything. I listen to Edith Piaf,' and I'd be like, ‘But you sound like Slint! You don't sing cabaret music! You're playing a guitar that's tuned funny in seven!'”

We weren't the only ones growing disillusioned. “There's this notion that indie rock has this intelligence. I think it was the opposite. More like know-nothingism,” Andy Cohen, the guitarist from Silkworm, remembered. “Most of these bands were terrible, and they couldn't even play their instruments, in a bad way—not like how the Sex Pistols couldn't play their instruments, in a
good
way. Most bands were unambitious, and couldn't even execute their shitty little ambition.” What bothered Cohen most was exactly what bothered me at that Small Factory show: laziness and low expectations. “You don't go to that famous opera house in Milan and suck and not hear about it. You go to the Apollo and you suck, you get knifed. But if you were in an indie rock band in the nineties and you sucked, you'd do well if you had the right friends.”

The mainstream still sucked, but you always knew it would. Now our thing was starting to suck, too. Suddenly the weirdos—all right,
my
weirdos—were no longer winning, even in our little underground. “Indie rock became a genre of music, and it was very jangly and poppy,” said Juan MacLean, a founder of Six Finger Satellite, who's now a renowned dance music artist and DJ. “That's why I quit. I grew up with hardcore, and then the Butthole Surfers. It seemed like their goal was to fuck with as many people as possible. I loved that. And I was so angry that indie rock became like what I actively rebelled against in the first place.”

Lots of bands playing our circuit were only half a step from the mainstream—remember that the Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, the Pixies, and Beck all started on indie labels—and in the wake of platinum and gold records from Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Helmet, major-label reps drew targets on most every middling band with a soupçon of indie cred. Things got so strange that those reps also signed some bands that were actually oddball enough for me, among them San Diegan eccentrics Three Mile Pilot and the all-instrumental Pell Mell. (Those bands' major-label records died a very quick death, of course.) College radio veterans and guys from punk rock bands ended up on staff at Atlantic or Sony or Geffen, the token young people told to go out to their favorite hangouts and find the next big thing. The bands they courted received some version of The Spiel, often at fancy restaurant dinners attended by label execs and their flunkies. Ted Leo fronted Chisel and then Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, so his career has spanned multiple commercial booms for indie bands, and he's heard The Spiel in a few different decades. He recalled it like this:
You guys are doing something great. We want you to have a home where you can make the records you want to make and have the funding to do it
.

Further conversation, of course, revealed that reality in the big leagues wouldn't necessarily fit that frame. You might be told that the drummer or bassist or even the entire rest of the band had to go. When Sebadoh went to record
Harmacy
in 1995, Lou Barlow was pulled aside by someone on the project, who told him, “If you want this to be a big hit, you gotta get rid of your drummer. And you gotta do it now.”
(It's important to underscore here that its technical wobbliness was part of Sebadoh's package, much like the Pogues' drunkenness or Motorhead's facial warts.) “I knew he was right,” Lou recalled. “And I knew I couldn't fire my friend in order to make a more dynamic, post-Nirvana-sounding record.” To his credit, he didn't. And
Harmacy
didn't sell like
Nevermind
. But hardly anything did.

The tally of indie bands broken on the shoals of major-label indifference is, frankly, far too long to get into here, but in time everyone had friends in bands like Die Kreuzen or Walt Mink or Tad who had very detailed and unhappy stories. Among the recurring themes: the guy who signed us got fired and suddenly no one returned our phone calls; the guy at the label strung us along with teases and promises for over a year and then didn't sign us and we finally broke up from frustration and inertia; the release date of our record kept getting pushed back until we finally broke up; we got dropped right after they released our record.