Your Band Sucks (20 page)

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 classics 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 BUMPING 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 bass. I hadn't thought about it, and when I told him to bring either, he paused and said he'd bring the bass. On my way out the door, almost as an afterthought, I grabbed my looping pedal. We met at the rehearsal space 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 bass, 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 bassist and guitarist, come to think of it.) Also, we were really, really fucking 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 bass 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 space 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 space, 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 fucking
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 cassettes. Songwriting involved listening to everything we improvised and then—painstakingly, piecemeal—assembling 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 Japan. We went to Japan 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 spaces. That pirate radio station. An old garment factory, converted into an arts space. 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-space complex where most of us rehearsed: 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 assembled a bulk order of ecstasy. He called E “the Ambassador” and sent everyone an e-mail. Subject line:
THE AMBASSADOR'S KEYNOTE
ADDRESS
. It informed us that the Ambassador 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 passed 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!

Then I thought,
Wow. I must be tripping my balls off.

Like I said, it was
very
good E.

I
n May of 2006 Coptic Light returned to Japan to play Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, and three shows in Tokyo. In Nagoya we played with a band from San Francisco called Why? A terrible name, and a terrible band—and, worse, a
very earnest
one—equally beholden to white rap and polite collegiate indie rock. It was also a terrible day in Nagoya, pouring rain, unseasonably cold, and back then American smartphones didn't work in Japan, so when Why? started soundchecking, I darted through the downpour to find somewhere I could check my e-mail. I finally found a place to rent the Internet, but soon discovered it was where guys came to watch porn and jack off. My private room looked remarkably like a dentist's office—the exact same chair, but the tiny metal tray where a dentist keeps his tools instead bore a tube of lubricant and some wipes. I logged in, read and answered e-mail, and washed my hands very thoroughly at the first opportunity. I was still in a bad mood when I returned to the club, where Why? was still soundchecking, and I hated their name and I hated their band and I started to really hate their singer, who seemed as precious as the most annoying kid in a gifted-and-talented program. Then he stepped down from the stage and started doing
cartwheels
.

Coptic Light had been together five and a half years. What began as a lark in my early thirties was now the longest-running band of my life, and our original lineup was still intact. Maybe that's why we were all a little tired of each other. In Tokyo the three of us shared one small hotel room, as always, and in close quarters idiosyncrasies chafed. Our drummer, Kevin—how to put this?—lived like he drummed, and thus was not the most structured and organized individual in the world. The smart thing to do, on our upcoming day off, would be for Jeff or me to hang out with him to make sure that he didn't run off, or get lost, or join the circus. But Jeff and I each had our own lists of Tokyo things we itched to do—having both gone crazy for the city the last time we were there—and after being on tour for a week, we desperately needed time alone, and on that day we split in opposite directions before breakfast. Kevin didn't return to our hotel that night or the next morning. He got utterly lost and, after wandering for hours, was finally taken in by two sympathetic young women who spoke no English. He didn't really sleep, and reappeared just a few hours before our big Tokyo show with Gang Gang Dance, spent and fried, as anyone watching could tell. So that show sucked.

I started repeating a dangerous sentence to myself:
I'm too old for this.
Not for rock. For being in a band with someone who still required babysitting.

That thought led to others:
We're in Japan. This should be more fun.
And:
We've recorded, and released, all our songs.
And:
We can't do anything cool—like tour Japan again—until we write and record another album. Which, given how we work, will require eighteen months. And be torturous.

Which led to this conclusion:
I guess we're done.

Really?

Yeah. We're done.

A sign of aging: quality of life within a band mattered. Twenty years ago I could grit my teeth through any shitty interpersonal jive if the music was good enough—if there was any music at all. Now I couldn't. After the tour we had one show scheduled in Brooklyn at North Six, opening for Yura Yura Teikoku, and I promised myself that would be it.

A few weeks after we returned from Japan, after straggling through another unproductive rehearsal, Jeff and I left the practice space together. As we walked toward McCarren Park I turned to him and said, “I don't think I can play with him anymore.”

Jeff paused. “Yeah,” he finally admitted. “I've been meaning to tell you that, too.” I don't want to get into how we told Kevin after that show that we were breaking up, except to say that we—I—handled it badly, which led to a torrent of hurt and infuriated e-mails, and I don't entirely blame Kevin for his response, and that, after all of it ended, it horrified me to realize that, at thirty-eight, I still didn't know how to communicate with people I'd played with for years.

That night after Jeff and I quietly broke up the band, I detoured to Barcade, the bar closest to my apartment and, as you might guess, one known for its vintage video games. There I drank three or four beers, alone, and played Centipede for an hour. Visual comfort food—a few forms of old and familiar. Something was messing with my inner weather, but I didn't know what.

I always believed that each band would be my last. When I got kicked out of Bitch Magnet, I thought I was finished with music at twenty-one. But now forty was approaching. There was no music inside, burning to get out. Just thinking about the mechanics of starting up again—taking out ads, finding other musicians, the awfulness of endless auditions—exhausted me. I went to Barcade because I felt bad that I didn't feel worse, because I walked away from Coptic Light with only a twinge of melancholy, not a crushing sense of the end of the world.
That
,
I suddenly understood
,
was the sad part: once all this had mattered so much more. A photographer friend shot us at that last show. I felt disconnected, but not much worse than that. But not one picture caught me smiling. And with Coptic Light I actually smiled onstage.

The notion of mellowing with age kind of makes me want to vomit, so I won't say that's what happened. But I no longer needed to fill a bottomless hole. I was now a columnist for
BusinessWeek
, writing about media and technology, which, once you factored out certain unavoidable bullshit, was interesting and gratifying and paid reasonably well. In 2002 I'd met Laurel Touby, a brainy entrepreneur once described in the press—accurately—as a tiny blond bombshell, and very quickly realized that I'd finally met someone I could spend forever with. (Luckily she shared this opinion.) Funnily enough, she knew very little about music, and what she knew and liked was
exactly
what most gave me hives: the most egregious forms of top-forty dance music. All those years I spent chasing sallow art chicks who hid behind long dyed hair and guitars and basses, and the one for me was absolutely bewildered by the music I most treasured. But I was over seeking women based on their record collections.

I'd spent my entire life absolutely obsessed with music. What the Brits politely call “a specialist.” One eventually able to discuss music only with those as afflicted, and ultimately not even with them, because no one else could share the precise contours of the idiosyncratic taste you honed through years of solitary listening and thinking about rock. That obsession shaped me. Through it I found my place in the world. Because of it I've spent much of this book vociferously defending an aesthetic I'm not at all 100 percent behind anymore, unless an outsider attacks it. But what a relief it was when the fever finally broke.

Through various strokes of late-bloomer's luck, mine was a very good life: a happy marriage, a challenging and rewarding job—all that crap grown-ups say! but I meant it! not like everyone else who secretly doesn't!—that brought a sort of public profile, thus scratching, somewhat, that youngest child's itch for attention. In 2007 Laurel sold the company she founded, enabling us to live far more grandly than I'd ever dreamed, since my biggest financial move involved graduating from playing noisy punk rock to typing sentences for a living. Like I said: lucky. Really, really lucky. A late transition to real life turned out amazingly well. I landed a regular gig as a commentator for CNBC and found that some aspects of live TV were a passable replacement for being in a band—the acting out, the fix and rush of performance. Though I had to learn to remain still, after all those years jumping around onstage, and project energy rather than enact it, while staring into a camera, alone in a tiny over-air-conditioned studio room, with the show just voices in your earpiece. When you spotted your opening or the anchor threw it to you, you soloed—well, argued—with all the smarts and fire you could summon. You learned to speak fast when you cut in on someone else. Each show had its own rhythm, which I often tapped out with my fingers to make sure my motor was tuned to the right speed. In a few minutes it was all over, and the producer in your earpiece thanked you and said they'd have you back. (One way TV is like indie rock: no one ever tells you that you suck. Even if you do.) A black town car waited for you at the curb—TV networks really like spending money—in which you glided to your next destination. My mom always called, as I lounged in the back of the new-smelling car, full of the joy American parents feel when they see their kids on TV.

Even then it seemed like a scene from a different and earlier New York: gilded, privileged, all the men wearing hats, the day's work over, drinks awaiting at the bar. I'd be lying if I said I didn't love this. It also wasn't enough.

The closest I got to performing for a live audience was speaking at media and tech conferences. Which, of course, is not very close at all. At one event at Moscone Center in San Francisco, I found myself waiting backstage—or the conference equivalent of backstage—with the other panelists. A crowd awaited us in the enormous room nearby, and from it I heard some small hubbub rising, and old associations sent adrenaline into my bloodstream. But when I looked at the other panelists' faces and body language, I saw only tension, discomfort, a grim sense of duty. No one else felt an old tingle. No cues shot fire across their synapses. None of them knew from
showtime
. No one else had the performer's urge, and in fact it was totally out of place here. On these stages you had to sit still and be polite. I'd roasted under hot white lights at 120 decibels too many times to be fooled into thinking that these settings substituted for the real thing.

I hid my history in music from co-workers and bosses, because hiding it is always easier than explaining it. (Though I wasn't as obsessive about it as one friend, who thought out loud, apparently seriously, about whether he should use a pseudonym in his new band.) But the past never stays entirely past. Not in the William Faulkner sense, but in the sense that every morsel of information eventually ends up on the Internet. I worked among journalists, who by trade want to know too much, and as more data turned up online I could no longer conceal this part of my life.

One holiday season everyone from my section at
BusinessWeek
went out to a celebratory lunch. Like most such gatherings, it was fine, if a bit manic and awkward. Then my editor turned to me and asked the question you never want to hear.

“You know, Jon, I read about your band on Wikipedia. What was math-rock?”

Well. It refers to underground bands that played songs written in odd time signatures. Such bands were aggressive, generally too smart for hardcore or rote forms of heavy metal, and often featured downplayed vocals, if they had vocals at all. But, you know, I never liked that term at all, because . . . Oh, never mind. Forget I said anything.

What was it?

Much more fun than
this
.