Your Band Sucks (3 page)

Then, when I was eleven, in 1979, Neil went off to college, and suddenly it was only me and my parents in that big suburban house, and the seventies turned into the eighties just as I started getting bored with Little League and youth soccer and baseball cards and, restless, started searching
Creem
and
Rolling Stone
and
High Times
for some new excitement. There was a symphony of crickets' and cicadas' drones on summer nights—when I go back to visit my parents now, I'm surprised how loud it gets—but nothing else going on after dark, which was the whole problem. There was no culture that didn't come from a television, a radio, or the malls' movie theaters and record stores, and they all had such narrow ideas of what they could present.

I mean, if I'd grown up in an earlier era, maybe I could sing some paean to radio, the magic appliance through which you received secret transmissions from your true home planet, the best friend with whom you huddled in the dark, etc., but good God was radio awful in the eighties. Tears for Fears. Debbie Gibson. Billy Idol. George Thorogood. Genesis, after Peter Gabriel left, and Phil Collins's entire solo career. Corey Hart, the poor man's Bryan Adams in new wave sunglasses, while Bryan Adams was a poor man's John Cougar Mellencamp, as if just being John Cougar Mellencamp weren't brutal enough. Things were so bad we tried to get excited about John Fogerty's first album in like ten years, even though any chemistry textbook was more exciting and contained no writing as horrendous as the lyrics to “Centerfield.” Survivor. Fucking
Starship
. Journey played on an endless loop, and no one acted like it was funny or weird. Howard Jones had a huge hit with “Things Can Only Get Better,” and no one called him out for lying. During one surpassingly strange fifteen or eighteen months, the ghastly and bouncy Men at Work was the biggest band in the world. Even the “quality” rock bands—those adored by critical consensus, like Bruce Springsteen and U2—were as wearying as algebra. Dog-faced with sincerity. Groaning with sanctimony. Their endless, applause-seeking urge to
do the right thing
. The great secret history of music, the stuff with some substance to it—Stooges, Suicide, Leonard Cohen, Can and Guru Guru and NEU! and the entirety of krautrock, Funkadelic, Blue Cheer, Albert Ayler, Magma, Wire, King Crimson, Joy Division, all the great mutant offshoots of disco, punk, hardcore, and psych—was so far out of reach in my suburb it might as well have been buried on Mars. Before breaking up in 1983, Mission of Burma had been desperately setting off signal flares up in Boston, where they practically invented the template for brainy and aggressive underground bands that's still followed today: unusual song structures; melodic and powerful bass; distorted guitar serving more as sonic sculpture than mere notes and chords; relentless off-center drumming. But the local college radio playlists were still choked with synthy new wave and British imports, so, as with everything else going on with an entire founding generation of American punk rock, we had no way of knowing.

Nor did anyone at any of our battles of the bands in 1983 know about a few oddballs in rural Washington who toggled between hardcore and slowed-down Sabbath riffs and called themselves Melvins. Nor that, in Minneapolis, Hüsker Dü was readying
Zen Arcade
, the double album that would win them the maximum attention the mainstream could bestow upon a super fast, super distorted punk rock band. (Of course they'd eventually end up in
Rolling Stone
: their buried pop hooks made them the one noisy and aggressive band R.E.M. fans could like.) Wipers had been playing in Portland, Oregon, for years, ditto the Meat Puppets in Phoenix and Naked Raygun in Chicago. An unstable agglomeration of smart kids and party-jock types in Louisville, Kentucky, were playing in a band called Squirrelbait Youth—they hadn't yet chopped off the last word in their name, or recorded the two albums that are still rightly cherished today. Sonic Youth lived and practiced thirty-five miles from my high school. They'd released two EPs and a full-length album by the end of my junior year, but no one around me had any idea. Metal was huge in my hometown, but only the weak and flashy kind—Judas Priest and Quiet Riot. Slayer and Metallica and Voivod and a zillion others were already reordering the entire genre, but no one I sold pot to knew anything about them. Things weren't necessarily better for those lucky enough to grow up in cities, where many key people in bands were still considered complete weirdos. Sometimes even to the
other
weirdos. “I always thought [Wipers front man] Greg Sage was a cancer patient,” Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of the label SST, told me. “He had tufts of hair missing, and what was there was white. He was too old to look like a punk rocker. So you assumed he was a patient.”

In 1983, when I was fifteen, a friend's older brother brought a cassette to summer camp with Sex Pistols'
Never Mind the Bollocks
on one side and Dead Kennedys'
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
on the other. I grabbed it and never gave it back, and it pretty much got me through the following year. It took me forever to find the first New York Dolls album. Once I did, I played the hell out of it. Over time it grew less interesting, especially once that band became the model for a junkie-Stonesy subgenre that still really annoys me. But I'd heard them described as being a generation too early for punk rock, and in high school I was desperate for any kind of different. I didn't hear any Stooges songs other than “I Wanna Be Your Dog” until college. All their records were out of print everywhere, and if Iggy was far from deification in the early eighties, no one in the world cared the tiniest bit about Ron and Scott Asheton. In the absence of any guidance, you developed your own strategies. Growing up in Peoria, Illinois, years before he formed Tortoise, Doug McCombs would go to the local record store and buy the albums with the weirdest covers. In that way, he explained, he quickly found records by Wire, the Stranglers, Television, and X. Then again, he also bought the first Pearl Harbor and the Explosions record, so, you know, crapshoot. It could have been worse. In Manchester, Iowa, where Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 bassist Anne Eickelberg grew up, the record store was a couple of bins in the hardware store.

***

THERE WAS ONLY ONE OTHER LOCAL VENUE BESIDES THE BATTLES
of the bands. Every June my hometown held a fair called Expo Warren, with carnival games and rides, all trucked in and assembled on the fields where the Little League played, and an outdoor stage. Expo Warren brought a lovely boardwalk seediness to our town. Greasy traveling carnies collected tickets and thunked rides into life—and they really were greasy, since futzing with their machinery smeared their hands with oily black gunk, which came off when they thoughtlessly wiped sweat off their faces or slapped away mosquitoes. The midway was full of bad fried food and games with cheap stuffed-animal prizes. Entire stalls sold nothing but those small rectangular mirrors with band logos emblazoned on them. (It took me fifteen years to realize you were supposed to chop up coke on them.) School was finally out. Night came on slowly, swollen with summertime. One year I snuck into the woods past the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Roundup with a bunch of other kids to smoke joints rolled in strawberry-flavored rolling papers. That and the cotton candy dust drifting in the air—I can taste it all right now.

When it came to music, though, Expo Warren couldn't even match a battle of the bands' after-hours-at-the-mall atmosphere. And we couldn't help but notice, even through the fog of adolescence and whatever cigarettes and bad weed and cheap, sweet booze we scrounged. One evening the band consisted of one guy with a guitar and a practice amp struggling through some Kiss songs. (To steal the old joke: He played “Rock and Roll All Nite,” and “Rock and Roll All Nite” lost.) Another time some chubby guys with mustaches came onstage, looking like accountants and seemingly much older than us, which probably meant they were thirty. The lead mustache stepped up to the microphone and announced, “Hello, everyone. We're the Electrons!” and the band launched into “White Wedding.” They got through the introduction, but when the first verse began, that guy moved back to the mike and sang, “White Weddinnnnnnggggggg! I don't know the lyrics!” Why none of us watching ever got the urge already common in places near and far to say, “Fuck them, we can do it better”—well, I have no idea.

Some of this is hard to remember. I smoked a great deal of pot back then, but that's not why I don't remember, because I have very clear memories of being extraordinarily stoned through many gorgeous and horrific events. Rather, hormones and throbbing teenage anxieties created their own amnesia. Simple interactions and conversations often, and out of nowhere, transformed into hostility and sometimes even violence and the blurring, yappy chaos of an overcrowded dog run, albeit one with fists and flung bottles. One night my best friends, Andy and Mike, and I were driving around aimlessly, Mike kept his bright lights on a little too long, and a guy we drove behind went white hot with rage. He trailed us all the way to Andy's house—into which Andy quickly disappeared—and charged out of his car, looking for a fight. Mike stood absolutely silent and motionless while this guy screamed and shoved and fake-lunged at him. Mike didn't talk or fight back, which completely baffled this guy. Finally he screamed that if Mike ever wanted to fight, Mike knew what car he drove, and stomped off. (People actually said things like “If you wanna fight, you know my car!”) I watched, stoned and paranoid, from the backseat, bewildered and overmatched, as always, by aggressive male display. No fucking way was
I
getting out.

Adolescent hostility, that hot and insensible anger, was everywhere. Testosterone flooded bodies that couldn't handle it. It's understandable to me now as another generation of boys imperfectly body-slamming their way toward adulthood, but had any grown-up tried to explain it at the time, I wouldn't have listened. It wouldn't have made sense, because very little made sense. Close friends turned on you. Bullies shocked you with moments of tenderness. Conversations at parties would turn on a dime, and then you'd have to flee—from parties! Where for a moment you thought you'd found a temporary détente!

As a very scrawny freshman, I knew a hulking upperclassman. “Hulking,” meaning his neck was roughly as thick as my waist. He alternated between subjecting me to grotesque cruelties—once, in one of our school's legendarily gross and doorless bathroom stalls, he held me by my legs and dangled me over the toilet until my collar rubbed the dried piss on its rim—and speaking to me candidly, in a way I wondered if he did with anyone else. He'd played varsity football and certainly had the build and violence for it. But, as he explained to me once, he couldn't take knowing that he could fuck up someone forever with one hit, and this knowledge made him quit. Was this bullshit? The way he delivered it, I didn't think so. Another guy, wiry and entirely overwired, eventually stopped punching me in gym class and instead started pulling me aside to confess that he worried he did too much coke, or how it bothered him to watch a friend drink beer for breakfast. He was an admitted racist, but I spent a lot of time with him talking fairly seriously about politics. He could do that, though he was deeply ignorant—I mean this in a certain Southern sense, where “ignorant” can carry a racial valence—and lacked even a brain cell's worth of impulse control and common sense. I was learning that the bond between the bullied and the bully is strikingly intimate: odd, deeply sexual, confusing. But listening patiently to either of these guys was better than getting punched in the stomach.

Sometime in junior or senior year I got my hands on a bag of magic mushrooms, and one Friday or Saturday night I felt what-the-fuck enough to eat about half of it. Maybe more. I'd never tripped before, but I was curious. I was going out that night with Andy and Mike, but I didn't tell them what I'd done, which was probably a big mistake, although not as big a mistake as having no sense of “enough” or “too much” when it came to mushrooms. They started to kick in at a party we crashed, where I ducked outside to smoke a joint with our class president. My heart was pounding, and my general sense of reality was buckling and fractalizing even before we lit up, but that didn't stop me. Soon enough I became somewhat subverbal and was no longer seeing properly, but I still swear he told me which girl he planned to make out with at the party
exactly
as he put on his pair of douchebag Vuarnet sunglasses before walking back inside. (DEAR GOD, WHAT WAS IT WITH CLASS PRESIDENTS AND SUNGLASSES?) I stumbled through the front door for the tail end of a conversation in which Andy and Mike managed to piss off everyone so badly we had to leave very quickly. There may have been some threats made toward us. I don't really remember, because by now I was totally tripping my balls off.

Then I was in the backseat of Mike's car as he drove somewhere. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. No one spoke. Mike stopped the car on the edge of a giant marshland preserve called the Great Swamp, without explanation, and I lurched outside to pee.

Then the car quietly drove off.

There were no lights anywhere nearby, and the night was absolutely black. The swamp gurgled, stirred, breathed, belched, grunted, sighed, bubbled. Sounds piled atop sounds. Things thrashed in the muck. It was impossible to know what was real and what was not. I peered into the dark and saw patterns and flickers. Anything could be lurking in the enormous soup that began a few yards in front of me, though I was already sort of unable to discern where I stopped and the swamp started. Miles from home, in a remote nature preserve, late at night. I could reasonably expect to see no cars till morning. Maybe I was just together enough to walk home, if I knew the way. But I didn't.

Time, too, distorted, so I don't know how long I stood there, but at some point the car pulled up again, and the back door swung open. No one said anything. Andy and Mike stared straight ahead in the front seats, unsmiling, and had no explanation when I asked why, other than to say: “Because.”