Your Band Sucks (15 page)

Orestes likes to talk about how everyone needs to let the demon out, so long as you know when to usher the demon back into its cage. Hearing him say that always made perfect sense to me, because pursuing drumming with the singlemindedness that excellence requires can make anyone go completely insane. Even someone like Doctor Rock, who, despite all those thousands of hours spent practicing, was far more lover than thug. But upon landing in Europe, he let the demon run amok and never tried to drag it back to its cage. Maybe it was that the end was now in sight. Maybe he held back on the American leg of the tour, worried that he'd freak out us geeks. Maybe the right combination of environment and availability flicked an invisible internal switch. In Europe he became caricature. In Europe we started calling him Doctor Rock.

DECEMBER IN NORTHERN EUROPE. I WON'T BE THE FIRST PERSON
to say it, but much of that continent doesn't really understand heating. Our van was tiny and lacked seatbelts, which I hated, because without them your ass slid around the slippery backseat, making it impossible to sleep, while the chilly weather gradually leached out all your body heat. A few scenes of snowy alpine glory, but much was just lightless and gray. We pulled into each city at twilight—no, it was
always
twilight—while passersby hunched their way home through streets and sidewalks coated in soot-covered snow. Parts of England still stank from coal smoke. After we played our first show of the tour, opening for the Wedding Present in London, our van was broken into, and we lost both of my guitars, my amp, Sooyoung's bass, and a bunch of merch and cash, which didn't do much for morale.

We argued in the van, in hotels, backstage and onstage. Sometimes moments before the show began. Sometimes during the set.

I went days without speaking to Doctor Rock. (Sooyoung went longer.) But it didn't seem to bother him, once he discovered the greater volumes of free booze, the occasional availability of speed, and that larger crowds meant lots more women at each show. Early in the tour we played Hamburg, a town that, as every touring band knows, has an actual red-light district. Another American band opened for us, and we all checked out the Reeperbahn afterward. Available women sat in lingerie in storefront windows, lit by low ambient light. They had mastered an almost-subliminal signaling system: you never saw any of them knocking on their windows, you just heard ghostly taps echoing down the alleys.

We tried to find the cheapest place with topless dancers. Not the best strategy if one wants a good show. To his enduring credit, a googly-eyed Doctor Rock posed the same question to all the barkers who stood by the entrances: “Is it decadent?” (A question we all found profoundly amusing. Also kind of the right one to ask!) We finally found a suitable one—by which I mean the cheapest one—and paid the minimal fee. Each of us entered his own booth, a wall opened, and we found ourselves looking into a giant round room, staring directly into one another's open booths, while a tall blonde gyrated and shimmied without any enthusiasm. She asked where we were from, and the guitarist from the other band said, in the flattest American-news-anchor accent possible, that we were all English. The absolute highlight was when she straightened up, pointed at her chest, and, apparently seriously, pronounced, “Tits.” The show ended after that, and Doctor Rock trotted off to explore the sights.

The rest of us went to another club, which had a sloped and polished painted-concrete floor, like a roller rink or skate park, and was about as big. Immediately two or three blond German girls, nude but for high heels, descended upon me, and one tried to strike up a conversation.

Attractive Naked Blond Girl:
Hello! Where are you from?

Me:
Um. New York.

ANBG:
Would you like to come with me to a private room?

Me:
No. [
Exit
.]

Doctor Rock, meanwhile, was enormously complicating his evening by forgetting the name and address of our hotel, then spending all night trying to find it. At one point he went to a police station with this sad story. I was interested in hearing how Hamburg's constabularies responded, once they stopped laughing. But after seeing an exhausted and angry-eyed Doctor Rock glaring at the rest of us over breakfast—he managed to find his way back just as we started eating—I thought it better not to ask.

I could say that Doctor Rock drank a lot, but it would be more accurate to say that if he was awake, he was drinking. We played a shitty show in Innsbruck—literally shitty, in an absolutely freezing room in a squat that was home to a pack of dogs that left scattered frozen clusters of droppings everywhere. As disheartening as that sight was, it was nowhere near as disheartening as what happened when the heat finally went on and the room filled: the poop unfroze, mingled with the snow on everyone's shoes, and was tracked everywhere until the entire floor was sloppy with a thin, foul-smelling muck. Before the show Doctor Rock drank a beer while flying around on someone's skateboard. He hit a patch of frozen dog shit, or something, and took a pretty serious tumble. But he didn't let go of his beer bottle—interestingly—and he landed on it, opening a nasty gash. I saw him howl and flail a bloody hand and immediately thought,
Tour over.
But Tanco, our unflappable Dutch driver/tour manager/Doctor Rock minder, wrapped it neatly in gauze and tape, and within minutes Doctor Rock was relating and reenacting his accident to a crowd of new friends.

He did not appear to require sleep. He was awake when we went to bed and awake when we woke up. Sometimes he would doze in the van during the day, then suddenly sit up, reach for a beer, and down it.

He seemed to find a woman at every show. In Austria (or Germany, or Switzerland, I really don't remember), one stuck around in the van for a few days. She must have hoped for a better time than what we showed her, because, if I understood correctly, she had put her job in danger by coming along. Had I spoken to her at all, I might be able to tell her story now.

Long van rides lead young men to hash out theories, and on this tour we started wondering whether Germany was so uptight because its men scorned cunnilingus. One morning in Karlsruhe or Kassel or Bremen or Dortmund, outside our hotel, following an impressive make-out/mauling session with the previous night's conquest outside our idling van, Doctor Rock described how he had gone down on her the night before, making her softly exclaim in wonderment, “What are you doing?” We all developed the theory, but Doctor Rock did the actual lab work. Credit him for that, I guess.

Some of this was kind of funny and made for great stories, even if the day-to-day sucked, as it inevitably does when you live with someone who's always in character. The complications came from realizing that the joke-doll version of Doctor Rock was easier to deal with than the talented and disgruntled drummer who was ill-suited for our band. Encouraging him by chuckling at the cartoon had queasy moral aspects, even if, to paraphrase Orwell's brilliant quote, he was quite happy to let his face grow to fit the mask. I kept him at arm's length and laughed at his excesses because it was the easiest thing to do. Not my most shining moment. It never occurred to me to say,
Hey, what's up? Maybe it's time to slow down
. Anyway, the general codes of the road dictate that someone has to be found unconscious with a needle in his arm to warrant an intervention, or to be so fucked up he or she starts ruining shows. Doctor Rock never did that. Which is not to say that his metally flourishes were working or welcome.

The last show of the tour was in the Netherlands on the next-to-last day of 1990, and the following night there was a huge New Year's Eve party in the well-appointed squat where we stayed. (On this tour I learned that no country did squats as well as the Dutch.) I stayed in my room, reading fanzines, watching TV. I was worn out, feeling shy, also sad that this was the end. Doctor Rock, of course, was roaming the halls but had divined that our host had a small cache of speed, and every half hour or so he asked sweetly for another hit.

You don't want to see someone you know acting like this, but the tour was over, as was the band, and we were finally going home. Well,
most
of us were. Doctor Rock had received a vague offer to drum with an expat American guitarist of minor renown. Perhaps some caution light should have flashed, since he found said guitarist hanging out with a clearly junked-out opening band one night, but, whatever, he was no longer our problem. He planned to stay at the squat for a few days and then . . . well, we didn't know and we didn't ask, because Doctor Rock was finally off our hands.

An article in a British fanzine, written just after Sooyoung and I limped home, closed with the image of Doctor Rock riding toward the horizon, heading deeper and deeper into some rock fantasy, until he disappeared from sight.

The reality was different. A few days after I got back to the States, while licking wounds at my parents' comfortable and massively un-punk-rock house—unemployed, band over, no clue what to do next, sitting with them each night at the dinner table, joining them uneasily in front of the TV afterward—the phone rang. It was Doctor Rock's dad, an extremely gentle white-haired academic, who had some questions.

Among them: “Now, Jon. I have to ask you something. And I understand if you feel you can't betray a friend. But was my son having problems with drugs when he was in Europe?”

No, I said. But he was drinking heavily. (I didn't bother mentioning the speed.)

“Well, if it was just drinking . . .” his dad started to say, but I didn't want to give him any false sense of relief. It wasn't that I gave a shit about Doctor Rock. I was basically hoping I'd never see him again. But his parents were so kind when we stayed with them on tour. I also sensed that his dad had made this call before, and that thought made me squeeze my eyes shut.

No, I said. He was drinking
heavily
. Really, really heavily.

Meanwhile, Doctor Rock's girlfriend, understandably upset that he was, you know,
not coming home
, called my girlfriend, whom I'd made the mistake of telling many things I assumed she'd keep in confidence. (Getting through that tour required a lot of venting.) But when Doctor Rock's girlfriend called her, she shared what I'd recounted of his multivarious dalliances, and afterward told me about this discussion. Like me, my girlfriend also went to Oberlin. Unlike me, she was still influenced by the most excruciating aspects of the school's exhausting leftydom. She argued that sisterhood prevented her from lying or shading the truth when asked about Doctor Rock's faithfulness. I pointed out that she had betrayed my confidences, and by doing so screwed me and some other people as well. But by then scorekeeping was moot.

Doctor Rock's parents contrived a way to bring him back home, though I don't recall how. They didn't inform him that, upon arrival, he was going straight to rehab. Though they did tell me.

Before we flew to Europe, he had left his car in my parents' driveway, and it fell to me to pick him up at the airport. He'd already gotten an earful from his girlfriend, so: awkward. But he was nowhere near the asshole that he had every right to be. In fact, he was almost cheerful. Or at least he, like me, desperately did not want any kind of scene, and he, like me, just wanted to get on with what was left of his life. I did not bring up any touchy topics. (I was happy being pretty Midwestern-indirect about everything myself.) He stayed at my parents' house just long enough to shower, while I reflected upon the shitstorm awaiting him, and then he hopped in his car and disappeared in the direction of the interstate. He left as cheerfully as he came in, even though he also talked about what he thought was coming—that he would have some serious explaining to do when got back home.

But he had no idea what was coming. A few weeks later I got a letter from rehab.

“I'm sorry to be writing this, but anger must be vented,” it began in seething and tiny handwriting. It went on from there to denounce my betrayal, my disingenuousness, and my eternal complaining while on that last tour. (Right on all counts, by the way.) I stewed for a couple weeks, feeling guilty, again, that I'd tacitly encouraged his worst instincts. Finally I sent a few perfunctory sentences conceding certain points while asserting that he had no one to blame but himself.

I couldn't help it. You couldn't have helped it, either. Something about rehab forces clichés out of everyone.

This note crossed in the mail with a sunnier, blame-accepting letter from a clean, sober, and steadier Doctor Rock. What a shitty time we had all along trying to communicate. We couldn't even time apologies and accusations correctly. Our correspondence dwindled to nothing after that. I got a postcard from him about a year later, gently, cheerfully—Midwesternly—chiding me for not sending him live tapes of the European tour. He ended up in a band we knew, but left after one album. I ran into him on the road in the mid-nineties, while I was on tour with Vineland, and we had an awkward conversation. Like many dreamers and seekers, he ended up out West, where he spent years drumming for a show in Las Vegas. He's married now, with kids.

***

I DIDN'T SPEAK WITH HIM AGAIN UNTIL LATE 2013. FUNNILY
enough, after completing a PhD in music, he taught university classes in pop music: he really
was
Doctor Rock. I'd told him I was writing this book and wanted to talk about our time playing together. I wanted him to take some shots at me, fair being fair and all, but no matter how much I prompted, he demurred. I didn't expect the conversation to be easy, but it was clear that I was ripping off many old scabs, and the way he wallowed in apology was hard to hear.

I asked: What happened in Europe?

“I fucked everything up. Isn't that what this is about? I was the guy who fucked it all up.”

No, I said. That's not what this is about. What happened?