Your Band Sucks (18 page)

I didn't want to be like Hum. I didn't want the major-label deal. I didn't want to be a rock star. I didn't want to get rich. It was a drag to know that bands I didn't like toured all the time and only returned to their hometowns, glamorously exhausted, to rest and drink and tell road stories until they all got in the van again—maybe even a fucking
bus
—for another six-week circuit around the United States or Canada or Europe. I wanted what I called just-enough. I wanted people to hear my band. I wanted to be known and respected. I didn't want the tour bus. (I did want the van.) All I wanted was just-enough people buying our records, so there was just-enough of an audience to tour ambitiously. Just-enough was probably ten thousand to fifteen thousand people worldwide. Zack Lipez wrote that he wanted Freshkills to be Murder City Devils famous: successful enough to get by on touring seven months a year while bartending a few nights a week when he was at home. Needless to say, neither Freshkills nor Vineland had just-enough. Not even close.

***

EACH MORNING ON THAT LAST VINELAND TOUR, AS WE
headed off to the next city, I saw a vanful of deflated faces and knew better than anyone that nothing would get better that day, or the day after that, or the following week. I started asking, “What, you expected this to be
fun
?” Often several times a day. Meanwhile, Jerry and Fred were becoming best friends, forming an impenetrably tight circle with its own inside references and van rituals inflicted on everyone else. One of them involved choosing a radio station and keeping it on until the signal faded. Fred and Jerry routinely sought out the worst classic rock stations they could find and insisted on singing along to Spacehog's “In the Meantime”—the noxious song of the moment—while playing it at top volume. I had a very low threshold for tolerating classic rock, not to mention Spacehog. Which they both knew.

No boss ever experiences the workers' camaraderie. Though the boss at a real job gets certain perks, like making more money. In indie rock the boss
loses
the most. (As I did.) And it's especially lonely to lead a band when Daddy can't feed the family. One lunchtime or dinner, before playing the Bug Jar in Rochester—a venue so idiosyncratic that any band had to split itself up between two tiny stages—I sat alone while my bandmates chose a table across the room. There I marinated in bad vibes, thinking,
They're talking about me. I know they're fucking talking about me.
Over and over again. Couldn't make it stop.

In Pittsburgh we played at a coffeehouse, opening for a ferocious and then-obscure trio from Portland called Sleater-Kinney. Someone wrote
JON FINE IS A DICK
on the wall in the women's bathroom. That someone, I learned much later, was probably in my band. But the other indignities of that last tour weren't colorful enough to make for funny stories, like the time Eggs' Andrew Beaujon, hung over and huddling miserably in his sleeping bag on a long van ride, puked
into
said sleeping bag. Or the time a barefoot Anne Eickelberg, the bassist in Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, stepped into a pile of fresh dog shit while looking for the bathroom late one night while bunking at an unfamiliar house. Or the time, many years later, when, bereft of any other option, Fred was forced to shit in his toolbox while stuck in traffic on a treeless highway during a solo tour. Nothing like that happened to us. And no matter how bad any tour was, you still spotted random dazzlements amid the vast strangenesses of America. In one rest-stop bathroom near Macon, Georgia, unbelievably detailed pre-Craigslist men-seeking-men graffiti instructed interested parties to show up in a specified location and “touch cock” to signal interest. While on my way to dinner before the show in Richmond, I paused to light cigarettes for two grateful quadriplegics. And at our last show, in surpassingly depressing Worcester, Massachusetts, the small crowd went batshit. The kind of night in a small town where no one knows you but you make the most unlikely new fans, like a middle-aged auto repair shop owner who for some reason showed up, still wearing his work uniform. I'm sure that show sounded good—wound up tight, pissed off and burning. Bands about to break up often do, if they channel the tensions correctly.

By then Fred had quit, after a blowup one night in Georgia, though he agreed to play the shows we'd already booked. A major complication, since he owned the van, and he and Jerry and I all still lived in the same loft. After Fred left, and one bad post-tour practice as a trio, Jerry called a band meeting, at which he very gently announced, “I don't want to do this anymore.”

I was dicking around with a bass, to relieve tension.
So there it is
, I thought. I put the bass down and said, “Me, too. How about you, Kylie?” Band over. It didn't take five minutes. I probably went out for a beer afterward, alone. By then Fred and I were barely speaking, and I was ready to avoid Jerry for months. But he wouldn't let me, and I loved him for it.

***

WAS VINELAND GOOD? I THOUGHT SO. AND ON THAT LAST
tour we reached our peak. Each night onstage Fred and I threw all our frustrations into acts of musical passive aggression that somehow worked. Besides our unspoken hostile amplifier standoff every night—
I
will turn down mine as soon as
he
turns down his—we each embellished our individual parts more and more without working said bits out with each other, without even
listening
to each other. Judging by the tape from one of our last shows, a skull-crushingly loud one at the Middle East in Boston, this worked much better than it should have, the songs constantly assuming new shapes before quickly snapping back into the correct forms. But it's no loss to humanity that the final Vineland album remains unreleased, even if it's the first full album Jerry recorded. Once I could stand to listen to it again after he died, I was horrified at how snug a box I had forced his drumming into. Also, I hated my voice. My singing sounded thin and strangulated and nasal—a whine, not a growl—even after I had learned to breathe in time with the music onstage, to have enough air for each line and keep my rhythm in sync with the band. It felt weak, and I grew to despise it.

We'd built the band to my specifications. I wrote the songs, sang them, and had veto power over most aesthetic decisions. (Here I could fault myself for adding too much sentimentality and poppy touches, out of insecurity, but let's set that aside for now.) I contacted clubs and labels. It didn't happen for us. If we weren't as good as the other bands I played in—it's still hard to think this part through, but sometimes I suspect that's really the story—and didn't go as far as they did, any blame goes on me. I know I should be stoic and expect nothing from a band except the joy of the music. I know I should be thrilled I wrote a few songs for Vineland that I'll sing to myself forever. But Vineland broke me. After we split up, it killed any desire to start a band, which had been my sole animating impulse since I was twelve. And while I still identified as a musician—what else could I be?—I lost much of my appetite for playing music, and all my confidence. I went back to an anonymous cubicle job writing and editing a newsletter with a minuscule readership, halfheartedly played bass in Alger Hiss, and tried not to think about it too much.

I also realized something important, even if I wasn't proud of it at all: there were people brave enough, and strong enough, to place all their bets on music, no matter what happened, and I was no longer one of them.

***

BUT I'VE BEEN DOING ALL THE TALKING, AND THE SUN IS SETTING
ting over the Hudson, and Zack is just sitting here.

Zack? Are you heartbroken? Relieved?

“Both,” he said, and then doesn't talk about relief at all. “I'm heartbroken that nobody liked my band. I did it for nine years, and nobody liked my band.

“I'm not sad to be out of Freshkills,” he continued. “I'm sad that nobody ever gave a shit about any single fucking thing we ever did. It's a constant sorrow. I'm going to take it to my grave.”

True story: Walter Mondale ran into George McGovern not long after Mondale lost to Reagan in 1984. They had a lot in common. Two liberal senators from prairie states. Two candidates who lost forty-nine states to an aloof Republican opponent they plainly regarded as unworthy. Mondale asked McGovern, who was crushed by Nixon in 1972, “George, how long does it take to get over a big loss like this?” McGovern replied, “I'll let you know when it happens.” Ha-ha—though not really. McGovern repeated this line for the rest of his life, until he died, in 2012.

I didn't share this with Zack. It's rather overblown to equate the heartbreak of your band's failure to the heartbreak of someone convinced he'll be the next president—and who spent all his time trying to convince everyone else that he would be the next president—but then finds out, very quickly and very definitively, that he never will. But this is how I feel about Vineland, and how I imagine Zack feels about Freshkills. One day I'll get over it. I'll let you know when it happens.

B
ut I'm not telling the whole story. Because I missed so much of it while it happened.

I keep saying our world was ascetic, boring, so not-like-rock. So little sex. So few drugs harder than pot. Sometimes I saw this wasn't quite true.

In the mid-nineties a friend who played in a band in Los Angeles visited New York every few months and we'd hit the bars. He liked to get losing-your-language drunk. After a certain hour, if you heard him on the phone, you'd think he was drooling.
That
drunk. But just before that he'd suggest, then demand, that we find some coke. I had no idea how, and always tried to change the subject, but even in a strange city he could parse any room within five minutes:
I can't get coke here, I can only get E, let's go
. Then he'd tell me about the threesome he had with an icy blonde and a male friend, whom, he insisted on assuring me, he
did not touch at all, not even once
, during said encounter. But that was L.A. Not New York. Here we dressed badly and burrowed inward. Here we so rarely acted on what we wanted. Our fuel was unfulfilled desire, channeled elsewhere. Right?

Or maybe I wasn't understanding what was really going on around me. One night I was out late in the East Village, getting drunk with a woman who was also a musician. Pale-skinned, giant eyes, she was everyone's crush, and I felt fortunate to be there with her and a woman she knew. After the bartender announced last call, we walked toward an apartment, tightly pressed together, with me in the middle. At least that's how I remember it.

When we arrived, the musician—let's call her Maroon—sent her friend upstairs and pulled me aside to chat on the street corner. The look on her face suggested she knew secrets and felt far more confident than I did. A confusing conversation, out there at a quarter to four. Confusing to me, at least. Maroon asked me, half-smiling and looking sideways, to come upstairs for a while and then leave.
So she's hitting on me
, I thought. She recently broke up with her boyfriend—someone I knew, who was also in a band, of course—and I wanted to know if fooling around with me was some rebound or revenge move. I started in on
Are you doing this because of him?
Looking important and off into the distance, for effect. Taxis drowsed their way up First Avenue, beyond an overflowing orange garbage can. No one else was around.

Then her face rearranged into bewilderment and (I thought) a mocking grin. Maybe you saw this coming, but I didn't: Maroon was after her friend, not me.

Then
why did she want me upstairs at all
? I didn't ask, because I was humiliated that I had misunderstood her, and still felt like I misunderstood what might happen next. I followed her upstairs, gulped half a beer, ran out the door. She protested that I shouldn't go, but it didn't sound sincere. I ran past that garbage can, hailed a cab—a luxury in those days—and headed to my practice space, where I grabbed my guitar, turned my amp way up, closed my eyes, and played until long after sunrise.

Looking back now, I think: threesome. You fucked up. But I still don't know. Do you?

It wasn't that no one got laid on tour. Once in Detroit, late at night after the show, a musician disappeared to make a quick phone call, came back chuckling, and said he was leaving to visit his cousin. Everyone else rolled their eyes. Because, they knew, he had cousins across the country. All of them women, all of whom he only saw late at night, all of them unknown to his live-in girlfriend.

My friend from L.A. wasn't the only one who wanted serious drugs. Eventually I realized why the first drummer in a band that would later get famous was so often dazed and distant and falling asleep, even at shows and parties. Or why I once ran into him as he walked west from Avenue C and he laughed and said he was out of money. Sometimes at night I ran into Jim or Travis, which are not their names, when their blue eyes looked especially beautiful. For a long time I didn't know why: dope had erased their pupils. I last saw Travis one Sunday night around eleven as he packed up his drums. He'd found someone to buy them right then. It was a classic, gorgeous old kit from the sixties. Ludwig, maybe, or Gretsch. He might have gotten a hundred bucks. Far less than they were worth, but I think the buyer sensed that it was a distress sale.

One of these guys overdosed and died. Another records himself reading poetry and posts it online. Heroin is very bad for you.

In Six Finger Satellite's early days, half the band were junkies. Even on tour. Which, by the way:
crazy
. How can you feed a habit when your band makes two hundred bucks a night? For one thing, their drummer Rick Pelletier told me, someone was FedExing dope to them as they traveled the country. (Important to note: Rick was
not
one of the junkies.) “We'd go to some mom-and-pop indie record store and say, ‘Is there a package here for Six Finger Satellite?'” Rick said. “The unknowing counter person would say, ‘Yes, there is.' It was filled with drugs. Which would then be taken very quickly.”

“Quickly you resort to stealing,” admitted Juan MacLean, who
was
one of the addicts. “Even from the other guys in the band. J. [Six Finger's singer J. Ryan] caught me breaking into his apartment.” J. was also one of Juan's closest friends. Previously Juan admitted to a different technique to solving a different dope-on-the-road problem: when faced with border crossings, he hid his drugs in his bandmates' suitcases. Anyway, Six Finger was on tour, had just played a show, and they all were bunking at some punk rock house. Late that night or early the next morning, a resident did dope and turned blue. Panic. “Someone wanted to call 911. I said,
You're not calling
,” said Juan. “I remember unplugging the phone.” Luckily that resident lived. When Six Finger Satellite got back from that tour, the other guys dropped off Juan and the other junkie, fired them both, and told them never to contact the rest of the band again. Juan went to rehab and got clean, which is why he's still making records. The other guy didn't. He died.

Not everybody was in the monastery. Many of us had a crooked-grinning, slippery side and locked ourselves in bathrooms or snuck over to Avenue D when no one was looking. And, really, it was okay, because you could convince yourself that everybody did it. Everybody needed their cousins. Everybody wanted a taste of something sweet before turning out the light in their tiny rooms, and a dollar brownie or a carrot juice from the corner deli wasn't doing it anymore.

I knew you could get by on crumbs while living this life, as long as sometimes a woman's in your room at 4 a.m., or a few bartenders or baristas or taco stand employees slide you free drinks and food, or, occasionally, an excited fan stops you on the street. These made up for the times you checked the bank account on the first of the month, rent due, and saw you had $97, made up for wearing the same shabby clothes for years, made up for buying canned tuna only when it went on sale. You'd be amazed how sustaining those little moments were. You could live off any of them for another week, easy. Until they stopped happening.

I thought music alone could feed us forever, but it turned out to be too slender a diet. I thought we were about opposition. I thought this was us and them—them being the big-time music biz and commercial radio. I thought we were supposed to keep fighting. But how long could you accept your half-assed lot of being fanzine-famous—no, just fanzine-
known
—and kind of starving? Was this why the standard indie rock emotional response was to duck your head, avert eye contact, not admit to wanting anything—because you were never going to get it? Were twee bands here because adulthood meant adult desires that the world would never satisfy?

I saw more and more bands in which no one onstage seemed to be trying. They looked like they didn't give a shit, and not in the interesting way: the way a waiter at an indifferent café at 4 p.m. doesn't give a shit. I'd see them and think,
Why are you doing this?
One night I saw Helium when Mary Timony played with her then-boyfriend Ash from Polvo. I loved Helium's early records, and Timony's track record offers plenty of evidence that she's a serious badass. But live, that night, the two of them were so sleepy and uninvolved I was like,
Christ, you two. Take a nap.
They both seemed exhausted—in the sense of having nothing left to offer—and absolutely without joy, or vitality, or sex, or much of anything, really. I went to see Bugskull—excited, because I adored their singles—and watched the singer shamble through the set, simpering, unable to meet the audience's eyes. He kept telescoping his head into his shoulders, like a turtle; he kept shrinking back from the microphone and the lip of the stage. I left disgusted. Couldn't anyone
pretend to believe a tiny bit
in what they were doing? Move beyond the rut of modesty and understatement that we stuck with so long it became its own cliché? After ten or fifteen years all our indie rock modesty and seriousness only meant: no pleasure. Not much hope. No fun at all. A sameness had descended on a culture once so sprawling and uncategorizable. So remind me again: why were we here?

I found myself thinking,
I wish I could quit.
I'd have money in the bank. Wouldn't be pissed off all the time. Life would be easier, I knew, if
I could just fucking stop.
But I couldn't. Even after Vineland fell apart. “I don't mean to be melodramatic, but there are times when it feels like an affliction. A terminal illness. You're never going to get rid of it,” Tim Midyett, the bassist from Silkworm, once told me.

I couldn't let go. Not yet, anyway. I wore the same T-shirts over and over again. The same flannel shirts until they frayed off my back. And suddenly you were in your thirties. You hadn't worked at a real job in years, unlike your old pals from college. Some of them still made a fuss over your band and sometimes came out to see you play. (At least on weekends. Not many made it out during the week anymore.) To them, you were interesting. Maybe even famous-ish. But they were married. Some had kids. Jobs became careers. Meanwhile, you knew some things they didn't. Your record sales had plateaued, or were shrinking. Your crowds and guarantees weren't getting bigger. You played the same clubs in Berlin or Minneapolis or San Francisco or Dublin each tour, and each time you saw the same faces. Aging faces. Suddenly the crowd was older. (Were you, too? It dawned on you: yes.) You'd stare out at the crowd and think,
Maybe this is as big as it gets
. Or
Maybe a few years ago was as big as it gets
. You still swore up and down you'd never sign to a major label, but this wasn't exactly a choice. They stopped being interested a long time ago. If they ever were. So what the fuck do you do?

No, really. What the fuck do you do?

***

BY THE MID-NINETIES THINKING FELLERS UNION LOCAL 282
had been around almost a decade. They'd released four impressively sprawling and idiosyncratic albums on Matador. A fervent fanbase adored them. They got reams of great press. They also played the same clubs each tour, and they toured a lot, and were all well into their thirties, surviving on a band salary that peaked at seven hundred bucks a month. Then, in 1995, they got an offer to tour with the dreadful band Live, back when Live was one of the biggest bands in the world. According to their bassist Anne Eickelberg, this is how that went:

We kept saying, “We want to tour with bigger bands. Let's get more exposure.” People kept coming up with really insane things. Like “You want to tour with Toad the Wet Sprocket?” Where does that even come from? Then: Live. We didn't know who Live were. But then we were like, let's just do it.

It was a full tour. Twenty-something shows across the country. Secondary markets, mostly. Total test of character, because the audiences fucking despised us. We got stuff thrown at us all the time. Kids just screaming, “You suck!” for a whole set. Sometimes it was like a high that you could ride, because it was just so ridiculous. In his tour diary Brian [Hageman, her bandmate] said something like “We're standing there looking like their fucking mom and dad, and we're the obstacle between them and Live, so they're really, really angry about it.” But you'd be done super early, go back to catering, have really amazing food, have people move all your shit for you. Play a half-hour set and get paid a lot of money.

It was great fodder for future conversations. We played an outdoor venue in Knoxville, and after our set one guy in Live nonchalantly came up to me and said, “I cracked the window on the tour bus. You guys sounded all right.” Another day he breezed up to us in catering, shoved
Billboard
at us, and pointed, so we could see that Live's record had reached number one: “Just showing this to you because I can.” We were also there to see the delivery of their matching robes, which had the album logo on them.

But we knew within a couple days: there's no way we could ever do this. We're too weird. We're not right. This will not happen.

Other bands found that the world had stopped caring. Mudhoney's third album on Warner Brothers,
Tomorrow Hit Today
, came out in 1998, and sold roughly a tenth as many copies as their earlier records. Sebadoh released
The Sebadoh
in 1999 to what Lou Barlow describes as the open disdain of their label, Sub Pop. It sold a fraction of the band's previous releases, and Sebadoh toured in front of a rapidly disappearing audience. “Our last show in that cycle,” Barlow recalled, “was playing to like twenty-five people at the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas. A place we had sold out a year before.” The Gypsy Tea Room's capacity? Approximately seven hundred. Barlow now shrugs, “I just thought,
Message received
.”

Meanwhile, the real estate and stock market boom during President Clinton's second term reshaped the American city. Which is a dry and academic way to say that, as happens to every generation, cheap neighborhoods became unaffordable as demand kicked in for real estate in the places we helped gentrify. Beginning in 1992, Unrest's Mark Robinson lived in a house about five miles from Washington, D.C., at 715 North Wakefield Street in Arlington, Virginia, and ran his label Teen-Beat from there, too. He and some fellow musicians rented it for virtually nothing. Andrew Beaujon of Eggs recalls paying $234 a month, a bargain good enough to overlook the rats that lived there, too. Eventually the landlord offered-slash-demanded: buy this house for $135,000. Which, for the residents, might as well have been three million bucks. (At its peak, Robinson said, Unrest was a full-time job for its members and paid them twelve grand a year. In Beaujon's highest-grossing year as a more or less full-time musician, he made about $9,000.)