Your Band Sucks (30 page)

We end up at a horrid bar nearby, in the no-man's-land near NYU, with a bunch of people who went to the show, and stay for hours. I finally leave around 3:15 a.m., the taxi floats me home down trafficless streets, and I collapse into bed next to Laurel, home at last, stinking of drink and show sweat and my post-show halal-cart sandwich and everything else that had happened since I left our bedroom this morning.

***

WE PLAY BROOKLYN THE FOLLOWING NIGHT WITH VIOLENT
Bullshit and Turing Machine. Orestes and I again drive the Forester, jammed with gear, to the club. Idling at a stoplight near the Williamsburg Bridge while I'm staring at my phone—cranky from the flood of texts and e-mails, impatient because
the light is still red—
Orestes excitedly nudges me and nods at the next car over. At first I hear indeterminate thuds and muttering and assume it's hip-hop. But the dude is blasting our song “Lookin' at the Devil.” And headbanging. This has been a grouchy, hungover, and stressed-out day, but now we're in a good mood all the way to the club.

The Knitting Factory is a shoebox turned sideways, primarily composed of concrete. In terms of acoustics, that's strike one and strike two. It's painted a sickly, sticky-looking red that, now that I think about it, reminds me of Kokie's walls circa 1999. (Strike three, for looks.) The club's soundman, Bob, paces the room, wearing shorts and a face well-creased by rock and carousing, endlessly stressed out. He greets each request with a series of compulsive headshakes and dark mutterings about how impossible it is, then disappears and returns with whatever we need.

Before the show two guys wave me over to tell me they flew in from Atlanta for last night's show and changed their flights to stick around for tonight's.
(I hope we don't suck
.
)
Jerry Fuchs's younger brother, Adam, also came up from Georgia, and his sister, Erica, from North Carolina. Jerry should have seen this. I'm enormously touched that his siblings will. Besides its bad acoustics, the room is too shallow and the stage height is weirdly out of proportion with the space, and it isn't the best show of the tour. But somewhere during the loud part of “Ducks and Drakes,” I close my eyes, turn my face up toward the stage lights, and behind my eyelids everything goes orange and I feel something I'll never properly describe, and I can't stop myself from laughing out loud, tickled by something, I'll never know what. During the long sustained A after the first verse in “Valmead,” I turn the feedbacking note down, bend down to gulp a beer, stand upright, turn my volume back up, then launch into the next bit, perfectly timed and on beat. From your perch inside the song, you imagine that its intervals sound staggeringly cool, though these little dramas are far too inside baseball for almost anyone else to notice.

Then an afterparty where a bunch of us DJ, and when that bar closes its doors and turns up the lights, we stay for one more drink. Afterward Sooyoung takes us to a place he knows in Koreatown that is still serving food and, perhaps more important, pitchers of beer. It's not as if we're celebrating and bro-hugging all over the place—that never was our style—but none of us wants any of these final nights to end. We get home around 6 a.m. That afternoon we fly to Chicago for our last show.

THAT FINAL SHOW BROUGHT US TO AN INCREDIBLY EXALTED
and appropriate venue, by which I mean a shithole made comfortable by years of familiarity. The Empty Bottle. The kind of place that every band, ever, has played at least once, and though I hadn't been there in years, it was instantly familiar once we stepped inside. Smaller and grottier than I remembered, perhaps, but its essentials hadn't changed at all. The couches backstage almost certainly hadn't. The main interior color was black, stickers covered virtually every surface—different ones than in 1996, but honestly that felt like a minor detail—and the backstage bathroom was still a riot of multicolored graffiti. Quality bourbons were available now, since its crowd was getting older and transferring its musical connoisseurship to food and drink, as well as a very good selection of beer, for what struck a New Yorker as shockingly low prices. The club was still a clumsy hodgepodge of three oddly connected rooms, with steps awkwardly and randomly placed throughout. I almost tripped, spectacularly, while getting offstage, and another time getting
to
the strangely shaped stage, which is situated where two rooms meet in the corner of a capital L. Bands usually set up their drums in the middle of the stage, then everyone else struggles to figure out where they should place and point their amps. I set up stage left, as always. From there, I was told, the local consensus was to aim the amp toward the men's room.

It was fitting that Bitch Magnet would end here. We remixed our first album and recorded much of our last album in Chicago, and Sooyoung lived there for years in the nineties. Also, the old Chicago rule still held: no matter how bad any tour was going, as you slogged through whatever dead and depressing stretch in the Great Plains or topmost tier of the South, you hung on until Chicago. It was your second hometown. Where everyone knew your name and understood your decades of accumulated indie rock bullshit.

I was unusually obsessed with selling merch, because I knew unless we had a huge crowd and sold a mountain of shirts and records and CDs, we'd lose money on the tour. I felt like a campaign manager who realizes, the night before Election Day, that his candidate needs a record turnout and a couple of other breaks to win. (And who doesn't share this insight with the candidate—or Sooyoung and Orestes.) Rose Marshack, the Poster Children bassist and another old friend, showed up early. She may have offered, but it's more likely I shamed or strong-armed her into running the merch table. Two people working merch is exponentially better than one, and—rock is sexist—for mostly-male crowds, women often sell better than men. I kept barking idiotic
Glengarry Glen Ross
jokes at her. But they worked. Soon Rose, a deeply kind, modest, and mild-mannered Midwestern mom, was all but grabbing people by the ear as they passed, demanding they buy something. One guy couldn't decide between a gray shirt and a brown one. “You should buy both!” she shot back. He picked brown. Three minutes later he returned, wearing an embarrassed grin, and bought the gray version, too.

Sooyoung's parents showed up, and I handed his dad a beer and two pairs of earplugs. Then, still playing host, I gave earplugs to Rose, my ex-girlfriend Martha, and my old friend Zoe. Martha and Zoe had been best friends at Oberlin and still seemed to be. I imagined such a thing was easier in Chicago than in New York or Los Angeles or London, cities where the currents of life and work dragged you into deeper and deeper water, so when you finally paused to look, all the people you'd known were dots on the horizon, paddling away from you, toward some other distant shore. I don't know if this is actually
true
of Chicago, but it's always been easy for me to idealize it as the road not taken.

The openers, Electric Hawk, were crushing and relentless and right up my alley: a very loud instrumental trio, all rock solid on their instruments, performing music at once elemental and complex. When they finished their set, Orestes and I paused alongside one of the awkwardly placed sets of steps. I scanned the room and said, “Good turnout.” But he shook his head and replied, “No, it isn't,” and he was right. Empty Bottle's capacity is four hundred. Only a couple hundred people were there. Said it before, but I'll say it again: when dealing with nightlife aimed at thirty- and fortysomethings, one has to accept that life complications can interfere with the best of intentions. I certainly did. But it still stung. It made me think, again, that we weren't good enough or important enough or
whatever
enough to get everyone off their couches. Still invisible. A too-secret handshake.

What Jeremy had implied—and what I'd suspected—at the beginning of the reunion, I now knew was true: we weren't going to get any bigger. I knew that we were out of step with this decade, in so many ways. To cite just one reason, the way we mixed our records was utterly unsuited for today. Too much ultra-low end, for starters. We also often avoided using compression on our records, because we wanted as wide as possible a range of soft and loud. Ultra-compressed production crushes those dynamics and makes EVERYTHING SOUND LOUDER. It's no coincidence it came into vogue in the twenty-first century, because ultra-compressed recordings sound good—or, more accurately, less bad—on the tiny cheap speakers in earbuds and computers and smartphones. Which is how most everyone hears music today. After our first reunion show in Japan, I went drinking with Katoman, and he told me he'd been thinking for days about how no current bands sounded like Bitch Magnet. He meant it as a compliment, and I was moved. But later I understood the secondary edge to that observation, one that cut in a far less complimentary way. “Unique today” could also mean “a relic from a time now gone.”

When the familiar stomach rumbling came on, as it had for every reunion show, I looked for a moment toward the backstage bathroom, but there wasn't enough time. Twenty-five years since I started doing this, but with this band showtime still gave me the bowels of a coke fiend, drugs in hand, waiting. But then we were onstage, where it was dark and loud, and the crowd was crazy, or as crazy as a crowd of record nerds our age ever get. As with all the best shows, all I registered was snapshots. Boys and girls—well, men and women—headbanging down front, a few even pounding their fists on the stage. This night I played the closing solo in “Navajo Ace” and a certain end-of-verse flourish in “Sea of Pearls” just right. I don't think I'd ever played either entirely correctly before. And though I knew all along I was leaving all this, and there was something sad about that, nothing felt sad about the show. It felt correct. It felt complete. The proper finale to a very peculiar midlife foray.

One last night at the merch stand. It seemed that everyone who came bought something. In some cases, many things. My right back pocket held a burrito-sized wad of cash, until it grew too big to fit and I had to palm it like a small basketball. When I did the final tour accounting, I saw that, thanks to Rose and Chicago, we had turned a tiny profit in America after all.

The next day I drove over to see my old friend Bryan, the general manager of the mini-chain Reckless Records. Another musician was there, who'd also come to the show. He thanked me. Told me that his bucket list was now one item shorter. He also said he was surprised that certain people weren't there. I smiled, nodded, said: Me, too.

But no. No. I won't complain. It was beautiful. Nearly everyone in that crowd had a story. The ex-drummer from Hum—the same one who, in the nineties, tormented me every time our paths crossed with endless questions about Orestes—had driven three hundred miles from southern Indiana. The guitarist in Hum came up from Champaign. One guy came from Minneapolis; one woman, all the way from Los Angeles. An entire contingent drove from Louisville. Someone from St. Louis. Rose came from Bloomington, Illinois, which meant a two-hour drive to and from the show, followed by an early wakeup to teach her morning classes at the university. People we had met years ago in Pittsburgh, in New York, at school, in Europe. Looks of deep gratitude in familiar eyes, now set into older faces. A look that, I hope, was mirrored in mine.

***

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE TOUR, VERY FEW PEOPLE
I spoke with believed we'd really played our final shows. But I was not among them.

Bitch Magnet wasn't a band whose reunion would blossom into a second career, as had happened for bigger bands like Dinosaur Jr. or Mission of Burma or the fucking Pixies.

Bitch Magnet wasn't the kind of band for which a new generation of young fans would crowd into clubs.

With the possible exception of Orestes, none of us was that interested in keeping this going.

Though Bitch Magnet
was
the kind of band in which, during our year and a half of reunion rehearsals and shows, Sooyoung and I each wooed Orestes for new projects that excluded the other.

And we never even mentioned those projects to each other.

***

WE WERE STAYING WITH SOOYOUNG'S PARENTS IN CHICAGO,
in their two apartments in a Gold Coast building. That company they started so many years ago in Charlotte, the one they'd worked so hard to build, had done very well. The three of us drank beer in the guest apartment until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. Someone woke me just after 7 a.m., and I went to my room.

I woke about three hours later, and, checking the circuits—weary eyes, bearable headache, no epic nausea—decided they were intact enough. Sooyoung's mom had thoughtfully left a basket of sweet rolls and muffins on the dining room table, around which the sun streamed in, beautifully if a bit painfully. Orestes had an early-afternoon flight home and already had his bags neatly stacked in the hallway, and Sooyoung, who'd slept in the other apartment, materialized to say goodbye.

I insisted that his dad take a few last pictures. Who knew when we'd be in the same room again?

Sooyoung and I both look pretty rough in those shots. We were facing the windows, and sunshine was a hard thing to take.

Then Orestes's phone rang: his cab was waiting outside. Sooyoung and I helped him hump his bags to the curb. Cars were speeding by, and we stood there, blinking in the sunlight. Always a little awkward, these goodbyes.

I hugged Orestes after maneuvering around his enormous pecs and traps and shoulders. In that clinch I managed to mutter, “We did it.” Sooyoung and Orestes hugged, Orestes climbed in the backseat, and then he was gone.

I knew Sooyoung and Orestes's new band, Bored Spies, had recorded a single a few months ago, and in the upcoming year they'd play shows in America and Europe and Asia. Sooyoung and I had never talked about that before, and we didn't now. Instead, Sooyoung announced he was going back to bed.