Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) Hardcover – May 19, 2015

Preface

A toddler, still small enough to strap into an infant’s car seat in his father’s white Plymouth Fury II, a vehicle so huge that, when he was a newborn, his parents fit his crib in the backseat.

He is a jumpy child, easily bored, always seeking new stimulation, and his parents have been murmuring to each other for many miles before noticing he’s unusually quiet on this rainy and dreary day.

The father’s head tilts up as he glances in the rearview mirror. Flashing a big movie star grin, he waggles his eyebrows and calls out, “How are you doing back there?”

But the boy is oblivious, eyes vacant, lost and dreaming. He did not hear the reassuring rumble of his father’s voice. All he knows is the sound of the wipers as they squeak and rub across the slick windshield, chasing each other across the glass in an endless, perfect rhythm above the drone of the sighing motor and tires on wet pavement:

Kkwssh—nn—a—gaah—kknnn.

Kkwssh—nn—a—gaah—kknnn.

Kkwssh—nn—a—gaah—kknnn . . .

Melody, drone, and percussion, entrancing in their repetition, onto which he fixates this rainy day, staring, stupefied and in absolute fascination, at the windshield, hearing a song that blocks out everything else.

Kkwssh—nn—a—gaah—kknnn . . .

Foreword

Despite everything I’ll say in the next few hundred pages, I really liked this stuff. Still do, even.

My first real band, formed in late 1986, was Bitch Magnet. It’s always kind of gross to have to characterize your own band, but: we started out playing loud, noisy punk rock, then soon started stretching out song lengths and playing in odd time signatures. We were steeped in the American independent rock underground of that time, we released three critically acclaimed records, we enjoyed a dedicated but not particularly sizable fan base, we toured Europe and America, and at no point were we threatened, even distantly, by actual fame. Though a video we made in 1990 for about $100 on expired black-and-white film made it onto MTV once, in the ghetto at the end of 120 Minutes, where they played short snippets of weirder and more aggressive stuff. To varying degrees, my other bands—among them Coptic Light and Vineland—share that same story. Books like this generally tell stories by or about the luminaries. This book isn’t that.

Anyway, massive record sales and videos on MTV and whether or not your uncool cousins would have known us are the wrong yardsticks. Bands like ours didn’t give a shit about any of that, because we all understood immediately that most of it was out of reach. An incredibly liberating realization, one that went hand in hand with our general instinct to play only what we wanted, leave all edges unsanded, and never modify anything in a bid for a bigger audience. We were lucky to be teenagers in the eighties, futzing around with instruments we didn’t quite know how to play, during a rare and oddly open moment when a scruffy crowd of like-minded souls gathered, far from the gloss and waste of the big-time music business, and an underground network arose that spanned the globe: venues, bands, zines, fans, record labels, record stores, college radio stations. It seems accidental and frankly miraculous that we all ended up in the same rooms at the same time, but we did, and in those rooms a culture was built, by hand and often from the barest of raw materials. On tour, our bands crashed on fans’ floors, not in hotels, and rode in rattling vans, not fancy buses. We loaded and unloaded these vans by ourselves each night. We rarely had managers or other middlemen; we often dealt directly with club owners and labels. Or we released our records on our own, selling them to the companies that distributed them to record stores, hand-packing promotional copies into cardboard boxes to mail them to the hundred or so college radio stations that cared and all the fanzines we knew.

We built this thing—our own circuit—because we had to, because otherwise it wouldn’t have existed, and because it felt like a life-and-death matter that our favorite bands and our own bands got heard. Just enough people erected just enough of an infrastructure to make possible the foundation of a parallel music industry—one that also entailed three-record deals and international tours—while still remaining a tight and (mostly) welcoming community. It was a swimming hole small enough, and secret enough, for you to know everyone in it. It wasn’t hard to float atop its surface for a couple of records and tours if your band was good, and sometimes even if it wasn’t.

There was always something provisional and flimsy about all this, before the likes of Pavement and Nirvana started selling records in greater than five-figure quantities, and even afterward. Labels and distributors and clubs and promoters were always going out of business, so money that was owed frequently disappeared outright. (As I write, Sub Pop Records is still around, twenty-eight years after releasing its first records. Congrats! It has also almost gone under at least four times, and—who knows?—may well be gone by the time you read this.) All this happened long before the Internet was anything, which meant that while we lacked a key communications channel for tightly knit outsider communities, our generations weren’t distracted by a mythology of getting filthy rich young in a sort of cool and Web-by way. If you got out of college in the post-Reagan economic doldrums, as I did—well, why wouldn’t you play in a band and live off temp jobs?

So, beginning in my late teens, many of my most cherished experiences took place in dusty practice spaces crammed with barely functioning equipment, inside cramped and overfull vans, and in small clubs that stank of cigarette smoke and yeast from old spilled beer and featured absolutely horrifying bathrooms. (You learned, eventually, to bring soap and toilet paper with you on tour: you couldn’t count on either being there when you arrived at the venue.) Once I found this world, I found my home. The people who remain my closest friends to this day. My tribe. Or, rather, our tribe, because I was not the only one looking for these people and the small patch of land that was ours and ours alone. I threw myself upon it with a great and almost tearful relief. And, above all, I loved the music. I loved it so much it made my whole body hurt. (It also fried my ears and left them ringing, but sometimes love extracts a price.) The bands I most liked—the bands I was in—were guitar-based; quite loud; aggressive; eager to explore varying degrees of complexity and compositional ambitiousness; and instrumentally oriented, even though most had vocalists. I mention many in this book, but some of my favorites are Scratch Acid, Slovenly, Gore, the Ex, Meat Puppets, Slint, Swans, Mission of Burma, and Bastro. The best known among them are probably Black Flag and Sonic Youth. None would exist were it not for punk rock, but none were just punk rock; apart from that distinction, allow me to give up right now on trying to classify this stuff. Many times in this book I just say something like “weird bands,” which is somewhat imprecise and insulting—but they were all a bit off-center, in one way or another, and often that was why I loved them.

Some guys lunge toward cultural moments to meet girls and drinking and drugging buddies. Not me and my friends. If you’re looking for recitations of rock depravity, let me say right now I saw cocaine exactly once before I turned thirty, spent a great deal of my adult life working in cubicles, and can count on one hand the number of times I had sex as a direct consequence of being in a band—and still have fingers left over. Kurt Andersen once wrote that the eighties were America’s manic episode; if so, indie rock was its depressive phase. But that was fine, because for me and many of my friends, the music pretty much blocked out everything else. It was shocking how much better this music, and its antecedents, were than any current music on the radio—than most of anything ever recorded, even. Realer, more visceral, and more direct. Smarter and more adventurous, too. It clearly expressed the emotional extremes all outsiders know. And, since the musicians and fans in our underground weren’t exactly high school football stars, these extremes were especially keenly felt. This music was unafraid to color outside the lines unimaginative people thought defined what was acceptable in rock music. Because there were so many things you could do with rock music, once you started ignoring all the rules: What if a song had only one part? What if a song had only one chord? Why do we need choruses? Why not write songs where no parts repeat? What if we never play in 4/4 again? What if we distorted the bass and made it the lead instrument? Why do we need vocals? Everyone’s playing really fast, so why don’t we play really slow? I thought this music was the most important thing in the world. I probably would have died for it.

Sometimes I try to explain playing in such a band to people unfamiliar with this era, and, in trying to understand it, they grope for words and say something like “Oh, so you had a cult following.” That awkward term—which I will not use again—makes me think of musicians and bands that never had a big hit and never will but still have enough fans to eke out a living. Someone like Richard Thompson. Bands like Bitch Magnet weren’t even that. Nor were we the kind of band whose name my less obsessive co-workers might know, like Arcade Fire or Yo La Tengo or Dinosaur Jr., the ones that attain what Ted Leo likes to call “indie tenure.” The diehards of this culture encompassed a couple hundred thousand people scattered across the globe—and “diehard” does not overstate the case, as its adherents generally organized their lives around the music. Our fans were a significantly smaller subset of that crowd. We were beloved by ten or fifteen thousand people worldwide, more or less. As to our record sales, that’s probably a good guess, too. (I’m not being coy: thanks to how disorganized our early labels were, we really don’t know the numbers.) Not many people cared—but a good chunk of those who did care were really into it. They cared enough to make Bitch Magnet reunion tours possible in Asia and Europe and America twenty-one years after our final album was released. They drove several hours or got on planes to attend those shows, even if they were often as fortysomething as we were, and as worn out from the demands of parenthood and careers, and also had to be at work the next morning.

Back when he was a writer, the baseball executive Bill James came up with a fantastic sentence: “It is a wonderful thing to know that you are right and the world is wrong; would God that I might have that feeling again before I die.” In the eighties and early nineties I was certain we were participating in something important. Something that would change the world, or the world of culture, at least. I was, of course, completely wrong, and neglecting to consider how the world would eventually change the music and the people who made it, but that’s a common mistake of youth. I also didn’t know at the time that all your bands would eventually break your heart, albeit in slightly different ways, or how the insularity of this world would eventually make you insane. But there was great power in being young and not knowing those things. As there was in being certain that if you pointed your van or car toward any city or college town, you could find the people who didn’t know those things, either.

And, despite my complicated relationship with this time and its many aftermaths, what I’d do to have that feeling again before I die.

Thank You, New Jersey. Good Fucking Night

In the woodsy New Jersey suburb where I went to high school in the early eighties, the idea of a band as a unit that writes and performs its own material did not exist. The term “cover band” wasn’t used, because that’s what all bands effectively were, playing some version of the hits, and their names generally signaled the ground they plowed. Rapid Fire was metal, and ambitious, which meant they sometimes rented a lighting rig. They wore denim and black leather and played songs by Judas Priest. Leather Nun, who apparently didn’t know the Swedish band that first used the name, was a more poorly accessorized version of the same idea. Scufl (pronounced “scuffle”) wore bright colors and lots of hair mousse. You know: new wave. Some of the guys in Scufl and Rapid Fire ended up in a band called Fossil that had a blink-and-you-missed-it moment on Sire in the early nineties. General Public—which wasn’t the dull English Beat offshoot that had a minor hit with “Tenderness”—probably had the highest percentage of honor roll members. One guitarist was even a class president. The one time I saw them, he carefully applied a pair of Ray-Bans just before going onstage with his new-looking Strat. General Public played songs by Genesis and Men at Work, and, to paraphrase Raymond Carver quoting Charles Bukowski, here I am, insulting them already.

Other bands had headache-inducing early-eighties names like Feedback and Steeler, and a few of them actually wrote a song—like one song. The only punk rock band in our school was the Pukes. (Could I make up that name? No.) Their singer had spiky hair—still a novelty in the suburbs back then—a rubber face built for bugging eyes and bared teeth, and a stick figure’s physique. I thought they played extraordinarily fast, but I saw them before I’d heard much hardcore. They, alone, may have written their own material, since I can’t imagine that the song titles I think I remember—“Puke Now,” “Mercenary Life for Me”—were covers.

The idea of making your own record was completely inconceivable to us, even though, by the mid-eighties, it was a reality rampant throughout the world. How did you even do it? No one knew. Teenage bands in our stretch of suburban New Jersey didn’t even have a place to play. There were no rock clubs near us. Bars were out, since the state drinking age was raised to twenty-one in 1983, and, as far as I knew, you had to go to a city for any all-ages hardcore shows. But once a year local high schools staged a battle of the bands, and bands crossed town lines for them, to perform for other students amid humid atmospheres consisting of hair mousse and longing and hormones. Our school hosted its battles of the bands on a Friday night in late fall, when the days were cooler but not yet cold, and dark arrived in the late afternoon. Under inky skies parents’ cars nudged through the parking lot, brake lights flashing on and off, disgorging clots of teens. Returning to school after hours made you think that the normal rules were somehow suspended. Everyone searched for someone to fumble with in a dark corner, or for some small bit of contraband to make the evening.

Yeah, those nights. Even outcasts like me were susceptible to whatever hung in the air.

All the girls in makeup, in skimpy tops, in short skirts, in leg warmers, and doused in perfume; the scent they trailed was unbearable. A girl from French class showed up in skintight satiny black pants made more remarkable by the big chunky zipper traversing the entirety of her crotch, belly button to spine. MTV was now widely disseminating bad-hair ideas, so I urge you to visualize the horror show atop this crowd’s heads. Parachute pants, loud colors, and geometric striped-and-gridded shirts and skinny ties for the Scufl fans. The more fashion-forward dudes among them wore white Capezios—jazz oxfords—which, somehow, no one found hilarious. The guys who didn’t particularly fit in wore Members Only. (I was one of them, dividing my time among the pocket-protector crowd, the most droolingly unregenerate dope smokers, and a few smart outsiders orbiting around art and music.) The boys identifying as heavy metal all had spandex pants and faded-denim vests emblazoned with Iron Maiden and Judas Priest and Ozzy patches. These vests had been denim jackets before their arms were ripped off, leaving behind dangling fringes of white cotton fabric, which you burned off with a lighter. If you weren’t careful while you did this, you set your vest on fire, though it was kind of fun when it happened. Only the stoners had a look that still holds up today: lank-haired, sleepy-eyed, jeans and faded tees. They were totally onto something, and they didn’t even know it!

The cafeteria was briefly remade into something else—the lunch tables hauled away and a couple of makeshift stages quickly assembled at opposite ends of the room. In a major concession to atmosphere the blazing fluorescent overhead lights were turned off. If you squinted, it kind of looked like a club. It would do. It had to, anyway. Then the bands nervously took the stage and played other bands’ songs. Oftentimes the same other bands’ songs. One night, during that odd interval when Quiet Riot was briefly the biggest band in the world, three different bands covered “Metal Health.”

Rapid Fire impressed me. Or at least their guitar solos did. The witless commercial-metal version: finger sprints, really, dashing up and down blues scales as fast and as smoothly as possible. The sheer speed lit up something in my brain. As much as I professed to detest metal, at home I’d shut the door to my room, plug my lousy Peavey guitar into my lousy Peavey amp—both bought with bar mitzvah money—and see how quickly I could run through scales, too. (In sum: not fast enough.) Then Scufl would play the Cars’ “Touch and Go,” and suddenly everyone in the room was singing along and reaching up to mime the “I touched your star” part, as if that lyric was about a star in the sky and not, you know, a vagina. I joined in while secretly glancing at the preposterously hot girl I was crushing on, wholly without hope, who was nice enough to befriend me, though nothing more. Michelle was half-Asian, half-Italian, absolutely Jesus Christ she’s beautiful. I wore oversized glasses with lenses so thick they distorted my face, a halfhearted Jew-fro, and braces. I cringed when I looked into mirrors and was mutely grateful for our long phone calls. For any flakes of her attention, really. At this battle of the bands, she was all tarted up, hotter than a heartache, and, unlike everyone else, she didn’t sing along, just nodded her head and languidly chewed gum in time with the music, a hand on her hip. Grown men have gone to jail for less. I looked at her and thought, as overwrought as any teen, She does not know this entire moment is about her, even though girls that pretty usually do.

Everything about these nights was totally Tinkertoys, and I knew it even then. But knowing it didn’t stop how crazy and excited and bottled-up and absolutely unable to express it I felt, so uncomfortable in my skin it may as well have itched, crazy from the crowd and the guitars and the amps and the drums and the girls and that girl especially. I thought, maybe I could start a band to impress her. No. Wait. This is better. Maybe I could start a band with her. I’d see her a lot more then, right? We actually tried this, though she wanted to sing a bunch of Pat Benatar songs for which I couldn’t even feign interest, and in any event I couldn’t play the solos fast enough. And I hadn’t yet realized that you started a band not to get the girl but because you couldn’t get the girl. To channel all the horrible churning, surging feelings—the goddamned unmanageable desire and anger and other emotions you couldn’t name, you could never understand, and that nonetheless never left you alone. A band might make them into something other than what you seethed over endlessly, or what you whacked off to behind a locked bathroom door.

***

I DID MOST OF MY GROWING UP IN WARREN, NEW JERSEY, about an hour west of Manhattan, in the kind of development common to comfortable suburbs erected in the late sixties and seventies, and the one good thing I can say about my hometown is that it gave you time and space to dream. The houses kept a respectful distance from one another. There were woods with tall trees, and great expanses of lawns. We lived well off any main road, and the surrounding streets were very lightly trafficked. Cars floated by slowly, gently, kids wriggling and bouncing in the backseat. You could ride your bike for hours, dazed and drifting, seeing no other humans, utterly and gloriously alone. The gears on your ten-speed made a nasal, narcotic clicking when you stopped pedaling, and there was a song in that sound. You achieved a minor cinematography coasting down the street, a slow pan past the trees through which you glimpsed your neighbors’ houses. Though no one would want to make a movie out of this.

Other boys my age lived in the neighborhood, and though we sometimes played endless games of two-on-two baseball during the longest days of summer, I spent a lot of time alone, riding my bike on the quiet roads or reading and poring over baseball statistics in my room. Middle-class American childhood was not yet a relentlessly scheduled sequence of commitments, and you had lots of time for idle dreaming. So much stillness and quiet. So little around that you could spend all day inside yourself, as confused and whimpering as it may have been in there. You had no sense of a “we”—the thought that people like you did, in fact, exist and you hadn’t spun off, alone, into some solitary and forgotten corner of the cosmos—but you knew where the “I” was.

We moved into that neighborhood when I was four and my older brother, Neil, was ten. After we had our housewarming party, I remember asking my dad if we were really going to live here, because it was so much bigger than the downstairs rental in which we’d lived before. There was a two-car garage and an acre and a half of tall trees. Neil and I now had our own bedrooms. The low-ceilinged basement had more square footage than our entire old apartment, and down there Neil and I somehow managed to play baseball and basketball. It was a big leap for my dad, an only child whose father repaired watches and whose mother ground out ridiculously long workweeks as a back-office clerk on Wall Street to put him through Columbia and med school. For years the three of them lived with my dad’s maternal grandparents in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, but when he was thirty-six, he was able to move his pretty wife and two smart sons into the kind of house every Jewish mother wishes for her son the doctor, and my grandmother is a Jewish mother right down to the homemade chicken soup.

My mom grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, on a hilly and cobblestoned street near Isham Park, in a top-floor three-bedroom duplex that, if it’s been left untouched, is someone’s dream apartment today. Her dad ended a long career with the city’s Board of Education as the assistant superintendent overseeing all of Brooklyn’s high schools. That may scan as “hack,” but that wasn’t my grandfather: the squib the New York Times ran when he died in 1993 said, accurately, that he was known for developing interesting educational programs. My mom’s mother, to whom she was closer, died of leukemia when my mom was sixteen and away at summer camp. (Typing that sentence brings home, again, the horror she surely felt.) She and my dad started dating at that camp. Their courtship survived those summers, as well as the commute once the two of them were back home—Flatbush to the north end of Manhattan is a ninety-minute subway ride, if you’re lucky. She ended up at Barnard and he at Columbia, and they got married just before she turned twenty. After graduating from Barnard, and before my parents moved to New Jersey, she taught fifth grade at Manhattan’s PS 122. Today it’s a famous performance space, but her stories made the East Village of the early sixties sound like wartime Beirut with worse parenting. She gave up teaching to raise my brother and me and became a librarian once I started grade school. She was the family disciplinarian and had a temper that terrified me whenever it blew. I’m sometimes a hothead, too. Hi, Mom!

Everyone in my house was so much older and talked so fast about things I didn’t understand that at the dinner table I felt several crucial seconds behind each exchange, head-swiveling as the conversation bounced between my parents and my big brother, a few beats too slow to follow the ball in some Ping-Pong competition. Like a lot of youngest children, I craved much more attention than I got. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem—the baby of his family, too—once told me that being the youngest and feeling ignored or left to your own devices can leave you with a tight core of stubbornness about whatever you wanted to do: All those years you abandoned me to dream this up in my room, and now you’re telling me I can’t? Fuck you. I knew exactly what he meant.

My brother is one of my best friends today, but the six years between us is a huge gap when you’re children, something I learned over and over again when I would galumph after Neil and his friends to be rejected, or grudgingly tolerated. Like a lot of Jewish kids from the Northeast, Neil and I went to summer camp for two months each summer, amid hills and trees and soccer and softball fields and basketball and tennis courts semicircling a mile-wide lake. Neil had gone to that camp for years and was kind of a big deal there when I arrived for my first summer. The annoying thing about him was that, early on, he mastered never looking like he was trying very hard, and he possessed the remove and equilibrium older siblings sometimes have. Whereas I always felt like I was belly flopping around school and camp and our hometown, socially leprous, barely getting by. (He did especially well with girls at camp, unlike me, about which I remain incredibly bitter.) Sometimes when grown-ups who knew him—teachers, coaches, counselors at camp—made the connection between us, they would light up, and I’d stupidly stew on this, feeling too insubstantial to cast a shadow, visible only as an adjunct to someone more memorable who’d passed through before. My mom’s response was, better that than dread flashing across their faces, a sentiment with which I didn’t necessarily agree.

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.”

These guys, I remind you, were my best friends.

***

THERE HAD TO BE SOMETHING ELSE. BUT WHAT?

In junior high school I’d failed to convince one of the few guys even less cool than me to start playing bass, but prospects seemed better in high school. For one thing: I could now play bar chords. Andy was another smart underachiever (short version: I smoked pot daily and sold it ineptly; he had far worse grades), and he and I had similar taste. He had a Telecaster—even then I hated Teles, but whatever—and, like me, a lousy solid-state Peavey amp. We tried playing together, but whether we worked from sheet music or attempted to play by ear, it didn’t work. A song as simple as R.E.M.’s “7 Chinese Brothers” completely eluded us. It wasn’t until after I got to college that I learned about drone strings: playing two strings together, leaving one open, and working your way up and down the fretboard on the other. Once you know that, you can play “7 Chinese Brothers” in five minutes. But as with everything else, learning that in the suburbs in the eighties was a matter of groping blindly in the dark. I know, I know, it’s a total cliché to even bother pointing this out, but it’s still true: life was much lonelier and more isolated without any entrée to interesting music and the people who flocked to it, without a band, and without any band culture. If you were surrounded by assholes hostile to the fact of your existence, it was easy to assume that everyone everywhere would be like that, for the rest of your life. I assumed that. No one could point me to a control group that proved that life could be different. No one like me knew it wasn’t our fault. Or that there were even enough of us somewhere to create a bigger our, one that encompassed more people than the few freaks we hung out with.

But there were ten or fifteen or fifty kids like us in most high schools. There were a few hundred in every small city and thousands in each state. There were a hundred thousand or more in America and a few hundred thousand more worldwide. There was plenty of kindling. Something was about to happen.

The Importance of a Tiny Stage

Pictures from the early days of any rock or art movement always display discordant details. No style has been codified, everyone looks too young, and a kind of aesthetic baby fat blurs many edges. Photos from Sex Pistols gigs show dudes in the crowd with mustaches and seventies hair. In shots from the early hippie days, there’s always at least one guy with hair that wouldn’t be out of place at IBM. So it was with indie rock when I first really discovered it upon arriving at Oberlin College in August 1985. What ultimately became a blend of hippie, punk, and hobo still had jarring touches of eighties MTV here and there: mushroom-shaped or asymmetric hair, boys in tight black shirts buttoned to the throat, boys who looked like they wanted really badly to be in the Cure. It wasn’t even called “indie rock” back then. We generally stuck to “punk rock,” since it was hard to use a more common term du jour—“alternative”—with anything like a straight face.

Oberlin is a small, reasonably pretty college town situated within a landscape so featureless that a hill is an event. The closest major city is a forty-five-minute drive, and since that city is Cleveland, you kept your expectations low. The skies over the college were almost always gray as you passed the old stone buildings and crisscrossed the quad, shoulders hunched against the wind, hurrying down brick paths to get to the two-street town. (Oberlin has a unique microclimate, which is a polite way to say it rained all the time and stayed cold until early May.) Among us music freaks, the boys wore flannels and ripped jeans and plain white T-shirts—they were cheap, and available everywhere. Quite a few of the girls dressed like that, too, though those with good thrift-store instincts opted for secondhand dresses or skirts with dark tights. It was acceptable, and even desirable, for everything to be oversized and slouchy—a terrible idea today, but a common one when no manufacturer made jeans that actually fit. We were also big on discarded classic-rock concert T-shirts, picked up secondhand for a buck or less, decades before they went on sale at places like Barneys for hundreds of dollars. (The bassist in one campus band sometimes wore a perfectly faded black Pink Floyd tee, the one with the pig from Animals on the front. Today he could practically make a mortgage payment with it.) We all wore sneakers or combat boots or motorcycle boots. Long coats for most, and faded denim or army surplus jackets for the stonier types. The boys let their hair get shaggy or cut it very short, and never used any kind of product. The girls made more of an effort, dyeing theirs blond or black or burgundy. Many of us smoked. Cigarettes occupied your hands during those twenty years until smartphones were invented. That all this became a look, in the fashion sense, a few years later, after some Seattle bands got big—well, we found that hilarious. We dressed that way to avoid having a look.

Nestled outside a third-floor window in the student union building, a clock radio tuned to the campus station was almost always on. The sound cascaded down the building’s sandstone front, beamed across an adjacent lawn, and bounced off the other nearby buildings, creating an unusual amplifying effect: from fifty or even a hundred yards away, you heard it loud and clear, as if it came through a set of speakers far bigger and better than any the station owned.

Steam clouds hung in the air over the campus power plant. Spring would come one day, we were sure of it.

Left to our own devices far from anywhere, with no adults around, none of us had any idea what we were doing. But there was also no one to say you were doing it wrong. Anyway, what were you supposed to take cues from in 1985? Commercial radio and MTV were wastelands. Many college radio stations were still content to play the overproduced and underwhelming major-label “alternative” bands of the time, like the Woodentops and China Crisis and Aztec Camera, bands no one liked then and no one remembers now. Once a year Rolling Stone would cover some other going-nowhere, penny-ante sort-of-subculture and the bands it spawned—the Paisley Underground and the Three O’Clock! Roots rockers like the BoDeans and the Del Fuegos! (The Del Fuegos got started at Oberlin; their frontman, Dan Zanes, now writes songs for well-bred toddlers.) Those records you could find everywhere. But you had to strain so hard to get even the teeniest buzz from them.

A very strong hippie streak persisted on campus. Deadheads and tie-dye were everywhere, as were men with ass-length hair, whom you’d see playing hacky sack on the quad. Hideous scarves and ponchos hand-knit by the oppressed indigenous peoples of Nicaragua, etc., passed for fashion statements, and people showed off by pronouncing “Nicaragua” with the correctly rolled “r.” I was still at an age when any hardcore band yapping about how much Reagan sucked sounded pretty good, but at Oberlin I got disgusted with lefty politics almost immediately. Still, I lucked out by ending up there, and one big reason was my freshman-year roommate, Linc, an extremely skinny, short-haired, pale-skinned music autodidact from suburban L.A. He was wearing a Meat Puppets T-shirt the day we moved in. He was clearly much cooler than me, but more important, he was much more knowing than me. He owned every record SST put out—I barely knew Black Flag; he was already over them—back when that signified something. Linc had heard everything I’d heard, everything I wanted to hear, and everything I didn’t know I wanted to hear, had answers for almost every musical question I posed, and brought a few hundred carefully annotated cassettes with him to school.