4. BORNE ON THE FM WAVES
We wanted to be huge, but knew deep down we never would be. That’s the punk mentality, always shooting yourself in the foot before even taking the first step. We went into the major label experience expecting the worst, nervous about what promotional events we’d be pressured into committing to, or what tours we’d be signed up for. We didn’t want them changing our DNA.
We were given a tour of the Warner offices, but left without understanding anything that had been said to us.
“So what exactly do you do here at the label?” I asked one guy who showed us around. I’d forgotten his name twice, and felt stupid asking again.
“I deal with MP3s and iTunes, digital media technology,” he responded.
“What are you working on right now?”
“Well, actually, I’m really excited about this. There is this new drink coming out, it’s a milk drink with different flavors, probably not that good for you. We’re doing a deal with them for ringtones. You take a picture of the bottle in your hand on your cellphone and send it to a number and they in turn send you a ringtone. Like we hope to do for your band.”
I didn’t want to be a ringtone sold with shitty flavored milk.
I worried every day that by putting our names on the dotted line, we were signing our death warrant. I couldn’t get that fucking lawyer’s fee out of my head: $75,000 just for negotiating one contract. That was almost three times as much as we had made on our entire first record with Fat Wreck Chords.
The rest of the band seemed to mind less than I did. They had uses for their money. They were getting married, putting down payments on homes, adopting dogs, and buying big flat-screen TVs. Nothing beyond anyone’s means, but starting adult lives, at least. Freshly divorced, the thought of that sort of mundane, domestic lifestyle was suffocating to me, yet at the same time, I was jealous. So determined was I to remain untethered that I didn’t even have a permanent address.
I had put what few possessions I owned into a storage unit and was cashing in the thousands of hotel points we’d accrued on the road to live rent-free out of hotels on the swampy outskirts of Gainesville during the band’s downtime between tours.
I’ve always loved hotels and am fascinated by them, even the most banal. There’s a security to be found in the consistency of a good generic hotel chain. No matter where you go, at least this one thing remains the same. Non-offensive wall art like a framed sepia photograph of pine cones in a basket, complimentary toiletries lined up and waiting. Much like being in a punk band, hotel living is a suspended state of adolescence—someone there to change the bed sheets and bring you fresh towels every morning, no electric bill, free HBO, and room service at the push of a button. When it was time to leave for tour again, I would simply pack up my bags and check out. I lived like that for a year and a half.
Hotel living even made me healthier. I weaned myself off drinking and availed myself of the fitness center, sweating off the pounds with long runs on the treadmill. The only drawback was the extreme isolation. I had essentially exiled myself, trying to avoid my ex-wife and the bar life, but it gave me almost too much time for reflection. I had put so much of myself into the band, and even though I was proud of our success, underneath it, I felt alone. I felt envious of my bandmates and the lives they led outside of Against Me!. Andrew had his wife, James had his fiancée, and Warren had a whole group of friends and social life that he kept separate from the band. But I had no one. That loneliness ultimately led me to Heather.
I met Heather on the first day of tour. Against Me! was scheduled to do five weeks across the country in the spring of 2006 opening for Alkaline Trio, and she was selling their merch. More than their merch girl, Heather was the visual artist behind the designs on the band’s T-shirts and album covers, including their iconic logo of a skull inside a heart, which countless fans have tattooed on their bodies.
It’s a total cliché to put it like this, but I mean it when I say that Heather was truly the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, the emphasis being on “woman.” Whereas every other female I’d been with before was just a girl, she was a fully formed woman. An Egyptian-Canadian who grew up in a Detroit suburb, standing at six feet to my six feet and two inches, she was tall, dark, and mysterious. There was an exotic aura about her, and her gravity terrified me.
I was sitting off to the side of the stage, changing the strings on my guitar when she walked by and introduced herself. I told her I was excited about the tour and she agreed. If you blinked you’d miss the significance of this brief encounter, but I spent the rest of the day replaying it in my head.
The next night in Vegas, I asked if she wanted to get a drink at the bar. She dodged me with an excuse about having to meet up with her aunt. I took her word, although I thought she might be blowing me off. The next night, I talked her into having that drink, and the next night, and the night after that. Soon we were arm wrestling, then passing notes and stealing glances at each other throughout the day, making up excuses to walk by each other in the venue.
Heather and I spent the entirety of those weeks together. Alkaline Trio did the tour in a bus and we were in a van, but Heather started riding with us after a while. We’d sleep in the same bed, although we weren’t having sex. Neither of us wanted to risk spoiling the spark between us. Mostly we would do the things two people do when they’re crushing on each other—hold hands, stare into each other’s eyes, eat apple pie at all-night diners and wash it down with stale coffee. I wrote her a song, but never played it for her. I penned the lyrics on a piece of paper, folded them up into a note, and slipped it to her just before doors opened at the NorVa in Virginia.
It turned out Heather was still halfway through a breakup with her ex back in Oakland, a guy named Smith. Smith was close friends with the members of Alkaline Trio and was roommates with their tour manager, Nolan. So out of solidarity to Smith, neither the band nor their crew took kindly to me spending so much time with her. Nolan would pull childish crap with us in retaliation, withholding the food and beer guaranteed in our rider, or shifting our set times around last minute as a power move.
“You have to go on an hour early tonight, right when doors open, because all of the band and crew want to get to our hotel early,” he told us once.
I wasn’t having any of it. “No, you dumb fuck,” I said, waving our contract in his face. “It says right here that our set time is an hour after doors open.”
Before one show in New York, Nolan got physical with Jordan who was tour managing us at the time, over our set time, shoving him to the ground. Jordan is tall and physically imposing, but he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He’s a total teddy bear. After I found out about the incident, I made it a point to call Nolan out on stage that night.
Nolan used to hide behind Alkaline Trio’s amplifiers during their set and play a second guitar part along to the songs to fill in the sound, a move I thought was infinitely lame and unpunk. So I told the audience to “be sure and give an extra round of applause to Nolan, the hidden guitar player behind Alkaline Trio’s amplifiers. He’s been a little grumpy lately and needs the attention!”
Alkaline Trio’s frontman, Matt Skiba, didn’t like this and, armed with a crew behind him, he found me backstage after our set and told me his boys were going to beat my ass. None of my bandmates came to my defense, but our manager, Tom Sarig, got right up in Skiba’s face.
“Fuck you, you fucking fuck, I will end you if you so much as breathe wrong on my artist.”
Skiba backed down, but after that show, not one person from Alkaline Trio or their crew said a single word to me or even looked at me for the rest of the tour. Any working relationship I had with them was destroyed, but it only forced me and Heather closer. She told me she loved the way I stood up for myself, and that I was right in thinking Nolan was an asshole. She said I had a swagger that she found sexy.
Heather understood me. She knew what tour life was like; she lived the lifestyle too. She di
dn’t judge me for the ways in which I’d learned to cope. I felt myself falling for her, and a singular thought struck me upon realizing this: This person will kill me.
April 3, 2006—Drive Day—Somewhere in New Mexico
The tour manager is stoned behind the wheel right now. The sun is shining. There is endless desert to my right and there are mountains to my left. There is no other place in the world I would rather be right now than here, riding shotgun while driving east on I-10, listening to Ryan Adams.
There is an art to touring in a 15-passenger van. The van is your shared home away from home when you’re on the road (occupied by eight people in our particular case, four band and four crew). You must be courteous of your fellow passengers. We’ve developed a set of unspoken rules to make it work for us.
1. The back two bench seats of a van should always be reserved for sleeping. That way if a stop is made, those sleeping can remain undisturbed in the back, no one has to climb over them or push past their extended legs. Some of the best sleep I have ever gotten in my life has been on the back bench seat of a 15-passenger van.
2. If someone invites company along on the road, that person must sit on the front bench seat, passenger side. This is the worst seat in the van. You have nothing to lean on, nothing to prop your knees up against. It’s murder on your neck and back. Already one of the sleeping benches will have been sacrificed by having the guest on board. The band and the crew need rest. We are working. The guest is a tourist in our world. Whoever invited said guest should occupy the seat directly to the left of the guest as this is the second least desirable seat in the van. The host should never drive when a guest is in company and under no circumstances should the guest occupy the coveted shotgun seat, especially if the host rudely chooses to drive and especially if the host and guest are a couple because no one wants to be looking ahead at the road over two people fawning over each other.
3. Guest should never, under any circumstances, occupy the rear bench seat while host drives. Hosts have assumedly invited guests to spend time together so they better do just as much of that as possible.
April 11, 2006—Charlotte, NC
Heather and I got matching tattoos of a rat that Black Arm John The Roadie drew. I’m a couple days deep into my crush on her now. I’ve never met anyone like her. I’ve never seen beauty that could match.
We slept on the floor next to each other at the Holiday Inn. We talked until sunrise. We talked about our parents and agreed that fathers suck. I never want to be a father. I told her my theory that kids with parents who stay together don’t get cavities and kids who come from a broken home do.
I want to touch her but I do not. I want to kiss her but I do not. Waiting for signal.
She told me that Neurosis was the best show she’s ever seen and that Lungfish is her favorite band. I will now commit every Lungfish song to memory.
April 13, 2006—Norfolk, VA
“Alright, boys, let’s do this,” Andrew says before we take the stage. I’m not a boy like him.
“We’re all just normal dudes playing in a rock and roll band.” I’m not a normal dude like Andrew, like the rest of them.
I wretch and crawl in my skin.
Door times were incorrectly advertised and we take the stage to a half-empty room. Seconds into our first song, the stage lights go black and we are playing in the dark. We play with overcompensating anger for the rest of the set, which feels good if not pointless.
Heather jumped into our van after the show.
Together we polished off a bottle of Jameson on the ride to the hotel.
Sitting on the hotel room floor in front of the TV, we talked until everyone else was asleep. Then it happened. Our hands touched, our hands held, we kissed.
“I like you,” she said. “I really like you.”
“Will you like me in the morning? You aren’t just drunk, are you?”
We slept next to each other on the bed. In the morning I still like her.
Heather is by far the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever kissed.
She is apart from the others.
April 18, 2006—NYC
I’ve managed to make enemies out of everyone in Alkaline Trio and all of their crew. Most of them won’t even look me in the eye when we see each other around the venues. They just walk by me in silence looking the other way. Their tour manager is a straight-up asshole and got physical with Jordan yesterday, shoving him to the ground over an argument about set times. They clearly do not like that I’m hanging out with Heather.
Heather and I have stayed at the Senton Hotel for the past two nights. The band has been staying at The Broadway Plaza Hotel around the corner. There’s an hourly rate at the Senton and pornography is already playing on the television when you walk into a room but staying there with her makes it my favorite hotel room that I have ever been in.
Heather and I lay in bed and count the cigarette burns in the blanket. We haven’t had sex, we’ve only made out. I could make out with Heather forever.
Pill hangovers in the morning but I haven’t slept in days.
Cold sweats and shakes.
Were those Valiums 10s or 15s?
How many did I take again?
Pills to calm down.
Going to need some help to come back up.
I’m having a mild anxiety attack that’s on the verge of becoming a full blown freak the fuck out.
This tour has shaken me.
Too much momentum.
She has shaken me.
This is all too much, too quick.
Fighting to stay in control of the situation.
I don’t want a girlfriend.
As the tour was ending and Heather and I were saying our goodbyes, we made plans to meet up. We talked about taking a road trip together through the South, driving someplace like Savannah and exploring a city neither of us knew. But I ended up canceling on her before we had the chance.
Not only was I scared of the relationship between us going any further and setting me up for more heartbreak, I was overwhelmed by the pressure to make a hit record for Sire. Things were moving quickly on the new album—we were in the process of picking out a producer and scheduling recording sessions, and I was the only one in the band doing any writing. I had abandoned the idea of Against Me! being a full-band effort, and took on all the responsibility myself. I wanted this. I had waited my whole life for this. My credibility was on the line. I wasn’t going to fuck that up over a girl.
Oftentimes on tour, the guys would go out and party through the night, and I’d be the lone weirdo who stayed behind at the hotel to write, trying to stay focused, trying to stay sober. This dynamic put a divide between me and the other members. Since I was writing the songs, I started to feel that I was entitled to the publishing rights to them, which led the rest of the band to feel that I was being a greedy asshole.
We were still in the honeymoon phase with the label, so I was letting things slide. It was a trade-off. While they were clueless about our band in certain regards, at least they were enthusiastic about us, assuring us that we were going to be huge and throwing a shit-ton of money into our efforts. They sent us a list of producers they suggested we work with for the new album. The only one that didn’t make us all cringe was Butch Vig. Butch had produced some of the most influential records of the last 20 years, including Nirvana’s Nevermind. I got set up on a call with him while we were in Leipzig, Germany, on our European tour.
Speaking on the phone with Butch was intimidating, but he told me he loved the demos and had ideas on how to push our vocal dynamics, going softer when called for. “It seems like you’re always singing at a ten,” he told me, before quickly apologizing. But my skin was thick. I wanted the criticism. “Just keep writing. You can never have too many songs,” he encouraged before we hung up. “And don’t be afraid to try new approaches as well. Venture outside your comfort zone!” I ended the call feeling sure that I wanted to work with him, although the rest of the band was sti
ll not convinced, unsure about how his background with bands like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins would translate to our punk sound. But I took his advice and kept writing songs as we trekked through Europe.
Some songs take time, some songs dissolve into nothing, and very rarely, a song will simply find you in the night. I wish there was a science to it, but there isn’t. After treating ourselves to a €600 meal in France that included mussels and bottle after bottle of wine at a restaurant in our five-star Grand Hotel Des Thermes, a place fancy enough to make our crew stick out like eight sore thumbs, I walked along the shore of Saint Malo alone. I lit a joint and stared off at the horizon. A fully formed song—lyrics, melody, and all—crashed onto me like one of the incoming waves. It was the kind of moment you live for as a songwriter—true inspiration. A gift. I titled it “The Ocean,” since I was staring out at sea.
The song was my interpretation of heaven, and how interconnected life is. In the middle of it, I included a line about wishing I’d been born a woman. I’d thrown very subtle hints at my dysphoria into Against Me! songs before, sprinkling in a few coded lyrics here and there over the years. Early on, in “The Disco before the Breakdown,” I included the line: “And I know they’re going to laugh at us when they see us out together holding hands like this.” Being “together holding hands” was a metaphor for my relationship with “her.” Later, in Searching for a Former Clarity’s title track, I got a little bolder: “And in the journal you kept by the side of your bed, you wrote nightly in aspiration of developing as an author, confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women’s clothes, compulsions you never knew the reasons to.” But “The Ocean” would be the most forthright. The thought of presenting the lyrics to the band made me uncomfortable. Still, I didn’t want to change a word.
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