Tranny

by Laura Jane Grace

  December 4, 2007—Boston, MA

  The Tampa radio station festival show was terrible, absolutely awful. We didn’t fit on the radio rock bill. It wasn’t our scene of bands. None of us wanted to be there.

  “I feel like a whore,” Andrew said after the set.

  I hated looking out while playing and seeing the tops of Army recruitment tents. I hate being a part of events like this. I hate not saying anything against it from stage. I want to tell every kid here to go tear those fucking Army tents down, forget college, drop out of high school, get drunk, get high, get smart, get pissed, get even. I feel like a sellout.

  We are Rolling Stone’s #9 album of the year, #5 in Blender, and #1 in SPIN. But when a former fan writes to me, saying, “Your old fans are dropping like flies. I hope this whole thing implodes in your faces,” it crushes me.

  December 10, 2007—San Diego, CA

  We walked off stage to a mix of boos and applause.

  Not only were there military recruiters present at the San Diego radio station show, the whole event was sponsored by the Marine Corps. Neither management nor the label told us this information when talking us into playing these events. I found out when I heard the radio DJ introducing us over the PA and thanking the show’s sponsors. I don’t want to play shows for the war machine. This was embarrassing.

  My resentment grew and grew until I could take it no more. During the last song, I told the crowd that had we known that the Marines were a sponsor we would not have agreed to play. I told them that isn’t what our band is about and that we’re against the U.S. military-industrial complex. I asked the audience not to buy our merchandise and I apologized for being there. I feel like a chump for having played the show and I feel like a chump for having said anything.

  I hate that my hands shake when I’m angry.

  You can high-five me in the elevator,” my lawyer whispered as we walked out of the office. I should have been happy, but I was so angry with myself. The judge in my case agreed to withhold adjudication after I apologized and accepted that I was at fault. It didn’t hurt that the plaintiff in the case had been arrested for armed robbery a couple weeks after the coffee shop incident. We would not go to court and no conviction would appear on my criminal record, as long as I paid a fine and fulfilled community service.

  What a stupid mistake. A stupid, $35,000 mistake. Still, it was the day before my 27th birthday and, considering how many musicians like Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix all met their demise at that age, I figured things could be worse. I was relieved to put it past me and move on. No longer did I have to walk around with the burden of legal uncertainty. I could just exist.

  For all our hard work over a year that nearly tore us apart, New Wave charted higher and sold more copies in the first week than all of our previous records. We played on Letterman, Leno, Conan, and Kimmel. The mainstream music press showered the album with critical praise, drawing comparisons to “this generation’s Clash,” and the CD ended up selling 100,000 copies worldwide. This was a monumental accomplishment for the band, but a tremendous disappointment for the label because it didn’t go gold. The label didn’t care about critical acclaim. They wanted sales figures, and 100,000 copies meant nothing to them. They wanted half a million, at least, and really wanted a million. It felt like all of our efforts had come up short.

  I was asked in an end-of-the-year interview, “When is the breaking point? How much is too much?” Although I didn’t say so, I felt that I’d found that breaking point and was ready for a vacation.

  Heather and I did a fair job of keeping secret the fact that we were already married. We had always planned on having an actual wedding ceremony at the end of the year. I wanted that experience for us because it was my second marriage. I wanted this time to be different. Maybe with a real ceremony, the commitment would actually mean something. I wanted to have a first dance together and feed each other wedding cake. I wanted to get married for the last time.

  In December, we headed back to South Beach once again for a proper wedding at the National Hotel, right down the street from the courthouse where we had our private ceremony earlier that year. I wore a tuxedo custom-tailored to fit me, and Heather wore a black gown. We kept it intimate, around 100 guests, mostly family, both blood and band family.

  The wedding was the first time in almost 20 years that my mother and father had been in the same room. I had to make sure they were seated far apart from each other at all times. Not only did I have their tables at opposite ends of the room during the reception, but their seats had their backs to each other. Though the setting was intimate, they avoided each other the whole time.

  All of my band came to the wedding and all of Alkaline Trio showed up for Heather. Even Nolan made the trip, although Matt Skiba told him he couldn’t come to the wedding after starting a fistfight at the bar the night before.

  Heather and I left for our honeymoon shortly after, spending Christmas and New Year’s in Rome, just the two of us. I should have bought first-class plane tickets, but everything else about the trip was a five-star experience, starting with a limousine driver waiting for us at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport arrival gate, holding a sign reading our now-shared name, “Gabel.”

  We spent two weeks taking in the amazing Italian sights—the Basilica, the Pantheon, the Sistine Chapel, the Capuchin Crypts, but mostly just sitting outside of cafés in the Campo Di Fiori, drinking espresso in the mornings, wine at night, and eating all the penne arrabiata we could. I hadn’t had a cigarette in over five years, but allowed myself to smoke all I wanted there. When in Rome, right?

  We stuck our hands in La Bocca della Verità, as is the custom, and I pretended it bit mine off. We ice skated along the banks of the Fiume Tevere, in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo, bought masterpieces off of street painters while stumbling drunk along the Via Del Corso, and paid a euro for the basement tour of the Profondo Rosso Museum of Horrors. We never made it to the Villa Borghese, though.

  There was a New Year’s Eve party on the roof of our hotel, next door to the Colosseum, with all the guests and staff popping bottles of champagne and dancing. I don’t remember the countdown or kiss, and ended the night in typical New Year’s fashion, gripping porcelain tight and heaving all my guts up. As I laid on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, leaving 2007 a spinning mess behind me, I had the feeling that I was at a turning point. I just didn’t know in which direction I was turning.

  6. DON’T ABANDON ME

  There were 10,000 people in front of us and a giant black banner hanging behind us, decorated with the cover of New Wave. No band name, just the face of the snarling panther.

  Against Me! kicked off 2008 on a stadium tour opening for Foo Fighters. We had to ask Sire for over $30,000 in tour support because the gig paid practically nothing. We had turned down a tour opening for Linkin Park that would have actually made us money, just to go out with the Foos. Linkin Park had cash, but Foo Fighters had credibility. We took the opportunity hoping it would turn a whole new audience on to us, but we didn’t do much to help ourselves there.

  We would walk out onto the gigantic stage every night, pick up our instruments, and start playing. No “hello,” no “we’re Against Me!,” not a word, just a four-count into the first song and then straight through the set without break. I’d look out into the audience from the stage and see faces in the front row glued to their phones. I could sense the disinterest, like if we didn’t care to tell them who we were, then why should they care to find out? Still, we did pick up some fans each night, those who walked away wondering, “Who was that band in black?” and actually bothered to investigate.

  I didn’t want to talk on stage for a few reasons. For one, every time I opened my mouth, all I could hear was a voice that sounded too close to my father’s blasting through a huge PA system. But also because it had been disillusioning to learn over the years that bands that I’d loved would say the same exact thing to their audiences every night. S
ame words, same jokes, same banter. All part of the act. I didn’t want to turn into that. I wasn’t a politician, and I wasn’t a comedian. I wasn’t trying to sell people anything, save for maybe a few records and T-shirts. And on top of all that, I never really knew what to say anyway.

  Arena and stadium touring was a completely new experience. I was so blown away by the size of the operation. I’ve always thought it was important to take the time to know the people you’re on tour with, at least catch their names and say hey around the venue. This was impossible in this setting. The scale of the operation was just damn remarkable—dozens of semi trucks and their drivers, crew people to load them, multiple stage techs for each band member, not just singular sound engineers and lighting designers, but whole teams for each function, not to mention the tour buses and drivers to carry all these souls. There was no way you could expect to even see the faces of all the people traveling with this circus, and I quickly gave up. My favorite thing to do on this tour was to climb to a high vantage point in the arena before and after each show and just watch everyone work to build or tear down the stage. Truly impressive.

  Even though there were so many people zipping past us at all times, the experience was extremely isolating. It’s an odd thing to feel so alone surrounded by that many people. When you’re the opening band on a tour like that, you have endless free time. You wake up in some underground parking garage in a sports arena outside of town. Aside from whatever press obligations you have, which take place somewhere in the venue most often, you have limited responsibilities. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are prepared and waiting for you at the designated times so you don’t have to worry about that.

  Your backstage room is the visiting team’s locker room. (The headliner gets the home team’s locker room.) Black curtains are draped over the lockers, and a couple couches or chairs are thrown in, as well as a folding table covered with snacks and beverages, cold cuts, veggies, and Clif Bars. I could never eat another Clif Bar again and die happy.

  As the opener, there’s no sound check. If you sleep until noon, that’s an eight-hour window of time to kill before the show. All that waiting for a 30-minute set, and then another eight or 10 hours until bus call, just sitting there backstage. Same schedule, day after day. This particular tour was three months long. This is why bands drink and do drugs, and why they’re addicted to smartphones and computers. Touring is lonely and monotonous and often boring.

  The Foo Fighters were more than welcoming to us, though. It’s reasonable to expect a band of their size to be completely cut off from the openers, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if we had gone the whole three months without even meeting any of them. But I’ll never forget that first day of tour, turning a corner in the venue to see Dave Grohl’s big smiling face and outstretched hand coming in to shake mine, quickly striding toward me…

  “Hey, I’m Dave!”

  Inside, I was screaming, Of course you are! You played in fucking Nirvana. There isn’t a person out there who owns a guitar pick or a drumstick who doesn’t know your name. But instead I just returned the introduction and nervously mumbled something about being grateful to be on board.

  Night after night, I watched in awe as Dave and the rest of the band held the massive crowds in the palms of their hands like the well-oiled machine they are. I developed a new appreciation for this world, contrary to what the DIY punk scene had instilled in me. That’s the lie of punk. Sure, you can play a 20-minute set through a barely audible PA and make the kids in the basement go off and tell yourself it’s the noble path, but can you do what Dave Grohl and his band do? Can you hold the attention of thousands for almost three hours? Or is it easier just to dismiss that kind of rock and roll as too corporate and lacking artistic merit? I realized how inadequate I was as a performing artist. I was so inspired by this deficiency that I wanted to learn from the experience and grow from it.

  I’m not sure the rest of the band took the tour as a learning experience. Their wives and girlfriends came along with us for stretches, and they stayed with them most of the time, while I avoided everyone. We were still cold and distant from each other, and arena touring gives you the space to do that. If they were in the dressing room backstage, I would stay on the bus. If they were on the bus, I’d be in the dressing room. The only time we really spent together was right before our set.

  Our last show of the tour was at the iconic Wembley Arena in London to a crowd of 80,000 people, every single one of them there to see the Foo Fighters, not us. Andrew made a comment before the set: “Well, at least we made it to Wembley.”

  “I’m not counting it until we come back as the headliner,” I responded. I wanted to be the ones people came to see, and I wasn’t going to rest until the vision was realized. I felt at odds with the ambition of the rest of my band. I wanted them to see the vision, too.

  We were so close, right there on the precipice, playing in front of the largest audiences of our career, but we weren’t connecting with the crowds because we weren’t connecting with each other. The wide open spaces of arena touring had done nothing to improve band communications. I still hated everyone and everyone still hated me. Opportunities kept coming in and we kept saying yes to them; there was no stopping. We needed a sacrifice, someone or something to hold accountable for our lack of functionality so we could continue on as we’d always done. Desperate for a scapegoat, we did something we’d been talking about doing for ages. We fired our manager.

  He had babysat us through the years up until this point, dealing with all my bullshit, and was still continuing to grow the band. Despite my arrest and legal woes, we had just had the most successful year of the band’s history. A week after playing our highest paying gig to date, a $75,000 paycheck for one Southern Comfort–sponsored free show in Atlanta that the manager organized, we dropped the axe. Coming to a unanimous decision on this move gave the four of us a sense of solidarity we hadn’t experienced in a long time, but our excitement quickly dwindled when we actually had to let him go and realized we were faced with the question: What next? Of course, we went ahead and fired the lawyer, too, while we were at it, because why not clean house and start fresh?

  Managerless, we headed back out on the Warped Tour, which was a bleak, tiring version of what we remembered from two years back. None of the bands we had befriended were back this time around, and gone was our preferential treatment. What once felt like punk rock summer camp was now nothing but an arduous blur of sunscreen, sweat, and dirt.

  “What the hell are you all doing back on this tour?” Stephen Christian of the band Anberlin asked me, puzzled upon seeing us on the first day. “You all had Spin’s #1 album, and you agreed to do the Warped Tour again? Why?”

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question, but I pretended it was because I didn’t have a good answer. I wasn’t sure who our audience even was anymore. We had lost credibility in the DIY punk scene by doing the Warped Tour the first time around, and now by being back on the tour, we were losing the credibility with the hip media outlets we had worked so hard to gain traction with.

  It was the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, and the economy was so fucked that we were budgeting $20,000 just for gas. We also made the mistake of agreeing to do daily meet-and-greet signings, which made us hate each other even more. Two hours after every set posing for pictures in 100-degree heat in the parking lots of America will do that to you.

  When the tour went to L.A., we interviewed a series of potential new managers, each one more clueless about us than the last. One of them, Axl Rose’s former manager, told me over dinner that we should be taking advantage of the opportunity to get paid by the Army for performing for troops overseas. He stroked our egos, telling us we were the greatest band in the world. I responded by asking him to name our albums. He couldn’t come up with a single one besides New Wave. “That kind of knowledge isn’t really important in this business,” he told me.

  Finally, after being worn down by a seemingly endless line of manage
r meetings like this, we impulsively hired the first one who could hold a reasonably enjoyable conversation with us, Ian Montone. It was his roster of bands that really sold me—the White Stripes, M.I.A., and the Shins, among others. These were the type of bands we wanted to be associated with, successful bands that sold concert tickets and albums, and got songs placed in movies. Bands that were galaxies away from the world of Warped Tour.

  The high we all felt from this big change was immediately deflated by a call from our label A&R. “What the fuck did you just do?!” he snarled at me with an ice-cold tone. He told me that he absolutely refused to work with Ian, that Ian had “fucked him over on a deep and personal level,” but wouldn’t explain how. It was a difficult position to be put in. Our whole decision suddenly became a mess of confusion, and it was hard to separate fear from logic. I was so sick of thinking about managers.

  Writing songs at a furious pace, I was chomping at the bit to get back in the studio. I had been bringing songs to the band all summer, but the reaction from them was lukewarm at best. The rest of the band was ultimately on board, but Warren said he just “didn’t know how to come up with a drum beat for some songs,” which I found unacceptable. I bought a drum machine and set up a recording time, entering the studio prepared to play all of the instruments myself along with my new battery-operated beat-making friend. The label wanted me to release it as an EP under the name Against Me! because it would sell more copies, but I insisted on releasing it under my own name as a solo effort. It ended up being called Tom Gabel’s Heart Burns. This did nothing for inner-band relations, and the label did nothing to promote it. We were imploding, and we would have been done for good had I not gotten the phone call.