Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  I had just broken up with a grad student I’d met in the fall named Dominick, and I was lovesick. Dominick looked like the statue of David and was a hell of a lot smarter than I was, but he’d bait every conversation with his pointed socialist discourse. I grew tired of his didacticism, but the sex more than made up for it. We’d only been dating for three months but I was prone to falling in love as accidentally as one might step in some Tompkins Square Park dog shit.

  I had become close with the queer theorist Michael Warner and his partner, Sean Belman, who ran Bound and Gagged magazine at the time, and was headed upstate to their place for the weekend. I assumed that Dominick would be coming with me. But he materialized at my apartment the night before to tell me we were over. I cried after he left with The Wall cranked up at full volume. Those tears were justified, it had been some damn good dick.

  I still decided to go to Michael and Sean’s place in Poughkeepsie. They called it Camp Climax, a little hippie haven where everyone could laze about or get lost in their own creative projects. The other guests that weekend were a radical faerie named Granite, performer Justin Bond of Kiki and Herb fame, and fiction writer Stacey D’Erasmo and her anthropologist girlfriend, Beth.

  Justin Bond was my neighbor on Twelfth Street now. I idolized her: a true downtown performer able to sustain herself off of her raw talent and imagination. This was the first time I had spent with her in a private setting, which for me was like hanging with a celebrity, just like my nights with Ms. Brown in the second grade. I wanted so badly for Justin to notice and like me, but I could tell that she still thought of me as a kid.

  That night after dinner, I lay on the floor in the living room as Justin improvised a long, sorrowful song on the piano, her hair hanging in her face. Granite sat on the couch, making a giant collage out of vintage porn magazines, delicately gluing cutout dicks and spooge. Stacey and Beth quietly read. Not able to stop thinking about Dominick, I wanted to walk out in the snow and not come back.

  After falling asleep on the floor, I woke up the next morning feeling horrible. But this wasn’t just my heart hurting—my whole body ached. I tried to stretch and yawn it out to no avail. A flu was coming on. A bad one. I decided to wait a couple hours and see how I felt. We had a Scissor Sisters show at Marion’s that night on the Bowery.

  “I’m so sick, Scott,” I said later, my teeth chattering from the chills. I wasn’t able to stand up all the way. I was crouched down in the hallway, clutching my phone. He knew I wasn’t faking, I wouldn’t miss a performance for anything.

  “So what do we do about Marion’s?” he said.

  “I guess see what Ana thinks,” I said. “You guys just might have to go with my vocals on track.”

  “Oh God. This’ll be classic.”

  It was going to be our third gig with Ana. The last two had been successes, though they’d been sparsely attended. For one of them, we’d played three songs on the restaurant side of B Bar, for some kind of variety performance night. I’d worn a leather harness and cutoff denim shorts. Scott’s look was an ill-fitting union suit with the sleeves off. Ana wore a dark-red wig and square black sunglasses. We were doing our best, but there was no budget for clothes.

  We each had our own microphone now, and Scott still pretended to play keyboards as usual, running the backing track on a minidisc player. Our rehearsals were in Scott’s kitchen, where we came up with a little dance for “Electrobix.” It was clunky but worth it to see Scott try and keep up with the moves. The two of us didn’t excel at choreography.

  Scott and Ana played the show without me that night. It had been snowing in the city and there weren’t very many people there anyway. Ana apparently told the audience that I was “off fucking Liberace’s ghost.” I wish I had been: I felt like death. The fever finally broke, leaving me drenched in a pool of my own sweat. I felt useless. It would take a couple weeks to feel better, emotionally and physically, and get over missing Dominick, or at least him giving me the what for.

  When we played a makeup gig at Marion’s a few weeks later, this time with all of us present, I was disappointed not to see Amy Sedaris waiting tables. I’d heard she took shifts sometimes just because she liked the place and had done it for years. The restaurant was full, but it felt a little like a dinner theater: Everyone was sitting at a table. Ana used this to her advantage, however. She was brazen with the crowd, fearless with her jokes: If one didn’t land, the next one would. We were working without a net and having unbridled fun with each other onstage.

  Somebody liked our set enough to steal the backup CD from the sound booth; we kept it there in case the minidisc player didn’t work. Two guys from a record label had watched the show. They left us a hundred-dollar tip, along with a note that said they wanted to put one of our songs out. It turned out the label was called A Touch of Class and was run by two Swiss producers named Oliver Strumm and Dominique Clausen, who worked out of a loft turned music studio in SoHo. I was familiar with one of their previous songs on the label, a twelve-inch single from my friend Nashom’s band the Ones. It was called “Flawless” and had been a big club hit. ATOC did all their own artwork and each twelve-inch had its own special look.

  Our first meeting with them was congenial. Scott and I were impressed with their office’s all-white interior and studio rig, which was legit. When they talked about our songs, they acted energized and mentioned they would like to release a single of “Electrobix” with “Comfortably Numb” as the B side. They said they loved how “honest” our music was.

  Scott and I left that meeting buzzing. “They’ve got their shit together,” I said. We walked at a brisk pace, our eyes straight ahead, both processing whatever this could mean.

  “Someone’s gotta look at the contract,” Scott said. “It’s not like we have any idea what this stuff means.” We walked in silence for a block. In my head we’d already signed everything and were moving forward. Scott was more careful and pragmatic to the extent that sometimes I felt like he savored dousing my fantasies.

  “Any ideas?” I said. “Do we know any lawyers? And where would we even find the money for one?”

  “My uncle? Not sure if he knows anything about entertainment law, but we can try him. This kind of stuff is hard without a manager.”

  We ended up signing away some important points on that first contract, which we’d painfully find out later. But at the time, I was intoxicated with the thought that anyone wanted to release our songs. We didn’t realize it yet, but every decision we made from here on out was a possible pitfall. The more songs we wrote, and the more time we put into our little shows, the more we had to lose. Young kids with talent and no money can be perfect targets to be taken advantage of. The initial paychecks can seem worth it at the time, making it easy to sign away what should remain yours.

  I was going to Luxx in Williamsburg almost every weekend at this point. Friday night was Mutants, which wasn’t as big as Berliniamsburg on Saturday, but there was still a decent amount of people showing up, and Larry Tee was in need of more acts to perform. So I gave him our demos and got Scissors a gig.

  We needed a look, so I had Scott and Ana bring in some black clothes, which I laid out on Scott’s living room floor and splattered with a toxic-green paint. It didn’t look great by any means, but I figured it would at least give us some kind of visual unity.

  The night of our first Luxx show, it was freezing outside. I had been posting flyers everywhere downtown that just had the Scissors logo, our name, the date, venue, and two lines from “Electrobix”: YOU GOTTA PUMP YOUR BODY, IF YOU WANNA BE A HOTTIE. Just seeing the flyers on bulletin boards or taped up on a lamppost filled me with pride. We were real. I had also been ironing the logo onto some of my clothes, denim jackets and T-shirts. When I wore them in public, even though I was the only one who had them, I knew people could see it and might wonder what it was.

  The show was no later than 9 p.m. that night for some reason I can’t remember. And the room seemed bigger than I’d ever n
oticed. We decided to actually plug in Scott’s keyboard for a change, as well as a bass guitar that could be played live over the minidisc playback. Just rehearsing with the microphones before people came in I realized that even though the stage wasn’t very far off the ground, at least we weren’t using a wooden box or standing on the floor anymore.

  The dressing room barely fit the three of us, with a cracked mirror and a curved black pleather seat that fit two. Scott had his feet up on the dressing counter. “Ana just called, she just missed the train, but she’s on her way.”

  “Are the flaggers here yet?”

  “I stuck them in the men’s room. What are they doing exactly?” For each show now we tried to think of some kind of feature or gag. We thought it would be ridiculous to have gay flag dancers behind us for our last number. Flag dancing was a holdover from gay parties of yore. Though it was easy to poke fun, the dancers themselves notoriously felt a spiritual connection to the style. And if you really watched it, it was quite beautiful. The only thing was, we were paying these two flag dancers every cent we were making off the gig. Which wasn’t very much, probably just over a hundred bucks.

  “They’re just doing what they do, I guess. I told them to come onstage for the last number.”

  “Does that include ketamine?” he said. “They were just snorting some in the bathroom.”

  Before we went on, I felt like my insides were getting squeezed. No matter how many times I went, I still needed to pee. It was hard to speak. I was so distracted and nervous that when we got onstage, my energy was overwrought. In front of an audience, I didn’t know yet what to do with myself or the crowd. It was as if I could look past and around them, but not at them. Ana’s presence made up for this, however. She worked the drag banter angle she’d learned on the San Francisco stages and smoothed over any obvious nervousness I brought to the table. My friend Mark Tusk had been right: She loosened up the room, whereas I was projecting a pent-up, manic energy.

  We had about fifty people at the show, most of them friends and charitable former lovers. Our set lasted twenty minutes and the dancers added flair, though their flags kept scraping the low ceiling.

  Larry Tee in his thick glasses approached me afterward, clapping. “That was great. There’s so much new stuff!” He said he couldn’t wait to play it in his sets. His sentiment was sweet, but I knew that a lot of our music was a little too quirky and not quite electro enough to be DJed at his and Spencer’s parties. It didn’t bother me, though. I was just happy to be embraced by the club in a live capacity.

  The most exciting time for a successful band isn’t necessarily at its peak, playing huge sold-out shows, or (back in the day) selling a ton of records. It’s at the cusp, the split-second hairline fracture that precedes a break. It’s a beautiful limbo when people are discovering the music, when every day is full of inquiries from surprising sources, the achievement of small goals that start adding up into something significant. It’s a time that feels so special in retrospect because it can never be returned to. Once a band truly breaks, it can’t be replicated. The magic trick is impossible to pull twice.

  If there was any time in my life I wish I could freeze, live inside perpetually, it would be in this spot. Making my work, I was an unspoiled bonehead, innocent and happy. The joy of creation was coming from the purest place it possibly could. It would take me many years to truly be able to tap into that same unfiltered reservoir again.

  I wanted to write about my world—both internal and external—to multiply the fun I was having by just being myself, maybe inspire other people to do the same. Bit by bit, we were creating a vessel for what I was envisioning. But if I had stopped myself, been realistic about the real chances of success, if I had actually paid attention to having to get a “real job,” the momentum would have sputtered. I was living in my own boy-crazy music-fantasy world, scribbling incantations in notebooks, improvising with a pencil. I would force myself to write even when there was nothing coming out but nonsense. I had a magic and manic ability to conjure my own excitement, half dancing, half shuffling down sidewalks, talking and singing to myself. It was an extended trancelike state that kept me productive, but the freewheeling discipline would eventually harden and escape my control.

  I WAS DRESSED LIKE A mime, sitting on the beach, high. The sun was barely peeking over the horizon, turning the sky into delicious streaks of pink and orange. Peals of laughter bubbled up nearby from small groups on the beach, the sound traveling across the mostly flat silence. They were all straggling revelers not yet ready to call it a night. My jaw was clenching; with my right hand I rubbed the side of my face, massaging my mandibles. My other hand, after pulling my cap off, stroked the hair on my head. MDMA made me happy most of the time, but this was something else. The night had been an epic neon spectacle. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get back to the hostel, but at this point I didn’t care. I just wanted to stay in this moment, right now, alone.

  Something had clicked inside me with the high: I’d held a hunch that I’d been on the right path, and now I knew for sure. The previous months spun in my mind’s eye: the work, the hustling, the shows and lyrical epiphanies. On this dusty beach in Barcelona, I was so far from New York, across a whole ocean. But it still felt so close. The world was smaller than I thought.

  Only two weeks before, Scott and I had gone to the Touch of Class office and seen the vinyl in person. We held it in our hands, impressed with the artwork of grotesque muscle, collaged to form our name. It was the real thing, not just some iron-on I had put on an old denim jacket. It wasn’t a black-and-white flyer that I had tacked up on the bulletin board at the gym. People could buy this, in actual stores!

  The Touch of Class guys seemed proud to put it out, but I still wasn’t sure what their role was supposed to be. No one had explained to Scott and me what we should expect from an indie label. I had been reading some music business books, but it still felt confusing. Did they put money into promoting our stuff? They did give us a stack of records. I took them downtown to all the record stores: Rebel Rebel, Other Music, and some other place on Avenue A that I shopped at sometimes. Other Music and Rebel were happy to take and feature the record. But the guy on Avenue A wasn’t interested. He just shook his head with his arms folded. “Yeah, man, I heard it already. Not my thing.” I asked if I could just leave one there. He shook his head again. I walked out thinking what a jerk the guy was. He could have taken one just to be polite.

  I was burning copies of our demos faster than I could give them away. People weren’t sending digital files around much yet, so I always had a stack of homemade Scissor Sisters EPs that I would pass off to anyone that seemed interested. They went over the front of every DJ booth I encountered. When I saw Björk at a party, I discreetly tapped her on the shoulder, slipped it into her hand, smiled, and made a quick retreat.

  A few weeks before, my pal Peter Murdock had taken me as his date to the B-52’s twenty-fifth-anniversary show at Irving Plaza. No one would be more thrilled than me. They were my lifetime heroes. Yoko Ono came out and guested on “Rock Lobster.” Riding Peter’s shoulders, singing along to every word, I thought of my twelve-year-old self, dreaming about a moment like this.

  When the show finished, I met Fred Schneider at the after-party. I wasn’t shy. I gushed. I couldn’t believe I was actually meeting him. I told him I was in a band and that maybe he could help us produce some songs. He was nonplussed and didn’t seem interested. “That’s not something I really do,” he said. I was a little disappointed at his response but didn’t take it personally. It was people like him who had the juice. Fred was a human talisman. I felt that by just shaking his hand, magic would rub off on me as if it were covered in glitter.

  On a weekday afternoon I was still waiting tables at Leshko’s and two men with British accents sat down in my section. One of them looked familiar, and I realized that it was Phil Howells, the head of the City Rockers record label in London, a subsidiary of Ministry of Sound. I knew an opp
ortunity when I saw it. The single had been pressed, and the record was sitting on the counter in my apartment. I couldn’t let this pass. I tapped a fellow waiter on the shoulder and pulled him back to the bussing station.

  “Just one favor—please can you watch my tables for six minutes. I have to run home and get something.”

  “What?” He was confused but game.

  I told him to look after my tables and pretend that I hadn’t gone anywhere. If anyone asked, I was in the bathroom. I stepped out the door of Leshko’s and broke into a sprint for six blocks, not looking back. I flung the building door open, took the stairs three at a time, unlocked my apartment, and grabbed the record. It was ten minutes by the time I got back to Leshko’s, dripping in sweat.

  “Sir,” I said, approaching Phil Howells’s table, in between gasps for air, “I know you don’t know me but I have this band. . . .” I handed him the record and one of my homemade EP CDs. “I just want to give you this. I think you might like it.” He seemed genuinely surprised and shook my hand, said he’d give it a listen and that in fact he’d recently heard something about us. In six months, that same guy would fly back from London to offer us a record deal.

  I decided to return to the Sónar festival in Barcelona, this time with our record in tow. Scott and I would take stacks of the vinyl and give one to every DJ we met. Our flight was late, so we missed our first connection and had to repurchase our tickets from Paris to Barcelona, but we finally arrived and stayed at my favorite spot, the Hostal Que Tal, where I had stayed in previous summers. Carlos, the sweet manager, welcomed us in his Spanish style, making us coffees and clucking about the local gossip.

  Gary Pini, my friend from Paper magazine, was in town for the festival, and said he had a pal named Neil Harris that he’d like us to meet, a former A and R guy from London Records. “He’s smart and could be a good manager for what you do.” At one of the Sónar afternoons that they held at the contemporary art museum, Gary introduced us to him. But before he did, he said to me, “Just be cool and don’t bug him about anything.”