by Jon Fine
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 dress
es 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.
The second reason I lucked out by attending Oberlin was its radio station, WOBC, staffed by music nuts and, in the classic sense of college radio, unformatted. (Too many college radio stations back then mimicked commercial radio, with programmers insisting that DJs choose among songs placed in “rotation.” That would never fly with the freaks of WOBC.) At station headquarters in the student union building, entire walk-in closets were stuffed floor to ceiling with old records—you could get lost in them for hours, and I often did—and a few mail crates overflowing with telltale square cardboard packages arrived each day. The college was continually pissed off at the radio station, because the collective weight of those records made the old floors sag, requiring regular reinforcement. I graduated in 1989, and I’m not sure the station even owned a CD player by the time I left.
WOBC’s office had all the institutional charm of a military recruiting center, albeit with more smokers and fewer ashtrays. Everything in the control room appeared to be government-surplus gear from the fifties, if not earlier. The occasional giveaway poster from random bands like the Raunch Hands or the Reducers passed for decoration. Ceiling tiles were past yellowing and getting well into brown. Couches sagged and groaned when you sat on them, and smelled like an old man’s flannel shirt. DJs coughed their colds into the decaying gray foam covering the on-air mike and made one another sick. A crescent of metal protruded from the giant black speaker in the lounge, on which someone had scrawled in white wax pencil: THIS IS NOT AN ASHTRAY YOU ASSHOLE. I adored it all, spent every minute there I could, and, like everyone else, started with a weeknight 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. show.
WOBC was also a link, however tenuous, to the occasional concert in Cleveland. Early in my freshman year I won free tickets from the station to see the jangly Austin band Zeitgeist. It was a weeknight, and there were maybe twenty people at the club. But forget the music, which was mildly interesting at best. A friend, who earned my plus-one by borrowing a station wagon for the trip there, spent much of the night at the bar, hanging out with the woman who played second guitar for Zeitgeist, because here it wasn’t arenas, backstage passes, and limousines, and there was hardly any barrier between performer and fan. You could know these people. A really important thing about this world, because your real influences were ultimately the people you knew: the friends with whom you hung out, went to shows, traded tapes, and talked endlessly about music.
Oberlin was just a few thousand kids, but it midwifed a shocking number of real bands that wrote and played their own material every weekend at dorm lounge parties and in off-campus living rooms amid the cornfields in our nowheresville. Flyers advertising upcoming shows fluttered from the overfilled bulletin boards in every public space. These bands got airplay on WOBC, on a kind of 8-track tape that DJs called “carts,” and they were the most important fact about this time and place, which is why I’m going to talk about one you’ve never heard of, called Pay the Man.
No one outside Oberlin knows about Pay the Man, because ultimately they never did anything. They moved to Boston at the end of my freshman year, but then the drummer left, and they couldn’t replace him. Nothing they recorded was ever released. (They were supposed to do a four-song EP, “Gettin’ the Juke,” on the long-defunct Cleveland label St. Valentine Records, but it never happened.) But they were genuinely good, and not “good” as in “acceptable to hear in a friend’s basement” or “there’s a halfway decent song on the cassette they guilt-sold to their friends.” “Good” as in, you would listen to them if they were from San Francisco or Spokane or Madison or Amsterdam, because their songs stuck with you and got bigger with repeated listening. You looked forward to their shows. I’ve been carrying a bunch of their songs for decades, first on cassettes, now on a computer, and those songs hold up, beyond the way they scratch an old itch. Each of the guys in Pay the Man played better than he needed to and was smarter than necessary. Most crucially, their drummer, Orestes Delatorre, was a lot better than he needed to be. Mike Billingsley wrote the tougher and darker songs and played a fretless bass. The guitarist, Chris Brokaw, played actual solos, and played them well. (Chris went on to a long career in music, playing with everyone from Thalia Zedek to Steve Wynn to Bedhead to Thurston Moore.) By the time I was at Oberlin they’d been together for three years, and though they still played some of their early, ultrafast songs, it was clear they had grown beyond
them. Like a lot of bands from the mid-eighties, they had commonalities with Hüsker Dü and early Soul Asylum without sounding like either—that is, another band that started out playing hardcore, then grew out of it without totally forsaking it.
Aside from being really good, the guys in Pay the Man were also just there: walking to class, eating at the dining hall, hanging out at parties. I was generally too chickenshit to talk to any of them, though Chris went out of his way to be nice to me. He and Mike were as skinny as scarecrows, with long, straight high school stoner hair trailing down to the middle of their backs. Chris was a senior and an English major. I’d see him out and about, a bottle of Boone’s Farm sometimes dangling from a pocket of his army jacket, and something about the whole literate stoner-rocker vibe made me think, Jesus. Too cool.
