by Jon Fine
Shortly afterward Sooyoung dropped by where I lived and, on his way out, paused to ask, “Do you think Jay is holding us back?”
Yes, I agreed, but in the end our slutting around with other drummers made the decision for us. Sooyoung and I had also recorded a ten-song Bitch Magnet cassette—our first—with a seriously good drummer he knew in West Virginia, who played in an actual hardcore band. (He could play fast.) Jay was pissed about the recording and pissed about the show we had played without him, and during an outraged lunch at a campus dining hall, he quit.
We were, we figured, screwed. Except that while Pay the Man was no longer around—Chris had graduated the previous spring, and Mike left with him—Orestes was back at school and wanted to play with us. What can I say about him? He looked, and drank, like a jock. He was the captain of the rugby team. You could easily mistake him for a meathead—because he was kind of a meathead—but then he’d start reciting long, dirty passages from The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, or conversing in one of the seven languages he knew, or rattling off incredibly baroque insults in Mandarin involving filthy chickens and your grandmother’s most private parts. He was serious about his drumming in a way I hadn’t really seen before—he was far more dedicated to his art than 90 percent of the art majors at a particularly artsy school. He was also a huge Zappa fan, but I didn’t hold it against him.
Our early shows toggled between scraggly hardcore and a few sore-thumb pop songs. Even with Orestes we were still the annoying little brother band among our peers—too loud, still inept—and the fifteen people who saw us every other week started rolling their eyes when I ripped the strings off my guitar, one by one, to conclude each set. I needed those theatrics, because I was a terrible guitarist. There was a huge gap between what I heard in my head and what I could actually coax from my instrument, a gap I sometimes tried to bridge by throwing my guitar at the amp. Also, I couldn’t keep in tune for more than half a song. But it was also becoming clear that Sooyoung had bass and songwriting chops far beyond what a scraggly hardcore band required and that Orestes was by far the best drummer on campus and, honestly, one of the best drummers in the world. (I have played with a lot of great drummers and seen many more, and I do not throw that superlative around lightly.) His explanation for what he was even doing in Bitch Magnet was that he wanted to play in a loud and weird band and of all local contenders we best fit the bill. We were also well-behaved. Orestes was only twenty-one, but already he’d been in a band with someone who liked heroin too much. Orestes only had to take one look at Sooyoung and me to know that would never be a problem. (All this four-eyed nerdiness was finally good for something.) During my worst moments onstage, with the crowd and the sound and my gear and my hands all working against me, I’d sometimes look back at him and think, We can’t be that bad if he’s there.
Christ. I’m just getting started, and already this is getting sentimental. Don’t get the wrong idea. We were three extremely different individuals who shared one specific and important interest. I was in the midst of transitioning from shy to angry, hormonal chatterbox and frankly obnoxious music geek. Orestes was laconic and something of a loner. He was an only child whose father, whom he adored, was a percussionist. His earliest musical memory—one of his first memories, period—is sitting on his dad’s lap while his dad played congas with friends in an impromptu living room band. Then: cancer, and his father was gone at thirty-eight, when Orestes was only ten. Once you knew this, it confirmed what you thought you knew about Orestes, because there was always something slightly orphaned and apart about him. But he was destined to have a hard time fitting in anyway: part Mexican, part French, part Native American, part Turkish, part Greek, seriously built, a geology and French lit major, a drum and language savant.
Sooyoung was the child of two driven Korean immigrants, the firstborn son from a culture in which that status carries significant weight. Five foot nine and punk-rock skinny, he was, like me, nearsighted almost to the point of requiring a seeing-eye dog. His aptitude for math and academics in general—for a shocking array of topics and skills, really—coexisted, often uneasily, with an equivalent facility for music. He started writing songs in high school, and more than once I heard him say, “It’s not that hard to write a song” or “It’s easy to start a band.” Despite being Bitch Magnet’s front man, he often was the most ambivalent member because of his kinky, conflicted, stop-and-start relationship with music and the role it would play in his life. Since before we could even drink legally, he always seemed one tour or one record away from quitting music forever, and often said so outright. But he ended up playing in touring bands far longer than Orestes or I did. Over the years I’ve shared beds with Sooyoung—each of us in our own sleeping bag, but such intimacies came with the territory—spent long hours driving all night with him, and traveled through thirteen countries with him. I can recite a litany of his attributes—even-keeled, relentlessly logical, a long fuse but a big bomb, proud, quiet—and still feel like I’m fumfering around when I try to describe him accurately. I always thought I was the angrier one, but some of his early lyrics were full of guts and nuts, pissed and reeking from frustrated desire (“I could split your head in two,” “Each thrust out of love,” “A brick across the bean”). Then, on the last song of the record, he’d often slip in stuff full of longing for a girlfriend and a home. I’d see his ideas in his notebook, jotted in his precise geometric handwriting, and marvel at how he translated a stray observation or an overheard snippet into the lyrics of a song, like the plainly insane homeless woman cops at Port Authority led away while her pants were still pulled down to her ankles, who turned up in the first verse of “Americruiser.”
All this may make him seem grim and overly serious, but his deadpan humor could tie you up in knots if you weren’t careful. Once a gleeful Sooyoung told me about yanking Linc’s chain for an entire conversation by insisting that the best new record at the radio station was that of Metal Church, the dire Northwestern speed-metal band. As Linc lathered himself into a full-on righteous indie rock frenzy tinged with dumbfounded disbelief, Sooyoung demanded, with a pitch-perfect blend of impatience and indignation, “Linc, have you even heard the new Metal Church record?”
A Korean, a Mexican, and a Jew walk into a band . . . Orestes’s running joke was that no country club in the world would have us. The common thread running through our backgrounds, I think now, was an otherness and loneliness. Part of it was ethnic: on a certain level, all of us were outsiders in America. Then there was Sooyoung’s tension over which world he’d occupy, Orestes’s fatherlessness, and my sad-boy suburban yadayada at having being ignored or overlooked at home and at school and at camp and the subsequent determination to wreak revenge on my hometown and those there who had methodically kicked my ass year after year. We never admitted any of this to each other, of course, and even if we had, I doubt it would have been enough to unite us. Some bands are touchy-feely, huggy, always talking. Not us. But we didn’t have to talk much, because, when it came to music, we understood each other intuitively and absolutely, in a way that none of my other bands ever replicated. Sooyoung would write a song, and I’d practically see the guitar part appear and fall into place with perfect seamless logic. At practice we’d show Orestes a couple of parts and, nodding his head, he would instantly play the exact thing that pulled the song together and made it better. As with great sex, there was no need for discussion. No need for anything, really, other than a nod and a muttered “yeah.” Every band has a creation myth that ends with the right musicians finding one another and bursting out into daffy grins—it’s our equivalent of a shared orgasm. Clint Conley once told me that meeting his Mission of Burma co-founder Roger Miller, who thirty-five years later remains the most important musical collaborator of his life, was “not unlike falling in love. It’s so rare. And it’s very powerful. I just thought, Wow. This is the guy I want to be with.” I wanted to be with Sooyoung and Orestes. My secret w
as that I kept waiting for both of them to realize I had no business being in their band. But maybe if I put up a brash enough front, no one would ever find out.
***
ONCE ORESTES JOINED BITCH MAGNET, THE MUSIC FELT BETTER and stronger. Like we were suddenly seeing everything in 3-D. The songs no longer seemed as if they were made from toothpicks and could be knocked over by doubt or a strong wind. It all felt correct. Songs are problems you set up and try to solve, and with Orestes a new and better logic snapped into place. Though we still had a long way to go. We recorded four songs just a few weeks after he joined—a terrible and thin-sounding recording that the world is better for never having heard, but underneath it all, Orestes was there. Making everything on that sad tape better. The best drummers always do.
Atlanta, ABBA, and Agnostic Front
Because I had nothing worth doing at home, and since both Sooyoung and I knew you hang on to a great drummer with all you’ve got, Bitch Magnet spent the summer of 1987 in Atlanta, where Orestes was living with his girlfriend. Absolutely no one knew us in Atlanta, but since maybe two hundred people anywhere knew us at this point, one place seemed as good as another. The prior summer I lived with my parents and made $4.88 an hour working in a Dun & Bradstreet print room. Anything was better than that.
My parents opposed everything about our plans, but I’d hit that crucial age when even slightly overbearing Jewish parents realize they can’t stop their children. We had one of those heartbreaking, nascent-adult conversations in which your parents try to convince you to do something or not do something and you stand firm and watch them—slowly, with sadness, the full weight of their age and then some pressing down upon them—give in. Sooyoung’s parents were against the entire idea, too, although I didn’t know that until I drove down to pick him up at their house in North Carolina, in suburban Charlotte. I arrived as his report card did. Atypically for him, some of his grades that last semester of sophomore year weren’t great, though they were still probably much better than mine, and this set off a huge conflagration. His dad—a compact, capable, and tightly wound man, an ex-smoker who was always chewing gum with real intensity and purpose—invited me to stay for a while, presumably to give them time to work on Sooyoung, but I politely cast my lot with Sooyoung, and he wanted to leave. As I pulled the car out I saw his Dad slump, as if with some huge, exhausting weight on his shoulders, running a hand over his face and forehead as if he were trying to mop off some trouble. Later Sooyoung told me that his parents were starting a business, and there were expectations that he’d stick around and pitch in. He felt guilty about splitting, but like me, he had to do it. The band had become that important, rickety and uncertain though it was.
It rained very hard on the drive to Georgia, a Southern summer storm that doesn’t let up or blow over for a long time. As Sooyoung drove and the car slopped through the downpour, I said to him, “Remember this lyric: Swimming to Atlanta.” He glanced over at me but said nothing. He was kind enough not to point out that I hadn’t mastered writing songs or lyrics yet.
Sooyoung and I found rooms in a house in Decatur, run by the kind of itinerant management consultant who names his dog after a favorite baseball player. Shortly after we arrived, we heard about a loft space downtown run by a guy who spelled his name Jhymn, a hippieish Butthole Surfers freak with long red hair and deep-set blue eyes. He put on a hardcore show one of the first nights we were in town featuring Porn Orchard, Dead Elvis, and General Revolt. (Which we thought would be the coolest name ever if they’d only change it to Joe Revolt.) We gave him a cassette, and he agreed to put us on an upcoming show and—even better—let us practice in the loft for cheap, or free, I don’t remember which.
Atlanta’s exurbs were exploding with zillions of housing developments, and we landed jobs on a landscaping crew that sodded fresh lawns at new houses that cost $70,000, $40,000, sometimes less. Around those still-unpopulated subdivisions it was just construction guys and us. The guy who ran our crew, Merritt, moved slowly and didn’t talk much. He had red-brown hair, a full beard, ruddy skin from spending so much time in the sun, and the kind of physical presence that makes people say “a mountain of a man”: at least six four, and while he was well over three hundred pounds, easy, his build wouldn’t have looked fat if he’d weighed two-fifty. He insisted on steak for lunch every day, at whichever chain restaurant was closest. You could definitely picture Merritt in a pair of extra-extra-large overalls, but he wore a polo shirt with a collar every day, and this detail gave him a certain authority. The only physical work Merritt did was driving his tractor, and each day we followed behind it, raking out the stones and smoothing the broken sunbaked red clay dirt. When the ground was ready, you picked up coils of sod and rolled them out to form a tight carpet of new grass; dark gray sandlike soil drizzled onto your shorts and shirt as you did. There was a trick, using a shovel, to chomp down on adjoining sod strips so they’d grow together to form an instalawn. Then you turned on sprinklers and moved on to the next house. Or, after plowing and raking, you’d strap something resembling a large flour sifter to your chest like an infant in a harness, then turn a crank to fling grass seed over the newly turned dirt. Afterward you spread wheat straw over the seed. I once asked Larry, a taciturn and tight-lipped man who appeared to be Merritt’s right-hand man, what the wheat straw did. He said it helped fertilize what we laid down. “Like with a man and a woman,” he said, and cracked a rare grin at his joke—unnaturally, like someone twisted his arm to force it out of him. When he did, I saw a mouth full of empty space and tiny rotting teeth. I understood then why I never saw him smile.
I learned to be Southern on that job, if being Southern means moving slowly in the sun, and during those long, steamy days it was easy to drift off while we hauled sod or dug holes and think about riffs and songs and the next round of shows. Sometimes a summer falls into an easy, simple rhythm. I ate cereal for breakfast and fast food for lunch and dinner. I learned why drinking Coke for breakfast was a thing in the South, because when we awoke at seven for a day of working outdoors, it was already 93 degrees and hot coffee sounded like a bad joke. We woke, drove, worked. We practiced at Jhymn’s and afterward went to Krispy Kreme—then a novelty found in only a few states—and suffered intense sugar rushes and crashes from splitting a dozen hot doughnuts chased with water because we didn’t want to spend money on milk. We didn’t make new friends. We didn’t go to any shows after the one we saw at Jhymn’s loft. We called clubs from pay phones during our lunch break, trying to line up gigs. I found Wuxtry, the one good record store near where we lived, where I bought the first two records by the growling, grimy, and hazy-sounding Australian trio feedtime, which I still listen to. I slept deeply each night, exhausted from all the work in the sun.
Practicing was all we really needed. A few evenings each week we rolled up to Jhymn’s un-air-conditioned loft as a dirty summer sun set slowly over the deserted downtown and pleasantly streamed through the front window while we played. The evenings were still so hot that you sweated just walking up the one flight of creaky wooden stairs, so we stripped off our shirts upon arriving before switching on fans and dragging our gear out from the alcoves and niches where we’d stashed it all. I carried my boombox to the middle of the long loft, pushed RECORD, and scurried back so we could start playing. What had been skeletal and stumbly was finally starting to sound like something. We learned to slow songs down. Jhymn’s loft had really high ceilings, and their height and the length of the room produced a natural reverb that made everything sound bigger on tape, and you wanted to make sure the notes hung in all that air.
Between practice and work, Sooyoung and I probably spent more hours shirtless than shirted. Apart from Orestes’s girlfriend, I don’t know if either of us had a real one-on-one conversation with a woman the entire summer. I did send a few postcards to Martha, a curvy blond freshwoman with striking blue eyes. She was quiet and had a very dramatic way of blushing that made me think she was shy
, but I liked her even more when I found out she wasn’t and got to know her loud, throaty laugh. I’d spent spring semester at school trying to overcome her ambivalence, with mixed success at best, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was back home in Seattle for the summer. She had a history of ending up with rock guys, and in 1987 it was clear there were lots of them in her hometown, but I tried not to think about that too much.
Some days, at quitting time, Merritt drove off in his pickup to go get the cash he’d pay us after counting out our wages on his fingers, and one of us would head to the nearest gas station convenience store for a twelve-pack of cheap beer. One guy in Merritt’s crew said “cold beer” as a kind of one-and-a-half-syllable whoop. Like this: “Col’beer! Col’beer!” Dirt from the sod and new yards clung to our arms and chafed our skin, but the sun sank while we drank something that could give you a brain freeze if you gulped it down too quickly. That sweet, soft blow booze delivers to a hot, tired head. It was more than okay that it barely tasted like anything, because you just wanted that prickle of cold bubbles, the tiny hint of bitterness in each swallow. It made us feel worse on our long slog home in Atlanta’s rush-hour traffic, but in the moment it was pure pleasure. I suspected that the guy packed so much joy into col’beer because he didn’t get much happiness elsewhere. Sooyoung and I had guitars waiting for us in our rented bedrooms, still children of the comfortable class, only passing through where these guys lived.
