by Jon Fine
Anyone within fifty yards could see that the music and the excitement were leading me around by the glands, because I was not at all shy about showing how hopped-up it made me. Nor could I have hidden it if I tried. (To steal a line from Hunter S. Thompson, my nerves were pretty close to the surface and everything registered.) But Sooyoung and Orestes were as reserved as I was hyper. Sooyoung, an unusually expressionless front man, preferred recording to performing. While Orestes loved playing in any context, he despised clubs and wasn’t much charmed by those who congregated within them. The one of us who worked hardest onstage, he especially hated the fog of secondhand smoke in which bands invariably performed. Before shows I bounced around the club, chatting up musicians and fans and new friends, while Orestes sat dead-eyed and bored backstage, if there even was a backstage, clutching his sticks, clearly uncomfortable, refusing any booze until after the show, eventually stirring to warm up with some fundamentals, the basic movements drummers drill as calisthenics. Neither he nor Sooyoung had much patience with the schmoozers who worked for labels, and since it appeared I knew how to talk to them, I generally drew the short straw and dealt with them. But I didn’t mind. I wanted to know everyone.
We played a bunch of shows with Bastro, the band formed by Squirrel Bait’s guitarist David Grubbs and—ill advisedly—a drum machine, but then Grubbs and bassist Clark Johnson recruited a friend of ours at Oberlin named John McEntire to play drums, and they got really great. Complicated, super smart, oddly chorded and in odd meters, played at blinding speed—what Grubbs did with his bizarrely tuned metallic-pink Tele was unlike anything else I’d heard before, or, for that matter, have heard since. We played together just after we both released our first records, and our shows routinely drew twenty-five people, but each time I saw them I thought, Christ, this is one of the best bands in the world, and no one knows it. The way they—forgive the tired term—rocked, without having the slightest thing to do with “rock.” How they provided a purely visceral rush while still being so musically advanced and so thoroughly bent.
Another Squirrel Bait offshoot was far more mysterious, right down to the name: Slint. A quartet led by two extremely taciturn guys, Britt Walford and Brian McMahan, whose inside references were so intricate they seemed almost like a form of idioglossia. In 1988 we got a tape of a nine-song record, Tweez, before it became an LP the following year. Its songs were named after each band member’s parents (and one of their dogs), and they all sounded tweaked and slightly metallic and often swung—in the jazz sense—in a way very few others in our underground could. The vocals were occasional, incidental, and sometimes started to tell stories without ever really finishing them. When the album came out, the cover was a simple black-and-white shot of a Saab Turbo—with SLINT going where the SAAB was and TWEEZ replacing TURBO, and very little information appeared on the back or the insert. I cannot overemphasize how thrilling and absolutely unique it sounded or—and this is the part that gets lost today when people talk about that band—the oddball humor underneath it all. Bitch Magnet went crazy for Tweez. I listened to it every day. A cassette of it turned up in a photo we used for the insert to Umber. In 1988 almost no one in the world had heard of them, but that just fed the intoxicating feeling that you and your friends knew secrets no one else did.
The thing I most treasured about this time was that you kept stumbling over set after set of smart misfits playing amazing, fully realized music that sounded like nothing else. All the town weirdos were suddenly in bands. Some, like Slint, were making records while they were still teenagers that would age as well as those made by distant rock gods like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. In the rest of the world hair metal was king, and its bands—Warrant, Winger, Poison—ruled the radio and MTV, selling upbeat party-time bullshit in which the guy always got the girl and all underdogs triumphed over their adversaries by the third verse, if not sooner. The bands in our underground, like those that inspired them, told stories that didn’t fit into such narrow schematics. No other music so accurately evoked the black hole of self-loathing, and the power you could find within it, as “Nothing” by Negative Approach or “Black Coffee” by Black Flag. No mainstream artist drew such precise lines between us and them as Saint Vitus did in the embittered, extended middle finger of “Born Too Late,” or as ferociously as Minor Threat’s “Filler,” or with the naked anguish of Hüsker Dü’s “Whatever.” If our bands didn’t invent writing about the absolute abasement of romantic despair and loneliness—Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and Crazy Horse’s “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” came first, after all—nothing on the radio or MTV or any major label expressed it as clearly and starkly as American Music Club’s “Blue and Grey Shirt” or “Laughingstock.” Our bands even nailed standard rock topics better than anyone else around: the aimlessness of American youth, like Meat Puppets’ “Lost,” or the joy of libido and an open road, like Urge Overkill’s “Faroutski.”
And the lyrics weren’t even the important part. Not when Sonic Youth and Slint and Slovenly reached heights of gorgeousness and mystery that almost never had anything to do with what they said. Rather, it was how they sounded, even on records made as cheaply and quickly as possible in studios held together with duct tape. Songs were finally liberated from verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Bands everywhere made incredibly evocative albums, like Tweez or EVOL or Die Kreuzen’s October File, that sounded like nothing that ever came before them. Other musicians realized you could strip the exciting parts off metal’s carcass—loud distorted riffs, relentless rhythm sections—and make them into something else. Something better. Very few bands playing metal in 1987 ever set their instruments and amps to “crush/kill/destroy” as effectively as the instrumental Dutch band Gore did on Mean Man’s Dream—an album recorded live in the studio, with no overdubs, which no straight-up metal band in the eighties would ever have the balls to do.
***
THE MUSIC AND THE SMIDGENS OF ATTENTION WE WERE GETTING began to go to my head. I kept my mouth shut in high school, convinced I’d be misunderstood. Now, full of late-adolescent spunk, electrified by guitars, I was damn well going to be heard. Finally confident enough, for the first time in my life, to be absolutely straightforward. Though the people around me might have preferred to call it “being an asshole.” “You lived your life,” Orestes told me much later, “like you played your instrument.” I still couldn’t bully anyone physically, but I could bully everyone aesthetically. Oberlin, a colony of art nerds and mousy nose-to-the-textbook types, was a very safe place to do this. Despite its deserved reputation for excruciating political correctness, and even though the campus newspaper’s letters page endlessly hashed out the minutest aspects of sexism and racism and taking back the night, few people there knew how to put up a real fight. Passive aggression was more common: a large percentage of Bitch Magnet flyers were routinely torn down. We gleefully replaced them, and then some.
Sometime during junior or senior year I was pulling together a few bands for another dorm or house party when, with some reluctance, I approached a musician I knew. He was really annoying, and I didn’t care for his band, either. When I mentioned the party and asked if they could do it, he barked out a superior prep-school “Ha ha!”—and it really sounded exactly like “Ha ha!”—and added, “Everyone wants us to play that show!” Without hesitating, I banged out, “Well, I think you guys pretty much suck. But other people asked.”
He may have deserved that, but back then I sprayed that shit everywhere. I said stupid things. I did stupid things. On one of the first weekends of the school year, I slept with the woman at school who was involved with Orestes. I apologized to him, first on the phone and then in a self-lacerating letter, but a fissure opened that couldn’t be easily closed. And I had other problems with Orestes, because he bought a dog.
I’m serious.
Specifically, a baby English mastiff he named Victor. I’m told they are delightful, but an English mastiff is a dog in the way
that an aircraft carrier is a boat. Adult mastiffs can weigh more than 130 pounds, and they get big before they realize they’re big. As a puppy Victor might see you lying on the floor and step on your face, unaware that this could break your jaw. When he leapt up to greet you, he would practically knock you down. You prayed he wouldn’t cuff you in the nuts, because his paws were as big as baseballs. Each day the overflow from his panting mug could fill a few pint glasses. Luckily he didn’t bark much, which was good, because when he barked, it scared the absolute crap out of you.
Orestes was too broke to kennel Victor—and god knows the band wasn’t making any money—so oftentimes he brought him to shows, where Victor would wait, long-faced and lugubrious and panting and drooling, in the back of Orestes’s truck while we played. Today, I understand the balm to loneliness Victor was for Orestes, but to me, back then, he only looked like an enormous pain in the ass. And Orestes was as bad as a new parent about him. One day he went on and on about how much he liked mastiffs and then he told me he wanted to get another one, and I lost it and started screaming. How the fuck would he be able to handle two mastiffs? He could barely manage one. You had to be a weight lifter—or Orestes—to take Victor for a walk. Once, when Orestes wanted to visit his girlfriend on the side, he tried, desperately, to talk me into boarding him at my parents’ house for a few days. I turned him down. Possibly after a lot more yelling.
What causes most band conflicts? Disagreements and competitions over girls and boys. Money. People getting fucked up on drugs and booze, especially if different members prefer different substances. “Creative differences,” which means someone’s ideas are so bad you start to hate him. Orestes and I fought most avidly over a dog. Sometimes one tiny thing your bandmate does drives you insane.
A mastiff is not a tiny thing.
***
EACH JANUARY, BETWEEN SEMESTERS, OBERLIN HAD A MONTHlong winter term during which students completed mandatory independent projects, however half-assed those projects might be. In 1989—my last January at Oberlin—my project was playing in a rock band, which made it the second January term for which I got school credit for Bitch Magnet−related activities. We had a mini-tour booked across the East and Midwest, and had studio time reserved in Chicago to record our second album with Albini. At the last minute the recording had to be canceled, because Orestes’s beloved paternal grandmother, who helped raise him, died. (Albini gave the recording time to Slint, and those recordings came out in 1994 on a two-song self-titled EP.) We still planned to play all the shows, but—
But let me start somewhere else.
A windy Saturday evening in mid-January, around dinnertime at a gas station in the middle of Pennsylvania. The temperature’s dropping. There’s so little light by the pumps that you have to squint to jam the nozzle into the tank. Sooyoung and I are driving my grandfather’s old car, a mid-seventies Oldsmobile, primer gray, shockingly huge by the standards of the eighties and possibly by those of the seventies as well. The front seat is one big bench, with nothing splitting the driver’s and shotgun seats. You can seat three people up here, if necessary, and maybe four more in the back. That backseat and the enormous trunk—the kind that protrudes several feet past the rear wheels, a duck’s bill sticking out its ass—are crammed with Sooyoung’s and my equipment, plus some assorted student detritus, like my milk crate full of LPs. We just played two shows in New York and are heading back to Oberlin for one night before setting off for our next dates in Columbus, Ohio, and Champaign, Illinois. I just finished putting our ten or twelve dollars’ worth in the tank while the wind picked up, promising another kind of weather—no, that weather is here, and the first raindrops start slashing sideways while Sooyoung maneuvers the beast back onto Route 80, heading west.
Somewhere between Milton and Williamsport, on a lengthy elevated stretch that connects bits of land as you cross the west branch of the Susquehanna River, the car’s enormous ass starts sliding. Sooyoung struggles it back into place, but then it’s whipping back and forth and momentum mercilessly takes over. The brakes lock, a big, slow spin begins, goodbye to the linear, that sickening and alarmed realization instantly familiar to all who’ve been through it: We’re gonna . . .
And we do. Head-on into the guardrail.
The good news is that it’s not a simple thin steel guardrail but one plopped atop solid concrete, and we were going maybe twenty miles an hour when we crashed. The impact on our monstrosity, the front bumper of which seems a Chevette’s length from the front seat, registers only as a sharp bump. We look at each other, wide-eyed, and quickly understand we’re both okay.
But this is a narrow roadway with only a few feet of shoulder between the lane and the railing, and since the car now completely blocks much of the road, I push open my door to begin waving people around us—and put my sneaker down on a roadway so slick that I fall before I can even stand. Though of course: Bridge freezes before highway surface. What was light rain had become—what’s the term?—a perfect “sheet of ice.” As I struggle back upright I see headlights a few hundred yards behind us swerve as cars start to-ing and fro-ing and scraping and crashing.
The next part is fuzzy, because it all happens very quickly, but we calculate that we can’t stay in the car. We can’t stand up on the road, either, or cower by the side of the road, because there is no side of the road. The cars skidding toward us can’t stop or steer. So we vault over the guardrail and suspend ourselves from a handhold on the railing. I’ve wondered for years if our feet found a purchase on something—they must have, but I can’t remember. Meanwhile cars serenely glide by, moving no faster than a brisk jog, wheels locked and motionless, plowing unstoppably into each other and into our Olds, each collision ending with popping and bursting sheet metal and the cymbal crash of breaking safety glass.
Then silence.
Tiny cubes of shattered glass are strewn all over the highway, refracting and distorting the streetlights. It’s lit like a disco out here.
A few other cars are clustered around ours. A woman with puffy frosted eighties-mom hair, and who looks pregnant, heaves herself out of a passenger seat, looks me in the eye, and then looks away, cradling her stomach and repeating, “Oh, my baby,” in a central Pennsylvania drawl. She’s fine, just frightened, and apparently a little drunk.
The Oldsmobile has a car-sized impression caved into its passenger side, right where I’d been sitting. The back window is shattered and lets in freezing rain. One guitar neck protrudes through the side of its cheap case. I touch it, then strum it. Miraculously it’s still in tune.
Sooyoung snaps a picture of me on the highway, standing amid the lights and shattered glass.
I’m together enough to ask whether everyone in our wreck is all right, though if they’re not, I wouldn’t know what to do. (Luckily, everyone is.) Cop cars and an ambulance arrive. I have never understood how they make their way through such scenes, and I don’t remember how they did here. Elsewhere on this very long bridge, I hear someone say, a tractor-trailer jackknifed. The cops tell us to sit in the ambulance. I guess they want us off the road. One guy inside with us seems confused. He was in a different wreck. He keeps saying he doesn’t know where his wife is. One cop tells him she’s at the hospital and they’ll talk to him there, then looks away, and in the silence that follows a terrible feeling blooms.
Sooyoung snaps another picture of me inside the ambulance while I’m making a strange face. Local volunteers in their twenties, wearing thick sweatshirts, sit among us, chatty with each other and with the emergency workers. I’d say they’re friendly, but they don’t talk to us or anyone else from the wreck. Aren’t they supposed to be handing out hot chocolate or something? They seem very casual about what has just happened. But it’s comforting. I’m grateful that these multiple crashes aren’t being acknowledged. The guy whose wife is at the hospital is quiet now, and I’m grateful for that, too.
Sooyoung and I don’t go to the
hospital, because we’re fine. The Oldsmobile gets towed to a junkyard, and somehow all our gear and baggage end up with us in a motel room. I call my parents and tell my mom that there was a crash and the car is destroyed but we’re unharmed. She does not take this news especially well. I find out later that people died in some of the other wrecks. I never learned what happened to the other man’s wife.
The next morning we dig through the local Yellow Pages, find the closest cheap rental car, load it up, and drive, under a diamond-bright winter sun, to Stache’s in Columbus, where we play with Hypnolovewheel and cancel the show in Champaign, and afterward drive the hundred miles back to Oberlin. To get into my tragic converted-attic apartment, you have to walk up a creaky back staircase. That night, when I arrive after three a.m., I find my housemate, Susannah, wild-eyed, waiting in her bathrobe.
“I heard you guys were in a really bad car crash and you were in the hospital.”
She’s half-right, at least. I throw my head back and give her my best maniac cackle, saying it would take more than that to stop me. She’s looking at me like I just came back from the dead. Everyone should see that on a friend’s face at least once.
The rest of January was small-bore and soap-opera-y. I stayed up late, slept in, saw little daylight. We bored college kids, left alone in a frigid and snowy rural isolation, drank as much as you’d expect. There were irritations and small fights and intense bonding with others also stuck at school. Orestes and I and some other friends spent one night giggling and tripping on mushrooms, without Sooyoung. I think we wrote one new song. Whenever Orestes made spaghetti sauce for dinner, he added at least a half stick of butter, and for a while I thought this was the best way to make it, too.
