Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  When Sooyoung showed me the photos he took that night, they didn’t look as amazing and otherworldly as I hoped. But I still wish I had them today. Because the crash was the highlight of that winter. Before we knew what really happened, nothing else was nearly as strange and as interesting—as magical—as vehicles turned into bumper cars, and the pure percussive crunch of each slow-motion collision on a highway suddenly as slick as an ice rink. Not a girl taking off her shirt in your room. Not another night at one of Oberlin’s two bars. Certainly not the campus buildings looming over the flat, frozen landscape under gray and indifferent Midwestern skies. Bands died in wrecks. College students died in wrecks. Our classmates died in wrecks. People died in our wreck. But nothing happened to us. This is a fucked-up thing to admit, I know, about something really awful, but those still moments on the bridge, amid the safety glass glittering in the streetlights, are among the most beautiful I’ve known.

  ***

  SCHOOL STARTED AGAIN, AND THE BY-NOW-FAMILIAR counter-rhythm returned. I’d been pursuing a preposterously hot freshwoman, and suddenly she acted interested. Full lips, blue eyes, pale skin, a hint of a British accent, a tangle of long, loose, curly hair. She moved through campus with a dancer’s upright posture, wearing an expression broadcasting that no one could tell her anything she hadn’t already known forever, all of which I found incredibly inflaming. She didn’t seem to realize she was way out of my league. Over the years I’ve gotten very little play as a direct consequence of being a musician—after a show, I mean—but I know I never would have approached her were it not for the band.

  Shigaku was planning a European tour for us the following fall: six weeks, something like seven countries, around thirty-five shows. Sooyoung and I scanned itineraries outside the library’s smoking lounge. Orestes’s grandmother had left him a brownstone in Brooklyn, and it was agreed—I thought it was agreed—we’d all live there after Sooyoung and I graduated. When I blabbed about it to our American record label, that factoid showed up in a press release, which didn’t thrill the other guys. As always, I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut about anything that excited me, whether in interviews or in private conversations. I didn’t realize that my bandmates’ silence did not equal consent. Nor that they were starting to feel that I was hogging the spotlight, inasmuch as there was any spotlight shining upon us.

  I sensed that things were starting to feel a bit strained with Sooyoung, and things with Orestes weren’t any less complicated. He was the first male friend to whom I routinely said “I love you,” but then I slept with his girl on the side and courted her afterward, which at Oberlin meant we sexlessly shared the same bed and sometimes mashed mouths while drunk. Then—and I don’t know why—Orestes became a target for my rants about music. In April we played Club Dreamerz in Chicago with Slint. Afterward—all the band riding through Indiana together in Orestes’s truck, for once, along with one of his old friends—I unloaded, at high volume, for something like fifteen minutes straight on a silent Orestes. Neither of us remembers what prompted it, but there’s a good chance (I can barely write the rest of this sentence without laughing) I was outraged that he liked the Bad Brains comeback record I Against I. Orestes explained to me much later that he’d been raised in places where people didn’t go off on someone like that without getting beat up, and in fact it took serious impulse control for him to keep driving and not pull over to kick the shit out of me. I kept dinging Orestes’s fierce loner pride—whether accidentally or on purpose or accidentally-on-purpose. As for Sooyoung, years later he told me he was growing increasingly pissed off about day-to-day control of the band and people’s perceptions of us. (My comments and story lines tended to dominate interviews and articles.) But there were girls and classes and new records at the radio station and letters from fans and fanzine interviews and plenty of other reasons to avoid confronting a growing chill.

  Spring finally came, and the fields and trees sighed in relief, and the air smelled of wet earth and mowed grass and cornfields. I was six weeks from graduation, lucky to be living a luxury rare among my classmates: I didn’t have to worry about what came next.

  Then one evening, while I was eating dinner with the preposterously hot freshwoman, Sooyoung stopped by our table and asked me to meet him after dinner on the steps of the student union. “Band business,” he explained, totally deadpan.

  We finished our separate dinners—we no longer ate together, as we once did—and ran into each other en route to our meeting, made small talk, joked about musicians and students we knew. There was a table on the union’s terrace, overlooking the expanse of grass between the library and the academic buildings, and as we sat down I cried out—a single strangulated cry, the kind a kitten makes when someone sits on it by mistake, and the kind of sound a boy in a punk rock band never wants to hear coming out of his mouth. I quickly insisted it was nothing, but maybe I had sensed something coming, even though there had been no hint beforehand.

  Then:

  “This is something we should have talked about a while ago, but Orestes and I want you to leave Bitch Magnet.”

  Jesus, here it is. A gasping, airless feeling I’d prefer never to feel again. I did manage to shudder out “Why?”

  “I’ll get to that.” Though I don’t remember what “that” was, because I don’t remember anything else. When I interviewed Sooyoung for this book, he said one night he and Orestes had a short back-channel conversation and made a decision pretty quickly. Sometimes power struggles in a very loud band end quietly. The idea of trying to talk any of our issues through had occurred to exactly none of us.

  The full extent of my life plan was: I am playing in Bitch Magnet. I had no long-term vision beyond recording an album in June and touring Europe in the fall. So now what?

  I went looking for Martha, even though our on-and-off thing had been off for a while.

  The next morning before breakfast the freshwoman saw me walking in a different direction from where I lived, wearing the same clothes she had seen me in at dinner. This led to a very unpleasant phone call later that day and a subsequent meeting to “talk,” one I had to leave faster than I should have, because I was expected at another meeting to “talk” with Sooyoung. I left her in a bathroom with the lights out, crouched on a sink, crying. I liked her. I did. Just not enough. But even if I’d loved her madly and forever, that night I would have left her unconscious and bleeding in a ditch during a thunderstorm, because talking my way back into the band was the only thing that mattered. I didn’t, but what I did do was point out to Sooyoung that it made no sense to break in an entirely new guitarist or two in the few weeks before recording an album of material we’d already honed for months, and that argument got me back in the band temporarily—just enough to play on Umber.

  Oberlin was a small campus, where people tended to know by breakfast on Sunday who’d hooked up with whom on Saturday night, so the news spread quickly. My circle of friends was very kind to me, despite how obnoxious I’d often been to them, but the final weeks of school were awkward. How can I describe the feeling? A soft blow to the heart? The kind of mild heart attack after which everyone whispers, He’s just not the same? Maybe that. Without the band I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. What had happened felt like a rejection from every band I knew and everyone else I’d met on each strand of our spiderweb, and I experienced it with all the drama and high tragedy you’d expect from someone who in many ways was still a teenager. And the thought of losing the music—those songs—was much worse. Lou Barlow, famously and abruptly booted from Dinosaur Jr. in 1989, described that situation like this: “I was kicked out of the band because they didn’t like me.” But his reaction was “Who gives a shit whether you like me or not? The music we play—that’s the most important thing.”

  Getting kicked out also confirmed the hidden, horrid, nagging feeling that I never quite belonged. And maybe I didn’t. Near the end Orestes often suggested that I start playing
guitar solos. I refused, partly on aesthetic grounds—this is punk rock; we do not play solos—but partly because I didn’t think I could. Unfortunately I lacked the wit to reply: we are a trio, therefore everything I play is a guitar solo. Though I doubt that would have worked.

  ***

  SOOYOUNG AND I GRADUATED IN MAY OF ’89, AND IMMEDIATELY afterward we recorded Umber in Hoboken, with one of Orestes’s best friends, Dave Galt, on second guitar. That fall Orestes and Sooyoung toured Europe with two guitarists: Galt and Bastro’s David Grubbs. I moved to an apartment hard by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and took an idiot temp job. On lunch break I read rave reviews of Bitch Magnet’s shows in the British music weeklies. At least Linc was still my roommate. He owned a copy of I Against I, but I was getting slightly better at overlooking it.

  IN EARLY 1990 SOOYOUNG SENT ME A LETTER ASKING ME BACK into the band. We had another album to make, he explained. It would be his last record before retiring from rock forever.

  We chatted briefly during a quick phone call. I was thrilled but wary. He promised to FedEx a cassette. That tape contained the makings of “Dragoon”—the ten-minute-long song that opens our last album, Ben Hur—and after listening to it once, I called Sooyoung and said, “I got the tape. Let’s make a record.”

  He sent me a check for past royalties, wrapped in a letter of apology. His head got too big, he said. All he could see was his own vision of the band, and he needed to make it happen really bad. He’d made the mistake of thinking a modicum of attention was all he needed.

  So we had a lot in common after all, I thought, reading it.

  In time-honored indie rock tradition we rehearsed and finished writing Ben Hur in the basement of my parents’ house in New Jersey in the spring of 1990. I hadn’t seen Orestes since we’d recorded Umber in June, and when he showed up, I strode over and hugged him, a bit desperately, a bit overeagerly, and his body language made it clear a gulf still lay between us. Rehearsals and recording went better than ever. But Orestes got very squirrelly whenever the topic of touring came up, and shortly after we finished making the record, he visited Sooyoung and quit the band.

  Sooyoung and I found a replacement and carried on. (More on that later.) I was a little sad to see Orestes go—though not much more than “a little”—and never forgave myself for fooling around with his other girlfriend. But the machine was grinding into life again, and that, I thought, could salve almost any wound. There was a record, there were fans, there were gigs, there was a van. I didn’t need or want for anything else.

  BANDOGRAPHY

  Ribbons of Flesh

  DURATION: August–November 1986, more or less

  LOCATION: Oberlin, Ohio

  PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (guitar, vocals), Doug MacLehose (bass), Lincoln Wheeler (drums), Roger White (guitar)

  RECORDS: None

  Bitch Magnet

  DURATION: November 1986–December 1990, April 2011–October 2012

  LOCATION: Oberlin, Ohio; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Calgary/New York City/Singapore

  PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (guitar), Orestes Morfıin (drums), Sooyoung Park (bass, vocals)

  OTHER PERSONNEL: Tim Carper (drums, 1987), Dave Galt (guitar, 1989), Dave Grubbs (guitar, 1989), Jay Oelbaum (drums, 1986–87), Doctor Rock (drums, 1990)

  RECORDS: Star Booty (1988), Umber (1989), Ben Hur (1990), Bitch Magnet (triple LP/double CD retrospective, 2011), Valmead/Pea 7" (US only, 1990), Valmead 12" (Europe only, 1990), Mesentery 7" (Australia only, 1990), Sadie 7" (US only, included with first 1,000 copies of Ben Hur, 1990), Sadie 7" (UK only, 1990), “White Piece of Bread” included on Endangered Species compilation (Europe only, 1990). There were some self-released cassettes early on, but I’m too embarrassed to discuss them.

  Vineland

  DURATION: Fall 1991–May 1996

  LOCATION: Brooklyn

  PERSONNEL: Countless lineups, but the final one was Jon Fine (guitar, vocals), Jerry Fuchs (drums, 1995–96), Fred Weaver (guitar, 1994–96), Kylie Wright (bass, 1996)

  OTHER PERSONNEL: Bob Bannister (guitar, 1991–94), Lyle Hysen (drums, 1991–93), Jenna Johnson (bass, 1994), Eamon Martin (bass, 1994–95), Dave McGurgan (drums, 1993–94), Gerald Menke (bass, 1991–93), Mike Mihaljo (bass, 1995), Doug Scharin (drums, 1994), Dave Tritt (drums, 1994). Other people filled in for a show here and there. It’s a good bet I’ve left someone out.

  RECORDS: Archetype 7" (1993), Obsidian 7" (1995), “Beholden” included on the This Is Art compilation (Europe only, 1993), “Archetype” included on the American Pie compilation (Australia only, 1994)

  Down and Away

  DURATION: 1989–?

  LOCATION: New York City

  PERSONNEL: Jon Coats (drums), Jon Fine (guitar, 1989–90), Billy Pilgrim (guitar, 1990–), Jerry Smith (bass)

  RECORDS: Change Order (1992)

  Jon and Jerry had been in Phantom Tollbooth and were another excellent rhythm section I played with before I really knew how to play guitar. I quit to rejoin Bitch Magnet after Down and Away played one show in Boston, which I still have on tape somewhere.

  Don Caballero

  DURATION: 1991–95, 1997–2000, 2003–present

  LOCATION: Pittsburgh, Chicago

  PERSONNEL: Mike Banfield (guitar, 1991–98), Damon Che (drums, 1991−present), Jon Fine (guitar, 1999), Pat Morris (bass, 1991–94, 997–98), Eric Topolsky (bass, 1998–2000), Ian Williams (guitar, 1992–2000). Damon re-formed the band with no other original members in 2003.

  RECORDS: For Respect (1993), Don Caballero 2 (1995), What Burns Never Returns (1998), Singles Breaking Up (1999), American Don (2000), World Class Listening Problem (2006), Punkgasm 2008), Gang Banged with a Headache, and Live (2012), Five Pairs of Crazy Pants. Wear ’Em: Early Don Caballero (2014), Look at Them Ellie Mae Wrists Go!: Live Early Caballero (2014)

  I played around twenty shows with them in 1999, after Mike Banfield left the band. Never recorded with them. Damon Che was one of the two drummers we auditioned to replace Orestes in Bitch Magnet in 1990.

  Alger Hiss

  DURATION: 1994–98, 2000–present

  LOCATION: New York City

  PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (bass, 1996–98), Haji Majer (drums, 1994–98), Jordan Mamone (guitar and vocals, 1994–98, 2000–present), Dalius Naujokaitis (drums, 2003–present), Chris O’Rourke (bass and vocals, 1994–96), Frederick Schneider (drums, 2000–2002), J Yung (bass, 2000–present)

  RECORDS: Settings for Nudes (1995), Graft vs. Host (1997)

  I played bass for them, when I was broadly bummed out about music but couldn’t entirely quit.

  Coptic Light

  DURATION: 2000–2006

  LOCATION: Brooklyn

  PERSONNEL: Jon Fine (guitar), Kevin Shea (drums), Jeff Winterberg (bass)

  RECORDS: Yentl 7" (2003), Coptic Light (US and Japan, 2005), Coptic Light EP (US and Japan, 2006)

  The weirdest band I ever played in.

  What I Liked

  After the first record came out, we got a proper booking agent and we did eight-week tours and weekend shows almost every other weekend. If something was within six hours, we’d drive there Friday night, play it, play somewhere Saturday, and then drive back on Sunday. We’d drive to Chicago for a weekend and play two shows. We’d play Louisville. We would play North Carolina. We would play Boston quite a bit. We’d play a lot of Ohio shows.

  That’s how you discovered the whole network. You’d meet these people who booked shows—these people running unprofitable businesses, basically. Every weekend night: setting up an out-of-town band with a show, paying them, getting a sound guy. This was happening in all these towns all over the country. Fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred people would show up.

  We decided, let’s see what happens with this. Everybody quit his real job. We would do temp work when we weren’t touring. We did three big tours. Big, as
in you have to bring two seasons’ worth of clothing because it’s going to be snowing, and then you’re in L.A. and it’s 75 degrees.

  On the road you get used to having bruised hip bones from sleeping on the floor and you get used to using your pants as a pillow, and, no matter where you play, this is the quintessential story. You’d play Columbia, South Carolina. No one ever shows up, but you always book a show in Columbia, just because. You play the show, and no one shows up, and that’s fine, and at the end of the night, after you say from the stage, “Hey, thanks for coming. By the way, if anyone has a place to stay, we’d totally appreciate it, we’re clean, we’re not picky, thanks a lot,” there was always a guy in a place like Columbia, South Carolina, who will take you back to his house, feed you not-so-great food but very well-intentioned food, and then make you stay up watching the Sun Ra movie.

  In almost every town where no one will come to your show, that guy will show up, and that guy will take care of you. He will put you up—he’s probably paying two hundred bucks a month for his entire house—and you will have a decent night’s sleep. In the morning, because you’ll ask, “Is there a cool diner here? We’re going to need to get breakfast,” he’ll take you to a Waffle House, or someplace like that, where you’ll get four thousand calories’ worth of food for six bucks, and then off you go. Then you’ll be in Bozeman, Montana, and you’ll find that guy again. And you’ll watch the Sun Ra movie, or something like it, and he’ll play you a record you never heard of, and you’ll think, this is a crazy record, I need to find this record, and you’ll write it down, and then a year later you’ll find it and realize it’s the greatest record of all time.