Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  In the spring of 2013 Zack Lipez wrote an excellent piece for The Talkhouse newsletter, “I Threw a Show in My Heart and Nobody Came,” describing how he broke up his band, Freshkills, because, as he put it, “we had more ex-bassists than audience members.” Shortly afterward I met him in an apartment in lower Manhattan on a humid afternoon. Zack, who’s now the singer of Publicist UK, is tall, with chunky round black glasses and pale skin and dyed black hair. A young thirty-seven when we met. (I might have guessed thirty-one.) Skinny but slightly potbellied, prickling with a nervous energy, like the frontman he is.

  “The only time I almost broke down and cried was when I got the record sales back from our last album,” he told me. The tally: 336 physical copies and 27 digital tracks sold. (Twenty-seven! Jesus.) “Our drummer just said, ‘There’s no positive way of spinning this.’” There isn’t, and here’s how I know: Vineland self-released—by which I mean I self-released—a thousand copies of our second single in 1995. About four hundred of them remain entombed in a bedroom closet at my parents’ house. Maybe there are more. I could count them, I guess, but to what degree must I quantify how many fans we didn’t have? Meanwhile, those in search of sibling rivalries will likely find the following facts interesting: in the mid-nineties Sooyoung’s band Seam toured America and Europe constantly and released well-received records on Touch and Go, while Orestes was making a living as the drummer for Walt Mink.

  ***

  THE GUITARIST IN THAT FINAL VERSION OF VINELAND WAS Fred Weaver, who first got in touch with me by sending a postcard to the band’s post office box to offer us a show in State College, Pennsylvania. When I wrote back to say, hey, thanks, but the guitarist quit and we need to find another one before we can play any shows, he responded by saying that he wanted to try out, and he drove to New York from a small coal-country town in central Pennsylvania called Clearfield. He was twenty and shy, tall and thin, and barely needed to shave. But he could play, understood what I was trying to do, was insanely motivated, and, though I didn’t need any more convincing, owned a van. He joined up and took on too much—like more or less singlehandedly soundproofing the practice space in our loft—without ever complaining. He also harbored his own ambitions to start a band. All of which meant tensions arose in difficult situations and in small quarters, and since we played in a struggling band and lived in a loft in which anywhere from four to six guys shared one bathroom, we spent plenty of time in both.

  Our drummer was Jerry Fuchs, long before he became a legend and drummed for everyone from !!! and Maserati to MGMT and Turing Machine and, briefly, LCD Soundsystem, and longer before he became my closest friend to die young, in a stupid accident in a busted elevator at a party in Brooklyn in 2009. He dropped out of the University of Georgia and moved to Brooklyn to join the band in 1995, when he was a very young twenty, still sporting a bit of baby fat and a great deal of social awkwardness. He was also built like a pit bull: shorter than me but twice as wide, and god knows how much stronger. I’m susceptible to drummer-crushes—you’ve probably noticed—and I totally developed one on him. I couldn’t believe my luck: Vineland was already going nowhere, but we’d grabbed one of the best drummers I’d ever heard. Kylie Wright, a dark-haired, pale-skinned photographer, played bass, joining not long before that last tour. I was twenty-eight, and she was around my age, so we were the grown-ups. Kylie was Australian, but her accent emerged only if you got enough drinks into her. She had tiny, delicate hands, but she was a really strong bassist.

  I had a generalized guilt about having hired Jerry—he dropped out of college for this?—and I still feel as if I should apologize to Kylie, too. Because on that last Vineland tour I often thought we were touring like burglars, if burglars felt remorse. We played many cities with local bands we knew, all of whose hometown draws were much bigger than ours, since they lived there and nobody much liked us anywhere. But we’d get more than our share of the door, because we’d driven a long way and because our culture always took care of touring bands. Jerry was aghast at this practice, but we convinced him that it was either that or forgo food and gasoline. Or, rather, we didn’t convince him and just did it anyway. Every night, when we got paid, I’d look down at the bills—a hundred and fifty bucks, a hundred bucks, often less—muttering thanks as I jammed them into a front pocket and quickly walked away, swallowing hard, feeling undeserving, and having taken advantage.

  The plan that tour was that everyone would get a princely $10 per diem for food, but finances became so disastrous so quickly we couldn’t manage even that. We were all broke, irregularly fed, and extremely crabby. At lousy fast-food joints I gobbled my burger and stared at anyone eating slowly, waiting for leftovers. There are people who live in a state of hunger. We weren’t them, by any stretch: we had jobs back home and families—to paraphrase something the writer Cheryl Strayed once said, we were the impoverished elite, not the actual poor, and that’s an enormous distinction—and this was someplace we were merely visiting. But still, on this tour, we were measuring wealth by the french fry. Something I jotted in a journal during that tour: When you’re this broke, your relationship with food changes. If it’s in front of you, you eat it, and anything on the table is fair game. You stuff yourself, to stave off hunger for as long as possible, then do it again. Eating less and lightly is for rich people.

  I overweighted Chicago on the tour, because playing Chicago was more or less the entire point. Chicago was home to lots of friends and bands and studios and labels. Something could happen there. Or at least some people would show up. But I got greedy and booked us Friday at the Empty Bottle and the subsequent Monday at Lounge Ax. These were rival clubs, each suspicious and paranoid about the other, and they hated it when bands played both places. My move, once discovered, pissed everyone off and cannibalized our tiny draw. Silkworm headlined the show at Lounge Ax, so there was a decent crowd. Afterward Sue Miller, the owner and manager and a generally beloved person, kachinged the cash register behind the bar and handed me a few bills. “Here’s some money for your band, Jon.”

  Seventy-five dollars. In Chicago. The one city where I thought we’d do well.

  I was very sensitive about money, mainly because I didn’t have any, and though I told myself over and over that money didn’t matter, being this broke so close to thirty was frightening. Around this time I co-wrote and performed a score for an NYU grad student production. My fee, for several weeks’ rehearsals and a week’s worth of shows, was five hundred bucks. No argument there: I’d agreed to that sum and was happy just getting paid. Except that I wasn’t getting paid, and I really, really needed the money, so I visited a theater prof named Nance, the faculty adviser for the show and the closest thing to an authority to whom I could complain. An assistant milled about her office as I asked, politely, for my check. Nance told me to keep waiting for it. And, she suggested, if I really needed the money now, I could always borrow it from the director—she knew he and I were old friends.

  Always question the judgment of anyone willing to be called Nance. I still regret not throwing a stapler, or saying something, or even staring for a long moment with a cocked eyebrow. Something. Anything. But I didn’t, because I was ashamed, and shame can make you freeze. (And, worse, someone else witnessed that shame.) As I was ashamed when Sue handed me the few bills, and I found I couldn’t refuse or complain. Charity once more. And had I heard a hint that we were being done a favor we could never call in again?

  Here’s some money for your band.

  ***

  VINELAND’S ENDGAME HAPPENED DURING THE WANING moon of that era in the nineties in which major labels were lunging spastically toward virtually any established indie band. Even though, by then, many signings had resulted in sales that were visible only with a microscope. Vineland or Freshkills numbers, albeit for giant entertainment corporations that expected six- or seven-figure sales. (The one record on Geffen by Hardvark—its drummer was Bob Rising, who’d formerly played in Poster
Children and Sooyoung’s band Seam—sold 372 copies, according to Soundscan.) But there were still a few late fluke hits from bands we knew. Hum, from Champaign, was briefly all over the radio in 1995 with “Stars.” Hum primarily played a pedestrian version of the this-is-the-soft-part/NOW-THIS-IS-THE-LOUD-PART thing, and their drummer had a huge thing for Bitch Magnet. Vineland played a few shows with them, and the drummer invariably cornered me to ask incredibly picayune questions about Orestes’s drum gear and technique. That year, I’d drive over the Williamsburg Bridge to go drink at Max Fish on a Friday or Saturday night, listening to the big FM rock station, and “Stars” would come on. The following Wednesday Vineland would play to a dozen people in a basement in the very pre−Sex and the City Meatpacking District. Hum’s subsequent work went nowhere, but they still squeezed through one of the occasional wormholes in the musical universe and scored a hit big enough to sell a few hundred thousand records.

  I didn’t want to be like Hum. I didn’t want the major-label deal. I didn’t want to be a rock star. I didn’t want to get rich. It was a drag to know that bands I didn’t like toured all the time and only returned to their hometowns, glamorously exhausted, to rest and drink and tell road stories until they all got in the van again—maybe even a fucking bus—for another six-week circuit around the United States or Canada or Europe. I wanted what I called just-enough. I wanted people to hear my band. I wanted to be known and respected. I didn’t want the tour bus. (I did want the van.) All I wanted was just-enough people buying our records, so there was just-enough of an audience to tour ambitiously. Just-enough was probably ten thousand to fifteen thousand people worldwide. Zack Lipez wrote that he wanted Freshkills to be Murder City Devils famous: successful enough to get by on touring seven months a year while bartending a few nights a week when he was at home. Needless to say, neither Freshkills nor Vineland had just-enough. Not even close.

  ***

  EACH MORNING ON THAT LAST VINELAND TOUR, AS WE headed off to the next city, I saw a vanful of deflated faces and knew better than anyone that nothing would get better that day, or the day after that, or the following week. I started asking, “What, you expected this to be fun?” Often several times a day. Meanwhile, Jerry and Fred were becoming best friends, forming an impenetrably tight circle with its own inside references and van rituals inflicted on everyone else. One of them involved choosing a radio station and keeping it on until the signal faded. Fred and Jerry routinely sought out the worst classic rock stations they could find and insisted on singing along to Spacehog’s “In the Meantime”—the noxious song of the moment—while playing it at top volume. I had a very low threshold for tolerating classic rock, not to mention Spacehog. Which they both knew.

  No boss ever experiences the workers’ camaraderie. Though the boss at a real job gets certain perks, like making more money. In indie rock the boss loses the most. (As I did.) And it’s especially lonely to lead a band when Daddy can’t feed the family. One lunchtime or dinner, before playing the Bug Jar in Rochester—a venue so idiosyncratic that any band had to split itself up between two tiny stages—I sat alone while my bandmates chose a table across the room. There I marinated in bad vibes, thinking, They’re talking about me. I know they’re fucking talking about me. Over and over again. Couldn’t make it stop.

  In Pittsburgh we played at a coffeehouse, opening for a ferocious and then-obscure trio from Portland called Sleater-Kinney. Someone wrote JON FINE IS A DICK on the wall in the women’s bathroom. That someone, I learned much later, was probably in my band. But the other indignities of that last tour weren’t colorful enough to make for funny stories, like the time Eggs’ Andrew Beaujon, hung over and huddling miserably in his sleeping bag on a long van ride, puked into said sleeping bag. Or the time a barefoot Anne Eickelberg, the bassist in Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, stepped into a pile of fresh dog shit while looking for the bathroom late one night while bunking at an unfamiliar house. Or the time, many years later, when, bereft of any other option, Fred was forced to shit in his toolbox while stuck in traffic on a treeless highway during a solo tour. Nothing like that happened to us. And no matter how bad any tour was, you still spotted random dazzlements amid the vast strangenesses of America. In one rest-stop bathroom near Macon, Georgia, unbelievably detailed pre-Craigslist men-seeking-men graffiti instructed interested parties to show up in a specified location and “touch cock” to signal interest. While on my way to dinner before the show in Richmond, I paused to light cigarettes for two grateful quadriplegics. And at our last show, in surpassingly depressing Worcester, Massachusetts, the small crowd went batshit. The kind of night in a small town where no one knows you but you make the most unlikely new fans, like a middle-aged auto repair shop owner who for some reason showed up, still wearing his work uniform. I’m sure that show sounded good—wound up tight, pissed off and burning. Bands about to break up often do, if they channel the tensions correctly.

  By then Fred had quit, after a blowup one night in Georgia, though he agreed to play the shows we’d already booked. A major complication, since he owned the van, and he and Jerry and I all still lived in the same loft. After Fred left, and one bad post-tour practice as a trio, Jerry called a band meeting, at which he very gently announced, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  I was dicking around with a bass, to relieve tension. So there it is, I thought. I put the bass down and said, “Me, too. How about you, Kylie?” Band over. It didn’t take five minutes. I probably went out for a beer afterward, alone. By then Fred and I were barely speaking, and I was ready to avoid Jerry for months. But he wouldn’t let me, and I loved him for it.

  ***

  WAS VINELAND GOOD? I THOUGHT SO. AND ON THAT LAST tour we reached our peak. Each night onstage Fred and I threw all our frustrations into acts of musical passive aggression that somehow worked. Besides our unspoken hostile amplifier standoff every night—I will turn down mine as soon as he turns down his—we each embellished our individual parts more and more without working said bits out with each other, without even listening to each other. Judging by the tape from one of our last shows, a skull-crushingly loud one at the Middle East in Boston, this worked much better than it should have, the songs constantly assuming new shapes before quickly snapping back into the correct forms. But it’s no loss to humanity that the final Vineland album remains unreleased, even if it’s the first full album Jerry recorded. Once I could stand to listen to it again after he died, I was horrified at how snug a box I had forced his drumming into. Also, I hated my voice. My singing sounded thin and strangulated and nasal—a whine, not a growl—even after I had learned to breathe in time with the music onstage, to have enough air for each line and keep my rhythm in sync with the band. It felt weak, and I grew to despise it.

  We’d built the band to my specifications. I wrote the songs, sang them, and had veto power over most aesthetic decisions. (Here I could fault myself for adding too much sentimentality and poppy touches, out of insecurity, but let’s set that aside for now.) I contacted clubs and labels. It didn’t happen for us. If we weren’t as good as the other bands I played in—it’s still hard to think this part through, but sometimes I suspect that’s really the story—and didn’t go as far as they did, any blame goes on me. I know I should be stoic and expect nothing from a band except the joy of the music. I know I should be thrilled I wrote a few songs for Vineland that I’ll sing to myself forever. But Vineland broke me. After we split up, it killed any desire to start a band, which had been my sole animating impulse since I was twelve. And while I still identified as a musician—what else could I be?—I lost much of my appetite for playing music, and all my confidence. I went back to an anonymous cubicle job writing and editing a newsletter with a minuscule readership, halfheartedly played bass in Alger Hiss, and tried not to think about it too much.

  I also realized something important, even if I wasn’t proud of it at all: there were people brave enough, and strong enough, to place all the
ir bets on music, no matter what happened, and I was no longer one of them.

  ***

  BUT I’VE BEEN DOING ALL THE TALKING, AND THE SUN IS SETTINGting over the Hudson, and Zack is just sitting here.

  Zack? Are you heartbroken? Relieved?

  “Both,” he said, and then doesn’t talk about relief at all. “I’m heartbroken that nobody liked my band. I did it for nine years, and nobody liked my band.

  “I’m not sad to be out of Freshkills,” he continued. “I’m sad that nobody ever gave a shit about any single fucking thing we ever did. It’s a constant sorrow. I’m going to take it to my grave.”

  True story: Walter Mondale ran into George McGovern not long after Mondale lost to Reagan in 1984. They had a lot in common. Two liberal senators from prairie states. Two candidates who lost forty-nine states to an aloof Republican opponent they plainly regarded as unworthy. Mondale asked McGovern, who was crushed by Nixon in 1972, “George, how long does it take to get over a big loss like this?” McGovern replied, “I’ll let you know when it happens.” Ha-ha—though not really. McGovern repeated this line for the rest of his life, until he died, in 2012.