Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  One day, though, I was killing time at work watching a clip of a live Laughing Hyenas show in Germany, and when the song ended, the location suddenly changed, and Orestes’s face filled the screen, talking into the camera, looking directly at me. (His friend had recorded that show.) He had to be out there somewhere, I thought. I kept trying. Some time afterward, I Googled him again, and his name popped up on LinkedIn. I doubted that anyone else in the world could share both his uncommon Greek first name and his uncommon Mexican last name. But there’s always that instant when you can’t be sure.

  We hadn’t spoken in at least twelve years. When I was prompted to “add a message” when I “invited him to connect on LinkedIn,” I stared at the empty text box, and all I could come up with was:

  Hi Orestes. How have you been?

  —Jon Fine

  Within an hour I received a reply:

  I’m well, thanks. And you?

  I thought a bit and sent him a longer response. I said I was visiting Los Angeles. I said it was colder than anyone would want it to be. I said I’d just seen Sooyoung in New York. Then I got to the point.

  A label on the East Coast—Temporary Residence—has been after us to do BM reissues. No $$ up front but a profit split. Sooyoung and I both think it’s a good idea. You? I know the guy behind the label and he’s a good and solid dude who will do a good job w/it.

  He said yes immediately, and we kept e-mailing. Two hours later, after two more exchanges, he wrote:

  Is there any possibility we would re-convene to support the re-issues?

  Son of a bitch. Did the guy who I was certain would never want to play again just say that? At the bottom of my next response, I asked:

  “reconvene” means what?

  At the bottom of his next response:

  Reconvene. Would we need to get back together and play a few shows, or does Temporary Residence not care?

  To steal someone else’s line, I wanted reunion shows so badly you could see the stains on my pants from across the street. But our band dynamic had always been me being too eager and everyone else being ambivalent, and I couldn’t tell if I’d entered the reality distortion field you can slip into when you want to hear something. Orestes could well be asking, eyes rolling and prefatigued, Oh, Jesus, are they really going to ask me to do this? I flashed back to the summer of 1990, during one of our last rehearsals, when I told him about some new development brewing as he screwed felts onto his cymbal stands, and he sort of smiled or winced and asked, “But what would that entail?”

  I deliberated for a bit and then wrote back.

  No one’s mentioned anything about playing shows, so I strongly doubt that’s a prerequisite. Were you asking because you’d like to?

  Ten minutes later:

  I ask because there is usually some talk of playing out with this kind of thing. I hadn’t thought about it, but I certainly wouldn’t be averse if that was part of the deal.

  So we were heavy petting. Or at least talking dirty. But I still wanted to be cautious. So I lied.

  I hadn’t thought of playing out as part of this, and haven’t discussed it at all with Sooyoung. But I wouldn’t be averse either. Have you been playing at all?

  Thirty seconds later:

  I haven’t sat down with it on a regular basis since early 2008, but I played out a few times this past Fall and was not disappointed.

  He still had that same red Yamaha kit, the one that sounded like God to me, which as far as I was concerned all but sealed it. A few months later I flew out to Tucson to play with him, but I knew going in that this was just a formality. On my second day there Orestes woke at 6 a.m., met the group of guys he cycled with, and pedaled his racing bike fifty miles in the desert. Then we loaded his drums into his car, drove to a practice space, set all the gear up, and played for six hours. He’d always been a fucking ox. Still was.

  ***

  WHEN SIGNING A RECORD CONTRACT WITH AN INDEPENDENT label, the smart move is to license your recordings for a specific term, such as five or seven years, so that when that term expires, all rights revert to you. (Certain indie labels—hello, Restless!—sometimes signed less-savvy bands to fuck-you-we-own-this-forever deals.) While visiting San Francisco in May 2010, I contacted Gary Held, whose label, Communion, had released Bitch Magnet’s records in America. From our old contracts I knew that the rights to those recordings had been ours for a decade. But Gary was still selling Bitch Magnet on iTunes, even though he hadn’t the legal standing to do so. We wanted him to stop. Also, I wanted him to cough up the royalties we were surely owed, since he last paid us around 1995.

  It was a brilliant spring day in San Francisco, and, like a tourist, I met Gary at the Ferry Building, and we walked to the end of a pier to see the Bay Bridge and Oakland’s hills and all the gorgeousness in the distance. But the meeting was as passive-aggressive as any indie rock business discussion could be. In a polite and almost kind way, Gary said there was no way we’d get royalties out of him, and in any case, he had no paperwork whatsoever documenting how much he owed us. He mentioned he had a small stash of a few hundred old Bitch Magnet CDs lying around, and afterward I made a few fruitless attempts to take them off his hands. He did agree to take our songs down from iTunes, and made good on this a few weeks later. He also promised to send over an accounting of iTunes sales, for which I am still waiting.

  Evidently I’d learned nothing in all my years of dealing with remote and soft indie rockers and still couldn’t cajole them into anything. As I started to stew, a curious Gary asked me if Bitch Magnet would reunite for a few shows, given the upcoming reissues. Normally I admitted nothing in response to such questions, but I thought, What the hell, it’s not that much of a secret, and said that, while it was by no means certain, I really wanted to.

  “You guys are lucky,” he said.

  I didn’t understand what he meant.

  He explained that he’d grown accustomed to running into guys who played in some band and, amid backslaps and reminiscences, asking whatever happened to this or that member. And suddenly everyone is silent, tight-lipped, looking down. Musicians died young, from misadventure, from illness. They disappeared into hardcore drugging or drinking, especially around San Francisco and Portland and Seattle. They wrecked their cars and rolled their vans. When Gary called us lucky, he meant that we were all still around, and healthy.

  Several hours later I called Sooyoung, ostensibly to tell him about meeting Gary, but really to discuss getting back together, while I paced in front of Hayes Castle, an oddball theme restaurant that had gone belly-up, leaving behind its fake-castle carcass and some bewildered reviews on Yelp. One argument I made was: People die. I said it with some levity—with as much levity as you can say something like that—but I was serious. Jerry Fuchs had died six months earlier. I’d been lucky, until then, never to lose someone around my own age, someone with whom I was in mid-conversation. I didn’t bring up Jerry with Sooyoung, because he knew what had happened, and anyway, what do you say about that? (This, I guess: A bunch of us played hooky from our lives and went on an epic weeklong bender, it was terrible, it was amazing, I sobbed and howled and laughed and drank until the bars closed every night, my ribs got bruised from endless crushing hugs, I danced on tables and did drugs in bathrooms and terrified my wife.) Anyway, Sooyoung always responded to persuasion and logic, not a hard sell. He was unconvinced. But Orestes and I would keep working on him.

  ***

  JEREMY WAS REMARKABLY PATIENT WITH HOW LONG IT TOOK us to assemble the Bitch Magnet reissues: forever, basically. The master tapes were spread among four locations in California, New York, and New Jersey, and Sooyoung and I weren’t certain what was where, and none of us lived within easy distance of California, except for Orestes, who, as a father of two young boys, had even less free time than the rest of us to travel and knock on doors and scour half-forgotten closets. Shortly after Orestes signed on, Jeremy assigned
us the catalog number TR150. The triple LP and triple CD finally came out three years later, just after Temporary Residence released TR203.

  One night in March of 2011, as the reissues slowly made their way toward a December release date, Laurel and I met Ian Williams of Battles and his fiancée, Kate, for dinner. At some point during the main course Ian mentioned that Battles was curating All Tomorrow’s Parties’ Nightmare Before Christmas festival in early December. Then Kate blurted out, “Hey, Ian, why don’t you have Bitch Magnet play?”

  Ian and I looked at each other.

  I was opposed to the entire idea of rock festivals, or as much as you could be without ever having attended one, but I knew ATP would be as good an offer as we’d get.

  The next day Ian told me to expect a call from Barry Hogan, and Barry reached me while I paced one of the grimy blocks in north Chelsea that defiantly, even gloriously, resist gentrification. Barry was charming. Barry was practiced at his spiel. The Nightmare Before Christmas would be held the weekend of December 10 at a Butlins (Butlins!) holiday camp in Minehead, an English coastal town ninety minutes southwest of Bristol. Bitch Magnet was guaranteed a prime-time slot. Rooms at the festival for the band and crew were included. Meals and flights were extra. Also, Barry said, he could book us a show in London and maybe even throw in practice space at Butlin’s if we needed it. Then he named a pretty generous fee. I named another. After a day or so of negotiation, he put everything in writing.

  All that remained was selling Sooyoung on it.

  ***

  THE OFFER FROM BARRY IN HAND, ORESTES AS ANXIOUS AS I was to get back together, both of us confident we could do it without embarrassing ourselves, we started war-gaming various scenarios with Jeremy—who was paying us attention far out of proportion to how many records we’d likely sell—and set up a conference call in mid-March with him and the three of us in Bitch Magnet. I’d stamped into my brain Sooyoung responds to logic and persuasion, so, in as steady and unaffected a voice as I could manage, I mentioned that we had received an offer to reunite and dispassionately read off the terms. I had Jeremy on hand to chime in with how singular an opportunity this was, but it wasn’t even necessary. I don’t remember when, or if, Sooyoung actually said yes, but the conversation shifted almost instantly from “will we?” to “how do we?” Several months later, in an interview in Asia or Europe, Sooyoung explained we had presented ATP’s offer while he was several drinks into a night at a pub in Singapore, so his defenses were down. But, hey, if that’s what it took.

  Through March and April we started working out details and scheduling practice weekends in Canada—because Orestes was moving to Calgary—and New York, and Sooyoung asked if we could practice in Asia as well. Then he said, “I can get us a show in Seoul,” and—because there’s always competition within bands, I guess—I said, “I can get us a show in Tokyo,” and we began planning our first reunion appearances, and our first Asian shows ever, for November 2011. Spring was coming on slowly in New York, and my days were pleasantly distracted by the logistics of plane tickets and finding practice space and lodging in distant cities, as well as by a low-grade rush always buzzing in my blood because we were doing this.

  Jeremy was almost as thrilled about the reunion as I was. But he was also sensible enough to wave a yellow flag. A few days after our conference call, he and I had lunch near his office, at the godhead pioneering Bushwick restaurant Roberta’s, and after we finished our pizza he made it clear that Bitch Magnet was best off reuniting only for a short and defined time. Play the biggest cities once, put it all back on the shelf, and don’t linger. And don’t make a new record. (Though he did graciously hint that he’d put it out on his label if we did.) He reminded me that Mission of Burma had just been dropped by Matador—and then got turned down by every other prominent independent label. I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: In our sandbox, everyone adored Burma. Everyone came of age idolizing them. In 2011, though, no one could afford to put out their records. And Jeremy didn’t have to point out that Burma was a hell of a lot more famous than Bitch Magnet.

  All right. So we were still doomed. So the clock started ticking as soon as we said yes. So what?

  Don’t you feel tears welling up at the end of This Is Spinal Tap—that love story about two old friends, dim-witted as they may be—when Nigel climbs onstage to rejoin the band? (And inexplicably finds his guitar there, plugged into an amp and ready to play, which would never happen in real life?) Or when Rodriguez walks slowly onstage in South Africa in Searching for Sugar Man? Or when Anvil takes the stage in Japan at the end of their movie—old guys fearful that everyone has forgotten, suddenly blinking in disbelief at the crowd that’s gathered? Their stunned faces as they take it all in, and their looks of dumb surprise?

  I had no illusions that involved arenas. What I wanted was another shot at our story. To stop feeling like an outsider in a band I co-created. To write a different and better ending for Bitch Magnet, and with these guys.

  Calgary Metal

  Like all rock reunions, ours started in earnest on the outskirts of Calgary at a rent-a-rehearsal-room joint called Slaughterhouse Studios, and driving there from downtown was like watching a movie of the city’s development run backward. You first passed the blue-glass curvilinear swoop of the newest and tallest building in town, The Bow, an atypically loud monument to the city’s new oil money. You passed the grim grandeur of the concrete Brutalist buildings erected in the seventies. Then you left the central core, passing feed and fertilizer businesses, a creamery, a scrap yard with a huge sign screaming CALGARY METAL, which never failed to make my heart happy, until you finally arrived at a cluster of absolutely unremarkable industrial parks, where businesses sold tractors and obscure parts for machines I’d never comprehend. Despite the oil boom, Calgary is still a cow town at heart. In its past life Slaughterhouse Studios had been a meat locker. Our practice room was behind the door of a giant walk-in refrigerator, one built for storing the cow and pig carcasses that had once hung there.

  We started rehearsing at Slaughterhouse in April 2011, but practically nothing there suggested that the twenty-first century had happened. Hell, not much at Slaughterhouse suggested that the late nineties had happened. I started hanging out in places like this in the eighties, and what a relief to find one where nothing had changed at all. In our practice space were three defunct and decrepit seventies surburban-piano-teacher organs: fake wood, complicated speaker grilles, multicolored buttons to nowhere. Also a mysterious Peavey tape deck that promised to strip vocals from cassettes, a useful technology for a previous era. I plugged into a mutant Marshall half stack that coughed out a nasally, trebly shit-metal tone no matter how much you fiddled with the dials. In the lounge, cans of Canadian beer chilled in a vending machine, across the room from the smeary-screened Asteroids game or the sad, faded pool table. Cold concrete floors and unadorned Sheetrock walls in the narrow and claustrophobic hallway. The bathroom, back by the office, was appropriately disgusting. Years-old posters everywhere for a local Iron Maiden cover band that was named after Maiden’s mascot: Eddie the Great, of course. And that slightly pickled scent, again, the one instantly familiar to anyone who’s spent time in practice pads or recording studios run by not particularly fastidious guys. But we weren’t looking to play somewhere sanitized. When it’s time to create some culture, I like to have a little native yeast floating in the air.

  On nice weekends Slaughterhouse’s owner, Bob, rolled a grill into the cement yard and offered free hot dogs and hamburgers. Bob sported a drinker’s reddened capillaries, an inveterate stoner’s blown-out gaze, and the uptalk and heavy Canadian accent that always makes Americans giggle, eh? He was tall and thin and big-headed, like Big Bird, a mop of a mustache spreading above his upper lip and a wad of brown-green-hazel hair flopping over his forehead. Some late afternoons it started to smell very skunky up front, where Bob and his friends gathered. It was such a boy’s clubhouse
that it was hard to imagine any woman ever stopping by, but Bob’s girlfriend sometimes did, to throw back beers and get roasted with Bob and his pals.

  By now I’d known for a long time that the entire idea of performing this kind of rock music was inherently awkward and dorky-looking: grown men standing around, clutching instruments, making organized loud crashing noises. (Turn off the sound on many older rock videos and squint a bit, and it looks like a bunch of thirtysomething fieldhands, slightly stiff from age and overwork, grimly performing farm chores.) But the vibe and gear at Slaughterhouse and the fact that no one younger than their late thirties was ever present often made me wonder if the entire idea of a rock band was a fossil from another epoch, something younger people no longer thought about, like doo-wop or electric typewriters. I knew hip-hop now occupied a lot of the cultural space that rock once had, but was rock really this dead?

  Still: fuck it. We were doing this again. The last time the three of us had played together was almost exactly twenty-one years earlier. And though Calgary seemed a supremely random meeting place, the location actually made sense. Orestes had just moved here from Tucson, and because I lived in New York and Sooyoung lived in Singapore, Calgary was as good a middle ground as any. We knew no one in this city, so it was a forgiving and private place to see if we could get into these old clothes without shredding any seams. There were no distractions, and there was no one to meet. Nothing to do but rehearse each day, then get dinner, and begin to warm to one another again, drink by drink, conversation by conversation.