Your Band Sucks

by Jon Fine

  Orestes and I arrived at Singapore’s Changi Airport in early April, mildly deranged after flying roughly twenty hours, for a few days’ practice and our first show. How nice an airport is Changi? There’s a fucking swimming pool atop Terminal One. Singapore is hot and equatorial. Also, basically an upscale outdoor shopping mall extrapolated to an entire country. Much of it looks like it was built in the eighties. These parts are considered historic. (I’m joking. Somewhat.) Everything works. Sit-down restaurants are exorbitant, since almost every ingredient is imported, but hawker centers are crammed with small stalls purveying cheap and variegated Asian grub, the stuff of food bloggers’ wet dreams, and Orestes and I gorged ourselves in them daily.

  I’d found a practice space called Four Tones—a reference to Mandarin pronunciation, I learned—and reserved time well in advance of our arrival by corresponding with someone who signed e-mails THE WALL. All caps. We found Four Tones on a surprisingly sketchy block. (“Sketchy” in Singapore is relative, but there was no mistaking the prostitutional vibe there and in an often abandoned bar just downstairs from Four Tones.) In person The Wall was a friendly, wavy-haired Malay in his late twenties or early thirties, neither hulking nor freakishly tall. His feet splayed in the way of people who are barefoot all the time: Four Tones is a shoe-free practice space. You stepped out of your sneakers in the hallway and padded into your carpeted rehearsal room, and when you glanced down during rehearsal, you saw your stupid socked feet alongside your effects pedals and suddenly felt twelve again, in a friend’s fancy suburban basement rec room—the friend whose parents were humorless hard-asses and banned footwear in their new-carpet-smelling house.

  That sight didn’t make you feel as if you were grasping pure power with both hands, and the gear at Four Tones was semi-functional and sounded terrible, but things still clicked once we started rehearsing. In our first reunion shows Sooyoung wore his bass higher on his body than he did our first time around, because some sense memory made him wear it as high as the guitar he played in Seam. But you don’t strum a bass gently, all wrist, as you can a guitar. In Singapore he adjusted his strap, shifting his bass maybe three inches lower, a minor change that made a huge difference. Now he got his shoulder into every downstroke and started playing with much more muscle and authority, and despite the bad amps and toy drums and overall sock-rock vibe, we sounded good. Noticeably better than we had in Europe.

  During the day Sooyoung went to work at his company’s office. He invited us to stop by, and we met his staff, though he generally kept the band a secret, and I don’t know how many of them really knew why we were there. Orestes and I stayed in an apartment complex near Fort Canning Park, popular with expat European and American families, where we sort of worked, too, on our laptops, but lunch took a huge bite out of our afternoons, and we spent a lot of time lounging around the giant outdoor pool, sometimes catching each other’s gaze and cracking up. Our first time around hadn’t been anything like this.

  Each morning at our apartment building, everyone crammed into the too-small breakfast room and attacked a free buffet until everything was gone. Once, still reeking of booze and fried food and the very late night before—the kind of morning when you feel the need to apologize for your appearance, if not your scent—I squeezed into the tiny elevator alongside a fresh-faced American family, whose young children regarded me with one glance and instinctively moved closer to their parents.

  Sorry, folks. We came to Singapore for rock. You remember rock, don’t you, ma’am? Though, who knows, it may be gone by the time your kids grow up.

  The Singapore show was at the Home Club, which sits in a mall across from a cement river channel, or maybe it was just a ditch to catch the runoff from heavy rainstorms. We’d never played in a mall before, but in Singapore it kind of made sense. There we met Phil, an Australian superfan who’d told us through Facebook that he was burning a lifetime’s worth of frequent-flier miles to make the show. (Great to meet you, Phil. I hope we don’t suck.) The club had concrete walls and concrete floors and concrete steps leading up to the stage, which is not exactly the zenith of acoustic design. But after our set we came offstage, looked at one another, and realized no one had made any mistakes. Nothing had gone wrong at all. The strange dawning hit all of us at the same time: we’d probably just played our best show ever. A young band called Amateur Takes Control opened and played incredibly elaborate instrumentals. Each guitarist had a pedal board maybe three feet square, as jammed as a city parking lot with effects boxes. As he’d done at our show in Seoul, Sooyoung enlisted someone from their band to play bass on our encore—on this tour the Hard-Ons’ one great song, “All Set to Go”—and then he watched us all from the audience. In this case, being drafted last-minute to play on a song you’ve never heard sounds much more intimidating than it actually was, because “All Set to Go” is a single two-chord progression, endlessly repeated, and after Sooyoung big-brothered this guy onstage and handed him his bass, I taught him the song in roughly fifteen seconds:

  It’s four bars of straight eighth notes on A: da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.

  And then four bars of straight eighth notes on D: da da da da etc.

  Got that? Great. Just keep repeating it.

  It’s a hard song to screw up, especially if you can play as well as any member of Amateur Takes Control.

  Afterward we went to a large private room in a karaoke joint, where an endless procession of new arrivals meant that, soon enough, there was nowhere to sit and not many places to stand. Platters of fried chicken (excellent) and bottles of whiskey (cheap) kept appearing. Eventually I kept a full plastic cup of whiskey nearby at all times so Sooyoung’s wife, Fiona, wouldn’t refill it and insist I drink more. Certain details are fuzzy, but I remember singing “Hungry Like the Wolf” with her. And that at one point Sooyoung tried to get me to sing something but I kept refusing, and when he tried to force the mike on me, we got into a weird, shovey standoff for a few seconds. What was that about?

  ***

  NOTE TO MIDDLE-AGED TOURING BANDS: IN HONG KONG, PAY whatever is necessary to avoid guesthouses and hostels like ours, on a crowded, commercial strip in Tsim Sha Tsui. Imagine a grimy building that takes up an entire city block on all four sides, so crammed with people and stuff and activity and everything that, unfortunately, the only word to use is “teeming” and the only thing to say is that a Wes Anderson fantasia played out within its walls, endlessly. The building was centered on a courtyard, across which residents hung laundry. To get to the elevator, you passed through a long and dense arcade of small, grubby shops until you found travelers lined up, waiting beside their giant backpacks. At each floor, as you ascended in the lift, people streamed on and off, clutching their microcosm of everything: guys rolling handtrucks stacked with bags of cement mix, women carrying countless plastic sacks, people staggering under statuary. After a few floors you wouldn’t be surprised to see someone ride in on a motorcycle.

  To get to our tiny room, you traversed an interior hallway, passing a few more “hostels”—a few equally tiny rooms off other obscure hallway passages—keyed open a door that led into a narrow passageway, and then opened the first door on the right. When we first walked that narrow passage, we squeezed past a woman eating soup on a tiny shelf next to our door. When we came back that night, after the show and drinks, the same woman was sleeping peacefully and remarkably compactly on that same shelf. Our room was just big enough to hold a bunk bed and a single, and it made you want to avoid the shower and keep your socks on at all times. I was all for being budget-conscious on a tour already destined to lose money, but on the way to the show I made a reservation at the Holiday Inn across the street for our second night. Rooms there were done up in slightly stomach-turning eighties tones of peach and beige and marbled brown, and a night cost something like $250, but it felt like money spent very wisely. Johns and hookers met in the p
arking lot. You’d see a dolled-up woman leaning against a wall. A few minutes later she’d be gone, replaced by some ferrety-looking and fidgety guy. Waiting. Though probably not for long.

  Our show was at a venue far more punk rock than I’d ever been, one called Hidden Agenda, tucked away on a high floor in an anonymous building in a deeply industrial part of town. There was some kind of auto shop on the ground floor, though the totally stripped Smart car skeleton out front made me wonder about its legitimacy. Filmmakers who seek the dystopia that looming gray cityscapes signify would do well to shoot in this neighborhood on a cloudy day. Or any day. I’m not sure sunlight ever made it to street level there. I mean: Burutaru desu.

  Hidden Agenda regularly butted heads with local authorities over real or perceived infractions, the latest of which meant the club couldn’t serve alcohol. We snuck some in, but I winced to think what that ruling would do to turnout. One guy in the audience had flown in from Taiwan, though someone else had to explain that to us, because he didn’t speak any English. He just stood there nodding during that conversation, and I hope our translator got across how thrilling and crazy that was to us. Another showed up with an original copy of our first record—from our self-released first pressing of a thousand—wanting autographs. Amazing to see how that record ended up so far from home.

  But we were already tour-weary and dispirited, even on our day off, when Orestes and I roamed the city while Sooyoung traveled for work. We did manage to eat well, an overweening concern of all bands, and ours in particular: an amazing meal at Mak’s Noodles—delightful dense and springy noodles, finer than angel hair—where the waiters were so actively unpleasant it was hilarious. On Sooyoung’s recommendation Orestes and I also went to a Korean place in Kowloon: Won Pung Won. At first the badass halumni—Korean grandmas—running the joint treated us indifferently. Then Orestes spoke to them in Korean—ever the language savant, he picked up quite a bit in our five days in Seoul—and it became a glorious meal. Afterward Orestes and I each did the inevitable asshole-American-tourist thing and took pics of a sign we liked, which he spotted emblazoned on an awning:

  FOOK KIU MANSION.

  ***

  I’D NEVER PLAYED AT A VENUE WHERE LIZARDS CRAWL THE walls until we played the saGuijo Café in Manila. A bar in the tropics, with a loose division between indoors and outdoors. We spent just enough time in Manila to begin to appreciate its size and troubles: the air is smoggy enough to hurt, traffic jams are epic and constant, and the people under the elevated expressway aren’t just hanging out—they live there. But saGuijo is in Makati, on a side street where you wouldn’t expect to find it, and it was quiet around the club. Before the show I walked the neighborhood, past scenes stolen from someone’s imagining of how a place like this might look: Guys hanging out on white plastic chairs, obscured by the night, nursing beers. One grilling meat in the street, in front of a satay stand. Sleepy open-air bars where a few solitary figures sat, slouching in front of their drinks. A woman sobbing quietly into a pay phone. A few hundred meters ahead, in the main street, taxis drifted past. The air still felt hot and wet but with a welcoming hint of a breeze. Night, and its great sense of relief, had descended. The only things missing were dogs lolling, half-conscious, in the street or chasing each other around the venue’s microscopic dirt yard, where we drank cold cans of San Miguel with the audience after the show.

  Inside the club there was a huge Virgin Mary mural—a punk rock club, perhaps, but nonetheless one in a Catholic country—and an old Caballero skate deck, under glass. (Sooyoung photographed the latter. I went for the former.) A tiny blue drum kit with SAGUIJO emblazoned on the top of the kick drum and SUPPORT PINOY ROCK just below it, which is how I learned that Pinoy = Filipino. The stage, too, was tiny, and during the set I stood close enough to Sooyoung to do the homoerotic back-to-back thing for the first time since sophomore year in college. But the beer was ice cold and dirt cheap, and the audience was thrilled, and one of the other bands, Wilderness, was one of the best bands that opened for us anywhere, ever. Wilderness—what a lovely and fitting name they chose—are an eight-piece, three of whom drum or play percussion. I imagine every review of them will inevitably include the word “tribal,” because there are congas and a kind of primal swampy, pounding repetitiveness. They spilled over the edges of the stage and into the audience, playing a sort of shake-your-ass psych that, I thought, was rooted in Filipino or Polynesian records from the sixties and seventies that I suddenly needed to find right now. After the show their percussionist Pat Ing pressed a CD in a handpainted and cracked case into my hands. “Made with love,” she said, smiling, and refused my money. People smiled in Manila. A relief, after Hong Kong.

  ***

  IF YOU’RE LUCKY, WHEN YOU’RE A BAND FAR FROM HOME, A de facto ambassador and chaperone materializes and takes you in. In Manila it was Diego Castillo, who plays guitar in Sandwich. He took us out for sisig—fried pig’s face—one night. (He also arranged for friends to bring us a sack full of balut—fertilized duck eggs—after dinner, but sadly we were too stuffed to try any.) In his apartment he played us a bunch of local funk and hard rock from the seventies, and I wish I’d taken notes. He drove us around in his new Honda, playing American indie stuff from the nineties and aughts that even I hadn’t heard. Diego loved a certain strain of sappy indie rock—minimal, soft to loud, heart on the sleeve, pop sweetening sprinkled over the top. A part of me likes it, too, in very small doses, but it’s primarily nostalgia for a particular time of my life, because I generally find both that music and that part of me weak and despicable. A group of old friends you forsook, after they disappointed you too many times, or the sad boy you no longer wish to be, alone in his room with his record player, his one true friend.

  The living room in Diego’s apartment was dominated by his massive wall of records, and there he told us how much effort it took for him to track down music on small American independent labels in the pre-Internet nineties. He had to find addresses for the record labels, scrounge in Manila for American cash to send to those labels, pen an appropriately obsequious letter, throw in extra cash for shipping, and cross his fingers, because not everyone sent records in return. Like all collections, his was built laboriously, and with an antlike determination, just more so than almost anyone else’s. It was easy to get disgusted with this little indie world: its incestuousness, its essential fecklessness, the way it always crumbled when you most needed it to be solid. But then you would run into people who still held on to its artifacts for dear life. And in 2012—years after these records were made, and probably years after rock last really mattered—I found myself standing in front of a wall of such records in Diego’s apartment, eight and a half thousand miles from home, shaking my head. Because people actually cared. People really worked for this stuff. They did whatever it took to track down your message in a bottle. And then they held on to it, throughout all these years.

  Many Thoughts About Underwear and Rock-Related Maladies

  Then you’re standing outside a locked hotel room at 3 a.m., without a key and naked but for a pair of briefs, and as much as you might wish for another solution, there’s really only one.

  Luckily the elevator was empty when it arrived, and after it chimed and sighed to a stop in the lobby, I marched toward the front desk, trying to act dignified and business-casual about everything.

  When the guy on duty looked up, he didn’t even blink. Just stood, poker-faced, waiting. “The less said about this the better,” I told him, “but I’ve locked myself out of room 1012.”

  He nodded and called the bellman.

  This was during a practice weekend in Calgary in September 2011, and I’d gone barhopping with Orestes after rehearsal. He’s twice my size and can drink like an elephant, but no night with him had ever ended this stupidly. I mean, after our last stop I was drunk enough to lose the willpower required to keep a slurriness out of my voice. But not that drunk. Still, when I woke needing to
pee and walked through the heavy door to the right, it slammed shut behind me, and I could see, even without my glasses, that things were not right. But understanding the problem was a very gradual process. I knocked on the door and called through the crack at the bottom. Neither of which did any good, because I was the only person staying in the room. Or had been, before I became the only person standing in the hallway.

  In the elevator back up to my floor, the very young bellman asked me how my night was going. “Really good until about five minutes ago,” I said. He nodded, we arrived, and he used his magic key card to get me back into my room. Thank god I didn’t have a hard-on, I thought, and settled back beneath the covers.

  During and after any rock-related travel during the eighties and nineties, I only needed to blink a few times after waking up to remember where I was. Now travel left me all harebrained and sleepwalky. One night in late April 2012, back home after two weeks of shows in Asia, suffering from jetlag and a bad case of the bends from a rough reentry into workaday life, I went to bed at nine. Our last hotel room in Tokyo had wedged the three of us into another space barely big enough for the beds, and I was grateful to be back in my own room. But just after 10:30 I bolted upright, panicked with the realization that I went to bed sans underwear and fearing that my bandmates would be freaked out in the morning when they saw me with my man-parts dangling. Even though neither bandmate was in my bedroom. Or the rest of the apartment. Or even in America, because both had returned to their homes in entirely different countries. But somehow that didn’t register at all. I looked around the room, which I didn’t recognize. Laurel was still watching TV in the living room, so she wasn’t there to remind me that the tour was over. I saw a door with a hint of light behind it and cracked it open. A bathroom. Finally I remembered: home. I opened a drawer, grabbed a pair of underwear, and—triumphant!—went back to bed.