by Jon Fine
But, as with that event in New York just after I got back from Europe, I was still too present in the world I had just left. Scanning the room made me keenly aware that the previous night would be impossible to convey to anyone, so, fairly or not, I was disappointed immediately. Someone I know sidled over, sat near me, disgorged his update, asked me what was up, and went facedown into his phone before I even started talking.
Say what you will about annoying and oversensitive indie rockers: they never pulled shit like that.
***
THE RICKSHAW STOP, WHERE WE WERE PLAYING IN SAN FRANCISCO, is (fortuitously) within walking distance of the food-nerd destination Zuni Café, but during dinner I realized I might miss Andee Connors’s new band, ImPeRiLs, who were playing first. When I called him in a panic, he said there was nothing he could do about their set time but reminded me, “You can do this. Not me.” A realization dawned: Yes, sometimes a headliner can. I made another call, to the club, and pushed everyone’s set back fifteen minutes.
That kind of night: back among friends, and those who understood. There was even excellent wine backstage, sent by my winemaker pal Fred Scherrer, of Scherrer Vineyards. In case any of this sounds the least bit rock-starish, I manned the merch table with Laurel before the show, and, judging from the questions I fielded (“What time are they”—gesturing toward our records and CDs—“going on tonight?”), it was clear that few people realized I was actually part of “they.” And, late into our set, I looked past the crowd toward the lit-up merch booth and saw Laurel sprawled out on a couch, asleep. Still, there is nothing wrong with being a king frog in a small pond, playing a real show for a few hundred people pouring off so much energy that all we had to do was feast on it and reflect it back to them. Halfway through the set, with people in the crowd yelling for different songs, I stepped up to the mike: “Hey, this is San Francisco, people. Can’t we come to some CON-SEN-SUS?” Sometimes you make jokes onstage just to amuse your own damn self.
***
WHEN LAUREL WOKE IN OUR HOTEL ROOM THE MORNING after that show, she was exhausted and crabby. I wasn’t, though I’d slept much less, because the rhythms of the road made perfect sense to me. I also knew, as she did not, that sleep is postponable on tour. Sometimes for a very long time. But Laurel wasn’t getting that nightly performance rush—the touring musician’s crucial chemical advantage. I felt bad for her as I watched her stumble, half-awake, to throw on clothes and get coffee. But I also thought, The difference between you and me is that I can do this for weeks.
There was little time to reflect on that, though, because we had to dash immediately to the airport to drop off the rental car and fly to the next show in New York, and of course we ran late and of course missed the exit from the expressway, and of course I only remembered to detune my guitars while on the AirTrain, to the bewilderment of all the other passengers, and of course we had to sprint while pushing a tottering baggage cart across the entire terminal before barely skidding to a stop in front of a wordless Orestes—whose expression nonetheless screamed, I’ve seen this too many times before. I turned my sleep-deprived, red-rimmed gaze toward him and demanded, “Isn’t this fun?” and he replied, without smiling, “No.”
He was right, he was wrong, this was awful, it was tremendous. I was sick of Orestes—he and I spent practically every waking moment together on tour—and I was sick of Sooyoung, and I didn’t want to spend time apart from them. It had to end, and I wanted it to last forever.
At home in New York the next morning, I lazed in bed, dicking around with the multitudes of any band’s online communications: retweeting and replying to mentions and shoutouts on Twitter and on Facebook, answering texts and e-mails. There is a special room in hell for people who send day-of-show texts asking, HEY, WHEN DO YOU GUYS GO ON TONIGHT? Especially if you’ve already told them. When my brother e-mailed asking that very question, I painstakingly tapped out a response gently reminding him to JESUS CHRIST LOOK UP OUR PREVIOUS FUCKING E-MAIL EXCHANGE. Then a nasty burr of realization: the day was over. Orestes and I were guest-hosting a show on East Village Radio shortly, and, according to my calculations, we should have left twenty minutes ago to start the sprint to showtime.
FUCK.
After that radio show, the day went like this: Pick up my 2002 Subaru Forester. Hand Orestes keys. Text Andy, the guitarist from Violent Bullshit, to arrange pickup of his Marshall cabinet. Direct Orestes to my practice space in Bushwick to pick up my amp. Dash up two flights to our room. Unlock the three locks on the door, marvel at the squalor, disassemble the tangled boneyard of synths and amps and basses and road cases and guitars and cords and amps and mike stands, locate my amp, realize that said amp in its road case weighs more than eighty pounds and is too bulky to carry. Drag it carefully down the stairs, hoping no rats appear, heft amp into car, jog over to Main Drag Music, next door to the practice space, for just-in-case supplies: picks, strings, a long patch cord. Head to Temporary Residence headquarters to pick up more records and CDs. Text the entire staff—all three of them—begging for someone to meet us on the sidewalk with our stuff when we arrive. Alfie waits for us outside the office, we screech to a halt, jam records and CDs in car. Thanks, Alfie. Head to pick up the next batch of T-shirts at the absolute ass end of Greenpoint, hard by Newtown Creek. Arrive and run into large warehouse building. Buzz the elevator. No response. Seconds, then several minutes, pass. Elevator finally appears, and the large Jamaican elevator guy runs me upstairs and—crucially, brilliantly—offers to hold the lift for me. Run into screenprinter’s space and spot head guy Carl, whom I’d met back when we both had long hair. Carl hoists a box and hands it over. Ride back down in elevator, then dart to the car. Head to the Queens Midtown Tunnel but take several wrong turns, each of which gives me a minor heart attack. Then home, where Sooyoung calmly stands by the kitchen island, in front of his computer. It’s unclear whether he even noticed me burst into the room, sweating and panting. Orestes grabs a pair of shorts, still wet from the washing machine, pulls them on, and points a hair dryer at his crotch. I gather every merch box. Everyone moves much more languidly than I do, as always, but in time we’re on the way to Le Poisson Rouge. As we load in I eyeball the area where bands sell merch, calculate how people flow past it, see where the light is brightest, and cover the best place to set up with boxes of records and T-shirts. Location and real estate are crucial everywhere, but a little more so in New York.
Though it has a private shitter, the dressing room is too small to accommodate two bands and everyone else who finds their way back here. After our soundcheck I come back to change strings, taking a seat across a low table from a guy I don’t recognize in a white button-down shirt, who’s chatting with friends far too loudly for the room. He is impossible to ignore, and very quickly I decide I have to throw him out. A simple matter: Dude, I’m sorry. But this room is for bands, and you gotta go. Just before I can, he leaves. It would have been awkward if he hadn’t, because when the opening band, Moss Icon, starts their set, he strides onstage and starts singing.
My mom and dad come in from New Jersey. My brother and his wife, Sharlene, come, too, bringing my niece and nephew, Edie and Zeke. (It took a few e-mails to ensure that the club would let in a nine-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy, but in the end all goes so swimmingly I should have asked for drink tickets.) Poisson Rouge is a far more professional club than the shitholes we typically play, and the staff kindly set aside a few tables for them in the seated section. I meet them all at the entrance, show them to the tables, and start to chat, but the club is filling, and I can’t ignore the tide pulling me back to the dressing room, which, when I return, is jammed with friends. The downside to knowing lots of musicians is that they all end up backstage. I have to change my shirt and briefly consider ducking into the bathroom but instead announce, “This is a dressing room. And I’m gonna take my clothes off.”
When Moss Icon start their set, the dressing room empties
but for Orestes, warming up, and his friend Mark, peacefully tapping on his phone. I take my preshow dump. I don’t know if calm is the right word, but I’m nearing the end of the tunnel without too much fear or excitement or tension. Moss Icon finishes, and once again I bound onstage to set up far too soon, before they have a chance to break down their gear. Another upside to the pro rock club experience: there is help. Stagehands in black T-shirts shove Moss Icon’s equipment to the side of the stage and grunt my cabinets into place. Matthew Barnhart is running sound for us on this tour, and I’d told him to play Rush’s “Red Barchetta” over the PA right after Moss Icon’s set, and when it begins, I walk through the club, air-drumming and miming guitar lines into some faces I know and some that I don’t. Maybe I’m more revved up than I think. When I bump into Moss Icon, I can’t stop throwing out overeffusive praise. I saw about thirty seconds of their set, tops.
I arrange two beers, two bottles of water, and our set list by my mike stand and set up my pedals. One extremely excited guy keeps shouting up at me while I tune the Les Pauls, but I keep a tight smile on my face, averting my gaze, saying nothing. A lot of people have come out tonight. I took pictures at soundcheck of the empty room and now snap two more from roughly the same angles. We’ll open with “Douglas Leader,” a slow and quiet song Sooyoung starts with unaccompanied bass and vocals. Orestes and I will come onstage mid-song, just before the drums and guitar come in. I go to the farthest end of the stage, past the amps, to lurk and wait on the steps, guitar strapped on. A woman comes up to ask if I’m Orestes. I tell her I’m not. She says she knew him in fifth grade and hasn’t seen him in a very long time. I say: evidently. She says she has a guitar pick for me, which I’m too surprised to decline, hands me a flyer, and then starts describing the project detailed on the flyer, which is called . . . well, why mention it here? I thank her, though I don’t want to, and slide the pick and flyer between some speaker cabinets, marveling at her brass to pitch me while I stood onstage in a crowded club, thirty seconds before showtime.
I totally fuck up the solo in “Douglas Leader,” thanks to some glitch in my setup, but the crowd is with us from the first note. They cheer loudly, shout when we launch into favorites, and stay dead silent during the quiet parts. We end with “Filler,” this time drafting my friend Jay Green, who sings for Violent Bullshit, on vocals. I drop my pick on one of its first chords and have to speed-strum the rest of it with my middle finger, convinced I’m flaying it to bits. Then my guitar strap breaks and there’s nothing to do but play the rest of the song on the ground. Someone gets a great photo of Jay bent over and screaming down at my head just before Jay shoves the mike into the face of someone in the front row, perfectly timed for the dude to yell out, “FILLER!” during the chorus. At the end of the song I toss my guitar skyward, catch it, then slam it pickup-side down atop my amp, more or less on beat. Good night.
At the merch booth Laurel rips open boxes of T-shirts and records and CDs and shoves shirts at people and loudly calls the name of someone who’s left his credit card. Edie is the first to appear, and I bend down to hug her, even though I’m a sweaty mess. I ask her if it was really loud, and when she says no, I make a mental note to ask Matthew why. Clusters of people stick around: old friends and old fans, people waiting to talk to us. Everyone is smiling, flushed, and sweaty from the happy, wrung-out feeling that follows a good show. Generally I prefer shitholes to pro rock clubs, but tonight everything clicked. Though Poisson Rouge also took 15 percent of the merch sales, as its standard contract insists, which I could have done without.
We end up at a horrid bar nearby, in the no-man’s-land near NYU, with a bunch of people who went to the show, and stay for hours. I finally leave around 3:15 a.m., the taxi floats me home down trafficless streets, and I collapse into bed next to Laurel, home at last, stinking of drink and show sweat and my post-show halal-cart sandwich and everything else that had happened since I left our bedroom this morning.
***
WE PLAY BROOKLYN THE FOLLOWING NIGHT WITH VIOLENT Bullshit and Turing Machine. Orestes and I again drive the Forester, jammed with gear, to the club. Idling at a stoplight near the Williamsburg Bridge while I’m staring at my phone—cranky from the flood of texts and e-mails, impatient because the light is still red—Orestes excitedly nudges me and nods at the next car over. At first I hear indeterminate thuds and muttering and assume it’s hip-hop. But the dude is blasting our song “Lookin’ at the Devil.” And headbanging. This has been a grouchy, hungover, and stressed-out day, but now we’re in a good mood all the way to the club.
The Knitting Factory is a shoebox turned sideways, primarily composed of concrete. In terms of acoustics, that’s strike one and strike two. It’s painted a sickly, sticky-looking red that, now that I think about it, reminds me of Kokie’s walls circa 1999. (Strike three, for looks.) The club’s soundman, Bob, paces the room, wearing shorts and a face well-creased by rock and carousing, endlessly stressed out. He greets each request with a series of compulsive headshakes and dark mutterings about how impossible it is, then disappears and returns with whatever we need.
Before the show two guys wave me over to tell me they flew in from Atlanta for last night’s show and changed their flights to stick around for tonight’s. (I hope we don’t suck.) Jerry Fuchs’s younger brother, Adam, also came up from Georgia, and his sister, Erica, from North Carolina. Jerry should have seen this. I’m enormously touched that his siblings will. Besides its bad acoustics, the room is too shallow and the stage height is weirdly out of proportion with the space, and it isn’t the best show of the tour. But somewhere during the loud part of “Ducks and Drakes,” I close my eyes, turn my face up toward the stage lights, and behind my eyelids everything goes orange and I feel something I’ll never properly describe, and I can’t stop myself from laughing out loud, tickled by something, I’ll never know what. During the long sustained A after the first verse in “Valmead,” I turn the feedbacking note down, bend down to gulp a beer, stand upright, turn my volume back up, then launch into the next bit, perfectly timed and on beat. From your perch inside the song, you imagine that its intervals sound staggeringly cool, though these little dramas are far too inside baseball for almost anyone else to notice.
Then an afterparty where a bunch of us DJ, and when that bar closes its doors and turns up the lights, we stay for one more drink. Afterward Sooyoung takes us to a place he knows in Koreatown that is still serving food and, perhaps more important, pitchers of beer. It’s not as if we’re celebrating and bro-hugging all over the place—that never was our style—but none of us wants any of these final nights to end. We get home around 6 a.m. That afternoon we fly to Chicago for our last show.
THAT FINAL SHOW BROUGHT US TO AN INCREDIBLY EXALTED and appropriate venue, by which I mean a shithole made comfortable by years of familiarity. The Empty Bottle. The kind of place that every band, ever, has played at least once, and though I hadn’t been there in years, it was instantly familiar once we stepped inside. Smaller and grottier than I remembered, perhaps, but its essentials hadn’t changed at all. The couches backstage almost certainly hadn’t. The main interior color was black, stickers covered virtually every surface—different ones than in 1996, but honestly that felt like a minor detail—and the backstage bathroom was still a riot of multicolored graffiti. Quality bourbons were available now, since its crowd was getting older and transferring its musical connoisseurship to food and drink, as well as a very good selection of beer, for what struck a New Yorker as shockingly low prices. The club was still a clumsy hodgepodge of three oddly connected rooms, with steps awkwardly and randomly placed throughout. I almost tripped, spectacularly, while getting offstage, and another time getting to the strangely shaped stage, which is situated where two rooms meet in the corner of a capital L. Bands usually set up their drums in the middle of the stage, then everyone else struggles to figure out where they should place and point their amps. I set up stage left, as always. From there, I w
as told, the local consensus was to aim the amp toward the men’s room.
It was fitting that Bitch Magnet would end here. We remixed our first album and recorded much of our last album in Chicago, and Sooyoung lived there for years in the nineties. Also, the old Chicago rule still held: no matter how bad any tour was going, as you slogged through whatever dead and depressing stretch in the Great Plains or topmost tier of the South, you hung on until Chicago. It was your second hometown. Where everyone knew your name and understood your decades of accumulated indie rock bullshit.
I was unusually obsessed with selling merch, because I knew unless we had a huge crowd and sold a mountain of shirts and records and CDs, we’d lose money on the tour. I felt like a campaign manager who realizes, the night before Election Day, that his candidate needs a record turnout and a couple of other breaks to win. (And who doesn’t share this insight with the candidate—or Sooyoung and Orestes.) Rose Marshack, the Poster Children bassist and another old friend, showed up early. She may have offered, but it’s more likely I shamed or strong-armed her into running the merch table. Two people working merch is exponentially better than one, and—rock is sexist—for mostly-male crowds, women often sell better than men. I kept barking idiotic Glengarry Glen Ross jokes at her. But they worked. Soon Rose, a deeply kind, modest, and mild-mannered Midwestern mom, was all but grabbing people by the ear as they passed, demanding they buy something. One guy couldn’t decide between a gray shirt and a brown one. “You should buy both!” she shot back. He picked brown. Three minutes later he returned, wearing an embarrassed grin, and bought the gray version, too.
