Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Read Free Book Online

practices hard, and we needed to communicate a lot, since we generally couldn’t play the same parts at the same time.
    At least we understood what we were trying to do: be in a loud, sloppy punk rock band. In many places in the mid-eighties you’d suffer through desperately trying to get this across to someone who wanted to play Springsteen or Poison covers. And at least some of us knew how to play our instruments. Previous generations started bands before they knew how. Or before they owned any equipment. David Yow, the singer for Scratch Acid and the Jesus Lizard, formed his first band, Toxic Shock, with his best friend in Austin around 1980. “We saw in the paper there was this syndrome called Toxic Shock,” he told me. “And immediately we said, ‘That’s the name of our band. Now all we gotta do is find somebody who can play instruments.’” For about a year Toxic Shock existed as a name on a series of confrontational flyers, some of which showed up years later in art books. “We would just make posters that said, TOXIC SHOCK: FUCK YOU, and draw a picture of a woman pulling a tampon out of her pussy, and plaster them all over campus,” Yow recalled, so a local publication referred to them as a “poster band.” Mr. Epp and the Calculations was another poster band, formed by a teenage Mark Arm in 1980, years before Green River and Mudhoney. Since they were, you know, in a band, Arm and another member split the cost of a cheap pawnshop guitar. “We didn’t know how to tune it,” Arm admitted and then corrected himself: “We didn’t know what tuning
was
.”
    We knew what tuning was. But we didn’t have a tuner. Ever been at a show where the guitarist starts checking his tuning at full volume? Add a lot of cluelessness, multiply that guitarist by two, and you have a pretty good idea of what our rehearsals sounded like.
    LATE IN MY FRESHMAN YEAR I STARTED NOTICING AN ASIAN guy around campus. He was skinny, had big, round wire-rimmed glasses, and generally wore oversized white T-shirts, jeans, and black Chuck Taylors. Even before I saw him with Hüsker Dü’s first album tucked under his arm, something about him registered on my punk rock sonar. He knew some of my friends—Oberlin is a small place—and eventually Sooyoung Park and I met and started bonding over music. He was a math major, had a show on WOBC, played bass in a campus pop band called Tall Neighbors. Like me, he was very nerdy, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Sooyoung also had a hardcore band called Easter Trauma back home in Charleston, West Virginia, and one of their songs, which he wrote and I loved, got some airplay on WOBC. He was writing others, too, but when he showed them to Tall Neighbors, they plainly didn’t fit.
    Tall Neighbors fell apart in the fall of our sophomore year, an event that seemed to throw Sooyoung and me together. He found me in the campus library soon afterward, and though we weren’t saying much, both of us grinned foolishly, and he was sitting there like he’d already moved in, because—I don’t think we even needed to say it out loud—
we were starting a band.
One that already had a bunch of songs, written by someone who had been in a real band that played real shows opening for bands whose names I recognized. (Albeit ones no one listens to today, like DOA and Social Unrest.)
    Not until I wrote that paragraph did I realize that Sooyoung effectively poached me from my own band, and yet I was happy about it.
    It was incredibly important to me that Sooyoung had been in a hardcore band, because I desperately wanted to play really fast. So I was disappointed when, at our first practice, I met Sooyoung’s drummer friend, Jay, a brilliant political science major who was sleeping with the high-strung politicawho ran WOBC, a tough chick with long brown hair and a doll’s giant blue eyes. I quickly learned to