Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Read Free Book Online Page A

steer clear of arguing with him, not just because he made mincemeat of any opposing view but because great mounds of spit bubbled from the corners of his mouth when he got worked up, and he got very worked up over politics. The bigger problems were that he was a hippie and a Deadhead and smoked pot. I hated pot with a convert’s zeal, having quit at college, and despised the Dead. Worse, Jay couldn’t play fast. But there were barely any other drummers on campus. Also, that WOBC connection couldn’t hurt.
    Sooyoung had a set’s worth of songs, so all we had to do was learn them and rehearse. Which we did. To the chagrin of Ribbons of Flesh, I started channeling all my ardor into this new band, and Linc and Doug, sensing that I thought they needed summer school, started practicing on their own. But by then I was already gone. I don’t remember if we ever had a real conversation about my leaving, and it’s possible we never did. (Already I was learning the finer points of indie rock passive aggression.)
    We named our new band while Sooyoung and I sat at the radio station with a few friends contemplating a flyer announcing our first show, which lay on a table amid a bunch of discarded paste-on letters. The flyer was finished, except for the blank space where the band name belonged. But no matter how long we stared at it, nothing appeared. Someone started talking about a particularly good-looking DJ at the station, a guy who had fabulous success with women. I mumbled a bad attempt at a joke that involved calling him a bitch magnet, a bit of some Southern slang I’d learned. Sooyoung started cracking up and gasped, “That’s it!” and then he was pasting letters on the flyer.
    We got shit
forever
for that name. When our records were reissued in 2011, a couple of reviewers claimed that it was a key reason we never got the recognition they thought we deserved. I know now that it’s a bad idea to choose a name that lets people easily dismiss you as not being serious, or that makes them laugh or do a spit-take. (Vomit Launch’s second album,
Exiled Sandwich
, is pretty great—a lovely, all-over-the-place artifact from people who’d just learned to play together—but good luck explaining that to someone who doesn’t already know that.) All I can say in our defense is that Sooyoung and I were
teenagers
. We weren’t really thinking about the long term.
    ***
    IF YOU WERE IN A BAND AT OBERLIN AND BURNING TO PERFORM , you spent the beginning of each week searching for someone planning a party that weekend and then worked on them to let your band play it. Then you tried to rent one of the few PAs on campus, for vocals. That part was politically tricky, since the guys who did have PAs generally played in bands that you didn’t want playing at your party, so often you borrowed one or (ideally) two bass amps and ran the vocal mikes through those instead. Before each gig Sooyoung and I would spend hours constructing and copying flyers and taping them up all over campus. He was very good with X-ACTO knives and photocopiers, both necessary tools in 1986. He knew that Oberlin’s art library had the best copy machine in town, and that the town copy shop stocked multiple colors of copier ink, and you could swap out these different colors and rerun flyers through the machine for interesting effects. My favorite early Bitch Magnet flyer has an image copied in blue and then red ink, on green paper, with a blown-up black typewriter font announcing the particulars.
    My other favorite flyer—which totally cracked me up when Sooyoung showed it to me—was a brilliant deadpan joke, and spelled out, over and over again, in white block lettering against a jet-black background, a song title from the Thrown Ups’ most recent single. Being disgusted that everyone around you was doing it wrong—as I was in high school—was always a good reason to start a band. But it was