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

still hilarious to see it expressed as baldly as this:
    YOUR BAND SUCKS
    You set up and played in living rooms. You set up and played in dorm lounges. You set up and played in spare bedrooms. You set up and played in actual bedrooms. I sent my mom a photo of Bitch Magnet playing in a kitchen, crammed in alongside the refrigerator and stove. What Fell? appeared with us that night and thought through that setting more carefully: before they started performing, they put freshly mixed batter in the oven, and after their last song, they served warm cake.
    I cannot sufficiently thank the people who, after the barest introductions, helped us become a less-bad band by letting us play in their homes, and tolerated us—well, me—flinging their way full cups of beer, or, on the night Sooyoung and I suddenly decided in mid-song to strip down to our underwear, articles of clothing. (We each arrived at that decision spontaneously, or, rather, it just sort of happened, but perhaps presciently Sooyoung kicked off our set that night by cheerfully informing everyone they’d be really sorry they stuck around to see us.) If I were them and they were me, I doubt I’d have been as generous.
    I’d get as cranky as a quitting smoker if a couple of weekends went by without a show, because, really, what else was there to do?
Study?
Days were better spent daydreaming about the next party we’d play, or cueing up tapes Sooyoung made of his newest song sketches and working on them until they were ready to play live. There was the crackle of possibility in each new cassette Sooyoung shared, in each new step forward every song suggested, and when you’re just getting started, each morsel of progress rocks you like a revelation. Hunched up against a hallway wall in Sooyoung’s dorm, squinting in that awful institutional combination of fluorescent light and deep shadow, we sat chatting while Sooyoung noodled on his bass and suddenly started to repeat a riff that made me whip my head around. “What’s that?” I demanded. The part to a new song, he explained, and repeated it over and over again, looking away, nodding in time, eyes half open, bass slung low: cool but quietly pleased with himself.
    I remember listening to a tape of an early show at the library with Jay, passing one set of headphones back and forth, flashing teeth at each other like Cheshire cats, alit with the joy of playback. But Jay, it was clear, wasn’t obsessed like Sooyoung and me. He was also playing in another band at Oberlin with two of his best friends. They were all long-haired, unabashedly hippie, and jammed onstage a lot, so I hated them. Named, for some unfathomable reason, Boo Boo Kitty, they once got a gig on the same night as a Bitch Magnet show. When Jay opted to play with Boo Boo Kitty, Sooyoung and I borrowed What Fell?’s drummer, Noah.
    Shortly afterward Sooyoung dropped by where I lived and, on his way out, paused to ask, “Do you think Jay is holding us back?”
    Yes, I agreed, but in the end our slutting around with other drummers made the decision for us. Sooyoung and I had also recorded a ten-song Bitch Magnet cassette—our first—with a seriously good drummer he knew in West Virginia, who played in an actual hardcore band. (
He
could play fast.) Jay was pissed about the recording and pissed about the show we had played without him, and during an outraged lunch at a campus dining hall, he quit.
    We were, we figured, screwed. Except that while Pay the Man was no longer around—Chris had graduated the previous spring, and Mike left with him—Orestes was back at school and wanted to play with us. What can I say about him? He looked, and drank, like a jock. He was the captain of the rugby team. You could easily mistake him for a meathead—because he
was
kind of a meathead—but then he’d start reciting long, dirty passages from
The
Canterbury Tales
in the original Middle English, or