Your Band Sucks Read Online Free PDF Page A

without explanation, and I lurched outside to pee.
    Then the car quietly drove off.
    There were no lights anywhere nearby, and the night was absolutely black. The swamp gurgled, stirred, breathed, belched, grunted, sighed, bubbled. Sounds piled atop sounds. Things thrashed in the muck. It was impossible to know what was real and what was not. I peered into the dark and saw patterns and flickers. Anything could be lurking in the enormous soup that began a few yards in front of me, though I was already sort of unable to discern where I stopped and the swamp started. Miles from home, in a remote nature preserve, late at night. I could reasonably expect to see no cars till morning. Maybe I was just together enough to walk home, if I knew the way. But I didn’t.
    Time, too, distorted, so I don’t know how long I stood there, but at some point the car pulled up again, and the back door swung open. No one said anything. Andy and Mike stared straight ahead in the front seats, unsmiling, and had no explanation when I asked why, other than to say: “Because.”
    These guys, I remind you, were my best friends.
    ***
    THERE HAD TO BE SOMETHING ELSE. BUT WHAT?
    In junior high school I’d failed to convince one of the few guys even less cool than me to start playing bass, but prospects seemed better in high school. For one thing: I could now play bar chords. Andy was another smart underachiever (short version: I smoked pot daily and sold it ineptly; he had far worse grades), and he and I had similar taste. He had a Telecaster—even then I hated Teles, but whatever—and, like me, a lousy solid-state Peavey amp. We tried playing together, but whether we worked from sheet music or attempted to play by ear, it didn’t work. A song as simple as R.E.M.’s “7 Chinese Brothers” completely eluded us. It wasn’t until after I got to college that I learned about drone strings: playing two strings together, leaving one open, and working your way up and down the fretboard on the other. Once you know that, you can play “7 Chinese Brothers” in five minutes. But as with everything else, learning that in the suburbs in the eighties was a matter of groping blindly in the dark. I know, I know, it’s a total
cliché to even bother pointing this out, but it’s still true: life was much lonelier and more isolated without any entrée to interesting music and the people who flocked to it, without a band, and without any band culture. If you were surrounded by assholes hostile to the fact of your existence, it was easy to assume that everyone everywhere would be like that, for the rest of your life.
I
assumed that. No one could point me to a control group that proved that life could be different. No one like me knew it wasn’t our fault. Or that there were even enough of
us
somewhere to create a bigger
our
, one that encompassed more people than the few freaks we hung out with.
    But there were ten or fifteen or fifty kids like us in most high schools. There were a few hundred in every small city and thousands in each state. There were a hundred thousand or more in America and a few hundred thousand more worldwide. There was plenty of kindling. Something was about to happen.

The Importance of a Tiny Stage
    P ictures from the early days of any rock or art movement always display discordant details. No style has been codified, everyone looks too young, and a kind of aesthetic baby fat blurs many edges. Photos from Sex Pistols gigs show dudes in the crowd with mustaches and seventies hair. In shots from the early hippie days, there’s always at least one guy with hair that wouldn’t be out of place at IBM. So it was with indie rock when I first really discovered it upon arriving at Oberlin College in August 1985. What ultimately became a blend of hippie, punk, and hobo still had jarring touches of eighties MTV here and there: mushroom-shaped or asymmetric hair, boys in tight black shirts