Your Band Sucks Read Online Free PDF

buttoned to the throat, boys who looked like they wanted really badly to be in the Cure. It wasn’t even called “indie rock” back then. We generally stuck to “punk rock,” since it was hard to use a more common term du jour—“alternative”—with anything like a straight face.
    Oberlin is a small, reasonably pretty college town situated within a landscape so featureless that a hill is an event. The closest major city is a forty-five-minute drive, and since that city is Cleveland, you kept your expectations low. The skies over the college were almost always gray as you passed the old stone buildings and crisscrossed the quad, shoulders hunched against the wind, hurrying down brick paths to get to the two-street town. (Oberlin has a unique microclimate, which is a polite way to say it rained all the time and stayed cold until early May.) Among us music freaks, the boys wore flannels and ripped jeans and plain white T-shirts—they were cheap, and available everywhere. Quite a few of the girls dressed like that, too, though those with good thrift-store instincts opted for secondhand dresses or skirts with dark tights. It was acceptable, and even desirable, for everything to be oversized and slouchy—a terrible idea today, but a common one when no manufacturer made jeans that actually fit. We were also big on discarded classic-rock concert T-shirts, picked up secondhand for a buck or less, decades before they went on sale at places like Barneys for hundreds of dollars. (The bassist in one campus band sometimes wore a perfectly faded black Pink Floyd tee, the one with the pig from
Animals
on the front. Today he could practically make a mortgage payment with it.) We all wore sneakers or combat boots or motorcycle boots. Long coats for most, and faded denim or army surplus jackets for the stonier types. The boys let their hair get shaggy or cut it very short, and never used any kind of product. The girls made more of an effort, dyeing theirs blond or black or burgundy. Many of us smoked. Cigarettes occupied your hands during those twenty years until smartphones were invented. That all this became a look, in the fashion sense, a few years later, after some Seattle bands got big—well, we found that hilarious. We dressed that way to
avoid
having a look.
    Nestled outside a third-floor window in the student union building, a clock radio tuned to the campus station was almost always on. The sound cascaded down the building’s sandstone front, beamed across an adjacent lawn, and bounced off the other nearby buildings, creating an unusual amplifying effect: from fifty or even a hundred yards away, you heard it loud and clear, as if it came through a set of speakers far bigger and better than any the station owned.
    Steam clouds hung in the air over the campus power plant. Spring would come one day, we were sure of it.
    Left to our own devices far from anywhere, with no adults around, none of us had any idea what we were doing. But there was also no one to say you were doing it wrong. Anyway, what were you supposed to take cues from in 1985? Commercial radio and MTV were wastelands. Many college radio stations were still content to play the overproduced and underwhelming major-label “alternative” bands of the time, like the Woodentops and China Crisis and Aztec Camera, bands no one liked then and no one remembers now. Once a year
Rolling Stone
would cover some other going-nowhere, penny-ante sort-of-subculture and the bands it spawned—the Paisley Underground and the Three O’Clock! Roots rockers like the BoDeans and the Del Fuegos! (The Del Fuegos got started at Oberlin; their frontman, Dan Zanes, now writes songs for well-bred toddlers.)
Those
records you could find everywhere. But you had to strain so hard to get even the teeniest buzz from them.
    A very strong hippie streak persisted on campus. Deadheads and tie-dye were everywhere, as were men with ass-length hair,