Your Band Sucks Read Online Free PDF Page B

whom you’d see playing hacky sack on the quad. Hideous scarves and ponchos hand-knit by the oppressed indigenous peoples of Nicaragua, etc., passed for fashion statements, and people showed off by pronouncing “Nicaragua” with the correctly rolled “r.” I was still at an age when any hardcore band yapping about how much Reagan sucked sounded pretty good, but at Oberlin I got disgusted with lefty politics almost immediately. Still, I lucked out by ending up there, and one big reason was my freshman-year roommate, Linc, an extremely skinny, short-haired, pale-skinned music autodidact from suburban L.A. He was wearing a Meat Puppets T-shirt the day we moved in. He was clearly much cooler than me, but more important, he was much more
knowing
than me. He owned every record SST put out—I barely knew Black Flag; he was already over them—back when that signified something. Linc had heard everything I’d heard, everything I wanted to hear, and everything I didn’t know I wanted to hear, had answers for almost every musical question I posed, and brought a few hundred carefully annotated cassettes with him to school.
    The second reason I lucked out by attending Oberlin was its radio station, WOBC, staffed by music nuts and, in the classic sense of college radio, unformatted. (Too many college radio stations back then mimicked commercial radio, with programmers insisting that DJs choose among songs placed in “rotation.” That would
never
fly with the freaks of WOBC.) At station headquarters in the student union building, entire walk-in closets were stuffed floor to ceiling with old records—you could get lost in them for hours, and I often did—and a few mail crates overflowing with telltale square cardboard packages arrived each day. The college was continually pissed off at the radio station, because the collective weight of those records made the old floors sag, requiring regular reinforcement. I graduated in 1989, and I’m not sure the station even owned a CD player by the time I left.
    WOBC’s office had all the institutional charm of a military recruiting center, albeit with more smokers and fewer ashtrays. Everything in the control room appeared to be government-surplus gear from the fifties, if not earlier. The occasional giveaway poster from random bands like the Raunch Hands or the Reducers passed for decoration. Ceiling tiles were past yellowing and getting well into brown. Couches sagged and groaned when you sat on them, and smelled like an old man’s flannel shirt. DJs coughed their colds into the decaying gray foam covering the on-air mike and made one another sick. A crescent of metal protruded from the giant black speaker in the lounge, on which someone had scrawled in white wax pencil: THIS IS NOT AN ASHTRAY YOU ASSHOLE . I adored it all, spent every minute there I could, and, like everyone else, started with a weeknight 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. show.
    WOBC was also a link, however tenuous, to the occasional concert in Cleveland. Early in my freshman year I won free tickets from the station to see the jangly Austin band Zeitgeist. It was a weeknight, and there were maybe twenty people at the club. But forget the music, which was mildly interesting at best. A friend, who earned my plus-one by borrowing a station wagon for the trip there, spent much of the night at the bar, hanging out with the woman who played second guitar for Zeitgeist, because here it wasn’t arenas, backstage passes, and limousines, and there was hardly any barrier between performer and fan. You could know these people. A really important thing about this world, because your real influences were ultimately the people you
knew
: the friends with whom you hung out, went to shows, traded tapes, and talked endlessly about music.
    Oberlin was just a few thousand kids, but it midwifed a shocking number of real bands that wrote and played their own material every weekend at dorm lounge parties