Your Band Sucks Part 3

I liked how our rehearsal room smelled of old amp tubes heating up. I liked the staticky way the PA crackled into life after you flipped its switch. I liked the ancient and unbelievably crude graffiti in the hallways where we practiced, especially the extraordinarily specific screed that instructed "you, the f.a.ggot," to suck diarrhea from a fat black man's a.s.shole, with a straw, so that "he doesn't even have to push." (The detail that shot it into the stratosphere, I thought, was using the word fat.) I liked having a nodding acquaintance with Ronald Shannon Jackson, the ultra-bada.s.s drummer who'd played with Albert Ayler and who practiced down the hall. I liked how, whenever we loaded in our gear at three in the morning after a show, we'd hear him drumming to what sounded like a CD playing backward while a thick scent of pot drifted toward us. I liked knowing I could go to the practice s.p.a.ce late at night if I needed to, because sometimes I needed to, when it was my only friend. I liked how Sundays were practice day, so starting with whatever show I attended Friday night, it was basically all rock until Monday morning.

I liked-no, I loved-my guitar rig, once I figured it out: a Gibson Les Paul Custom, or a Yamaha SG-2000, each with a Seymour Duncan JB pickup in the bridge position, into a Rat distortion pedal and a four-input Hiwatt Custom 100 amp going into a jet-black custom-made speaker cabinet that weighed more than I did, which we nicknamed the Beast. I liked reading about weird seventies guitars and amps and effects and trying to track them down, long before the Internet indexed everything and bargains disappeared. (I don't like remembering the crazy deals I missed out on while broke, like the gorgeous sixties Fender Jazzmaster on sale in Cleveland for four hundred bucks in 1991. Today it would cost four grand, at least.) I liked discovering a once-grand music store that lasted for decades in Newark, even as the surrounding neighborhood grew deserted and scary, and rooting through its boxes of old effects pedals, panning for gold, for something old and obscure that still worked or could be fixed. I liked finding an original and unused Orange head from the seventies there and buying it for slightly more than $300 in 1989, because with it I achieved my favorite guitar sound on record-the power chords on b.i.t.c.h Magnet's "Ducks and Drakes"-and because that amp still sounds great today. I liked the tiny adjustments I learned to make to my guitars, like tweaking intonation and replacing pickups, because this work was profoundly calming.

I liked handwriting the set list each night, and I liked identifying songs by shorthand or in-jokes so no one in the front rows could know what was coming. I liked being onstage, even if, for many years, I wasn't quite sure what to do once I was up there and remembered so little of it afterward. Not because I went into a trance, or because I walked onstage into a dream that made no sense once I woke up, or because the excitement created a blur in which only a few moments registered, like images glimpsed while riding a roller coaster, though every show was its own roller coaster. But because everything that happened up there vanished once the music stopped, lost in the stage lights and the adrenaline and the confusion from surfing so many currents at the same time: the songs, the sound, the volume, the crowd, the tiny changes bandmates made onstage, the parts I improvised every night. I liked having long, curly hair to hide behind when a show was going bad, and to fling around when it was going well.

I liked how some people in the crowd watched with real intent while you were just setting up. I liked how diehard fans planted themselves by the lip of the stage for all the opening bands and grimly held that position all night, never leaving to pee or grab a beer. I liked finding that guy-or was it having that guy find us?-in Columbia, South Carolina; or Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts; or Savannah, Georgia; or Eugene, Oregon. The smaller towns could surprise you. The first time b.i.t.c.h Magnet arrived in Morgantown, West Virginia, we had no idea what to expect-and we found a packed room, and when we played, more people stage-dove than at any show I ever played, anywhere. I booked Morgantown on every possible tour thereafter. The shows were always good, though the local economy was always depressed, so the crowd was too broke to buy much merch. But pretty much everyone there had weed, if that was your thing. (Though by then, alas, it wasn't my thing.) I liked staring into the eyes of random people in the audience until they looked away. I liked alternating coffee and beer before the show on the nights I was tired. I liked drinking two beers, no more, before the set, but I also liked the nights when I drank one or two too many and was a little looser and sloppier onstage. I liked how playing in a band was license to talk to anyone at the club. I liked working the merch table just after the show-wired, sweating, hollering-because how could you not like meeting people there and hearing them say, in sometimes stammery syntax, how much your band meant to them. I liked meeting the biggest music nerds in each town and hearing about the good local bands, even if those bands weren't always as good as you wanted. I liked having a backstage to escape to, even if backstage itself was often a s.h.i.thole. (People f.u.c.ked on those sagging, cigarette-pocked couches that stank of armpits and stale grief? Yes. They did.) I liked the club at the end of the night, after everyone had left, because I liked knowing the arc of a full day there and not just the brief interval its customers saw.

I liked how being on tour moved you in a perfect counter-rhythm to the nine-to-five world: your adrenaline rose when it ebbed for those at work and peaked after they went to bed. I liked how unmoored, how far out from sh.o.r.e, you were after a few weeks on tour. The minor insanities of your day-to-day: the fast food and cheap beer, the c.u.mulative fatigue and hangover, the rising preshow tension and its ecstatic onstage release, the ringing ears, the squalor in the van and the houses where you crashed. I liked the drug-dealer feeling you got on tour from carrying a bag containing thousands and thousands of dollars in cash, sometimes in a jumbled rainbow of many different currencies. I liked learning that the smell of American money is like sour wood and sweat, gamy and slightly sick-making, which you didn't know until you kept a lot in a very tight s.p.a.ce. I liked hearing other bands' disgusting, tragic, and hilarious road stories, the strange things each band did, like how members of A Minor Forest would shove dozens of slices of steam-table pizza from all-you-can-eat joints into a shoulder bag, dump them on the dashboard of their van, and survive off them for the next several days, or how they'd buy twenty or more breakfast tacos from Tamale House every time they played Austin and do the same thing. ("They would stay pretty well," their drummer, Andee Connors, a.s.sured me.) I wanted to stay on the road forever: Sell the house sell the car sell the kids find someone else forget it I'm never coming back, not that I had any of those things to sell or anyone to not come back to. I hated how each tour eventually deposited you, without mercy, at work on Monday morning after you barely made it back home a few hours earlier, blinking bloodshot eyes at the bright fluorescent lights, feeling abandoned and far from love.

I liked the eight or ten or fifteen fanzines I read religiously, and the excitement I felt when they irregularly appeared. I liked See Hear, the all-zine store in a bas.e.m.e.nt on New York's East Seventh Street. I liked that I could make it there and back during lunch hour from the small architecture firm where I worked my first job after college, from late '89 until the following fall, when I quit to tour America and Europe with b.i.t.c.h Magnet. It was the only thing I liked about that job.

I liked ca.s.settes-demo tapes, mix tapes-their covers made from colored markers and collages on photocopy machines. These were perhaps the defining relics of this culture's handmade ethos, and today they exist almost entirely as pure objects, since only diehards like me kept their tape decks. I liked the tapes and letters that would arrive at the band's post office box from fans with whom we'd traded addresses while on the road. I liked opening that PO box with a sense of antic.i.p.ation that I never felt when opening the mailbox at my apartment, and I didn't even mind waiting in the achingly slow line to pick up packages sent there.

I liked dubbing ca.s.settes of my band and sending them to labels, along with a self-addressed postcard, on which they sometimes responded. I liked staying late at work to make flyers for upcoming shows on the office copy machine, and I liked carefully carrying home thick stacks of them, still warm and smelling of ink and chemicals. I even sort of liked mixing wheat paste and water in a bucket until it reached a disturbingly s.e.m.e.nlike consistency, and hanging flyers all over the East Village at night back when you could do that without getting arrested. I liked how a few Vineland flyers stayed up for years in some nooks along First Avenue.

I liked walking around on weekend days, searching for sights or an a.s.sociation or a sc.r.a.p of an overheard conversation from which I could squeeze a line or two, a seed for a song, like the homeless guy shaving the other homeless guy in a doorway, who turned up in the Vineland song "Archetype." I liked staying up all night with people I just met. I liked-and was always awed and moved-when people in each new city adopted you for a few hours or a day, took care of you, showed you around, showed you cool stuff you didn't know. I liked the intensity that attached itself to those relationships, and your condensed togethernesses whenever you met on the road or in each other's hometown. I liked hosting other members of our tribe in my city and taking them to my circuit of dive bars, record stores, and cheap restaurants. I liked meeting people whose records I knew. I liked the way people reflected where they grew up and where they lived-Seattle, Cleveland, Richmond, Charlotte, Austin-as well as our commonalities that transcended origins and accents. I liked learning local slang in one region and introducing it to another-"dookie" for "s.h.i.t," years before Green Day stole it; "dodgy" for "unreliable"; "wheef" for "pot." (Wheef came about when we almost certainly misheard something said by Urge Overkill's Ed Roeser, but we liked saying bad wheef way too much to drop it.) I liked coming back from Europe with a few affectations that let those who could hear the dog whistle know where you'd been: a phrase in German, some new British slang, a taste for a cigarette hard to find in the States, like the red-pack Gauloises Blondes one friend bought by the carton from the duty-free after every tour. I liked leaving graffiti for friends in other bands backstage at clubs in Europe: LYLE HYSEN: CALL YOUR MOTHER. BRITT AND BRIAN: MAKE SURE YOUR VAN HAS SEATBELTS.

I liked the way all this effectively organized and structured my life. I liked that we all found this way to stay young, well into our twenties at first, and then well beyond. I liked believing that we knew something most everyone else didn't. I liked believing that this culture was going to change music. I liked believing that it would last forever. Because, for a while, that was easy to believe.

Why We Never Smiled Onstage.

Late one weeknight in the late nineties I sat in a bar in Chicago with Damon Che, the drummer for Don Caballero, the instrumental quartet for which I briefly played guitar. Broke full-time musicians hold a few trump cards, and we were playing one: nights were our days, we had nowhere to go in the morning, so tonight we'd stay out forever. We nursed our drinks, savoring the practically empty room and the quiet settling over the city.

Damon is an enormously talented drummer and guitarist, but often it seems his primary skill is burning bridges. To cite just one example, while on tour with Bellini in 2002, he quit the band onstage in Georgia, loaded his gear into the van, and drove home alone, leaving all the other members stranded. This was especially bad form since two of the three remaining Bellini members live in Sicily. So, yes, Damon has a bad temper. When I first practiced with Don Cab, witnessing his rages was unsettling, since he's around six foot three and his head is roughly the size of my torso. (The other members of the band were so inured to such displays they looked bored whenever he erupted, an affect I soon imitated.) Still, Damon had spent practically every sentient moment since grade school thinking about music or playing it or both. However enormous a pain in the a.s.s he could be, he came up with stuff, on drums and guitar, that no one else in the world could. He also had an autodidact's unique perceptions of music, and of any other culture that interested him. This last part made him a very good person to get slowly drunk with after midnight on a Tuesday, and as we did we got to talking about a musician we knew. We both liked him and all, but Damon, like me, was pretty whatever about his band. They were really great guys, but "really great guys" is the absolute kiss of death if it's the first thing you say about a band.

Damon's beef was that the band was unrelentingly modest, in the manner of many at that time: understated, too shy for grand gestures, and whatever color they applied stayed very much within the lines. But this was the interesting thing. He didn't say the band sucked. He said that he didn't understand it. He wanted to know: why would anyone aim for something so plainly unambitious?

Exactly, I thought. Both of us wanted something more from music than mere entertainment. Something much more than merely cerebral, "cerebral" being a very easy fallback for a subgenre that practically required a college diploma from its partic.i.p.ants. Too much music, we knew, only tickled the surface and never explored the vast untapped areas that were just sitting there. I liked playing music that came from the head, guts, and crotch. Anything else was pointless. If you weren't going for power-or just to be really weird, or to do something that hadn't already been done a thousand times, or something big-I didn't understand why, either. We had such powerful weapons in hand-guitars, distortion, drums, amps, volume-so why charge toward such a small hill? Cormac McCarthy voiced the literary version of this idea back when he gave his first interview in 1992: "A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange," he said. They weren't dealing with life-and-death issues, and McCarthy didn't see the point in writing about anything else.

I wanted to play, and hear, music that was physically involving. I wanted sound to physically affect the audience. I wanted it loud enough to feel it. Some people want a song to speak to them. I wanted to disappear into the sound. I know, I know, I'm supposed to say that you can't crescendo at 125 decibels all the time, and there's supposed to be that blend of light and shade, as Jimmy Page famously wanted for Led Zeppelin. But screw that. Because some of my favorite records, like Minor Threat's first 7s or Slayer's Reign in Blood or p.r.o.ng's Primitive Origins, do nothing but amp up every moment to the absolute max.

Bland bands had always popped up in American indie rock, but as the eighties turned into the nineties, such bands-watered-down, polite, average-were getting harder and harder to ignore. In the fall of 1992 I walked out of CBGB, utterly bored by a hotly hyped band from Chicago. I didn't see the point of the Smashing Pumpkins, and nothing I heard later by them changed my mind. They struck me as middling arena rock crafted with some slightly different ingredients: better guitar sounds and heavier distortion, basically. I didn't mind the arena-sized ambitions, which you could sense even then. I minded how dull it all was. Even before then, I remember my heart sinking when the Pixies started getting big: there was so much else going on that was so much more interesting. This was what people were going for?

But I still don't think I'm explaining this properly.

If I could reach through these words, grab your throat, and squeeze until you struggled to breathe-would you understand me then?

If I played you a song and the final chord in each verse crashed upon you like a piano falling from a skysc.r.a.per, as it does in f.u.c.ked Up's "Crooked Head"-would you understand me then?

If the drummer drags the beat with his kick drum, sending the sensation to your reptile brain that rolls your eyeb.a.l.l.s toward the back of your head, if the guitarist's overtones are so intense you start seeing angels, if the singer screams not like every other singer has screamed since the dawn of time but instead surfaces the terror and dread that you spend your entire waking life trying to tamp down- Would you understand me then?

Then maybe you can understand everything that a well-crafted, essentially polite rock song can never express.

SOME PERFORMERS ARE DESPERATE TO BE LOVED. THEY WANT to ingratiate. They're part of a long tradition that encompa.s.ses vaudeville-though I'm sure it was around before then-and most performers in musicals. In her prime Liza Minnelli was likely its apotheosis. A slightly more recent example is Ozzy Osbourne, who performs as if his life depends on an audience clapping along-save Tinkerbell! but more metal!-and who's been screaming onstage, since the earliest Black Sabbath shows, "We love you ALL!" over and over again, a boyfriend saying he loves you so you have to say you love him back. Aside from the Clash's sanctimony and overall Springsteen tendencies, another reason I never liked them was that Joe Strummer struck me as an overly needy front guy. He wanted agreement. He wanted approval. (And Joe was no Liza when it came to working it.) Bands playing the softer styles of indie rock were generally ingratiators. Salem 66, the jangly Boston band, showed up on one alb.u.m cover dressed up and hanging out around a dining room table, in what appears to be the aftermath of a dinner party. But "Hey! come join! civilized fun!" is always a questionable idea to telegraph with your cover art, unless you want people to a.s.sociate your record with brunch.

Other performers want to dominate, like Beyonce and Madonna and James Brown and Black Flag and Miles Davis and Swans. They don't want to be loved, though they may be happy being worshipped. They aren't solicitous of an audience. They're there to overwhelm. Another kind of performer, like Sonic Youth in their prime, plays as if the audience isn't even present. Performing, for them, is like breathing, or drinking coffee: natural and very cool, in the sense of "removed." But you have to be really good at that sort of detachment to make it work.

I liked the natural approach. But onstage I wanted to dominate. I didn't want to see smiles in the audience. I wanted to see people looking slightly stunned, as if something very large had just struck them and they were trying to calculate whether that collision was very bad or very good. I wanted awe, not affection. I didn't even need applause. Spa.r.s.e and tentative clapping was enough, if the crowd seemed sufficiently concussed and they were still slowly processing what had happened. (Though hearing screams was always pretty great.) b.i.t.c.h Magnet played the Kaikoo festival in Tokyo in 2012, and we ended our set with "Sea of Pearls," a fairly poppy song by our standards. Halfway through it I saw a woman in the front row smiling and wagging her head to the beat from side to side, back and forth, back and forth. I immediately thought, s.h.i.t, ugh, failure. Pop songs-songs that ingratiate-elicit this blandly pleasant side-to-side bop. Songs that hit harder make an audience snap heads up and down: the headbanger's response. That's what I wanted to see.

When friends and family who hadn't spent years obsessing over punk rock saw my bands play, they almost always mentioned one thing: we didn't smile onstage. They found that puzzling. But not smiling made perfect sense to us. For one thing, we were playing fairly complicated and athletic music, which required concentration. But there was more to it than that. You smile when you're nervous. You smile while on a bad date. You smile during excruciating job interviews. You smile greeting the relatives you hate. But you don't smile when you come, when you cross the finish line after running a marathon, when a good Samaritan pulls you from the surf onto wet sand, rescued, when the firemen save your house from burning down, or when the surgeon, in his scrubs, trudges to the waiting room to tell you that everything turned out fine.

In February 1986 I saw Hsker D headline the Phantasy in Cleveland. They were touring behind Flip Your Wig, a fairly toned-down record, but the night was strictly old-school Hskers: all the songs sped up, running into each other without pause, at an unG.o.dly volume. The show was basically one giant, continuous grinding sound, like a truck dumping a load of large rocks. Sometimes I thought I recognized a lyric. Down front, where I stood, was too chaotic and unformed to warrant being called a pit. As the show went on, row after row of the old-school bolted-in theater seats-the cla.s.sic red velour ones that snap upright when you stand-got destroyed. The entire night swung wildly between ecstasy and absolute terror, and at any moment it was impossible to tell which pole you'd be flung to next. Sometimes I think I'd have to survive another car wreck to feel that way again. I don't know what to call that sensation, though I desperately hope I have it a few more times before I die. Whatever it was, it didn't make me smile. But I didn't go to punk rock shows for fun. I needed something that, for just a moment, got its hands around everything too complicated and intense for language. I didn't want anything happy, and I hadn't for a very long time.

One night when I was sixteen, stoned and sitting in a friend's borrowed beige Chrysler outside a convenience store, a pal bolted from the front seat to chat up a girl he knew. I watched the entire conversation, and she seemed really happy. She smiled the entire time, big enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes. Her eyes shone in the parking lot lights, and inasmuch as eyes can laugh, hers did. It was winter and the windows were closed, so I couldn't hear anything, but she c.o.c.ked her head back and forth whenever she spoke and looked like she punctuated everything with a little giggle. She was really cute, too. And I hated her. I hated her because she was happy and I wasn't, and back then I thought if you were happy, you had to be an idiot. I thought, She doesn't know how important it is to hate something. She doesn't know the joy of being hated and hating back. She doesn't know the power of being hated and having nothing to lose. She doesn't know what it's like when it's February and you don't have a Valentine, because you never have a Valentine, and the sky's been a giant bruise for weeks, and the streets run with slush, and everyone is shuffling through their midwinter light-deprived catatonia, but you know you have a secret, shining like a newly formed sun-this determination to get back at everyone-and it not only keeps you moving but you catch yourself thinking, I don't care if it's never summer again, I have all the wattage I need.

No. She didn't know any of that. Nor the buried-deep, hot nuggets of self-hatred that feeling fed on. Nor the moments of sudden violence common to male adolescence.

A few months later I went on a first date with the freshman girl with new-wave hair in my French cla.s.s. Sarah. She lived in Millington, a town more rural than mine, in a big old house atop a hill, which you reached by following a series of short dirt roads. I picked her up one night after spring rains had made them muddy. I pulled out of one intersection a little too fast and sprayed some mud on the car behind me. Or at least that's what the guys in that car were screaming when they pulled up beside us at the next stop sign.

Mistake number one: I poked my head out my window to see why they were yelling. One of them s.n.a.t.c.hed the eyegla.s.ses right off my face. Mistake number two: I got out of the car.

As with s.e.x or performance, the particulars of physical confrontations are blurry afterward, and in this case they were particularly blurry because I couldn't see anything. But very soon after I got out of the car, I was mopping mud off their car with my denim jacket. Then these guys-swarming and jabbering, stinking like hyenas-started throwing me onto the filthy hood, hard enough to send me scudding up and onto the windshield. After a few rounds of this, they tore off my T-shirt, shoved my gla.s.ses into my hand, and drove off, laughing and hollering. Happy first date, punker!

I ended up wearing Sarah's sweatshirt that night, and later she taught me how to French kiss, or, rather, I guessed correctly enough, and we became a thing, and for the next few months we rubbed against each other and stuck our hands inside each other's pants at every possible opportunity, thrilling to the headspins of teenage desire. But what I remember most isn't that, lovely as it was, and it was very lovely. What I remember is how I just accepted what happened that night. How I didn't really fight back.

You carry that knowledge with you every day, and then you're supposed to go home, turn on MTV, and watch the f.u.c.king Romantics?

That's why I didn't smile onstage.

On these stages, in these crowds-here, at last, was the arena in which anger and sadism and revenge and submission finally all made sense. When I was onstage, I wanted to destroy. But when I was in the audience, I wanted to be shoved around by how bands sounded and what they played.

One chilly, gray day at Oberlin-sorry, redundant-I walked around with Sooyoung seriously discussing which was better: being in a band or having a girlfriend. Even though we teenage punk rockers pined, often quite sappily, for a girlfriend, we both picked the band, and it wasn't that hard a choice. Contrary to traditional rock mythologies, we didn't form a band to meet girls. (As you may have guessed from the name.) And, yes, I loved the music. But everyone says they love music. What I really loved, once I got my hands on a guitar, was the power. The electricity it shot straight into your heart. That's why we-well, I guess I just mean me-were doing it. For the voltage you generated by fitting a few distorted chords together with a scratchy vocal line on top. Once you added drums, it got so much bigger. And onstage it got bigger still. It didn't matter if that stage was a corner of a living room in a rented house slowly being destroyed by a different crew of college kids each year, or in an old man's bar on a weeknight, with only five people there. It didn't even matter that it took years for me to understand that being onstage-and finding a way to be onstage that had nothing to do with the arena rock theatrics we hated-required as much practice as playing an instrument. In time, the best of us learned how to fill bigger stages, and those with the right kind of imagination starting having much more fun with the power of such settings.

The Jesus Lizard once played a sold-out show to about a thousand people at the Masquerade. Atlanta's version of the biggest place in town for a touring punk rock band, and a club with a giant dance floor, not a sea of seats. At one point, between songs, David Yow told the crowd that the band had planned something really amazing, but it required the entire audience sitting on the floor. The audience wasn't having it and hooted down the idea. But Yow kept at it, telling them that this thing would be really cool, and unforgettable, but if they were gonna to do it right, everybody had to sit down.

Amazingly enough, a thousand people shrugged and scrunched themselves onto the floor. Yow took in the sight for a long moment.

Then he burst out laughing, and the band launched into the next song.

The Glory, the Madness, and the Van.

The earliest stages of any band were lousy with longing for the moment you could finally stop saying "a van" and start saying "the van." Because nothing was more central to this culture's tiny mythology than our beat-up, barely running vans-they signaled independence, they signaled seriousness, they signaled that we didn't need a tour bus and a driver-no matter how squalid most of them became, no matter that civilians would peer inside, their eyes would go wide, and they'd slowly back away. Everything happened in the van, and much of it stayed there. The wadded McDonald's wrappers covering the floor, mud prints on the top layer from the last time it rained, alongside convenience-store coffee and soda cups, empty plastic bottles, gum and candy wrappers, half-eaten and long-forgotten snacks. Most of which inevitably migrated to the door wells, so every time a door was opened, the van puked out debris. But on the road the van was our home, our castle, our magic carpet, sometimes the setting for a hurried tryst in the parking lot in the back of the club, or even while parked on the street. Half our legends revolved around vans. Like: Just before another all-night drive the guitarist and ba.s.sist ate a bunch of trucker's speed and became so hysterically motormouthed for the entire trip that the other guys demanded that they never, ever do that again. Or: They drove through Nebraska so often that the drummer made a game of trying to make it all the way across the entire state without stopping to pee. Or: They had to drive straight from Oregon to make it to their next show in Chicago, and they each took six-hour shifts and stopped only for gas and bathroom breaks and they made it. Or: They had to drive straight home after the last show of the tour because the ba.s.sist had to be at work at 8:30 the following morning, and they drove all night and dropped him off at 8:25.

After one c.r.a.ppy Boston show we wanted to leave town so badly that we started driving back to my parents' house at 2 a.m., until the wind and the rain pushed us around on the road and my eyes kept closing, and I managed to pilot us off the highway to a quiet country road, where we slept a few hours. I drove home from CBGB after the show, even though it was very late. We drove home from Providence after the show, even though it was very late. We drove home from Philadelphia after the show, even though it was very late, because it was St. Patrick's Day, and I expected all the loud guys and women in high heels and too-short dresses to start puking in the gutters and worse. We drove home from Charlotte after the show, even though it was very late, but home was then New Jersey, and once Orestes and I got to Maryland and it was well into the next day, I understood that this was a very stupid idea. We drove home from Boston after the show, even though it was very late, got back to our practice s.p.a.ce in Hoboken, unloaded the van, took the subway to our apartments, showered and changed, got back on the subway, and went straight to work.

The van was a blue Dodge we bought for six hundred bucks, and the following day we found two unused tickets to an Ace Frehley show in Minneapolis wedged into the backseat (which I flash for a second in the video b.i.t.c.h Magnet made for "Mesentery"). Or it was a Mercedes rental in j.a.pan, and I climbed into the back to sleep alongside the gear, wearing earplugs to block out sound and an eye mask to block out light, and the ba.s.sist leaned over the backseat to snap a picture that looked as if it should accompany a ransom note. Or it was a maroon Plymouth minivan that didn't have enough seating for all of us, so for the duration of the tour we stood a cinderblock between the sliding side door and the back bench, and each morning one band member would grab a pillow, fold it onto the cinderblock, and perch on both for the entire day of traveling. Or it was the generic white Ford Econoline, with only ten thousand miles on the odometer, the floor lining still slick from whatever the car dealer used to wax it, and a power strip that we ran from the front cigarette lighter to charge our laptops and phones, all of which felt luxurious after years of creaking, half-dead vehicles. Or it was the yellow-and-green Dodge from the eighties, previously owned by a lawn-care company, in which, even after years of touring, you could still smell the raw chemical undertone of old fertilizer.

The best place in the van was the loft: the shelf atop all the gear in the back, which you wriggled up onto from the backseat. A simple sheet of plywood nailed onto a very simple frame of four two-by-six posts screwed into the van's floor to keep it stable. You hid the gear underneath, and it also provided a place to store small or squishable items, like sleeping bags and pillows and merch boxes and winter coats. The shelf was rarely more than sixteen inches from the roof of the van, but privacy is hard to come by on tour, and it was an excellent place to nap or escape during the long drives. Shelf life was deeply meditative, because there wasn't much you could do while nestled within such a shallow s.p.a.ce, hemmed in on all sides by boxes of records and CDs and sleeping bags and whatever else got stuffed up there, apart from lying on your back and looking straight up at the sheet-metal roof of the van, vibrating along with the ride. Amazing how thin, how unadorned, that membrane was. The steady white noise of the road was louder up near the roof, and lulling. Once you comfortably understood that you'd be pizza should the van roll over in a wreck, the setting was remarkably restful.

The shelf was also a very good place to whack off into a dirty sock, one of which I mistakenly left up there while on tour with Vineland in 1994. (Sorry, guys.) To steal a pal's observation, the only chance you had for s.e.x in a touring indie rock band was if you played a town where an ex-girlfriend lived, and the privation of such s.e.xless surroundings led some bands to hold tour-long whack-off contests: who could rack up the biggest number? Story goes that one band took this seriously enough to keep track of each member's tally on a patch of sheet metal behind the driver's seat. Said band is driving late one night after a show. Everyone's too tired to talk, and all seems hushed and still. Then one of the guys in the backseat shifts his weight, reaches over, and adds a fresh hash mark beneath his name. Every band had some version of that story-something stomach-turning to the rest of the world that, from inside the van, didn't seem so bad.

Anyway, the disgustingness of any band's van generally hinged on three factors: 1.whether its member were slobs 2.whether they ended each show drenched in sweat 3.whether they used p.i.s.s bottles b.i.t.c.h Magnet was a no for numbers one and three, but every band I ever played in sweated onstage like it was summertime in New Orleans. I didn't discover that some musicians didn't sweat onstage until I interviewed one member of a much gentler band. (Not judging. No, I'm totally judging. Make an effort, for Christ's sake.) Not us. One Vineland drummer sometimes hung his sweat-drenched show shirt in the van after the show so by morning it was dry, albeit crispy from all that salt. Vineland was also not particularly good about item one, which is a nice way of saying we were total slobs, but we were a no for item three. Don Caballero, unfortunately, ticked the yes box for all three items.

So I guess we gotta talk about p.i.s.s bottles, the portable emergency commodes often used by bands, especially those that day-drank the previous night's leftover beer. They were especially popular in bands with more than three members, in which, practically speaking, not every call to nature can be answered with a bathroom visit, because any rest-area stop inevitably meant thirty to forty-five minutes off the road: someone has to use the pay phone, someone else gets on line for a burger, two people mysteriously wander off, and the next thing you know the sun is setting. (Rule of thumb: time spent at rest stops increases exponentially with each additional pa.s.senger leaving the van.) Each stop also meant significantly longer drives to the next show, because the longer you dithered on the highway, the more likely it was that you'd get mired in the swamp of any city's rush-hour traffic, which meant you'd probably miss soundcheck, and maybe the show, and I've got to get out of this paragraph right now, because just thinking about this is totally giving me an anxiety attack.

Therefore: any large empty Gatorade or soda bottle starts looking like a solution. Ideally widemouthed bottles, not because everyone had giant d.i.c.ks but because such vessels forgave b.u.mps and jiggles and imprecise aim. (Physiology meant that women musicians were more apt to use a p.i.s.s cup. Big Gulp or larger, please.) In time, you and your van mates developed quite a casual relationship with p.i.s.s bottles. On one tour I left my camera in the van while I drove to a couple of shows in my car, and when I later developed the film, I found photos of the other guitarist p.i.s.sing into a one-liter Gatorade bottle in the backseat while the woman who sold our merch rested her head on his shoulder, watching, nonchalant. Even a liter bottle can be, occasionally, technically insufficient but in a pinch would keep you traveling until the next real bathroom stop. This interval could last a long time, so it was important to save bottle caps-crude though our sanitation instincts were, we knew that much. But then sometimes you'd find orphaned p.i.s.s bottles that had been fermenting peacefully for five or eight or ten days under the backseat.

I knew that everything happened in the van, but what I didn't know until very recently was this: people s.h.i.t their pants in the van much more often than you'd think. On tour with Scratch Acid in the eighties, David Yow was smoking hash oil in the back, took too deep a hit, and got into a coughing fit so ferocious that he c.r.a.pped his pants. Unfortunately he was wearing his favorite silk suit. Doubly unfortunate: he wasn't wearing underwear. The driver pulled over so he could clean up on the side of the road. But Yow didn't want to just throw away the pants, though the rest of the band-quite understandably!-didn't want them back inside. Which is why, for several hundred miles, a pair of sharp but badly stained gray silk suit pants flapped in the breeze, tied to the roof rack atop Scratch Acid's van.

All this amid the day-to-day of life in the van: They fought constantly as they drove from show to show. They never said anything as they drove from show to show. They laughed and drank beer as they drove from show to show, and realized that they liked each other and that this band could work, and twenty years later they still make records and tour. They decided, as they drove from show to show, to start an urban legend on one end of the country and see if it ever made its way back to them on the opposite coast, and the rumor they tried to start was that Dave Thomas-the comically mild-mannered Wendy's founder-was convicted of manslaughter in the sixties. (My embellishment: he'd killed a man with his bare hands.) Two bands toured America together, and the practical jokes they inflicted on each other's vans culminated in hundreds of crickets being dumped into one, and I'M DRUNK AND I LOVE COP c.u.m scrawled in the dust on the back of the other, with an accompanying ill.u.s.tration. No one in that van noticed until a highway patrolman pulled them over, demanded that the driver step outside, and showed him the graffiti. "I don't care," said the cop, "but lots of people have been calling and complaining." Then, "Wait. You guys are in a band? What kind of music do you play?" When someone mumbled, "Rock music," the cop said, "Oh, like Aerosmith?" and, sensing an exit, the guy said, "Yes, exactly like Aerosmith," which was much easier than telling the truth, and they got away without a ticket after gifting the cop a CD. We were driving through Pennsylvania and, as a car full of girls pa.s.sed, we thought, Hey, why not? but the only note we could come up with to hold out the window while we pa.s.sed them read, WE'RE IN A BAND, and then they pa.s.sed us, holding up a sign that said, WE'RE NOT, and that was pretty much the end of that. Once when we were overseas, a young roadie who didn't speak English very well confided that he had bought a vibrator for his girlfriend and was excited to try it out. A few days later he told me he had, and when I asked how it went, he frowned and said, "She pee," and I kind of did a spit take and repeated, "She pee?" and he nodded sadly and said, "She pee, and she cry."

I ASKED EVERYONE I INTERVIEWED FOR THIS BOOK FOR THE grossest van and tour story they knew, and the winner came from Rjyan Kidwell, who performed in a solo electronic project called Cex (say "s.e.x"), and Jeremy DeVine, the label head of Temporary Residence, who tour-managed Cex on an ill-fated 2003 tour of the UK and Europe, a tour for which DJ Beyonda opened.

JEREMY: We played in Nottingham, and instantly after the show Rjyan and I both hooked up with beautiful women. They lived together, so everything is super cool, and we go back to their house.

RJYAN: We parked in front of their apartment building. I was really wasted, and there were stairs, and we were like, "Do we have to bring everything up?" And the girls were like, "No. There's a security camera right there." They pointed to the end of the block, and there was a security camera pointed right down to where the car was parked. So we were like, "Perfect." I brought almost nothing inside.

JEREMY: Rjyan goes up, hooks up with this woman. I hook up with this other woman. Everything's great. The next day . . .

RJYAN: It was pretty early, and I needed to go down and get my clothes and toothbrush and stuff. Sander, the driver, went ahead of me. I went to the back of the car, and the door was swinging open, and I asked, "Sander, you opened this door, right?" He said, "What? No."

JEREMY: The van has been broken into. All the merch is gone. Rjyan's suitcase, his pa.s.sport, all gone. This is something like day two of a twenty-one-day tour.

RJYAN: I had just made this awkward "Okay, we live in other countries, so no number exchanging" goodbye. Then I had to turn around and go back up the stairs and say, "All our s.h.i.t was taken. What do you think we should do?"

Then we looked up at the security camera that had been staring at our van the night before. It had pivoted ninety degrees during the night and was now looking down another street.

JEREMY: The only way to get a pa.s.sport is to go back to the American consulate in London. So we do the drive. And Rjyan snaps, but not in an aggressive way. He snaps like, "You know what? I'm going to take ownership over this thing that happened to me, because these people do not own me. They can't make me miserable. I'm going to own my own freedom." I said, "Okay. And how is that manifesting itself?"

He said, "I am not going to bathe for the rest of the tour."

RJYAN: I had one set of clothes. I bought a skirt at Camden Market and just wore that for the rest of the tour. I thought, You're going to take all my stuff? I don't need stuff. I also didn't shower at all. Like, You can't bring me down. I'm going to wear the acc.u.mulated stress. And everyone is gonna have to deal with it.

I don't totally remember what the thinking behind that position was.

JEREMY: Me and the other people in the van said, "But that doesn't resolve anything. And eventually it very slowly tortures everyone around you." And he just said, "It's going to be the smell of freedom."

RJYAN: That does ring a bell.

JEREMY: We didn't take it seriously. Day three, day four rolls around. He still has not bathed, and he's played a show every night. Day six, day eight. Wow. He is really going for it. He's wearing the exact same clothes.

For the rest of the tour he never bathed. Eventually it got so rancid in the van that we couldn't drive without all the windows open. Even if it was cold. Sander, the hired driver, was getting visibly more upset as the days went on.

RJYAN: Very early on I feel like we figured out that Sander was not psyched about us at all.

JEREMY: We play a show in Paris. We play in a club that looks like a pirate ship. The ceilings are only eight feet high. It's really close quarters. And you can smell him. A stench is permeating the room. I don't know if the crowd knew it or not, but it's him.

RJYAN: Maybe to other people it's not like this, but I feel like I can tell when I have B.O. It's not as bad as anyone else's smell. It doesn't have that weird garbage, rank, sour smell. Mine has this nice, sweet smell. It smells like chalk or something.

JEREMY: That night he goes home with some woman he met at the show. I was thinking, He smells homeless and dead. There's no way that is attractive.

RJYAN: What I thought was, that's pheromones. That's how you find out who really likes you, when you're really kicking out those pheromones. It smells gross to people who are not suited to be your mate, and it smells awesome to people who are.

JEREMY: They hook up. Which really disgusts me. It really b.u.ms me out. And I'm a total hobo. I don't shower every day. But I shower every other day. And I change my clothes.

It ended up in a fistfight with the driver in the van. Because eventually Sander just snapped: "You have to f.u.c.king bathe! This is ridiculous!" And they get into this strange and existential argument, because Rjyan kept saying, "This is the smell of freedom!"

Sander is kind of meek. He's not someone we ever felt threatened by at all. And he punches Rjyan in the face as hard as he can. Then keeps driving and never says another word.

RJYAN: I actually don't remember that. But it probably happened. I feel like I just took it, and honestly, I feel like it wasn't a hard enough punch to have a memory of it. There was a period when I actively tried to forget a lot of things from this tour.

JEREMY: I said, "I don't know, dude. I'm going to be honest with you: that might have been deserved."

He smelled very swampy. Like a Cajun corpse. Louisiana Walking Deadtype s.h.i.t. I think at the end of the tour I literally threw what little money I had left at Rjyan and walked away.

RJYAN: It was at some cafe or diner. No one was there but us. I can't remember what I said, but I feel like I provoked him, with some kind of matter-of-fact thing like, "This has been the worst tour I've ever been on. Thanks." Something s.h.i.tty like that. Then he threw the money at me, and then I felt bad.

I gave everything that was left over to Beyonda. I feel like she was invited along on the pretense of my being a successful electronic musician, so this is going to be really easy and fun. She endured a lot of hardship for no reason.

Jeremy and I did two records after that.

Doctor Rock.

I realized I was very different from the guy we called Doctor Rock one morning around 2 a.m. while I was entwined with a very recent acquaintance on a living room floor in Madison, Wisconsin. This was during the last round of b.i.t.c.h Magnet tours in 1990, the ones right after Orestes quit. Doctor Rock was his replacement. He and I both had girlfriends back home, but that night we had made fast friends with two young women who'd driven eighty miles from Milwaukee to see the show. One of them told me they'd gotten stoned and listened to Umber every day that summer.

I was pretty anti-pot by then, and the stupidity of weed was a running inside joke. Sometimes onstage, as we paused mid-set, I'd step up to the mike and declare: "This is a song about smoking pot." But since we rarely smiled onstage, people often missed the point. In Columbus a soft-bellied, sad-eyed guy sought me out after the show, begging for weed, claiming it was impossible to find any. Of course you can't, I told him, deadpan: we have all the pot. Still, the image of two cute girls getting stoned to our record during long, flat, hot Midwestern summer days was quite picturesque, and I ended up with Mary. She was blond-Catholic, I guessed-and when I introduced myself, she gestured in the s.p.a.ce between us and said, "John and Mary!" I could tell she was spelling my name wrong even as she said it, but beyond a.s.suming it was some New Testament reference, I had no idea what she meant. But I just Googled "John and Mary" and discovered that it's the t.i.tle of a movie, released in 1969, wherein goyishe Mia Farrow and Jewy Dustin Hoffman meet in a bar and end up in bed. Was that what you meant, Mary? Did I miss the whole point until now?

After the show we maneuvered our new friends out of the club. That night a fight had broken out on the sidewalk and ended up on the hood of our van, leaving blood trails smeared across the windshield. After windshield-wipering the bloodstains away, we drove to the house where our hostess, a kind and shy friend from college I'll call Sarah, turned the living room over to us and tactfully disappeared.

There it was: the fluttery feeling of new lips, new mouth, new body, my hands under her shirt tracing patterns on her smooth and wondrous skin. But distractions quickly started pinwheeling: I have a girlfriend. What am I doing? Do I, like, f.u.c.k Mary right here, in front of everyone? And-oh, s.h.i.t-Sarah is friends with my girlfriend. How will she not find out?

The foreknowledge of regret. The d.i.c.kless indie rock anhedonia kicking in. Before getting too entranced by the cool of Mary's skin, I contrived some excuse-too tired, long drive tomorrow, something like that-kissed her good night, rolled over, and closed my eyes. Approximately eight feet from my head Doctor Rock and Mary's friend were going at it like they were playing tackle football, she sounding simultaneously like the opposing team and the cheerleading squad. Sooyoung was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, or-I dearly hope-calmly writing his recollections of the day in his notebook, eyes fixed to its pages, in the farthest corner of the room.

Sooyoung and I had very active governors on our ids. Doctor Rock's was innocent of any such mechanism. (Not for nothing did he earn that nickname.) Maybe nothing pushes a hedonist to comical extremes more than the company of ascetics. Now, I'm not judging Doctor Rock, though I certainly did then. But we had no business playing together, for reasons that were becoming brutally clear.