Your Band Sucks Part 7

Still: f.u.c.k it. We were doing this again. The last time the three of us had played together was almost exactly twenty-one years earlier. And though Calgary seemed a supremely random meeting place, the location actually made sense. Orestes had just moved here from Tucson, and because I lived in New York and Sooyoung lived in Singapore, Calgary was as good a middle ground as any. We knew no one in this city, so it was a forgiving and private place to see if we could get into these old clothes without shredding any seams. There were no distractions, and there was no one to meet. Nothing to do but rehea.r.s.e each day, then get dinner, and begin to warm to one another again, drink by drink, conversation by conversation.

Orestes and I had both been practicing on our own and came ready to rip into our whole repertoire. Sooyoung hadn't, and was far more tentative. His idea was to drill five songs, over and over again. I thought this had to do with his discipline, but he admitted to me much later that it was more about his fear. He hadn't played ba.s.s in over fifteen years-he'd sold his years ago and only bought a replacement a few days before he arrived-and knew he had a lot of work to do.

WE'D GATHERED IN THE SAME ROOM FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A long time several months earlier, in October 2010, when we met in Dallas to mix some unreleased songs for our reissues. That weekend went smashingly well, and we all got along, which was important, because playing in a band on this lower rung of rock means being around each other all the time. I still felt like the only talkative one, and was definitely the only one who talked with his hands, and, as always, their reserve and stillness made me a little more frantic around the edges. But it felt good, working with them and dining with them and drinking with them and crashing the Texas State Fair, where only I was brave enough to eat the fried beer. (Their caution was well founded.) Orestes was now an environmental scientist. He had those two sons and recently finalized his divorce. He still dressed like a rugby player, absolutely innocent of any style, and was a bit chunkier, with a lot of gray flecking his short black hair. The pa.s.sing years and fatherhood and all that desert sun had aged him in an appropriate and appealing way. Sooyoung looked almost exactly the same. He'd founded a software and programming company just as the world economy went into the toilet in 2008, and though he worked constantly and always talked about how much of a struggle it was to build his business and keep it going, by now it seemed on a much better footing. Somehow he had become even skinnier while learning to drink like a Russian. Sooyoung also flew around 200,000 miles a year, since his clients were spread across the globe, and he and I started swapping nerdy frequent-flier tips. All our airline miles would come in handy for this midlife caper we were planning, the first stop of which brought us to the rehearsal room in Calgary. Where, despite the decades, and the rust on the gears, and Sooyoung's struggles to relearn ba.s.s and needing to hear b.i.t.c.h Magnet MP3s to transcribe the lyrics he'd written but no longer remembered, an old feeling started stirring almost immediately.

One day when we broke for lunch, one of Bob's beefy and slightly stupefied friends stopped me as I rushed out the door and said, "Dude. Sounds great down there."

You never knew, in these practice-s.p.a.ce exchanges, if someone was being sincere or merely being kind. But I stopped for a moment and turned to him.

"Thanks," I said. "We haven't played together in twenty-one years."

"Ehhh?" the guy replied.

Which could mean a million different things. But why worry which?

Magnet, b.i.t.c.h.

I slept on people's floors well into my thirties whenever I was on tour. But you make certain concessions to age, and we quickly decided that, during the reunion, it was crazy-talk to consider couch-crashing with friends or fans. For rehearsals in December 2011 for our European tour, we rented a small house in Stoke Newington in London, for the three of us and Matthew Barnhart, our driver/tour manager/soundman/one-man road crew. I've never gotten along particularly well with England, and its skies darken far too early this time of year, but Stoke Newington is disarmingly neighborhoody, and each day we walked to rehearsal past shops and pubs and young couples and children at play, and it was really quite pleasant. After practice we sat in pubs for hours. If we had to do anything in the morning, our five or eight pints each night would be a mistake. But we were on rock time now, so mornings were an afterthought, and this, too, was lovely.

House and apartment rentals are way less rock-star than hotels, because doing dishes is not very rock and roll and because you don't get to stride through a busy lobby gripping a guitar case, hungover and wearing shades. But they're much more practical. At a house there's breakfast no matter how late you sleep. You have your own room-so: privacy-and a washing machine, both major blessings when you're on the road. Instead of a lobby, you hang out in an actual living room. Where we all sat, under comfortably dimmed lights, the night before our first show in Europe.

A nice moment, this. Even domestic, if temporarily. There's a fake fireplace, with design books piled on the mantel. Chairs next to the window, through which we glimpse the patterns of streetlight and row house and shadow. Though the house is cold, of course, because it's December in England, and apparently, even in the twenty-first century, no one in this entire country understands heating.

I'm playing my black Les Paul and surrept.i.tiously recording song ideas on my phone. Orestes and Sooyoung are on their computers. Sometimes I wonder if they feel a similar amazement at the strange coalescences that landed us in the same room, back on tour all these years later.

By now we've gathered for practice weekends in Calgary, Vancouver, New York, and Seoul-on so many levels it's amazing to be able to type that phrase-and hanging out is remarkably comfortable, and our roles are growing familiar. I'm the worrier, and handle logistics. Sooyoung is cool-medium cool, not hipster cool-and reserved. Orestes is the most genial, and almost always upbeat, and that part is new. Still, tonight this room is very quiet, because it takes us a few drinks, at least, to really start talking. If this were some sitting-room drama on the BBC, a grandfather clock solemnly sounding its hushed bongs would be all you could hear.

Orestes looks up from his laptop: "Did we talk before we had computers?"

I say, "No. We didn't talk. Except for me, so I always thought I was talking too much."

He says, "You were."

So I give him a bit of a look and say, "Well, someone had to talk."

(Sooyoung, gazing into his computer, says nothing at all.) But tonight, after all these years, it's okay. Soon we'll head to the pub. On our way out, we'll squeeze past the half wall of stacked boxes in the entry hall that contain the T-shirts, records, and CDs we'll sell at our shows. Matthew picked up the van today. Tomorrow we'll get back in it for our three shows on the Continent-in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany-then three more in England. It's unclear how much longer this reunion will go on, or even if it will go on, since we haven't discussed it. Though an hour ago Orestes mentioned the prospect of playing the Primavera festival in Spain in June, and started thinking out loud about playing Brazil, where none of our bands have ever performed. In response, Sooyoung said nothing. (To be fair, neither did I.) But Orestes's ideas aren't nuts. You can do almost anything in this culture, if you have any sort of following, and one superfan in Brazil could set up shows in So Paulo and Rio, once we found said superfan. But just because we could doesn't mean we should, because playing to twenty-five people in Brazil would mean losing thousands of dollars. I know the real reason why Orestes brought those shows up: he doesn't want this to end. Neither do I. Though Sooyoung is mulish at the prospect of long practices, I'm ready to spend eight hours each day rehearsing, as is Orestes. This is fun. I find myself smiling a lot during practice-lasting, daffy, face-splitting grins. The buzz these songs still provide, even if many were written before I could drink legally. (If our songs were people, all of them could drink legally now, too.) Orestes and I have talked about how we both keep finding new nuances in the music. I'm finally nailing the parts that I've heard in my head forever but that never sounded right when I tried to play them. "Big Pining" had been a staple of our live sets even before our first alb.u.m came out, but not until these rehearsals did I really figure out how to play the bridge. But in deference to Sooyoung's definitively reclaiming Most Reluctant Member status, neither Orestes nor I have discussed any of this with him. Although we know Sooyoung is getting an itch to write songs again. As am I. Maybe there is another record to make, after all.

FORTY HOURS LATER WE'RE IN A VAN FULL OF GEAR CRUISING up the A27 in the Netherlands after crossing the border from Belgium, pa.s.sing flat, gra.s.sy fields that, even on this cold and rainy December day, are an alarmingly bright green, bisected by neatly cut irrigation ditches in which still water shimmers. Last night we played Brussels. Matthew is driving, no one is talking, and I'm in the middle row, alone with my secret: I'm as happy as I've been in years. I could go from show to show forever. Simple scenes on this featureless highway shine with beauty. Sheep graze. A farmer plods along the roadside, leading a horse draped with a maroon blanket to ward off the chill.

We arrived at the club last night later than we should have, which drives me insane even when it's not the first show of the tour. (I've had nightmares about missing soundcheck since I was a teenager.) Ancienne Belgique, which everyone calls the AB, is so huge and complicated that it doesn't take someone as confused as Spinal Tap or Ozzy Osbourne to get lost going from the loading dock to the stage. Luckily the club had painted color-coded lines in the hallways-trail markers-and kind and capable men instantly appeared to get us and our gear to the stage and set up. As Orestes started a.s.sembling his kit and Sooyoung and I shoved amps and cabinets into place, Matthew started his system check, for which he mouths wordless noises into mikes and checks the PA's output against an app on his iPhone, seeking frequencies that either feed back or sound too prominent in the room, which he'll then tweak on the soundboard. Matthew is from Dallas but lacks any regional accent, is a music nerd through and through-he's doing this tour for love, not money, so he's cutting us a great deal-and is stocky, sandy-haired, and always clad in the road-dog uniform of loose jeans and a hoodie. He's cool-headed and very thorough, which are major virtues for someone who does what he does. He has also toured Europe enough to toggle fearlessly between driving on the left and right sides of the road.

After soundcheck an in-house mess hall served dinner. The backstage was s.p.a.cious and quiet-I'd forgotten how peaceful clubs are during off-hours-and included an excellent private bathroom with its own shower. Welcome back to touring Europe, boys. I learned that Sooyoung had showered by blundering in and glimpsing his bare a.s.s as he toweled off. If you're in a touring band on our level, you're all but guaranteed to see one another naked, but it had been a while. All other inevitable road intimacies, like sharing beds with your bandmates and seeing them cry, also grow less common as you age.

Just before showtime-the room was filling nicely, I saw, relieved-I began my routine: check an iPhone photo to make sure my pedal and amp settings haven't changed since soundcheck. Tune the black Les Paul. Tune the red Les Paul. Tune the black Les Paul again, because I use it for our first songs. Thwack the m.u.f.fled strings to make sure the pedals and amp are working, recheck looping pedal settings, insert extra picks into the microphone clip, and head backstage, even if only for a minute or two. It took me years to understand certain things about performance, but by now I know: Never walk onstage alone. Or wait up there, after checking your rig, for the rest of your band to join you. (Only acceptable exception: if someone's starting the show with a solo piece.) Walking on together as a group looks so much tighter than if musicians straggle on individually.

Some nights things just feel off and every verse is a trudge uphill, and then you start antic.i.p.ating what might go wrong, fearing that each downstroke will invite disaster, which makes f.u.c.k-ups far more likely. Some nights you know everything will be all right from the first note. We opened the show with a long version of "Dragoon," the ten-minute song from our last alb.u.m, Ben Hur, and during the intro I jammed my guitar hard up against the speaker cabinet, to have the feedback come up just right, and the notes melted into feedback and hung in the air with perfect correctness, and I felt the way a surfer must feel after he catches a wave at the right moment and knows all he has to do is stay upright and let it carry him home.

In Brussels the first few rows-they're the only ones you can really see with stage lights shining in your eyes-were almost all guys, many bulky and fortyish. (That Soundgarden Louder Than Love tour shirt one very enthused dude wore definitely fit better back when he bought it.) There were, thankfully, some cute girls up front, too, including one thirtyish black-haired fan in a skirt and white boots, who bounced up and down by my side of the stage. She stayed there for the entire show. I locked eyes with her a few times, until she looked down. At one point my slide accidentally bounced offstage-I have to get rid of it very quickly between the introduction and the verse of "Motor," and the only way to do so is to fling it off my left ring finger-and afterward, while I stood tuning for the next song, she placed it at my feet. Obedient. I liked that.

In sum-no s.h.i.t-the best show I'd played with this band, ever. Which I needed, after the show we played in Tokyo a month earlier.

Guitarists constantly struggle with their instruments, and the procession of k.n.o.bs and devices and cords and amps and speakers required to transmit sound to the audience. Tube amps sound different each night. Dying batteries change how your pedals behave. My Les Paul is heavy enough to push your shoulder blade a few inches south, if you wear it long enough, and is solid enough to crack open a skull, but it's still a fickle and finicky a.s.semblage of wood, and changes in temperature and humidity knock it hopelessly out of tune. The collective body heat of a crowd drastically alters any room's weather, and the extremes of cold and depressurization on long plane flights can affect guitar necks and make them impossible to tune, which is exactly what happened when I flew to j.a.pan.

I'll spare you the technical explanation, in part because I'm not sure I understand it myself, but when a guitar's neck is screwed up, it doesn't just go out of tune-anomalies occur up and down the fretboard that defy logic. So it was that at soundcheck in Tokyo the notes I struck on the third fret were wildly sharp, while notes on those open strings were perfectly in tune. Through some strange magic, this was happening on both guitars, and as luck would have it, in several songs I play delicate, quiet pa.s.sages around the third fret. I've flown with guitars forever, and always take precautions: detuning each string one full step, loosely packing underwear or a T-shirt around the headstock as padding and talisman. Never before had anything like this occurred. I soundchecked in a quietly mounting panic, knowing that as soon as we were done I'd have to break out precision screwdrivers and diddle with the string saddles and intonation, trying whatever I could to coax the open string and the third fret closer in tune. But the problems remained, and I was left to await showtime with jangling nerves. I knew our set would suck, and it would be my fault, because my tuning was a mess.

I was mistaken. So many other things went wrong, too.

Different countries use different voltages-j.a.pan runs on 100 volts while America uses 120-and I forgot to run my looping pedal through a voltage transformer, resulting in a momentary blinding flash that toasted the pedal and spread the homey scent of electrical fire throughout the club. My amp kept cutting out because, I thought, low-frequency vibrations were shaking the speaker cable loose. A stagehand kept leaping toward my amp mid-song-this country treats touring musicians ridiculously well-to help, but her English was bad and my j.a.panese doesn't exist, and of course it was deafeningly loud onstage, so very quickly I was barking at her in frustration. An a.s.shole thing for me to do, and I'd also made a wrong diagnosis: even after she helped me switch amps, the sound kept dropping out.

Then my guitar strap came off mid-song, forcing me to play pancaked on my back while the same kind stagehand frantically tried to reattach it. It is a bad feeling to be p.r.o.ne onstage, staring straight up into the stage lights, horribly aware of the crowd, while strange hands fumble about your shoulder and waist. Though not as bad as it felt when the strap came off again a song or two later. I even got completely lost, somehow, during "Motor," a staple of our live set since we'd written it, and a song that, by now, I should be able to play in a coma.

Katoman, the Tokyo promoter who put on our show and the kind of guy legendary enough to be known by one name worldwide, stood by my side of the stage, looking more and more bewildered as the night went on.

Near the end of the set Sooyoung got on the mike to deadpan that we needed a new guitarist. Not a great thing to hear from the guy who once kicked me out of the band.

When we finished, I dashed backstage and blurted apologies to Orestes and Sooyoung. Despite everything, the crowd was still cheering. "What do you want to do?" asked Sooyoung. I said we should play our encores. Big mistake. When we finished, I jammed my guitar down on its stand and lurched backstage. From there I saw people staring strangely at my side of the stage, some clicking away on camera phones. Then Katoman dashed over, looking sheepish, and told me to check out my guitar.

It had fallen from the stand and now lay on the stage, its headstock split right down the middle. I took one look and thought: Unfixable. Second thought: What the f.u.c.k? I never knew guitars could crack like that. I wasn't even upset. On a night like this? It made perfect sense.

The crowd cleared out to an upstairs bar. I made my way to the stagehand I'd berated, iPhone in hand, translator app on. I punched in things like I APOLOGIZE, I WAS VERY RUDE, I AM SO SORRY. She nodded, smiled, pulled out her own phone, tapped onto it, and showed a screen saying, PLEASE COME BACK AND PLAY AGAIN NEXT YEAR.

I choked up a little. Sometimes you don't deserve the kind things people say.

I forced myself to join everyone at the bar. It's one thing, after a show, if people slap you on the back and thank you. It's another thing if they fumble for a polite way to say you stunk. It's another thing entirely if they fix you with a look of grave sympathy, put a hand on your shoulder, and say, "Man, I'm really sorry about that." That hadn't happened in a very long time.

Then a thought occurred to me. I slipped downstairs to the stage, grabbed the busted guitar, and jogged back up to the bar. Sliding sideways through the crowd, I strode toward an empty patch of floor, held the guitar up as high as I could, and waved it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

This was my gorgeous cherry sunburst Yamaha SG 3000. Shaped like a Gibson SG-those lovely symmetrical dual cutaways-but built like a Les Paul, from a thick slab of mahogany and a thinner maple cap. I'd bought it in 1993, just before a Vineland tour. A true seventies relic, this Yamaha. It had a bra.s.s block built into its body, which allegedly enhanced its sustain. I loved it, though it weighed a freaking ton. My Les Paul weighs more than ten pounds, and the Yamaha was heavier still.

But when I started slamming it into the floor, it came apart as easily as a toothpick.

People really like it when you smash a guitar. Here they howled and scrambled for smartphones and started s.n.a.t.c.hing up the big pieces. In a blink or two only a few scattered matchsticks remained. A longhair who'd stood up front all night, headbanging through the entire show, immediately pounced on the body, which was more or less intact. His friend grabbed the strap and immediately improvised a properly knotted tie from it. Two guys came up to me with stray chunks and Sharpies, wanting autographs on the wreckage. (I obliged.) Isn't it a common impulse to want to smash something to bits? Some agitation in the basal ganglia, the bit of our brains where we're no better than snakes, that place beyond the reach of words. Sometimes demolishing everything at the end of a show seems like the only proper finale. A very severe form of punctuation. Though I'd generally pictured it happening after a good show, like a very definitive last word.

The Yamaha was the third guitar I'd destroyed, but only the first intentionally demolished. Early on in b.i.t.c.h Magnet we ended our sets with "Cantaloupe," a song whose ending always begged me to throw my guitar around. Which is how I broke my Peavey T-60-the one accessorized with stickers of s.h.i.tty hardcore bands and Garbage Pail Kids and blood and the bitten-off logo from a can of Carling's Black Label-at the end of our first show at CBGB in 1987. We recorded that show, and that version of "Cantaloupe" ended up on Star Booty, and at the very end of it you can hear the guitar disintegrate, the feedback detuning a few half steps, after the neck snapped and the strings went slack.

The second was somewhere in Germany in late 1990, on the tour with Doctor Rock when all my gear was stolen, after which I paid an inflated British price for a Gibson SG from the sixties. d.a.m.n thing was way too delicate. I cracked its neck one night during the mildest bit of onstage roughhousing. At least it was fixable. I broke another guitar while recording Star Booty. Simple idiot luck: picked up the guitar by its strap, the strap slipped, the guitar fell, headstock cracked on a ceramic-tile floor, and then dangled like an unstrung marionette. Done. Though it probably didn't help that I started bashing it into said floor afterward.

After I annihilated the guitar in Tokyo and stood idly snapping the last few long bits, one guy cornered me with a video camera, asking why I'd done it. I told him it was the least I could do. That Tokyo, and my bandmates, deserved better. I told him I saw how the headstock had split and knew there was no way it could be brought back to life.

I didn't mention that I'd kind of been waiting forever to do it. I also didn't tell him that the comedown of a s.h.i.tty performance sometimes involves a pit of self-loathing so black and relentless that only an explosion can make it go away. I broke my hand once, punching a wall after a bad Vineland show in Pittsburgh, and it wasn't the first time I'd bruised and bloodied knuckles that way.

At least, in Tokyo, I didn't do that.

BUT IN THE VAN SPEEDING THROUGH THE NETHERLANDS, ALL that feels very far away. Even the way the night ended in Brussels was perfect. When we got to the hotel after the show, the desk clerk slid our keys at us, attached to a sheet of paper with MAGNET, b.i.t.c.h scrawled at the top. I always loved it when that happened.

But what's better is that I could breathe again. The fears were gone. We're all back within the roar I've been hearing in my head since I was a teenager, and it sounds exactly as it should. Even after all these years. Alone in the middle row of the van, I have the rare feeling that everything is going to be fine. We can play as well as we ever did.

h.e.l.l, maybe we can even play better.

I Hope We Don't Suck.

A tour is a parallel world in which all citizens basically only talk about rock, and once we got back on the road after being away so long, I started struggling through those conversations. Despite those decades feeding an encyclopedic knowledge of all current bands, I'd stopped following music obsessively and now knew so little about what was going on. At least I wasn't the only one who wasn't keeping up. When I mentioned to Sooyoung that someone from MOJO, the very smart British music magazine, would interview us in London, he looked at me blankly and asked, "What's MOJO?"

Then we saw our old friends Superchunk play La Scala in London. They encored with "Slack Motherf.u.c.ker," and the crowd sang along, so loud you couldn't hear the band. Because Superchunk, surprisingly, weren't loud. Clubs now posted and enforced volume restrictions. Our first time around, almost none did. (When I heard in the nineties that New York's Bowery Ballroom insisted that bands not exceed a certain decibel count, I was outraged, and vowed my bands would never play there. Of course, Bowery Ballroom never asked.) Onstage, Superchunk dressed more or less exactly as I remembered. I'd gone onstage in jeans and T-shirts since I was a teenager, but this tour I knew I just couldn't anymore. I couldn't stand looking like something dragged from the attic, dusted off, and sent out to play, slightly moth-eaten around the edges. Also, the ridiculous T-shirts in which I'd always performed-a Thompson Twins shirt silkscreened with garish new wave peaches, pinks, and blues; a three-quarter-sleeve 1981 Rolling Stones tour jersey featuring some giant serpent belipped with their logo; the blue-green one proclaiming, G.o.d BLESS DETROIT, ROCK & ROLL CAPITOL OF EARTH; that Grim Reaper s.h.i.tty-cities tour shirt-were now fashion cliches, often seen stretched across the chests of models and starlets. For the b.i.t.c.h Magnet reunion tour I wore my favorite white oxford b.u.t.ton-downs onstage: Thom Browne. Super-slim, perfect fit, and look great rumpled, which means they travel well. (I quickly got over the fact that the younger me would totally snarl at the thought of wearing such a shirt.) And tight pants, because I'm short, have no hair, and skinny's all I got. I wanted to wear a suit jacket, too, but people who've tried that a.s.sured me: bad idea. I'd shvitz; it would restrict movement and look misshapen and lumpy mashed under my guitar strap.

This time around I also had to learn to keep my head still when I played. As much as I had a stage presence on our early tours, it was built on whipping my long hair around, which is why several old friends asked if I planned to wear a wig for these shows. (Ha-ha. Thanks, d.i.c.ks.) That long hair made headbanging dramatic-because it made almost anything you did onstage look dramatic, a curtain of curls waggling back and forth, amplifying every gesture and movement. But when you're bald, headbanging doesn't look good. It looks like convulsions. Before this round of shows I sometimes practiced while looking in a mirror-a pro-rock vanity move I forever found repugnant-trying to unlearn old instincts to telegraph each chord, tempo change, or dramatic downstroke with a quick headsnap: Stop twitching!

Also, we decided it was cool for wives and girlfriends to come along. In the past I was always against allowing spouses or equivalents in the van. Not because tours are don't-ask-don't-tell trips for dudes-the no-mates rule held for tours I did with women bandmates, too, because I wanted tours to be band-only bonding experiences, and I didn't want any outsiders in the van making musicians peel off from the rest of the gang or, worse, introducing their own emotional valences and complications. Band chemistry is delicate in the best of times. Now, though? Why not? And we thought it would be nice to have our women witness this weirdness, too.

We still played primarily to overly intense guys in gla.s.ses, all of whom are still clad in familiar clothing: Chuck Taylors or cheap low-rise Adidas, band T-shirts, formless jeans, a flannel or hoodie. But at least the gender breakdowns were now often better than the brutal ninety-ten ratio we routinely experienced when we were an active band. Though some nights it was worse. I knew there were women at our headline show in London, but you wouldn't from the photos. At our show in Cologne I sat at our merch table, across from the entrance, watching the people stream in. The first hundred attendees were all guys. By the end of the night I think there were five women, one of whom booked the show. If success is playing to a crowd that looks exactly like me, Cologne was our best show ever-but it was a great crowd, even if, during the set, we couldn't make our blood run redder by eyeballing the women in the audience. And we were absolutely mobbed at the merch booth afterward, because our merch sales were suddenly twenty times better than they'd ever been. At some shows basically everyone who showed up bought something, sometimes also asking us for autographs for their kids.

What got me thinking, though, was that there weren't many younger fans at our European and American shows. After the show in Brussels one did ask me a question about Umber. I did some quick math and realized he was two when that record came out. Then I met the gray-haired guy who explained he'd loved us forever but had to sit for much of the show, because he had bad feet.

And here comes the part about How the Internet Has Changed It All. Everything is recorded now, and all of it is visible, because shows get posted to YouTube almost immediately. (The one song I f.u.c.ked up badly always went online first. Always.) Online translation engines helped me through minimalist Twitter conversations with fans in Asia, and with my apology to that kind stagehand in Tokyo. We dealt with nine different currencies during an eighteen-month-long reunion and quickly developed an iron-lung-like dependency on the exchange rate site and app xe.com. And you saw all reviews immediately. In the old days it took months to see the coverage of overseas shows, if you saw it at all. The day after our show in Brussels-the one that made me so happy-we read one review that contended that Sooyoung's performance slipped up at times, and quoted his backstage observation that relearning the songs had been hard. Also: e-mail, not faxes and transoceanic phone calls! Twitter and Facebook interactions with fans! Cell phones, so no more desperate searches for rest stops or gas stations when you were lost! Though you were never lost anymore, thanks to GPS and Google Maps! And in America you no longer worried about the cost of long-distance calls-so touring bands no longer had to use stolen credit cards or phone phreakers' red boxes! Thank you. Moving on.

Were we different, too? I wasn't sure. In 1990, after a riot of a show in Belgium or the Netherlands or Germany, I ended up at our hotel bar with a gaggle of fans, still wound up from the performance. I naturally vibrated at a very high frequency back then, so I'm hanging out, animated and wired even at that advanced hour, doing the thing where you talk with your hands, because, you know, Jewish, and a woman-Ellen-nodded seriously after I unleashed some spiel and said, in a thick accent, quite carefully and quite out of nowhere, "You know, you are really like-ehhhhhh-Woody Allen?"

So I wasn't getting laid by anyone that night.

Twenty-one years later she and her husband saw us in Brussels. After the show I ducked away from the merch table to talk to her. This time she said, "You guys were great tonight. And you seem much more relaxed than you were in 1990."

Low bar, Ellen. But thanks.

AND YET SO MUCH REMAINED THE SAME. ON TOUR YOU FUNCTIONED effectively on half as much sleep and twice as much drinking. You had four or five beers each night before you really started drinking. You didn't tolerate the long dead stretches in the van, you welcomed them and their crucial salve to sanity: hours of quiet with no demands beyond simple forward motion. You woke, dazed from a nap in the van, no longer concerned about whether this landmarkless stretch of highway was in Austria or Germany or Belgium or the Netherlands, because you finally understood that, in that moment, it didn't really matter at all.

After playing our three shows in Europe, we arrived at the Butlins holiday camp in Minehead for All Tomorrow's Parties in full-on tour mode. Getting there, of course, was a particularly British nightmare: sliding through an ink-black night and pouring rain, the sky seemingly six inches above the roof of the van, and a series of towns one can legitimately call "villages," with roads slightly too small for a van. Matthew sc.r.a.ped overgrown hedges and narrowly evaded ancient stone roadside walls. If I'd driven, at least one mirror would be lying on the side of the road somewhere, if not a b.u.mper and door, too. We pulled into Butlins just as the festival was starting on a Friday night, and immediately beached in an impressive clot of traffic at the check-in. My room key came taped to a piece of paper that had Stuart Braithwaite's name crossed out and mine in its place, leaving me terrified for days that I'd b.u.mp into a naked member of Mogwai stepping out of the shower.

A festival has its own momentum, and if you arrive late and road-weary, it can be hard to catch up. That night I saw the last fifteen seconds of Wild Flag-nothing but some feedback squalls and Mary Timony muttering "Thanks"-and left annoyed that I didn't see more. Mini-gangs of fortyish, anorak-clad overgrown indie kids, mostly British, were everywhere, and all seemed to know each other. They moved from building to building, happy and chatting and hunching against the wind and rain. It felt like attending someone else's college reunion. Albeit a very efficient one. Bands started their sets on time at ATP, which was great, unless you were sluggish and a step behind, as I was. Luckily I came across a gaggle of friends-the guys in Battles and a bunch of mutual pals, all of us joined later that evening by Laurel-which was enormously comforting, because there were something like six thousand people there, and fans were already coming up to us: We came from Macedonia to see you. I came from Dubai to see you. I came from Australia to see you.

The only possible response, which I found myself repeating over and over, was "Wow. Thanks. I hope we don't suck."

That scene in Body Heat when Mickey Rourke does the there's-fifty-ways-to-f.u.c.k-up-any-decent-crime thing? There's at least as many ways to f.u.c.k up onstage. (See: Tokyo.) By the time I was in Coptic Light I no longer suffered from preshow nerves. But here they were again, as bad as ever: the undefinable floating deep dread that something would go wrong, terribly wrong, and then the horrible shaming sense of failure would descend. A feeling made all the worse given how long I had waited for this show. The culmination of our reunion so far. The meal ticket that made it all happen, after all these years. Here. Now. At an off-season holiday camp on a cold coast of England, of all places. Amid several thousand people like us, whose existences I couldn't imagine when I was in high school, even though they'd all been out there, somewhere, stumbling upon records, wading each day through schoolmates' indifference or contempt, waiting for their lives to begin.

The day of a show flings you onto a conveyor belt and trundles you through the tunnel that leads inexorably to showtime: travel, arrival, unloading, soundcheck, dead time, doors open, onstage. But we woke up in Butlins on the day of our show, and I'd never played a festival before, so the rhythms were unfamiliar. I watched Battles and then Nissenenmondai destroy an early-afternoon crowd, but afterward bands washed over me without making any impression. A few times I choked up, realizing I'd never be able to tell Jerry Fuchs about any of this or hear him make fun of us for reuniting, as he surely would have, before coming to see us anyway.

At the merch booth we met a few more people who came a long way or said they'd been waiting a long time to see us.

I hope we don't suck. I hope we don't suck. I hope we don't suck.

The bands ate at a mess hall. A high school cafeteria, just about: an oversized kitchen, buffets of cold and hot foods in an underoccupied and giant inst.i.tutional room. But this was our water cooler and green room, and I saw people I hadn't seen since college, and I loved it instantly. I found Bob Weston-ba.s.sist in Sh.e.l.lac, soundman for Mission of Burma, all-around excellent human-and his wife, Carrie. Pharoah Sanders sat at the head of another table; stupidly, I didn't introduce myself. Dinner was a blessing, a normal interval on a day in which I was gradually losing my mind. I mean, just writing this makes me nervous, bowels rumbling, like a junkie watching bubbles break the surface in the spoon.

For a while we thought All Tomorrow's Parties was going to be our first reunion show. Good G.o.d, what were we thinking? Hey, let's play live for the first time in twenty-one years to our biggest crowd ever! Bad idea. The stakes are way too high, and no matter how much you've played together beforehand in a practice s.p.a.ce, you can't replicate showtime: confronting the fear, riding the adrenaline, understanding the spectacle of it, relating to your bandmates naturally while unnaturally being on display, dealing with the X factor any audience introduces. Onstage chemistry for the first reunion shows is always unstable and uncertain, and even the best performers can get pretty hinky about it. The Jesus Lizard's first reunion show was a headline slot at ATP, and David Yow, one of rock's most natural frontmen and the veteran of over a thousand shows, recalled, "I always get nervous before shows, but I was f.u.c.king shaking. I was so terrified."

After I ate, I headed back to our apartment to grab my guitars and get ready. Change strings, take a dump, breathe-all the preshow essentials-and then I told Laurel I was leaving. The late nights and late mornings of ATP ran counter to her biorhythms, but she still ran with the rest of our crew and did gangbusters business whenever she worked the merch stand.

Big smile. Big hug. "Aren't you excited?" she asked.

"No. I'm completely out of my f.u.c.king mind," I told her.

Backstage at Butlins was a holding pen, all cement and steel, as cold and echoing as the bowels of some great, hideous arena in the American Midwest, not that I'd know from experience. Block-printed band names were taped to dressing room doors above the legend "Fire door-keep shut." (So British, all that lowercase.) The three of us had to stand to fit comfortably in ours. A few mirrors took up one wall, all artifacts, with round bulbs running around their borders, the kind seen only in movies. These made me smile: s...o...b..z! Cases of bottled water and skunky lukewarm Peroni and Corona. And no cell phone reception, but that was fine. It was time to shut off the rest of the world.

I stretched the new guitar strings, and tuned and retuned. Sooyoung fiddled with a camera. Orestes languorously laid into his warmup. Normally steady before a show, tonight he turned oddly obnoxious backstage, referring loudly to Cults-the band playing before us, whom we hadn't yet met-as CAHHHNNTS, in a fake English accent. But he calmed as soon as his sticks started moving on the shallow white Formica shelf beneath the s...o...b..z mirrors. Always slightly mesmerizing, that mantra. Or at least it gave us something to look at and listen to: Rat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat-a-tat-a . . .

We congratulated Cults after their set when they pa.s.sed us backstage, though in truth we couldn't hear anything in our dressing room. Once onstage, I started to tune one guitar again but got no reading on the digital tuner at my feet. Oh, Christ. Then I noticed I wasn't plugged in. The lighting woman sauntered over to ask what we wanted. "More blues and whites than reds," I told her, glad to be asked. Reds make a stage look smeary. Blues and whites look sharp and distinct.

Sets are staggered among the different rooms at ATP, so there's a stretch of dead time in each venue after every performance, and the crowd quickly filed out after Cults' set. Thirty minutes to showtime, and we were setting up to a distressingly empty room that could hold a couple thousand people. Twenty minutes to showtime: still empty. Fifteen minutes to showtime: empty but for twenty diehards pressed up against the barrier separating them from the stage, and maybe twenty more people scattered elsewhere in the room. I don't care, I told myself, and continued the preshow ritual: check the tuning on my guitars again, thwack the m.u.f.fled strings, recheck amp and pedal settings. I jammed a few picks into the microphone clip and went back to the dressing room for the last ten minutes, resigned to play to a lonely crowd in a huge hall. Orestes's girlfriend, Rosi, was there with her camera. Click. Click. That and Orestes's rat-a-tat-tating drumsticks were the only sounds. Then I heard a familiar voice and looked up to see Laurel in the doorway, clutching a camera, a big smile on her face, flashing all of us a thumbs-up. For a long moment I stared at her blankly, lost in thought.

Then: showtime. Sooyoung and I walked down that chilly hallway, through the stage door and onto the stage lit a crystalline blue, pa.s.sing the stagehands and the gear, and only then did we see that somehow-somehow-the room had filled.

Grim-faced bouncers in orange shirts settled into position on either side of the stage. Sooyoung grabbed his ba.s.s. Scattered applause. I hefted the black Les Paul-the one detuned to D-settled the strap onto my left shoulder, flicked the standby switch on the Hiwatt, tapped on the guitar a few times to get a drone going, turned to face the crowd, then hit the three opening notes to "Dragoon" and spun around to belly up to the speaker stack, guitar body pressed hard against the top speaker cabinet, the notes hanging in the air just so.

Sooyoung-deadpan and still, as he always was onstage-glanced my way. We nodded, hit the C-to-D change that ends the opening riff, then I shoved the guitar hard against the speaker cabinet again, this time slowly running it up and around the edge. A gratuitous and totally phallic move, and I will never tire of it. Also a showy way to keep the guitar up against the cabinet and let sound waves and sheer volume make the three bottom strings vibrate a flawless, endless open D chord, all fifths and octaves. We let that chord roar for a while.

Three more notes, ending on a ringing, unresolved interval, and Orestes bounded onstage to shouts and cheers, settled on the drum stool, turned my way, mouthed "One-two," and we all slammed into the next three notes, and after the last I wheeled to face my amp, gripped the guitar with both hands and raised it overhead, the neck pointing straight up, shaking it furiously, catching a feedback note that shook along, exquisitely in sync-Yessssssss-and I saw Orestes looking hungry and intent, and I instantly knew he'd take us wherever we needed to go.

I was holding on to myself so tightly through "Dragoon"-the song has several different tempos, many gradations of soft and loud, and those delicate parts for which I forever fear being out of tune-that I ended the song out of breath, even though I hadn't run around at all, and during the set I understood that I'd played better shows on the tour. But I also understood that it didn't matter, because the event took over. The looks on some faces in the front row were so intense that glancing at them felt like getting shocked. The guys from Macedonia, standing directly in front of Sooyoung, hopped up and down, singing along with every song, eyes closed, faces contorted-watching them made me feel I was intruding. Chavez's Clay Tarver once told me about the difference between pretend shows and real shows. At a pretend show the crowd is sluggish and the band has to supply all the energy, while at a real show the audience provides the juice. This was a real show. An energy current whipped around the room without the least resistance: sound to crowd, crowd to us, amplify and repeat. There's a sheer s.e.xual power when you fill a huge room with glorious, ma.s.sive noise, playing through a guitar rig that behaves exactly as you want it. There's a magical feeling when you believe-no, when you know-you can wave your hands or a guitar at the amp and the electrons inside instantly respond. Even after all these years it's still the closest feeling to G.o.d that I know. And every time I got the tiniest taste of it, I understood why so many willingly ruin their lives for it.

After "Sea of Pearls"-likely our most baby-splitting compromise between Sooyoung's pop sense and my secret wish to go metal-and thank-you-good-night, we ambled backstage. (Something else it took me years to learn: exit all stages slowly, savoring.) I grabbed another beer, took a p.i.s.s, and when I returned to the stage, the room was empty again but for stagehands and spent cups and smells. Then someone called out, and I saw Bob and Carrie Weston standing alone in the middle of the room, huge smiles, Bob flashing a thumbs-up. Like I said, in indie rock almost no one will tell you that you sucked, especially friends. But my heart still leapt out of my chest a little at that sight.

After 4 a.m. our crew that night-us and Rosi, Battles and Ian's fiancee, Kate, Nathan and Madeleine from Cults, our friends Pedje and Anya, all our chemistries still blazing with post-performance highs-ended up at one of Battles' apartments, where Pedje methodically broke out excellent bread, geeky cheese, a case of natural wine, and the entire side of a smoked salmon. To plastic knives-the only ones around-salmon skin may as well be barbed wire, so soon we just yanked off unruly chunks, mashed them onto hunks of bread, and shoved the whole mess mouthward. I watched the fish and cheese sweat in the dim and crowded room, knowing exactly how gross it would smell in the morning and how much grosser it would smell with a severe hangover, toward which each of us was sprinting. Cults had a 6 a.m. van call for their three-hour drive to Heathrow. Their tour manager was a cla.s.sic British road dog, bald and soft-bellied in a loose gray hoodie, who showed up precisely five minutes early to shepherd them out. Being escorted from the afterparty to the van that takes you straight to the airport is rock-star stuff. But I was unbelievably grateful not to be them.

Were there drugs at ATP? There had to be, though, except for a little pot, I saw none. A few women working for a well-known record label offered us E. But entering the Decemberian gloom of London while coming down hard and short on serotonin would make any man suicidal, and we declined. (One undernoticed reason for indie rock anhedonia: it's almost impossible to explore rock's druggy sideshows when touring without a road crew. There's too much c.r.a.p to do each day.) I'm sure some colorful, rock festival-y things happened that weekend. The chilly morning after our show I saw muddy footprints-as in, from someone's bare feet-describing a winding path on the walkways. Guess someone had an interesting night.

OUR EUROPEAN TOUR ENDED IN LONDON, OPENING FOR HOT Snakes at the Garage, a show more addendum than a climax. The opening-band problem is that you don't play to your crowd. The appeal is that you play to people who otherwise wouldn't see you, but converting new fans is useless for an old band reuniting for just a few shows. Anyway, we were never an easy opening band-too weird to go well with aggressive bands, too aggressive to go well with weird bands, and definitely a sore thumb for something as straightforward as Hot Snakes. As I hit the first notes of the show, a good-looking woman standing by my side of the stage winced and went for her ears, eyebrows knitting together in dismay. How dare you, I thought. I moved to the lip of the stage-an actual stage, six feet tall; there was real hierarchy in standing on it-and stared straight through her eyes for several minutes as I played. Towering above her, with a guitar and amplification on my side, so it was not a very fair fight.

But halfway into "Dragoon" I realized my guitar had gone slightly out of tune. A very bad thing to discover when five minutes remain in a song. Then Orestes had some problems, which never happens. People talked through the quiet parts. Everything I said between songs sounded rushed, and even though I knew it did, I couldn't slow myself down. At the end of our last song I went hip to hip with the amp stack, making big Leatherface motions with the guitar, and when I threw it down in front of the amp, I destroyed a patch cord. Better that than breaking another guitar, I guess.

Bartenders at the Garage pour bottles of beer into plastic cups-having spent time among drunk Brits, I endorse any policy that separates them from potential weapons-so after the show I crunched my way across a huge dance floor calf-deep in crushed and empty cups to chat with a few fans still sticking around, like Phil. Phil was about forty, but it was his first time seeing us, he explained, because when we'd last toured Britain, his parents wouldn't let him go. That cracked me up. He snapped a pic of us together and begged us to return. "I hope your parents let you come next time, too," I told him, pleased he'd set up the punchline so perfectly.