Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine

wanted to know everyone.
    We played a bunch of shows with Bastro, the band formed by Squirrel Bait’s guitarist David Grubbs and—ill advisedly—a drum machine, but then Grubbs and bassist Clark Johnson recruited a friend of ours at Oberlin named John McEntire to play drums, and they got really great. Complicated, super smart, oddly chorded and in odd meters, played at blinding speed—what Grubbs did with his bizarrely tuned metallic-pink Tele was unlike anything else I’d heard before, or, for that matter, have heard since. We played together just after we both released our first records, and our shows routinely drew twenty-five people, but each time I saw them I thought,
Christ, this is one of the best bands in the world, and no one knows it.
The way they—forgive the tired term—rocked, without having the slightest thing to do with “rock.” How they provided a purely visceral rush while still being so musically advanced and so thoroughly bent.
    Another Squirrel Bait offshoot was far more mysterious, right down to the name: Slint. A quartet led by two extremely taciturn guys, Britt Walford and Brian McMahan, whose inside references were so intricate they seemed almost like a form of idioglossia. In 1988 we got a tape of a nine-song record,
Tweez
, before it became an LP the following year. Its songs were named after each band member’s parents (and one of their dogs), and they all sounded tweaked and slightly metallic and often swung—in the jazz sense—in a way very few others in our underground could. The vocals were occasional, incidental, and sometimes started to tell stories without ever really finishing them. When the album came out, the cover was a simple black-and-white shot of a Saab Turbo—with SLINT going where the SAAB was and TWEEZ replacing TURBO , and very little information appeared on the back or the insert. I cannot overemphasize how thrilling and absolutely unique it sounded or—and this is the part that gets lost today when people talk about that band—the oddball humor underneath it all. Bitch Magnet went crazy for
Tweez
. I listened to it every day. A cassette of it turned up in a photo we used for the insert to
Umber
. In 1988 almost no one in the world had heard of them, but that just fed the intoxicating feeling that you and your friends knew secrets no one else did.
    The thing I most treasured about this time was that you kept stumbling over set after set of smart misfits playing amazing, fully realized music that sounded like nothing else. All the town weirdos were suddenly in bands. Some, like Slint, were making records
while they were still teenagers
that would age as well as those made by distant rock gods like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. In the rest of the world hair metal was king, and its bands—Warrant, Winger, Poison—ruled the radio and MTV, selling upbeat party-time bullshit in which the guy always got the girl and all underdogs triumphed over their adversaries by the third verse, if not sooner. The bands in our underground, like those that inspired them, told stories that didn’t fit into such narrow schematics. No other music so accurately evoked the black hole of self-loathing, and the power you could find within it, as “Nothing” by Negative Approach or “Black Coffee” by Black Flag. No mainstream artist drew such precise lines between us and them as Saint Vitus did in the embittered, extended middle finger of “Born Too Late,” or as ferociously as Minor Threat’s “Filler,” or with the naked anguish of Hüsker Dü’s “Whatever.” If our bands didn’t invent writing about the absolute abasement of romantic despair and loneliness—Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and Crazy Horse’s “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” came first, after all—nothing on the radio or MTV or any major label expressed it as clearly and starkly as American Music