Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Page A

Club’s “Blue and Grey Shirt” or “Laughingstock.” Our bands even nailed standard rock topics better than anyone else around: the aimlessness of American youth, like Meat Puppets’ “Lost,” or the joy of libido and an open road, like Urge Overkill’s “Faroutski.”
    And the lyrics weren’t even the important part. Not when Sonic Youth and Slint and Slovenly reached heights of gorgeousness and mystery that almost never had anything to do with what they
said
. Rather, it was how they
sounded
, even on records made as cheaply and quickly as possible in studios held together with duct tape. Songs were finally liberated from verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Bands everywhere made incredibly evocative albums, like
Tweez
or
EVOL
or Die Kreuzen’s
October File,
that sounded like nothing that ever came before them. Other musicians realized you could strip the exciting parts off metal’s carcass—loud distorted riffs, relentless rhythm sections—and make them into something else. Something better. Very few bands playing metal in 1987 ever set their instruments and amps to “crush/kill/destroy” as effectively as the instrumental Dutch band Gore did on
Mean Man’s Dream
—an album recorded live in the studio, with no overdubs, which no straight-up metal band in the eighties would ever have the balls to do.
    ***
    THE MUSIC AND THE SMIDGENS OF ATTENTION WE WERE GETTING began to go to my head. I kept my mouth shut in high school, convinced I’d be misunderstood. Now, full of late-adolescent spunk, electrified by guitars, I was damn well going to be heard. Finally confident enough, for the first time in my life, to be absolutely straightforward. Though the people around me might have preferred to call it “being an asshole.” “You lived your life,” Orestes told me much later, “like you played your instrument.” I still couldn’t bully anyone physically, but I could bully
everyone
aesthetically. Oberlin, a colony of art nerds and mousy nose-to-the-textbook types, was a very safe place to do this. Despite its deserved reputation for excruciating political correctness, and even though the campus newspaper’s letters page endlessly hashed out the minutest aspects of sexism and racism and taking back the night, few people there knew how to put up a real fight. Passive aggression was more common: a large percentage of Bitch Magnet flyers were routinely torn down. We gleefully replaced them, and then some.
    Sometime during junior or senior year I was pulling together a few bands for another dorm or house party when, with some reluctance, I approached a musician I knew. He was really annoying, and I didn’t care for his band, either. When I mentioned the party and asked if they could do it, he barked out a superior prep-school “Ha ha!”—and it really sounded exactly like “Ha ha!”—and added, “Everyone wants us to play that show!” Without hesitating, I banged out, “Well, I think you guys pretty much suck. But other people asked.”
    He may have deserved that, but back then I sprayed that shit everywhere. I said stupid things. I
did
stupid things. On one of the first weekends of the school year, I slept with the woman at school who was involved with Orestes. I apologized to him, first on the phone and then in a self-lacerating letter, but a fissure opened that couldn’t be easily closed. And I had other problems with Orestes, because he bought a dog.
    I’m serious.
    Specifically, a baby English mastiff he named Victor. I’m told they are delightful, but an English mastiff is a dog in the way that an aircraft carrier is a boat. Adult mastiffs can weigh more than 130 pounds, and they get big before they
realize
they’re big. As a puppy Victor might see you lying on the floor and step on your face, unaware that this could break your jaw. When he leapt up to