Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine

the new offices of a moderately successful insurance company: all beiges and grays, and absolutely unremarkable. As at every studio, a tattered pile of magazines—
Rolling Stone
and trade publications aimed at engineers and studio owners, the latter being effective sleeping aids—sat on a coffee table near the couch: band distractors. The coffee was horrifying, thick and sour from the eight or twelve hours it spent warming in the carafe, but you drank it anyway. The one female intern sat behind the reception desk, where the take-out menus were kept in a folder in the top drawer. God forbid, in the eighties, she should actually be allowed in the control room.
    When no music is playing, the hush of any studio’s control room is womblike and deeply comforting. (Though we four dudes kamikaze-ing through a sleep-deprived weekend gradually made that room smell as sharp as kimchee.) Sound on Sound’s was tiny, but it neatly accommodated a truckload of outboard gear, the tape machines, and the pool-table-sized mixing desk, behind which the engineer or producer sat in a rolling chair. (An engineer recorded your band. A producer rewrote your songs and told you what to play. We learned the distinction after pissing off Albini by giving him a producer credit on the first pressing of
Star Booty
.) The band sat behind the engineer, the three of us snugly wedged onto the cokey - styled, blandly modern black leather sofa against the back wall.
    After something like a day straight of being awake in the studio, following a full week’s work with the construction crew and a mad dash to Manhattan, and after another round of guitar overdubs on “Big Pining,” I’d had enough and told everyone I needed to sleep. I flicked the light switches near the reception desk and collapsed onto a (beige) couch. A few hours later Orestes woke me to say he was leaving, that he had to get back to Boston. As he walked away I propped myself up on one elbow and blurted, “We’re the best band in the world.”
    He repeated it back at me, because we could still say something like that and believe it. Maybe I should have quit right then. No one knew who we were yet, but it could never get better than the certainty of that moment.
    ***
    AS IT OFTEN HAPPENED, OUR BOSTON SHOW WAS ACTUALLY in Cambridge, at the Middle East, a tiny room just off Central Square with surprisingly good sound. Billy Ruane, a local legend who booked shows there, had tracked us down and set it up. “Local legend” is, of course, a terrible and overused term, but anyone from Boston—even anyone in a band that came through Boston—will testify that he deserved it. Billy combed his hair up, wore loafers with no socks, and looked exactly like a drunk preppie, which is what he was. He had the pinkish skin you see on Irish guys who don’t really need to shave. I always picture him in a partially buttoned white shirt, shirttail out, long before that was a common look, under a blazer or a brownish knee-length overcoat. One term was so frequently, and accurately, applied to his appearance that, were you to type his name into Google, I half expect autofill would offer up “billy ruane disheveled.” Billy was notorious for jumping around at shows in an exuberant, flailing way, and I highly recommend that you go to YouTube and watch him dance. I was told there was family money, and a lot of it. Much later I learned that his dad had done well enough to warrant being described as an investor-slash-philanthropist. Billy’s day job was guarding rare books at Harvard’s Widener Library—really—but he lived to drink and go to shows and movies every night.
    Sooyoung and I drove straight to Orestes’s apartment, laughed and hugged him at the door, lugged our gear up a few flights of stairs to the sweltering attic where he kept his drums, stripped off our shirts—that again, but it was just too damn hot—set up as