Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Page B

thrilling the fanboy in me. We met the Harvard radio DJ before the show, too, and when she realized it was us, her eyes widened and her hand fluttered up to cover her open mouth, and I thought,
Shit—someone’s actually excited to meet us
.
    My hangover from the tequila had practically paralyzed me, and I was barely back to being human by showtime. There were a few technical fuckups that night, and I probably broke a string or two, because that’s what always happened, but the crowd was excited—there
was
a crowd, for once—and it rubbed off on us, and it became a great night.
    I soon started a brief dalliance with the Harvard radio DJ. When I stayed with her when we played her hometown of Youngstown in early September, or when she came to visit me at Oberlin one weekend thereafter, I stole her Grim Reaper T-shirt—the laughably awful metal band, not the guy who kills everyone—which I would wear onstage into the twenty-first century. I had to steal it. I still have it today. It’s an absolutely perfect artifact. Not just because it brilliantly encapsulates the idiocy of most eighties metal, but because it’s a reminder of how easily dreams of big-time commercial success could curdle. Black-light poster colors of purple and bright yellow, silk-screened onto the deep black of a half-polyester fabric. The front depicts a skeleton in a hooded cloak in a jail cell, bony hands curling around a prison bar and smoke seeping from ol’ Grim’s open mouth, over the legend LUST FOR FREEDOM . The back displays a soul-crushing litany of fifth- and sixth-tier markets through which the band death-marched for over six weeks in 1987, towns known only to their residents, places no band ever wants to see on its itinerary: Cookstown, New Jersey. Pasadena, Maryland. Salina, Kansas. Papillion, Nebraska. Lawton, Oklahoma. Some years later our friends in Codeine crossed paths on tour with an obscure Seattle band called Sweet Water as Sweet Water flogged an instantly forgotten major-label album and slogged through their version of this tour. In the lyrics for Codeine’s “Loss Leader,” you hear that band’s story: alone on the road, utterly abandoned by their record label and everyone else, all but left to die alongside some obscure highway, as the song sadly repeats, far from home, far from home.
    In 1988 you couldn’t imagine the sorry fate of a band like Sweet Water, which lived in the right zip code to get scooped up in the post-Nirvana major-label feeding frenzy. Nor could the fate be foretold of an oddball band we met in Chicago that summer, with whom we’d soon play shows in Ohio. They had few fans, performed their strange, tough, and beautiful songs while wearing elaborate velvet and lamé suits, and in general acted as if they alone were in on a colossal joke. Urge Overkill’s guitarist, Nate Kaatrud, and its bassist, Ed Roeser, both came from small towns in Minnesota, though both seemed far too weird and knowing for it: rightly or wrongly, I always sensed some savvy lurking beneath their generally dazed and stoney mien. Nate was a rare lady-killer in our midst, tall, rail-thin and angular, with sharply turned cheekbones and giant blue eyes. Rock-star looks, in the sense that rock stars often have odd and exaggerated features. He was a talented graphic artist, though he was too lazy to do much with said skill. He improvised absurd asides in any situation. Once, in Pittsburgh, we watched a confused drunk wallow on the sidewalk outside the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern—the sort of old dive bar that got colonized by punk kids putting on shows, to the bafflement of the native clientele. When the guy unzipped his fly and started reaching within, Nate immediately urged, “No, no, no, no. Let’s keep Li’l Elvis in Graceland.” If he liked your set, he wouldn’t come up and say “great show” or any such standard nonsense, but he’d fix you