Your Band Sucks Part 4

DOCTOR ROCK WAS SEVERAL YEARS OLDER THAN SOOYOUNG and me. He was compact and lean with a round face and big, white Midwestern teeth-the sort of face you could tell freckles had once spread across, and there still remained something very boyish about his enthusiasms and petulance. His shoulder-length red-brown hair had thinned and often went Albert Einstein on him, which was not a good look. Even before his audition, it was clear he did not speak our language of punk rock cred and correctness and hadn't spent years going to hardcore shows, reading zines, and hanging out at a college radio station. (Though neither had Orestes, and that worked out great.) When I called and left a detailed message for Doctor Rock with his live-in girlfriend-We're in this band he knows, alb.u.m's coming out, we need a drummer more or less immediately for upcoming tours of America and Europe-she immediately asked if "management" would pay for relocation. My response: "You're talking to management, and we can't."

Just after we met, he enthused about how cool it would be to have an electronic kit that triggered various industrial sound effects. 1990 was a long time ago, but not so long that this notion was in any way novel. There he is, locking eyes with me, miming hitting a cymbal and vocalizing a robotic Rrhhhooonnngggkk. There I am, trying to look noncommittal about a totally horrifying idea for this band. Still: he was a really good drummer. Powerful, precise, and at ease playing both the complex and the simple. He was a metalhead, but that could be kind of cool and might help in a conflict I knew could arise between my desire to get heavier and weirder and Sooyoung's pop sensibility. Then again, he'd also played the glammy fake-metal c.r.a.p we hated during a stretch of the eighties he spent in Manhattan, where he briefly lived in an illegal bas.e.m.e.nt apartment in Alphabet City. (The toilet was a simple drain cut into the cement floor.) Anyone reasonably familiar with that time and place will not be surprised to learn that his most promising band collapsed when key personnel, himself included, got too familiar with narcotics. The coup de grce came when a bandmate stole most of Doctor Rock's possessions, including a pretty nice stereo.

So, yes, he had a few miles on the odometer. But he'd cleaned up, and, unlike the only other drummer we tried out, he auditioned well. Welcome aboard, Doctor Rock. He threw his drum kit and some clothes into his Honda station wagon and drove down from the upper Midwest, moving in with a couch-tenderized South African Spicoli type I'll call Strom, whose accent rendered his favorite phrase as "ab-so-lewwt-lee NAHSSING!" To hear it, you just had to ask what he'd done that day. Strom's dedication to la.s.situde was so heroic that he affected a limp and wore a knee brace while working as a paralegal, to avoid having to do any physical work at a law firm.

YOU NEVER FORGET THE NEW SENSATIONS OF YOUR TEENS and early twenties. Or maybe it's that certain transitional moments in your life stick with you, and something about the way you find yourself waiting within them, in a pleasant sort of limbo between two destinations, etches them into memory. I loved those few weeks before we went on tour. I'd uprooted myself to North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where Sooyoung had moved after college. Once there, jobless, I aimlessed my way down the main drag a few times each day, chatting with people I'd met in clubs or at bars or through the whole brotherhood-of-bands thing. Sometimes I scammed free food from a b.i.t.c.h Magnet fan who worked at the pizzeria. I was dead broke, but Taco Bell served unlimited iced tea and 39-cent tacos, and one day I was able to feed myself with the spare change I found on the floor in my room. The Char-Grill in Raleigh served tea so sweet it made your teeth hurt, and shakes so thick that, as I believe Thurston Moore once observed, sipping them through a straw was like trying to suck a wrench out of mud. Sometimes I loitered outside Cat's Cradle when interesting bands came through, to charm my way onto a guest list. (When Sonic Youth played there, they arrived in a tour bus with FRAMPTON emblazoned in the skinny front window where buses once announced their destination.) I pulled long late-night sessions in the twenty-four-hour Kinko's-where Laura Ballance, the ba.s.sist for a new band called Superchunk, sometimes worked nights-constructing and Xeroxing show flyers and press kits, then skulked the deserted downtown, stapling flyers to telephone poles and bulletin boards while crickets sawed at the moist night air. My girlfriend lived hundreds of miles away, and contacting her required careful budgeting or a stolen credit card number. But this was a very contented time, and even today I can remember the tickly feeling spreading: So much was going to happen.

The only problem was that Sooyoung worked, and lived with his girlfriend, so Doctor Rock was my primary activity pal, and he seemed a bit bewildered by the setting and by us. Sooyoung and I didn't drink much, weren't into big hormonal displays, and our ambitions and demeanor, onstage and off, didn't exactly match Doctor Rock's. He adored the juicy, dirty pleasures of rock and the showmans.h.i.+p of an earlier era. We'd never play footsie with major labels or be in nakedly commercial gutter-metal bands in New York-and if we had, we definitely wouldn't have worn eyeliner and scarves, as he did. He had never heard of the bands we held closest to our hearts, though his mind was properly blown once I played him Voivod and Honor Role and Slint and Gore. (Not for the first time, I thought, See? This stuff is so great it can convert anyone!) Though he was full of great and horrifying stories. In one he went on a hiking trip with his ineffably gentle Midwestern parents while secretly coming off heroin. I made him retell these tales, howled in appreciation, then filed them in the mental ledger that tallied his faults.

A TRIO ON TOUR IN AMERICA SANS DRIVER OR SOUNDMAN OR other helping hands, as we were, is forced to get workmanlike pretty quickly. The days tick by: drive to gig, unload gear, soundcheck, set up merch table, grab quick dinner nearby, sit at merch table, play, have someone dash to sell merch right after the set (prime time for sales), get paid, load van, drive to sleeping quarters, unload van if necessary, sleep, repeat. The profit margin depends on finding strangers' floor s.p.a.ce. Three of us sharing one motel room? A rare luxury. In other words, ours was not a party van. Before the tour began, our booking agent showed me the standard contract rider his bands used. In the part outlining what food and drink we required backstage, I crossed out one case of beer and wrote in its place one twelve-pack of beer. At one point Doctor Rock confided to a mutual friend that the tour felt like being among scientists. He hadn't been in a band like ours: sober, somber, serious, somewhat distant. Somewhere in Ohio the ba.s.sist in an opening band-a ferrety, older Johnny Thunders type whom I immediately distrusted-said he had Seconals, which astonished me. Seconals? Who in the '90s was still eating reds? I don't think Doctor Rock indulged. But that night he had more to talk about with that guy than he had with us.

Anyway, it wasn't that Doctor Rock was so much older. It was that he seemed so much younger. At an afterparty following the last show of the American tour-in case this sounds in any way exciting or louche, it took place in a college dorm lounge, lined with grayish inst.i.tutional couches and ablaze in fluorescent light-he exulted, as hopped-up as a twelve-year-old, over our upcoming tour of Europe. Throwing his hands in the air, pumping fists, all that: "Yes! I'm going to Europe! Yes! I get to go to Europe! Yes! Yes! Yes!" The veteran of a zillion bands, he was b.u.t.ting up against the realities that being thirty brings into sudden sharp focus-and here he was, high-fiving strangers about a trip overseas.

Having been kicked out of my band for being a loudmouth, I'd internalized one lesson from that experience: If I was ecstatic about something, I a.s.sumed I was always best off keeping it to myself. I'd grown very conscious that how I acted affected everyone's emotional weather. I hadn't considered how much Doctor Rock's behavior would affect mine, to say nothing of Sooyoung's. Not for the first time, I stared at our new bandmate in disbelief. Where had this guy come from?

AT THE END OF THE AMERICAN TOUR, SOOYOUNG AND I DID some basic accounting and discovered that, on a series of dates that seemed well organized and reasonably well attended and that paid us decently, we'd lost something like fifty bucks. A few days later Sooyoung called a band meeting, where he announced that he'd enrolled in grad school and would start shortly after we returned from Europe.

Doctor Rock took this all in. Then he announced that, given this development, well, with great reluctance and with many thanks for this amazing opportunity and a great time all around, after this last round of dates he was going back home. He said all this with great Midwesternness. Great modesty and affability, accompanied by many smiles and self-deprecating head bobs. There was a touch of insincerity around the edges if you fixed him with a penetrating gaze. But I couldn't blame him if he'd had enough of our nerdy, solemn ways. And of course he had reason to smile: a decision had been made for him. (I should probably say here that both Doctor Rock and Sooyoung later told me that this meeting was not the first time Sooyoung made these plans known, but I a.s.sure you, the news was a giant surprise to me.) Anyway, it didn't seem like there was much reason to stick around, so I, too, said I'd go back home. There was just this entire European tour to get through first.

THE GREAT CULTURAL DIVIDE WITHIN BANDS LIES BETWEEN the drummer and everyone else. If your band is at all serious about impact and power, your drummer's job is the most physical and violent, and by far the hardest. Other musicians can half-a.s.s it-distortion is a remarkably forgiving tool-but the drummer must be both caveman and mathematician, and has a far smaller margin of error than anyone else. While the task is to bang the staff on one rock, loudly, the drummer also has to know, to the millisecond, when to start whacking the next one. You don't want someone just good enough: you want someone great, someone obsessed with drums and rhythm and beats and cymbals, who plays for hours every day and subsists on raw meat and steroids and p.o.r.nography and power lifting. You want sheer f.u.c.king power tempered with just enough finesse, and if you don't, I'm basically not interested in your band. Such a regimen won't civilize your average young adult, which is where the cultural divide starts. Those who write lyrics are thinking about poetry. The drummers are thinking about murdering animals with their bare hands. (Or should be.) Orestes likes to talk about how everyone needs to let the demon out, so long as you know when to usher the demon back into its cage. Hearing him say that always made perfect sense to me, because pursuing drumming with the singlemindedness that excellence requires can make anyone go completely insane. Even someone like Doctor Rock, who, despite all those thousands of hours spent practicing, was far more lover than thug. But upon landing in Europe, he let the demon run amok and never tried to drag it back to its cage. Maybe it was that the end was now in sight. Maybe he held back on the American leg of the tour, worried that he'd freak out us geeks. Maybe the right combination of environment and availability flicked an invisible internal switch. In Europe he became caricature. In Europe we started calling him Doctor Rock.

DECEMBER IN NORTHERN EUROPE. I WON'T BE THE FIRST PERSON to say it, but much of that continent doesn't really understand heating. Our van was tiny and lacked seatbelts, which I hated, because without them your a.s.s slid around the slippery backseat, making it impossible to sleep, while the chilly weather gradually leached out all your body heat. A few scenes of snowy alpine glory, but much was just lightless and gray. We pulled into each city at twilight-no, it was always twilight-while pa.s.sersby hunched their way home through streets and sidewalks coated in soot-covered snow. Parts of England still stank from coal smoke. After we played our first show of the tour, opening for the Wedding Present in London, our van was broken into, and we lost both of my guitars, my amp, Sooyoung's ba.s.s, and a bunch of merch and cash, which didn't do much for morale.

We argued in the van, in hotels, backstage and onstage. Sometimes moments before the show began. Sometimes during the set.

I went days without speaking to Doctor Rock. (Sooyoung went longer.) But it didn't seem to bother him, once he discovered the greater volumes of free booze, the occasional availability of speed, and that larger crowds meant lots more women at each show. Early in the tour we played Hamburg, a town that, as every touring band knows, has an actual red-light district. Another American band opened for us, and we all checked out the Reeperbahn afterward. Available women sat in lingerie in storefront windows, lit by low ambient light. They had mastered an almost-subliminal signaling system: you never saw any of them knocking on their windows, you just heard ghostly taps echoing down the alleys.

We tried to find the cheapest place with topless dancers. Not the best strategy if one wants a good show. To his enduring credit, a googly-eyed Doctor Rock posed the same question to all the barkers who stood by the entrances: "Is it decadent?" (A question we all found profoundly amusing. Also kind of the right one to ask!) We finally found a suitable one-by which I mean the cheapest one-and paid the minimal fee. Each of us entered his own booth, a wall opened, and we found ourselves looking into a giant round room, staring directly into one another's open booths, while a tall blonde gyrated and s.h.i.+mmied without any enthusiasm. She asked where we were from, and the guitarist from the other band said, in the flattest American-news-anchor accent possible, that we were all English. The absolute highlight was when she straightened up, pointed at her chest, and, apparently seriously, p.r.o.nounced, "t.i.ts." The show ended after that, and Doctor Rock trotted off to explore the sights.

The rest of us went to another club, which had a sloped and polished painted-concrete floor, like a roller rink or skate park, and was about as big. Immediately two or three blond German girls, nude but for high heels, descended upon me, and one tried to strike up a conversation.

Attractive Naked Blond Girl: h.e.l.lo! Where are you from?

Me: Um. New York.

ANBG: Would you like to come with me to a private room?

Me: No. [Exit.]

Doctor Rock, meanwhile, was enormously complicating his evening by forgetting the name and address of our hotel, then spending all night trying to find it. At one point he went to a police station with this sad story. I was interested in hearing how Hamburg's constabularies responded, once they stopped laughing. But after seeing an exhausted and angry-eyed Doctor Rock glaring at the rest of us over breakfast-he managed to find his way back just as we started eating-I thought it better not to ask.

I could say that Doctor Rock drank a lot, but it would be more accurate to say that if he was awake, he was drinking. We played a s.h.i.+tty show in Innsbruck-literally s.h.i.+tty, in an absolutely freezing room in a squat that was home to a pack of dogs that left scattered frozen cl.u.s.ters of droppings everywhere. As disheartening as that sight was, it was nowhere near as disheartening as what happened when the heat finally went on and the room filled: the p.o.o.p unfroze, mingled with the snow on everyone's shoes, and was tracked everywhere until the entire floor was sloppy with a thin, foul-smelling muck. Before the show Doctor Rock drank a beer while flying around on someone's skateboard. He hit a patch of frozen dog s.h.i.+t, or something, and took a pretty serious tumble. But he didn't let go of his beer bottle-interestingly-and he landed on it, opening a nasty gash. I saw him howl and flail a b.l.o.o.d.y hand and immediately thought, Tour over. But Tanco, our unflappable Dutch driver/tour manager/Doctor Rock minder, wrapped it neatly in gauze and tape, and within minutes Doctor Rock was relating and reenacting his accident to a crowd of new friends.

He did not appear to require sleep. He was awake when we went to bed and awake when we woke up. Sometimes he would doze in the van during the day, then suddenly sit up, reach for a beer, and down it.

He seemed to find a woman at every show. In Austria (or Germany, or Switzerland, I really don't remember), one stuck around in the van for a few days. She must have hoped for a better time than what we showed her, because, if I understood correctly, she had put her job in danger by coming along. Had I spoken to her at all, I might be able to tell her story now.

Long van rides lead young men to hash out theories, and on this tour we started wondering whether Germany was so uptight because its men scorned c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s. One morning in Karlsruhe or Ka.s.sel or Bremen or Dortmund, outside our hotel, following an impressive make-out/mauling session with the previous night's conquest outside our idling van, Doctor Rock described how he had gone down on her the night before, making her softly exclaim in wonderment, "What are you doing?" We all developed the theory, but Doctor Rock did the actual lab work. Credit him for that, I guess.

Some of this was kind of funny and made for great stories, even if the day-to-day sucked, as it inevitably does when you live with someone who's always in character. The complications came from realizing that the joke-doll version of Doctor Rock was easier to deal with than the talented and disgruntled drummer who was ill-suited for our band. Encouraging him by chuckling at the cartoon had queasy moral aspects, even if, to paraphrase Orwell's brilliant quote, he was quite happy to let his face grow to fit the mask. I kept him at arm's length and laughed at his excesses because it was the easiest thing to do. Not my most s.h.i.+ning moment. It never occurred to me to say, Hey, what's up? Maybe it's time to slow down. Anyway, the general codes of the road dictate that someone has to be found unconscious with a needle in his arm to warrant an intervention, or to be so f.u.c.ked up he or she starts ruining shows. Doctor Rock never did that. Which is not to say that his metally flourishes were working or welcome.

The last show of the tour was in the Netherlands on the next-to-last day of 1990, and the following night there was a huge New Year's Eve party in the well-appointed squat where we stayed. (On this tour I learned that no country did squats as well as the Dutch.) I stayed in my room, reading fanzines, watching TV. I was worn out, feeling shy, also sad that this was the end. Doctor Rock, of course, was roaming the halls but had divined that our host had a small cache of speed, and every half hour or so he asked sweetly for another hit.

You don't want to see someone you know acting like this, but the tour was over, as was the band, and we were finally going home. Well, most of us were. Doctor Rock had received a vague offer to drum with an expat American guitarist of minor renown. Perhaps some caution light should have flashed, since he found said guitarist hanging out with a clearly junked-out opening band one night, but, whatever, he was no longer our problem. He planned to stay at the squat for a few days and then . . . well, we didn't know and we didn't ask, because Doctor Rock was finally off our hands.

An article in a British fanzine, written just after Sooyoung and I limped home, closed with the image of Doctor Rock riding toward the horizon, heading deeper and deeper into some rock fantasy, until he disappeared from sight.

The reality was different. A few days after I got back to the States, while licking wounds at my parents' comfortable and ma.s.sively un-punk-rock house-unemployed, band over, no clue what to do next, sitting with them each night at the dinner table, joining them uneasily in front of the TV afterward-the phone rang. It was Doctor Rock's dad, an extremely gentle white-haired academic, who had some questions.

Among them: "Now, Jon. I have to ask you something. And I understand if you feel you can't betray a friend. But was my son having problems with drugs when he was in Europe?"

No, I said. But he was drinking heavily. (I didn't bother mentioning the speed.) "Well, if it was just drinking . . ." his dad started to say, but I didn't want to give him any false sense of relief. It wasn't that I gave a s.h.i.+t about Doctor Rock. I was basically hoping I'd never see him again. But his parents were so kind when we stayed with them on tour. I also sensed that his dad had made this call before, and that thought made me squeeze my eyes shut.

No, I said. He was drinking heavily. Really, really heavily.

Meanwhile, Doctor Rock's girlfriend, understandably upset that he was, you know, not coming home, called my girlfriend, whom I'd made the mistake of telling many things I a.s.sumed she'd keep in confidence. (Getting through that tour required a lot of venting.) But when Doctor Rock's girlfriend called her, she shared what I'd recounted of his multivarious dalliances, and afterward told me about this discussion. Like me, my girlfriend also went to Oberlin. Unlike me, she was still influenced by the most excruciating aspects of the school's exhausting leftydom. She argued that sisterhood prevented her from lying or shading the truth when asked about Doctor Rock's faithfulness. I pointed out that she had betrayed my confidences, and by doing so screwed me and some other people as well. But by then scorekeeping was moot.

Doctor Rock's parents contrived a way to bring him back home, though I don't recall how. They didn't inform him that, upon arrival, he was going straight to rehab. Though they did tell me.

Before we flew to Europe, he had left his car in my parents' driveway, and it fell to me to pick him up at the airport. He'd already gotten an earful from his girlfriend, so: awkward. But he was nowhere near the a.s.shole that he had every right to be. In fact, he was almost cheerful. Or at least he, like me, desperately did not want any kind of scene, and he, like me, just wanted to get on with what was left of his life. I did not bring up any touchy topics. (I was happy being pretty Midwestern-indirect about everything myself.) He stayed at my parents' house just long enough to shower, while I reflected upon the s.h.i.+tstorm awaiting him, and then he hopped in his car and disappeared in the direction of the interstate. He left as cheerfully as he came in, even though he also talked about what he thought was coming-that he would have some serious explaining to do when got back home.

But he had no idea what was coming. A few weeks later I got a letter from rehab.

"I'm sorry to be writing this, but anger must be vented," it began in seething and tiny handwriting. It went on from there to denounce my betrayal, my disingenuousness, and my eternal complaining while on that last tour. (Right on all counts, by the way.) I stewed for a couple weeks, feeling guilty, again, that I'd tacitly encouraged his worst instincts. Finally I sent a few perfunctory sentences conceding certain points while a.s.serting that he had no one to blame but himself.

I couldn't help it. You couldn't have helped it, either. Something about rehab forces cliches out of everyone.

This note crossed in the mail with a sunnier, blame-accepting letter from a clean, sober, and steadier Doctor Rock. What a s.h.i.+tty time we had all along trying to communicate. We couldn't even time apologies and accusations correctly. Our correspondence dwindled to nothing after that. I got a postcard from him about a year later, gently, cheerfully-Midwesternly-chiding me for not sending him live tapes of the European tour. He ended up in a band we knew, but left after one alb.u.m. I ran into him on the road in the mid-nineties, while I was on tour with Vineland, and we had an awkward conversation. Like many dreamers and seekers, he ended up out West, where he spent years drumming for a show in Las Vegas. He's married now, with kids.

I DIDN'T SPEAK WITH HIM AGAIN UNTIL LATE 2013. FUNNILY enough, after completing a PhD in music, he taught university cla.s.ses in pop music: he really was Doctor Rock. I'd told him I was writing this book and wanted to talk about our time playing together. I wanted him to take some shots at me, fair being fair and all, but no matter how much I prompted, he demurred. I didn't expect the conversation to be easy, but it was clear that I was ripping off many old scabs, and the way he wallowed in apology was hard to hear.

I asked: What happened in Europe?

"I f.u.c.ked everything up. Isn't that what this is about? I was the guy who f.u.c.ked it all up."

No, I said. That's not what this is about. What happened?

"I was having the time of my life. I'd never experienced anything so amazing." I'd forgotten that, despite all those years of playing in bands, he'd never really gone on tour before. "I imploded. I didn't know how to handle how cool it was. At the end I just didn't want to go home. I didn't want to leave. I didn't want it to end."

Clay Tarver, the guitarist from Bullet LaVolta and Chavez, once told me that going on tour is so much fun it makes you crazy. I love this line, because as soon as he said it, I knew what he meant. It sort of happened to me, early on. It definitely happened to Doctor Rock.

In retrospect, I said, there was no way to replace Orestes. No one else would have worked. (I've successfully replaced drummers in other bands, but it's really hard to swap out a musician in a trio. Though neither Sooyoung nor I knew that.) Doctor Rock said that he loved the band and thought we sounded great together. He asked over and over again if I would make him the villain when I told this part of the story. I told him I wouldn't.

Did I?

Or is the villain the guy who encouraged his worst instincts, talked s.h.i.+t about him behind his back, dropped the dime on his on-tour indiscretions-and then wrote about almost all of it in a f.u.c.king book?

DOCTOR ROCK, DOCTOR ROCK, YOU a.s.s PAIN, YOU OF THE dubious aesthetics and wince-inducing ideas, you who helped sink one of my most cherished bands, you who in so many ways needlessly complicated my life-well, you were completely right about a few things. Many of us indie rockers knew nothing about pleasure back then. The band you joined certainly didn't. We didn't drink much. Smoking pot made my heart race from nameless dread, and anything harder than pot was unthinkable. We didn't f.u.c.k nearly as much as we should have. We didn't even dance.

And you know what else? I wish that I, too, cut loose, went mad, drank beyond the point of knowing anything, accepted any pill or powder that floated my way. I mean: I was twenty-two and touring in a rock band. It wasn't like I had to wake up and go to work in the morning. I wish that I, too, ripped the tights off young, giggling German women and tongued them until they experienced the ultimate pleasure. But something held me back. Something that, for good or ill, I had and you didn't. The fix and rush of the music was enough for me. The hormonal thrill of being inside it, instead of watching from the crowd. You and I both chased a buzz we were powerless to resist. It just wasn't the same one.

Jonathan Richman Has Ruined Rock for Another Generation.

In 1994 or 1995 a band from Providence called Small Factory played in Manhattan at Brownies, and for some reason I went to the show. The drummer, Phoebe, was inept, and wrinkled her nose and made a funny face every time the band went slightly out of time, and they went out of time a lot. The guitarist, Dave, looked thirty-five, at least, but the entire band dressed like they were eight-bowl haircuts, stripey T-s.h.i.+rts-and acted like they were six. Their songs sucked, and they couldn't do a single interesting thing with their instruments. But-and this was the worst part-it didn't matter. The crowd was there to love the band, no matter what, and have the band love them back. A cuddle party, not a rock show.

Cities change. Even cities that, like Indie Rock USA, are just a state of mind. A very nave form of twee pop had started going around, like a flu, and was afflicting many along the Eastern Seaboard. (Ultimately, the best-known bands that had a foot or two in this scene were Belle and Sebastian and the Magnetic Fields.) This all started in Olympia, Was.h.i.+ngton, with Beat Happening, with whom, strangely enough, b.i.t.c.h Magnet once played at the CBGB Record Canteen. Beat Happening basically purveyed a more s.e.xualized and arch version of Jonathan Richman-he's been doing nasal and childlike since the seventies-largely because their front guy, Calvin Johnson, had tons of charisma and wit. (I still wasn't a fan, though I always liked the oral-s.e.x reference near the end of "Indian Summer.") Still, in the early nineties the consummate observer/superfan of our underground Nils Bernstein-who later ran publicity for Matador and Sub Pop-was prescient enough to make a few batches of T-s.h.i.+rts that declared in bold type: CALVIN JOHNSON HAS RUINED ROCK FOR AN ENTIRE GENERATION. As many bands influenced by Joy Division oversimplified a brilliant band into much bad minor-key goth, the postBeat Happening stuff was much like Small Factory: bowl haircuts, stripey s.h.i.+rts, smiley faces, utterly bereft of s.e.xuality. Summer camp after grade school, minus the aggression. D.C.'s Tsunami, which started the Simple Machines label and, like Beat Happening, established themselves as a maypole band for this kind of stuff, actually sang the line "You say punk rock means a.s.shole. I say punk rock means cuddle." (Actually: no, not at all. Punk rock means-pick one-self-determined or self-sufficient or individual or steadfast in the face of opposition, not a.s.shole, and definitely not cuddle. But you already knew that, right?) Blandness became an aesthetic. Tempos strolled, never grinding, never speeding. Little was heavy, and even less was interesting, amid this bunch of s.h.a.ggy-dog bands wanting to nuzzle you and a crowd seemingly eager to regress to childhood. Had eBay existed, prices for Archies and 1910 Fruitgum Company records would have skyrocketed. I was desperate not to grow up, too, but I thought the point was to be forever twenty-one, not a kindergartner. I liked adulthood, and most trappings of adulthood, like drinking and s.e.x and living on my own. I hated all these bands, and I especially hated that they were starting to shove aside the music I liked most. In his book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad identified a fear of s.e.xuality-an unwillingness to embrace the complications that come with any of it, straight or gay-at the heart of the indie pop childishness. I just saw the childishness. What was the point?

THINK OF THE KICK DRUM/SNARE DRUM INTRO TO JUDAS Priest's "Living after Midnight": Boom-CHA boom-boom CHA, boom-CHA boom-boom CHA Boom-CHA boom-boom CHA, boom-CHA boom-boom CHA Now count the beats by finding the pulse-the steady heartbeat beneath it all: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. A textbook example of rock in standard 4/4 time-four beats per measure, with the snare drum emphasizing the second and fourth beat.

Now think of the main piano riff for Dave Brubeck's "Take Five": b.u.m-BAH, b.u.m-BAH, b.u.m-BAH b.u.m-BAH, b.u.m-BAH, b.u.m-BAH and count this one out, too: 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5. Five beats per measure, with accents in different places, most notably on the last two beats of the measure. Now count out the main instrumental riff in Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill." You'll find it's in seven.

When I mention odd time signatures or odd meters, I mean fives, sevens, and elevens. In rock they were generally the domain of prog-rock eggheads like Rush and King Crimson-I mean this in the best possible sense of "prog-rock eggheads," since I actually like both-though Led Zeppelin was confident enough to play around with them, too: much of "Four Sticks" is in five, and "The Ocean" gets into fifteen. Occasionally they turned up in bona fide pop hits. Like "Solsbury Hill," Pink Floyd's "Money" is in seven, and with "Hey Ya!" Outkast somehow created an infectious and danceable song with verses in eleven. (For purposes of keeping this bit short, I'm using few examples, but aspiring time-signature geeks are directed to Crimson, Meshuggah, and Voivod for more advanced study.) What I liked about odd time signatures, once b.i.t.c.h Magnet and bands we liked started messing around with them, was how they made songs swing and groove in different ways-it was still rock and all that, but the feel was deeper, darker, more complex. Switching time signatures when you go from the verse to the chorus or from the verse to the bridge-Rush does this lots; to cite just one example, much of "Red Barchetta" is in 4/4, but the guitar solo and the subsequent refrain of one main riff slip into seven-was a gentle way of throwing in a subtle emphasis, or throwing off a listener's equilibrium in a way that always interested me. It can, of course become a contrivance. In the mid-nineties a bunch of bands had all these lurching, awkward songs because they were trying so d.a.m.n hard to turn riffs that wanted to be in 4/4 into seven or five. And I got to the point in Vineland where a song didn't feel quite right unless it had two different time signatures, if not more.

When you're coc.o.o.ned within a cultural bubble, you might start mistaking your circle of friends for a broader reality. You might start believing that whatever obscure thing you treasure most-like, say, rock played in odd time signatures-is about to take over the world, and you might believe that that thing will therefore thrive forever. Beatniks did. Hippies did. I couldn't stand either, but I, too, believed that the revolution was here and my side would win. Because you have to, right? You have to believe, even when the world throws so little love your way, because you have to find some way to get out of bed in the morning. Losing candidates do it every election. The star pitcher on the last-place team does it. And you-you work your c.r.a.p job every day for nine hours, where someone shoots you a nasty look during each personal phone call, so tonight you can fill a dirty plastic bucket with that disgusting comelike cornstarch solution and dodge cops while plastering flyers all over the East Village until 2 a.m. Are you gonna do that if you think you're doomed to fail?

In the mid-nineties I could rattle off names of many bands that worked the specific angles I most cherished: those odd time signatures, odd guitar tunings, heavy, largely instrumental. Caspar Brtzmann Ma.s.saker. Slovenly. Wider. Gore. Slint. Bastro. Breadwinner. Voivod. Don Caballero. Pitchblende. There were likeminded people everywhere, or so I thought, because we all found one another at the same shows. In real life there weren't that many fans of this music-only those really deeply into it will recognize most of those names-because few normal people care enough to spend time parsing which measure is in five and which is in seven. The guys interested in details like that-and they were almost all guys, most of whom wore gla.s.ses and reveled in finally finding nerd athletics at which they could excel-were frequently musicians, or they quickly became musicians, since the membrane between fan and performer was so porous. This was one of the greatest things about this culture, but it's a problem when your only fans are the other musicians on the bill each night. Though you might not notice that it's a problem if you're spending too much time inside your bubble, where it's too easy to disappear up your own a.s.shole, and be fully convinced that the rest of the world will soon join you up there. One friend at college who lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side was shocked when Reagan won in a landslide in 1984. Everyone she knew voted for Mondale, so how could Reagan have won? Precisely the trap into which we were falling. "You're in the studio," explained Turing Machine's Justin Chearno. "You've only listened to your five songs for two weeks, and when you're done, you really think, We've created this new thing called music, and the world is going to hear this thing, and it's going to change their lives, and Sat.u.r.day Night Live is next. You just get so caught up. Then when nothing happens, you're like, 'Oh. Right.'"

Life in Indie Rock, USA, wasn't what I'd cracked it up to be. What had started out as free and welcoming ended up becoming as rigid and rule-bound as everything I'd hoped it would replace. (I was totally part of the problem, having been completely doctrinaire about music since forever.) "There was a lot of 'you're doing it wrong,'" recalled James Murphy, who drummed in Pony and Speedking long before he started LCD Soundsystem. Entering this world, he said, was like "your parents saying, 'You're gonna leave the farm. We're going to send you to this really good school.' And you're like, 'I am so excited!' Then you get there, and everyone's like, 'What kind of shoes are those? Oh. The country kid thinks they're cool.'" And since everyone in indie rock thought of themselves as a precious little snowflake, many claimed a uniqueness that was hard to square with the facts. "I used to get into all these fights with bands," Murphy recalled. "They'd all be like, 'I don't listen to anything. I listen to Edith Piaf,' and I'd be like, 'But you sound like Slint! You don't sing cabaret music! You're playing a guitar that's tuned funny in seven!'"

We weren't the only ones growing disillusioned. "There's this notion that indie rock has this intelligence. I think it was the opposite. More like know-nothingism," Andy Cohen, the guitarist from Silkworm, remembered. "Most of these bands were terrible, and they couldn't even play their instruments, in a bad way-not like how the s.e.x Pistols couldn't play their instruments, in a good way. Most bands were unambitious, and couldn't even execute their s.h.i.+tty little ambition." What bothered Cohen most was exactly what bothered me at that Small Factory show: laziness and low expectations. "You don't go to that famous opera house in Milan and suck and not hear about it. You go to the Apollo and you suck, you get knifed. But if you were in an indie rock band in the nineties and you sucked, you'd do well if you had the right friends."

The mainstream still sucked, but you always knew it would. Now our thing was starting to suck, too. Suddenly the weirdos-all right, my weirdos-were no longer winning, even in our little underground. "Indie rock became a genre of music, and it was very jangly and poppy," said Juan MacLean, a founder of Six Finger Satellite, who's now a renowned dance music artist and DJ. "That's why I quit. I grew up with hardcore, and then the b.u.t.thole Surfers. It seemed like their goal was to f.u.c.k with as many people as possible. I loved that. And I was so angry that indie rock became like what I actively rebelled against in the first place."

Lots of bands playing our circuit were only half a step from the mainstream-remember that the Smas.h.i.+ng Pumpkins, Hole, the Pixies, and Beck all started on indie labels-and in the wake of platinum and gold records from Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Helmet, major-label reps drew targets on most every middling band with a soupon of indie cred. Things got so strange that those reps also signed some bands that were actually oddball enough for me, among them San Diegan eccentrics Three Mile Pilot and the all-instrumental Pell Mell. (Those bands' major-label records died a very quick death, of course.) College radio veterans and guys from punk rock bands ended up on staff at Atlantic or Sony or Geffen, the token young people told to go out to their favorite hangouts and find the next big thing. The bands they courted received some version of The Spiel, often at fancy restaurant dinners attended by label execs and their flunkies. Ted Leo fronted Chisel and then Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, so his career has spanned multiple commercial booms for indie bands, and he's heard The Spiel in a few different decades. He recalled it like this: You guys are doing something great. We want you to have a home where you can make the records you want to make and have the funding to do it.

Further conversation, of course, revealed that reality in the big leagues wouldn't necessarily fit that frame. You might be told that the drummer or ba.s.sist or even the entire rest of the band had to go. When Sebadoh went to record Harmacy in 1995, Lou Barlow was pulled aside by someone on the project, who told him, "If you want this to be a big hit, you gotta get rid of your drummer. And you gotta do it now." (It's important to underscore here that its technical wobbliness was part of Sebadoh's package, much like the Pogues' drunkenness or Motorhead's facial warts.) "I knew he was right," Lou recalled. "And I knew I couldn't fire my friend in order to make a more dynamic, post-Nirvana-sounding record." To his credit, he didn't. And Harmacy didn't sell like Nevermind. But hardly anything did.

The tally of indie bands broken on the shoals of major-label indifference is, frankly, far too long to get into here, but in time everyone had friends in bands like Die Kreuzen or Walt Mink or Tad who had very detailed and unhappy stories. Among the recurring themes: the guy who signed us got fired and suddenly no one returned our phone calls; the guy at the label strung us along with teases and promises for over a year and then didn't sign us and we finally broke up from frustration and inertia; the release date of our record kept getting pushed back until we finally broke up; we got dropped right after they released our record.

Even some bands that seemed primed to succeed c.r.a.pped out. Urge Overkill had their look and concept extraordinarily well thought out. Their cover of Neil Diamond's "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" gave them a star turn on the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. For their 1993 major-label debut, Saturation, they had the full promotional power of Geffen's machinery behind them: significant commercial radio airplay, a tour with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and a video for "Sister Havana" that ended up in MTV's Buzz Bin, back when that all but guaranteed you'd soon hang a gold or platinum record on your wall. To date Saturation has sold about 270,000 copies. A total that would have any indie label freaking out with joy. But for a band in the nineties that received a full-on major-label push, that figure is flat-out disappointing. "The people spoke," Urge's Ed Roeser told me. "It didn't work out." To employ the gentlest form of understatement, drink and drugs became a problem, and the band's dark and underbaked follow-up, 1995's Exit the Dragon, tanked. Urge had played a glamourpuss-rock-star shtick for laughs pretty much since they started, but now it looked like they could no longer tell which parts were a joke and which weren't, which even Ed admits now. He quit, and the band fell apart-or vice versa-and fell apart in the worst way. Many fans never forgave them for leaving for more-monied pastures. Smarter ones just questioned the wisdom of their tactics. "They probably would have been a much more successful huge rock band if they hadn't been trying so hard to be a successful huge rock band," said Tortoise's Doug McCombs.

As for me, after indie pop triumphed and virtually all indie-to-major signings failed, I ended up getting into the continuum of sludgy hard rock bands that ran from Blue Cheer to Saint Vitus and Melvins to Kyuss and Sleep, the most recent examples of which were being described with the unfortunate term "stoner rock." In these bands I found the physicality and visceralness I no longer found among my indie brethren. Unfortunately I also found a decided Doctor Rock-ness to many of the musicians. Dave Sherman, then the ba.s.sist in Spirit Caravan, once told me he was calling his new band Earthride, "because we're all just"-here he paused, looking off into s.p.a.ce, before concluding-"riding the earth." Then he described the art he wanted on the cover of Earthride's first alb.u.m, a blond woman straddling the earth, at which point he started demonstrating that image. (I'd love to be able to say that alb.u.m-whose cover features no such blonde-is pretty great. But it isn't.) By then I'd abandoned many of my indie rock prejudices, but I just couldn't hang with how these guys defaulted to standard party-time rock modes. Nor how, once you got past the best of this breed, quality declined so precipitously. Nor how, for many of them, punk rock never happened. Also, theirs was a different tribe. Outsiders, yes, but bikers, not nerds. No way I'd ever pa.s.s for one of them, even with my long hair.

AROUND 2003 TED LEO MET WITH ANOTHER MAJOR-LABEL A&R guy, who had a slightly different spiel: "We want to think of you as another Bruce Springsteen. You've got a life here with us." Afterward Ted went directly to an interview with a twentysomething magazine writer and mentioned what he'd just been told.

Ted said that writer told him, "'I gotta tell you, from the perspective of a lot of your fans, we'd be really b.u.mmed if you signed to a major label.' And initially I was like, 'f.u.c.k you. That's not for you to decide.' But my other reaction was practical." He now understood that the A&R guy feeding him those lines could well be gone in a few months, and Ted knew no one else at that label. And he realized something else: "They're not going to make me into a star. I was thirty-three or thirty-four, writing political pop songs. That's not the equation for hits. And I'm going to lose half my existing audience? That sounds like a loser of a move." Ted's very smart on the challenges that middle-aged indie rockers face-Google any recent interview he's given for proof-but even he had to watch a generation of indie bands fail on major labels before reaching that conclusion.

"Reasonable Ending": This itinerary is a key prop for the next chapter.

Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and Your s.h.i.+tty Band That No One Likes.

All bands fail.

-Joe Carducci, former co-owner of SST Records, author of Rock and the Pop Narcotic Some bands fail more spectacularly than others, and some fail very quietly, with no witnesses. But that failure doesn't feel quiet if you're in such a band and you find yourself confronting something tougher than the general outcastness of playing weird music: blank stares from those who actually like weird music. I don't mean "no widespread recognition" or "no pots full of money." I mean nothing. No labels putting out your music. No fans coming to your shows. Because there are no fans.

If you've played in bands or spent any time within the social swirl surrounding music, you're familiar with the interested t.i.tter or two that typically greet a band's first few shows. That ripple of recognition is an amazing feeling when your band is new, and thrilling in its potential. At those first shows you come onstage and see the crowd moving toward you through the darkness. The stage lights are s.h.i.+ning in your eyes, so you can't make out any faces, but you still sense the curiosity and eagerness in those bodies. The problem arises when it's three or four years later and your band has silently glided past new and kind of interesting and is now familiar and unbeloved. Your friends make excuses for not coming to your shows. You play to empty rooms, and the songs feel like cardboard, and you stand onstage atop unsteady legs, avoiding the eyes of anyone still watching. (Often all we had was conviction. When that went, what else was left?) But you still have to act like you believe, even though the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that no one else does, and that evidence gradually gnaws a hole in you. Once your band lands here, there's never a late-career comeback. There's no rock band equivalent to The Rookie. You're dead. The only question is when you'll realize it, too.

Peter Prescott was the youngest member of Mission of Burma, and at a very tender age he saw terms like "legendary" applied to his band. Nothing else he did in music-he played in Volcano Suns, Kustomized, and the Peer Group, among others-made such an impact, though, to be fair, not much else did. But he told me a very cool thing: "I'd be kind of b.u.mmed out if I didn't experience the more modest pleasure of being in a sc.r.a.ppy little messed-up band that thirty people in each city care about." I'm grateful I experienced that, too. The problem is when that's your audience and most of them drift away.

I started Vineland in late 1991. b.i.t.c.h Magnet had been a trio, so this would be a quartet: two guitars, very loud, songs built around alternate tunings and odd time signatures, very aggressive and, for lack of a better term, very rock. Riffs but no big major-key singalong choruses. By then the tyranny of vocals exhausted me-it still does sometimes-so in this band the singing would be understated, primarily spoken, fighting to be heard above the band. Having learned a lesson from getting booted out of b.i.t.c.h Magnet, I made myself the key man: songwriter and singer. Since I was going to be so annoying about vocals, it made sense to just take the bullet. Also, the last thing you ever want to do is audition frontmen. David Lee Roth is great in Van Halen, but you do not want to live with that every day. (Evidently neither did they.) Vineland lasted four and a half years. We released two singles and appeared on one Australian compilation and one Spanish compilation. If you, too, perceive something uniquely heartbreaking about the phrase "appeared on one Australian compilation and one Spanish compilation," well, imagine applying it to your own band. We also recorded two unreleased alb.u.ms-or, to be more precise, we recorded one alb.u.m and then rerecorded much of it with a new rhythm section a year and a half later. We toured America three times, going as far west as Kansas City, as far east as Boston, as far north as Minneapolis, and as far south as Savannah. We played lots of weekend shows cl.u.s.tered in cities within a day's drive from New York. The bubble of mild enthusiasm-I mean this in highly relative terms-that greeted us when we formed quickly dissipated. We didn't hear a whisper from anyone in Europe, that dream fulfiller of every loud indie band, no matter whom we barraged with tapes. At no point was any serious record label seriously interested, unless you count the nice postcard Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop sent us. (I don't.) We went through four drummers and five ba.s.sists, even more if you count people who filled in for one or two shows. For the last few years I was the only original member. Our longest-and final-tour, in 1996, lasted for a month. By then maybe fifteen or twenty people turned out for our hometown shows. In other cities, even less. Beyond the numbers, a dead feeling hung over those rooms. Twenty-five people in Cedar Rapids on a Tuesday night is fine, if you can feel their excitement, and you always can when it's there. On our best nights we'd draw forty or fifty souls, mostly friends and friends of friends, who'd shake my hand afterward and say something tactful, obligation weighing them down like a heavy coat. All the people who were there wished they weren't.

In the spring of 2013 Zack Lipez wrote an excellent piece for The Talkhouse newsletter, "I Threw a Show in My Heart and n.o.body Came," describing how he broke up his band, Freshkills, because, as he put it, "we had more ex-ba.s.sists than audience members." Shortly afterward I met him in an apartment in lower Manhattan on a humid afternoon. Zack, who's now the singer of Publicist UK, is tall, with chunky round black gla.s.ses and pale skin and dyed black hair. A young thirty-seven when we met. (I might have guessed thirty-one.) Skinny but slightly potbellied, p.r.i.c.kling with a nervous energy, like the frontman he is.

"The only time I almost broke down and cried was when I got the record sales back from our last alb.u.m," he told me. The tally: 336 physical copies and 27 digital tracks sold. (Twenty-seven! Jesus.) "Our drummer just said, 'There's no positive way of spinning this.'" There isn't, and here's how I know: Vineland self-released-by which I mean I self-released-a thousand copies of our second single in 1995. About four hundred of them remain entombed in a bedroom closet at my parents' house. Maybe there are more. I could count them, I guess, but to what degree must I quantify how many fans we didn't have? Meanwhile, those in search of sibling rivalries will likely find the following facts interesting: in the mid-nineties Sooyoung's band Seam toured America and Europe constantly and released well-received records on Touch and Go, while Orestes was making a living as the drummer for Walt Mink.

THE GUITARIST IN THAT FINAL VERSION OF VINELAND WAS Fred Weaver, who first got in touch with me by sending a postcard to the band's post office box to offer us a show in State College, Pennsylvania. When I wrote back to say, hey, thanks, but the guitarist quit and we need to find another one before we can play any shows, he responded by saying that he wanted to try out, and he drove to New York from a small coal-country town in central Pennsylvania called Clearfield. He was twenty and shy, tall and thin, and barely needed to shave. But he could play, understood what I was trying to do, was insanely motivated, and, though I didn't need any more convincing, owned a van. He joined up and took on too much-like more or less singlehandedly soundproofing the practice s.p.a.ce in our loft-without ever complaining. He also harbored his own ambitions to start a band. All of which meant tensions arose in difficult situations and in small quarters, and since we played in a struggling band and lived in a loft in which anywhere from four to six guys shared one bathroom, we spent plenty of time in both.

Our drummer was Jerry Fuchs, long before he became a legend and drummed for everyone from !!! and Maserati to MGMT and Turing Machine and, briefly, LCD Soundsystem, and longer before he became my closest friend to die young, in a stupid accident in a busted elevator at a party in Brooklyn in 2009. He dropped out of the University of Georgia and moved to Brooklyn to join the band in 1995, when he was a very young twenty, still sporting a bit of baby fat and a great deal of social awkwardness. He was also built like a pit bull: shorter than me but twice as wide, and G.o.d knows how much stronger. I'm susceptible to drummer-crushes-you've probably noticed-and I totally developed one on him. I couldn't believe my luck: Vineland was already going nowhere, but we'd grabbed one of the best drummers I'd ever heard. Kylie Wright, a dark-haired, pale-skinned photographer, played ba.s.s, joining not long before that last tour. I was twenty-eight, and she was around my age, so we were the grown-ups. Kylie was Australian, but her accent emerged only if you got enough drinks into her. She had tiny, delicate hands, but she was a really strong ba.s.sist.

I had a generalized guilt about having hired Jerry-he dropped out of college for this?-and I still feel as if I should apologize to Kylie, too. Because on that last Vineland tour I often thought we were touring like burglars, if burglars felt remorse. We played many cities with local bands we knew, all of whose hometown draws were much bigger than ours, since they lived there and n.o.body much liked us anywhere. But we'd get more than our share of the door, because we'd driven a long way and because our culture always took care of touring bands. Jerry was aghast at this practice, but we convinced him that it was either that or forgo food and gasoline. Or, rather, we didn't convince him and just did it anyway. Every night, when we got paid, I'd look down at the bills-a hundred and fifty bucks, a hundred bucks, often less-muttering thanks as I jammed them into a front pocket and quickly walked away, swallowing hard, feeling undeserving, and having taken advantage.

The plan that tour was that everyone would get a princely $10 per diem for food, but finances became so disastrous so quickly we couldn't manage even that. We were all broke, irregularly fed, and extremely crabby. At lousy fast-food joints I gobbled my burger and stared at anyone eating slowly, waiting for leftovers. There are people who live in a state of hunger. We weren't them, by any stretch: we had jobs back home and families-to paraphrase something the writer Cheryl Strayed once said, we were the impoverished elite, not the actual poor, and that's an enormous distinction-and this was someplace we were merely visiting. But still, on this tour, we were measuring wealth by the french fry. Something I jotted in a journal during that tour: When you're this broke, your relations.h.i.+p with food changes. If it's in front of you, you eat it, and anything on the table is fair game. You stuff yourself, to stave off hunger for as long as possible, then do it again. Eating less and lightly is for rich people.

I overweighted Chicago on the tour, because playing Chicago was more or less the entire point. Chicago was home to lots of friends and bands and studios and labels. Something could happen there. Or at least some people would show up. But I got greedy and booked us Friday at the Empty Bottle and the subsequent Monday at Lounge Ax. These were rival clubs, each suspicious and paranoid about the other, and they hated it when bands played both places. My move, once discovered, p.i.s.sed everyone off and cannibalized our tiny draw. Silkworm headlined the show at Lounge Ax, so there was a decent crowd. Afterward Sue Miller, the owner and manager and a generally beloved person, kachinged the cash register behind the bar and handed me a few bills. "Here's some money for your band, Jon."

Seventy-five dollars. In Chicago. The one city where I thought we'd do well.

I was very sensitive about money, mainly because I didn't have any, and though I told myself over and over that money didn't matter, being this broke so close to thirty was frightening. Around this time I co-wrote and performed a score for an NYU grad student production. My fee, for several weeks' rehearsals and a week's worth of shows, was five hundred bucks. No argument there: I'd agreed to that sum and was happy just getting paid. Except that I wasn't getting paid, and I really, really needed the money, so I visited a theater prof named Nance, the faculty adviser for the show and the closest thing to an authority to whom I could complain. An a.s.sistant milled about her office as I asked, politely, for my check. Nance told me to keep waiting for it. And, she suggested, if I really needed the money now, I could always borrow it from the director-she knew he and I were old friends.

Always question the judgment of anyone willing to be called Nance. I still regret not throwing a stapler, or saying something, or even staring for a long moment with a c.o.c.ked eyebrow. Something. Anything. But I didn't, because I was ashamed, and shame can make you freeze. (And, worse, someone else witnessed that shame.) As I was ashamed when Sue handed me the few bills, and I found I couldn't refuse or complain. Charity once more. And had I heard a hint that we were being done a favor we could never call in again?