Your Band Sucks Part 6

Then I thought, Wow. I must be tripping my b.a.l.l.s off.

Like I said, it was very good E.

What Was It?.

In May of 2006 Coptic Light returned to j.a.pan to play Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, and three shows in Tokyo. In Nagoya we played with a band from San Francisco called Why? A terrible name, and a terrible band-and, worse, a very earnest one-equally beholden to white rap and polite collegiate indie rock. It was also a terrible day in Nagoya, pouring rain, unseasonably cold, and back then American smartphones didn't work in j.a.pan, so when Why? started soundchecking, I darted through the downpour to find somewhere I could check my e-mail. I finally found a place to rent the Internet, but soon discovered it was where guys came to watch p.o.r.n and jack off. My private room looked remarkably like a dentist's office-the exact same chair, but the tiny metal tray where a dentist keeps his tools instead bore a tube of lubricant and some wipes. I logged in, read and answered e-mail, and washed my hands very thoroughly at the first opportunity. I was still in a bad mood when I returned to the club, where Why? was still soundchecking, and I hated their name and I hated their band and I started to really hate their singer, who seemed as precious as the most annoying kid in a gifted-and-talented program. Then he stepped down from the stage and started doing cartwheels.

Coptic Light had been together five and a half years. What began as a lark in my early thirties was now the longest-running band of my life, and our original lineup was still intact. Maybe that's why we were all a little tired of each other. In Tokyo the three of us shared one small hotel room, as always, and in close quarters idiosyncrasies chafed. Our drummer, Kevin-how to put this?-lived like he drummed, and thus was not the most structured and organized individual in the world. The smart thing to do, on our upcoming day off, would be for Jeff or me to hang out with him to make sure that he didn't run off, or get lost, or join the circus. But Jeff and I each had our own lists of Tokyo things we itched to do-having both gone crazy for the city the last time we were there-and after being on tour for a week, we desperately needed time alone, and on that day we split in opposite directions before breakfast. Kevin didn't return to our hotel that night or the next morning. He got utterly lost and, after wandering for hours, was finally taken in by two sympathetic young women who spoke no English. He didn't really sleep, and reappeared just a few hours before our big Tokyo show with Gang Gang Dance, spent and fried, as anyone watching could tell. So that show sucked.

I started repeating a dangerous sentence to myself: I'm too old for this. Not for rock. For being in a band with someone who still required babysitting.

That thought led to others: We're in j.a.pan. This should be more fun. And: We've recorded, and released, all our songs. And: We can't do anything cool-like tour j.a.pan again-until we write and record another alb.u.m. Which, given how we work, will require eighteen months. And be torturous.

Which led to this conclusion: I guess we're done.

Really?

Yeah. We're done.

A sign of aging: quality of life within a band mattered. Twenty years ago I could grit my teeth through any s.h.i.+tty interpersonal jive if the music was good enough-if there was any music at all. Now I couldn't. After the tour we had one show scheduled in Brooklyn at North Six, opening for Yura Yura Teikoku, and I promised myself that would be it.

A few weeks after we returned from j.a.pan, after straggling through another unproductive rehearsal, Jeff and I left the practice s.p.a.ce together. As we walked toward McCarren Park I turned to him and said, "I don't think I can play with him anymore."

Jeff paused. "Yeah," he finally admitted. "I've been meaning to tell you that, too." I don't want to get into how we told Kevin after that show that we were breaking up, except to say that we-I-handled it badly, which led to a torrent of hurt and infuriated e-mails, and I don't entirely blame Kevin for his response, and that, after all of it ended, it horrified me to realize that, at thirty-eight, I still didn't know how to communicate with people I'd played with for years.

That night after Jeff and I quietly broke up the band, I detoured to Barcade, the bar closest to my apartment and, as you might guess, one known for its vintage video games. There I drank three or four beers, alone, and played Centipede for an hour. Visual comfort food-a few forms of old and familiar. Something was messing with my inner weather, but I didn't know what.

I always believed that each band would be my last. When I got kicked out of b.i.t.c.h Magnet, I thought I was finished with music at twenty-one. But now forty was approaching. There was no music inside, burning to get out. Just thinking about the mechanics of starting up again-taking out ads, finding other musicians, the awfulness of endless auditions-exhausted me. I went to Barcade because I felt bad that I didn't feel worse, because I walked away from Coptic Light with only a twinge of melancholy, not a crus.h.i.+ng sense of the end of the world. That, I suddenly understood, was the sad part: once all this had mattered so much more. A photographer friend shot us at that last show. I felt disconnected, but not much worse than that. But not one picture caught me smiling. And with Coptic Light I actually smiled onstage.

The notion of mellowing with age kind of makes me want to vomit, so I won't say that's what happened. But I no longer needed to fill a bottomless hole. I was now a columnist for BusinessWeek, writing about media and technology, which, once you factored out certain unavoidable bulls.h.i.+t, was interesting and gratifying and paid reasonably well. In 2002 I'd met Laurel Touby, a brainy entrepreneur once described in the press-accurately-as a tiny blond bombsh.e.l.l, and very quickly realized that I'd finally met someone I could spend forever with. (Luckily she shared this opinion.) Funnily enough, she knew very little about music, and what she knew and liked was exactly what most gave me hives: the most egregious forms of top-forty dance music. All those years I spent chasing sallow art chicks who hid behind long dyed hair and guitars and ba.s.ses, and the one for me was absolutely bewildered by the music I most treasured. But I was over seeking women based on their record collections.

I'd spent my entire life absolutely obsessed with music. What the Brits politely call "a specialist." One eventually able to discuss music only with those as afflicted, and ultimately not even with them, because no one else could share the precise contours of the idiosyncratic taste you honed through years of solitary listening and thinking about rock. That obsession shaped me. Through it I found my place in the world. Because of it I've spent much of this book vociferously defending an aesthetic I'm not at all 100 percent behind anymore, unless an outsider attacks it. But what a relief it was when the fever finally broke.

Through various strokes of late-bloomer's luck, mine was a very good life: a happy marriage, a challenging and rewarding job-all that c.r.a.p grown-ups say! but I meant it! not like everyone else who secretly doesn't!-that brought a sort of public profile, thus scratching, somewhat, that youngest child's itch for attention. In 2007 Laurel sold the company she founded, enabling us to live far more grandly than I'd ever dreamed, since my biggest financial move involved graduating from playing noisy punk rock to typing sentences for a living. Like I said: lucky. Really, really lucky. A late transition to real life turned out amazingly well. I landed a regular gig as a commentator for CNBC and found that some aspects of live TV were a pa.s.sable replacement for being in a band-the acting out, the fix and rush of performance. Though I had to learn to remain still, after all those years jumping around onstage, and project energy rather than enact it, while staring into a camera, alone in a tiny over-air-conditioned studio room, with the show just voices in your earpiece. When you spotted your opening or the anchor threw it to you, you soloed-well, argued-with all the smarts and fire you could summon. You learned to speak fast when you cut in on someone else. Each show had its own rhythm, which I often tapped out with my fingers to make sure my motor was tuned to the right speed. In a few minutes it was all over, and the producer in your earpiece thanked you and said they'd have you back. (One way TV is like indie rock: no one ever tells you that you suck. Even if you do.) A black town car waited for you at the curb-TV networks really like spending money-in which you glided to your next destination. My mom always called, as I lounged in the back of the new-smelling car, full of the joy American parents feel when they see their kids on TV.

Even then it seemed like a scene from a different and earlier New York: gilded, privileged, all the men wearing hats, the day's work over, drinks awaiting at the bar. I'd be lying if I said I didn't love this. It also wasn't enough.

The closest I got to performing for a live audience was speaking at media and tech conferences. Which, of course, is not very close at all. At one event at Moscone Center in San Francisco, I found myself waiting backstage-or the conference equivalent of backstage-with the other panelists. A crowd awaited us in the enormous room nearby, and from it I heard some small hubbub rising, and old a.s.sociations sent adrenaline into my bloodstream. But when I looked at the other panelists' faces and body language, I saw only tension, discomfort, a grim sense of duty. No one else felt an old tingle. No cues shot fire across their synapses. None of them knew from showtime. No one else had the performer's urge, and in fact it was totally out of place here. On these stages you had to sit still and be polite. I'd roasted under hot white lights at 120 decibels too many times to be fooled into thinking that these settings subst.i.tuted for the real thing.

I hid my history in music from co-workers and bosses, because hiding it is always easier than explaining it. (Though I wasn't as obsessive about it as one friend, who thought out loud, apparently seriously, about whether he should use a pseudonym in his new band.) But the past never stays entirely past. Not in the William Faulkner sense, but in the sense that every morsel of information eventually ends up on the Internet. I worked among journalists, who by trade want to know too much, and as more data turned up online I could no longer conceal this part of my life.

One holiday season everyone from my section at BusinessWeek went out to a celebratory lunch. Like most such gatherings, it was fine, if a bit manic and awkward. Then my editor turned to me and asked the question you never want to hear.

"You know, Jon, I read about your band on Wikipedia. What was math-rock?"

Well. It refers to underground bands that played songs written in odd time signatures. Such bands were aggressive, generally too smart for hardcore or rote forms of heavy metal, and often featured downplayed vocals, if they had vocals at all. But, you know, I never liked that term at all, because . . . Oh, never mind. Forget I said anything.

What was it?

Much more fun than this.

I Wouldn't Be Averse Either.

Sing it like the Buzzc.o.c.ks song: Every band gets back together now. But there's actually a long history of underground bands reuniting. Wire was the first, in 1985, though they'd only broken up in 1980. Stiff Little Fingers got back together in 1987. Patti Smith released her first new record in almost a decade in 1988. The Buzzc.o.c.ks reunited in 1989, Television in 1991, the Velvet Underground in 1993, and the s.e.x Pistols in 1996. When Mission of Burma got back together in 2002, they kicked off the reunions of a next generation's bands. It didn't seem possible that Burma could reunite, since they broke up in 1983 when Roger Miller's tinnitus became unbearable. But he continued being a musician, and even though none of his other bands was as loud as Burma, smart folk could have realized that he hadn't wholly forsaken volume and amplification and that a Burma reunion was at least thinkable. (Though I don't know anyone who thought it.) Anyway, apres Burma, le deluge. A trickle of reunions soon became a torrent. There are many ways in which punk rock bands are not like big-deal rock bands, but shunning reunions isn't one of them. Today the list of underground American bands that haven't reunited is likely shorter than the list of those that have.

Why?

The Label Asked. Most-though not all-important and longest-lasting labels in the American independent underground were generally beloved by their bands. (In the case of Sub Pop, the better verb is "forgiven," given the label's multiple near-death experiences and, in its early days, a very casual approach to paying royalties.) Let's say such a label plans to celebrate its fifteenth or twentieth or twenty-fifth anniversary with a weekend-long festival. Let's say you were on that label early on, when the people behind it were overworked adolescents scrambling to make something happen. You took a chance on them, as they did on you. You made a few records together, laughed, cried, shared triumph and tragedy and that uniquely memorable state of being young together. Twenty years later, when the phone rings or the in-box pings and those label guys are asking your band to get back together for this ma.s.sive event-are you really going to just say no?

This kind of bond absolutely does not exist between bands and major labels. Capitol could never get the Beatles back together, and it was Live Aid, not Atlantic, that lured the surviving members of Led Zeppelin back onstage. But it's why Corey Rusk of Touch and Go convinced Scratch Acid and Seam and Killdozer and the Didjits and Negative Approach to reunite for that label's twenty-fifth-anniversary festival, in 2006. (Corey even got Big Black back together for a couple of songs; Steve Albini essentially said onstage that they only did it out of respect for him.) It's why Jonathan Poneman got Green River back together for Sub Pop's twentieth anniversary, in 2008. It's why Matador's Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi got Guided by Voices and Chavez and Come to reunite for its twenty-first-anniversary weekend, in 2010. The people who ran your old label were a very special kind of old friend. A stranger wasn't calling. It was your brother.

The Golden Era of All Tomorrow's Parties, 19992013. The first All Tomorrow's Parties, in 1999, immediately established ATP as the rock festival for people who, sensibly, detest rock festivals. The best versions were held at the peculiar British inst.i.tution of a holiday camp-though ATPs have since taken place in America, j.a.pan, Iceland, and Australia-where families go for a cheap getaway in a sort of rural English setting, albeit one crammed with water parks and small grocery stores and pubs and fast-food outlets and other amus.e.m.e.nts and conveniences. The entire ATP experience was a.s.sembled by and for indie rockers, and for good or ill-and more on that shortly-ATP held fast to the way the founding indie generation kept art and commerce separate. Unlike most every other recently created music festival, it shunned sponsors.h.i.+ps, even while newer generations of indie rockers proved far less doctrinaire about such arrangements.

In rock-festival terms ATP was small-6,000 people instead of 20,000 or 60,000. Convening them at holiday camps meant that, unlike at various Woodstocks, an attendee was never far from all mod cons, and you were never charged ten quid for a bottle of water if you were parched or for a cup of coffee if you were freezing. The British ATP festivals became beloved for the minimal barriers they erected between performers and audience. Everyone stayed in the same complexes of cramped apartments, drank at the same bars, went to the same restaurants, and stood together at the same shows. There were no VIP areas. (Theoretically there are no celebrities in indie rock.) Most important, ATP felt like ours, another secret treasured among music freaks and kept from the rest of the world. I won't be the first to describe the old ATPs as summer camp reunions for superannuated indie kids.

The bands were chosen-in ATP-speak, the festivals were "curated"-by a luminary headlining band, and the bands ATP most wanted and chose as curators were actually among the vanguard of interesting music from the past twenty years, as opposed to those that headlined, say, Lollapalooza. Some of ATP's favored bands I liked and some I didn't, but if Sh.e.l.lac or Sonic Youth or Mogwai or Melvins or Pavement choose the performers, then chances are the festival will be interesting. And Barry Hogan, ATP's founder and guiding spirit, figured out quickly that reunions made his festivals much more of an event. ATP offered generally unheard-of sums-in indie rock terms-to the bands it most wanted to appear: mid-five figures, and sometimes more if they wanted you bad enough, to musicians accustomed to getting far less. Among the bands ATP effectively reunited: Slint, the Jesus Lizard, Sleep, My b.l.o.o.d.y Valentine, and Neutral Milk Hotel.

ATP's reunions also enabled many bands to briefly reenter the bloodstream of the international touring circuit, because if you reunited for an ATP, it made sense to play London while you were over there. (Barry lives in London and often tendered a nice offer to play there, too.) Since you were traveling so far, why not a few dates on the Continent? Also, since we'll be rehearsing in the States, we might as well . . .

In most cases the tensions that broke up bands eased long ago. It had been decades since you and your band, barely old enough to drink, threw yourselves into vans and drove toward indifferent or hostile weeknight audiences. And if those old tensions still existed-well, it was just a commitment for a week or two. This was no months-long suicide mission of a tour. You could only play the places where people cared. How bad could it be?

Over the years, though, ATP's finances grew increasingly precarious. (Maybe there was a downside to offering tens of thousands of dollars to bands that never sold more than a few thousand records.) Its parent company went through receivers.h.i.+p-British bankruptcy-in the summer of 2012, listing debts of over 2.6 million, and three of its American festivals lost a total of 520,000, according to doc.u.ments filed at the time. Many strains were already evident when b.i.t.c.h Magnet played ATP in December 2011. ATP had started canceling festivals, sometimes on very short notice, when tickets sold poorly. Many bands reported that just getting paid was becoming an arduous, months-long process-or longer. It was for us. Although we did get paid, after around five months, unlike some bands I know who were owed money for far longer. Me being a loudmouth may have b.u.mmed out Sooyoung and Orestes, but it had its uses.

ATP put on its last holiday-camp festival in December 2013. (Though as I write this, it's planning a major event in Iceland in the summer of 2015, despite canceling a planned East London festival on three days' notice in the summer of 2014.) A cultural moment built around remining eighties and nineties indie rock could last only so long, as even Barry recognized. "The bubble is kind of bursting for reunited bands," he told me in the fall of that year. Partly, he explained, because almost every band that could get back together had. Perfectly understandable, in business terms, but it hurt when ATP's paychecks vanished. It marked the end of a brief era in which fan interest and financial means came together to make it especially possible-even profitable-for many bands like ours to reunite. And even if ATP were to come back in full force, given all its recent shenanigans there are now bands that won't work with Barry. As for me, I'll probably hug him the next time I see him. b.i.t.c.h Magnet likely would never have gotten back together were it not for ATP. Even though-or maybe because-Barry and ATP were so much like indie rock itself: promising so much, sometimes delivering, but often falling far short.

The Fans. In the late eighties and early nineties a left-of-mainstream American cohort graduated college and moved to cities, settling in neighborhoods bearing names we're now tired of hearing. There, in a fas.h.i.+on, they grew up. But unlike hippies-a peripatetic tribe-to a remarkable degree these aging creative types stayed in their cities as they aged. Indie rock's opposition to the mainstream, it turned out, was still congruent with real jobs in software and technology and law and media and teaching, those last two being long-standing destinations for smart misfits. And indie rock's fuzzy line between partic.i.p.ant and fan meant that virtually everyone involved was more stakeholder than spectator. You may have a complicated emotional relations.h.i.+p with the culture that unorphaned you, but it isn't easily forgotten. Performers from this subculture were not the distant rock stars of previous generations. If you met them, there was a good chance you'd end up friends.

Also, our bands were often short-lived and broke up before many fans could see them play. b.i.t.c.h Magnet played fewer than 150 shows. Scratch Acid played only a few more. Slint performed fewer than 30 times in their four-year existence and broke up before their landmark second alb.u.m, Spiderland, was released, in 1991. While Spiderland was a major secret-handshake alb.u.m in the nineties, it didn't get much press when it came out. Slint's fantastic debut, Tweez, got even less. I saw Slint twice in the late eighties, once at New York's Pyramid Club and once when b.i.t.c.h Magnet played with them in Chicago at Club Dreamerz. At both, they played to tiny audiences. In 2005 I saw the reunited Slint during its sold-out three-night stand at New York's Irving Plaza, which holds well over a thousand people. The crowd from any one of those shows may have been larger than the aggregate audiences Slint played to while an active band. Even better-known bands found bigger crowds when they reunited. When My b.l.o.o.d.y Valentine headlined shows in their heyday in their native Britain, they played halls that held around two thousand people. When the band got back together in 2008, they sold out five nights at London's Roundhouse. Its capacity: three thousand.

The Internet hollowed out the music business, we are told, but maybe it's more accurate to say the Internet hollowed out the business that depended on major labels. Because in many ways it made things better for bands like ours. The Web provided a central place-more precisely, a decentralized place-where many small campfires could be tended, around which widely dispersed but unusually ardent audiences traded tales and live recordings. Such audiences still cherished these bands and had been waiting a long time to see them play. While it's often hard getting fortysomething hipsters to come out to shows-they have real jobs and sore feet, and nights out often require a babysitter-they will respond to an event. A reunion of a band they still love. A night where they'll see others just like them, thus taking away the social anxiety an older person feels at a show. (Old age becomes childhood, and show-going fears in your forties mimic those of teenagers: you're entering an unfamiliar world, peopled by unfamiliar natives who know the rules that you don't.) And reunited bands' part-time endeavors are easily supported by such part-time fans.

Audience Realities. There was negligible interest in Ed Roeser's postUrge Overkill bands. Nash Kato's solo alb.u.m The Debutante, released in 2000 on a Sony-affiliated label, sold fewer than five thousand copies. But even after their ignominious mid-nineties implosion, there is still an audience for Urge. Sebadoh's draw collapsed at the end of the nineties, and J. Mascis's postDinosaur Jr. shows drew smaller crowds than the band that made him famous. So it was that J.'s manager called Lou Barlow one day in 2005, laying out the proposition for reuniting Dinosaur's original trio lineup. Musicians kept learning that their old band's popularity wasn't transferable to their new projects-but if they got their old band back together, there was actual money to be made, sometimes for the first time. For lifers it was a simple calculation: it beat finding a real job.

And, of course: Do Bands Ever Really Break Up? Yes, the world may have ignored your band and its records while you were around. Yes, hardly anyone may have noticed when your band finally slipped beneath the waves. But now a musician never knows when some music supervisor might choose one of his songs for some TV ad or video game and catapult him from obscurity to . . . if not fame, then at least non.o.bscurity and a half-decent check. Some real-world examples of rediscovery are the stuff of Hollywood: here's the part where we trot out Sixto Rodriguez, the subject of the 2012 Oscar-winning doc.u.mentary Searching for Sugar Man. A singer-songwriter from Detroit from the late sixties who released two alb.u.ms (which initially sold about as well as Vineland and Freshkills) and about whom only the barest facts were known, Rodriguez somehow became iconic in South Africa-a country in which he'd never set foot. In 1998 he flew there to play sold-out arenas, a jubilant occasion memorialized in the movie. Searching for Sugar Man omitted some key facts, chief among them that Rodriguez had his records reissued in Australia to significant acclaim and toured that country in 1979 and 1981, the latter with the (inexplicably) huge Oz band Midnight Oil, when it was exceedingly rare for smaller American bands to get to that part of the world. That aside, the doc.u.mentary parlayed Rodriguez's freakish fame far from home into something much bigger in America: sold-out shows at New York's Town Hall; appearances on Letterman and Leno. Somewhat similar is the tale of Anvil's heroic, if baffling, thirty-year commitment to a very mediocre Canadian version of eighties metal, despite decidedly limited rewards, which was recounted in the fabulous doc.u.mentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil. When that movie became a surprise hit, Anvil suddenly started selling out venues worldwide, more or less for the first time in its existence.

Chances are no one will ever make a movie about your forgotten band. (Though people made-or are making, while I type this-doc.u.mentaries about Tad, Silkworm, Mudhoney, Mission of Burma, SNFU, Slint, Walt Mink, and venues like Memphis's Antenna Club and Trenton's s.h.i.+thole hardcore warehouse City Gardens, and that's just what I know off the top off my head.) But none of us required a movie or sold-out shows at an arena in Cape Town to make us reunite. Kind words and a few small rooms full of transfixed faces were often enough. It's all we ever really wanted in the first place.

BY THE EARLY 2000S A FEW LABELS HAD CONTACTED ME OR Sooyoung about reissuing b.i.t.c.h Magnet's catalog. We ignored them or put them all off: We haven't been in touch, it's too much trouble, we don't know where that stuff is. Then, in 2008, during the final summer of the second Bush administration, Jeremy DeVine of Temporary Residence started courting us and in his quiet and persistent way ultimately won us over.

Jeremy is blue-eyed, wavy-haired, and atypically kind and levelheaded for someone in the music business. It's easier to imagine him as the proprietor of a small family-run company than as the guy running his thriving label. (Explosions in the Sky is the marquee band, but Jeremy has had a remarkable streak of signing other acts that still sell in the mid-five figures: big numbers for a company with a full-time staff of three, including Jeremy, all of whom work in about five hundred square feet in Brooklyn.) Jeremy doesn't drink, is a vegetarian, and in conversation it's impossible to hurry his Kentucky drawl. He lacks the chip on his shoulder common among ex-hardcore kids, myself included. If his idealism about the power and n.o.bility of indie and community is decidedly earnest and unblinking, it's because the label he more or less built single-handedly is a rare place where such idealism actually works.

Before we could make any final decision, though, we needed to find Orestes. Sooyoung and Orestes had always swapped the status of most reluctant member, but Orestes held it last. He could never hide how much he disliked rock clubs and smoky dives, always had unreadable motives-though Sooyoung's often seemed as obscure-and left the band abruptly. More to the point, after all these years, neither Sooyoung nor I knew how to find him. I knew that Orestes had taken his father's surname of Morfn in the nineties after attending college under his stepfather's last name, Delatorre. I thought he was living in Tucson, but neither he nor his wife-the girlfriend he spent that summer with in Atlanta-had a listed phone number. He was on Facebook briefly, but then his profile disappeared. I found a couple of academic citations for grad work he'd done years earlier, but there were no more recent traces on the Internet. He was not active in any band, or at least in any band mentioned on the Web. He did not appear to exist, though of course he did. Believing you can find everyone and everything through Google is another narcissism of the tech-y crowd.

One day, though, I was killing time at work watching a clip of a live Laughing Hyenas show in Germany, and when the song ended, the location suddenly changed, and Orestes's face filled the screen, talking into the camera, looking directly at me. (His friend had recorded that show.) He had to be out there somewhere, I thought. I kept trying. Some time afterward, I Googled him again, and his name popped up on LinkedIn. I doubted that anyone else in the world could share both his uncommon Greek first name and his uncommon Mexican last name. But there's always that instant when you can't be sure.

We hadn't spoken in at least twelve years. When I was prompted to "add a message" when I "invited him to connect on LinkedIn," I stared at the empty text box, and all I could come up with was: Hi Orestes. How have you been?

-Jon Fine Within an hour I received a reply: I'm well, thanks. And you?

I thought a bit and sent him a longer response. I said I was visiting Los Angeles. I said it was colder than anyone would want it to be. I said I'd just seen Sooyoung in New York. Then I got to the point.

A label on the East Coast-Temporary Residence-has been after us to do BM reissues. No $$ up front but a profit split. Sooyoung and I both think it's a good idea. You? I know the guy behind the label and he's a good and solid dude who will do a good job w/it.

He said yes immediately, and we kept e-mailing. Two hours later, after two more exchanges, he wrote: Is there any possibility we would re-convene to support the re-issues?

Son of a b.i.t.c.h. Did the guy who I was certain would never want to play again just say that? At the bottom of my next response, I asked: "reconvene" means what?

At the bottom of his next response: Reconvene. Would we need to get back together and play a few shows, or does Temporary Residence not care?

To steal someone else's line, I wanted reunion shows so badly you could see the stains on my pants from across the street. But our band dynamic had always been me being too eager and everyone else being ambivalent, and I couldn't tell if I'd entered the reality distortion field you can slip into when you want to hear something. Orestes could well be asking, eyes rolling and prefatigued, Oh, Jesus, are they really going to ask me to do this? I flashed back to the summer of 1990, during one of our last rehearsals, when I told him about some new development brewing as he screwed felts onto his cymbal stands, and he sort of smiled or winced and asked, "But what would that entail?"

I deliberated for a bit and then wrote back.

No one's mentioned anything about playing shows, so I strongly doubt that's a prerequisite. Were you asking because you'd like to?

Ten minutes later: I ask because there is usually some talk of playing out with this kind of thing. I hadn't thought about it, but I certainly wouldn't be averse if that was part of the deal.

So we were heavy petting. Or at least talking dirty. But I still wanted to be cautious. So I lied.

I hadn't thought of playing out as part of this, and haven't discussed it at all with Sooyoung. But I wouldn't be averse either. Have you been playing at all?

Thirty seconds later: I haven't sat down with it on a regular basis since early 2008, but I played out a few times this past Fall and was not disappointed.

He still had that same red Yamaha kit, the one that sounded like G.o.d to me, which as far as I was concerned all but sealed it. A few months later I flew out to Tucson to play with him, but I knew going in that this was just a formality. On my second day there Orestes woke at 6 a.m., met the group of guys he cycled with, and pedaled his racing bike fifty miles in the desert. Then we loaded his drums into his car, drove to a practice s.p.a.ce, set all the gear up, and played for six hours. He'd always been a f.u.c.king ox. Still was.

WHEN SIGNING A RECORD CONTRACT WITH AN INDEPENDENT label, the smart move is to license your recordings for a specific term, such as five or seven years, so that when that term expires, all rights revert to you. (Certain indie labels-h.e.l.lo, Restless!-sometimes signed less-savvy bands to f.u.c.k-you-we-own-this-forever deals.) While visiting San Francisco in May 2010, I contacted Gary Held, whose label, Communion, had released b.i.t.c.h Magnet's records in America. From our old contracts I knew that the rights to those recordings had been ours for a decade. But Gary was still selling b.i.t.c.h Magnet on iTunes, even though he hadn't the legal standing to do so. We wanted him to stop. Also, I wanted him to cough up the royalties we were surely owed, since he last paid us around 1995.

It was a brilliant spring day in San Francisco, and, like a tourist, I met Gary at the Ferry Building, and we walked to the end of a pier to see the Bay Bridge and Oakland's hills and all the gorgeousness in the distance. But the meeting was as pa.s.sive-aggressive as any indie rock business discussion could be. In a polite and almost kind way, Gary said there was no way we'd get royalties out of him, and in any case, he had no paperwork whatsoever doc.u.menting how much he owed us. He mentioned he had a small stash of a few hundred old b.i.t.c.h Magnet CDs lying around, and afterward I made a few fruitless attempts to take them off his hands. He did agree to take our songs down from iTunes, and made good on this a few weeks later. He also promised to send over an accounting of iTunes sales, for which I am still waiting.

Evidently I'd learned nothing in all my years of dealing with remote and soft indie rockers and still couldn't cajole them into anything. As I started to stew, a curious Gary asked me if b.i.t.c.h Magnet would reunite for a few shows, given the upcoming reissues. Normally I admitted nothing in response to such questions, but I thought, What the h.e.l.l, it's not that much of a secret, and said that, while it was by no means certain, I really wanted to.

"You guys are lucky," he said.

I didn't understand what he meant.

He explained that he'd grown accustomed to running into guys who played in some band and, amid backslaps and reminiscences, asking whatever happened to this or that member. And suddenly everyone is silent, tight-lipped, looking down. Musicians died young, from misadventure, from illness. They disappeared into hardcore drugging or drinking, especially around San Francisco and Portland and Seattle. They wrecked their cars and rolled their vans. When Gary called us lucky, he meant that we were all still around, and healthy.

Several hours later I called Sooyoung, ostensibly to tell him about meeting Gary, but really to discuss getting back together, while I paced in front of Hayes Castle, an oddball theme restaurant that had gone belly-up, leaving behind its fake-castle carca.s.s and some bewildered reviews on Yelp. One argument I made was: People die. I said it with some levity-with as much levity as you can say something like that-but I was serious. Jerry Fuchs had died six months earlier. I'd been lucky, until then, never to lose someone around my own age, someone with whom I was in mid-conversation. I didn't bring up Jerry with Sooyoung, because he knew what had happened, and anyway, what do you say about that? (This, I guess: A bunch of us played hooky from our lives and went on an epic weeklong bender, it was terrible, it was amazing, I sobbed and howled and laughed and drank until the bars closed every night, my ribs got bruised from endless crus.h.i.+ng hugs, I danced on tables and did drugs in bathrooms and terrified my wife.) Anyway, Sooyoung always responded to persuasion and logic, not a hard sell. He was unconvinced. But Orestes and I would keep working on him.

JEREMY WAS REMARKABLY PATIENT WITH HOW LONG IT TOOK us to a.s.semble the b.i.t.c.h Magnet reissues: forever, basically. The master tapes were spread among four locations in California, New York, and New Jersey, and Sooyoung and I weren't certain what was where, and none of us lived within easy distance of California, except for Orestes, who, as a father of two young boys, had even less free time than the rest of us to travel and knock on doors and scour half-forgotten closets. Shortly after Orestes signed on, Jeremy a.s.signed us the catalog number TR150. The triple LP and triple CD finally came out three years later, just after Temporary Residence released TR203.

One night in March of 2011, as the reissues slowly made their way toward a December release date, Laurel and I met Ian Williams of Battles and his fiancee, Kate, for dinner. At some point during the main course Ian mentioned that Battles was curating All Tomorrow's Parties' Nightmare Before Christmas festival in early December. Then Kate blurted out, "Hey, Ian, why don't you have b.i.t.c.h Magnet play?"

Ian and I looked at each other.

I was opposed to the entire idea of rock festivals, or as much as you could be without ever having attended one, but I knew ATP would be as good an offer as we'd get.

The next day Ian told me to expect a call from Barry Hogan, and Barry reached me while I paced one of the grimy blocks in north Chelsea that defiantly, even gloriously, resist gentrification. Barry was charming. Barry was practiced at his spiel. The Nightmare Before Christmas would be held the weekend of December 10 at a Butlins (Butlins!) holiday camp in Minehead, an English coastal town ninety minutes southwest of Bristol. b.i.t.c.h Magnet was guaranteed a prime-time slot. Rooms at the festival for the band and crew were included. Meals and flights were extra. Also, Barry said, he could book us a show in London and maybe even throw in practice s.p.a.ce at Butlin's if we needed it. Then he named a pretty generous fee. I named another. After a day or so of negotiation, he put everything in writing.

All that remained was selling Sooyoung on it.

THE OFFER FROM BARRY IN HAND, ORESTES AS ANXIOUS AS I was to get back together, both of us confident we could do it without embarra.s.sing ourselves, we started war-gaming various scenarios with Jeremy-who was paying us attention far out of proportion to how many records we'd likely sell-and set up a conference call in mid-March with him and the three of us in b.i.t.c.h Magnet. I'd stamped into my brain Sooyoung responds to logic and persuasion, so, in as steady and unaffected a voice as I could manage, I mentioned that we had received an offer to reunite and dispa.s.sionately read off the terms. I had Jeremy on hand to chime in with how singular an opportunity this was, but it wasn't even necessary. I don't remember when, or if, Sooyoung actually said yes, but the conversation s.h.i.+fted almost instantly from "will we?" to "how do we?" Several months later, in an interview in Asia or Europe, Sooyoung explained we had presented ATP's offer while he was several drinks into a night at a pub in Singapore, so his defenses were down. But, hey, if that's what it took.

Through March and April we started working out details and scheduling practice weekends in Canada-because Orestes was moving to Calgary-and New York, and Sooyoung asked if we could practice in Asia as well. Then he said, "I can get us a show in Seoul," and-because there's always compet.i.tion within bands, I guess-I said, "I can get us a show in Tokyo," and we began planning our first reunion appearances, and our first Asian shows ever, for November 2011. Spring was coming on slowly in New York, and my days were pleasantly distracted by the logistics of plane tickets and finding practice s.p.a.ce and lodging in distant cities, as well as by a low-grade rush always buzzing in my blood because we were doing this.

Jeremy was almost as thrilled about the reunion as I was. But he was also sensible enough to wave a yellow flag. A few days after our conference call, he and I had lunch near his office, at the G.o.dhead pioneering Bushwick restaurant Roberta's, and after we finished our pizza he made it clear that b.i.t.c.h Magnet was best off reuniting only for a short and defined time. Play the biggest cities once, put it all back on the shelf, and don't linger. And don't make a new record. (Though he did graciously hint that he'd put it out on his label if we did.) He reminded me that Mission of Burma had just been dropped by Matador-and then got turned down by every other prominent independent label. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: In our sandbox, everyone adored Burma. Everyone came of age idolizing them. In 2011, though, no one could afford to put out their records. And Jeremy didn't have to point out that Burma was a h.e.l.l of a lot more famous than b.i.t.c.h Magnet.

All right. So we were still doomed. So the clock started ticking as soon as we said yes. So what?

Don't you feel tears welling up at the end of This Is Spinal Tap-that love story about two old friends, dim-witted as they may be-when Nigel climbs onstage to rejoin the band? (And inexplicably finds his guitar there, plugged into an amp and ready to play, which would never happen in real life?) Or when Rodriguez walks slowly onstage in South Africa in Searching for Sugar Man? Or when Anvil takes the stage in j.a.pan at the end of their movie-old guys fearful that everyone has forgotten, suddenly blinking in disbelief at the crowd that's gathered? Their stunned faces as they take it all in, and their looks of dumb surprise?

I had no illusions that involved arenas. What I wanted was another shot at our story. To stop feeling like an outsider in a band I co-created. To write a different and better ending for b.i.t.c.h Magnet, and with these guys.

Calgary Metal.

Like all rock reunions, ours started in earnest on the outskirts of Calgary at a rent-a-rehearsal-room joint called Slaughterhouse Studios, and driving there from downtown was like watching a movie of the city's development run backward. You first pa.s.sed the blue-gla.s.s curvilinear swoop of the newest and tallest building in town, The Bow, an atypically loud monument to the city's new oil money. You pa.s.sed the grim grandeur of the concrete Brutalist buildings erected in the seventies. Then you left the central core, pa.s.sing feed and fertilizer businesses, a creamery, a sc.r.a.p yard with a huge sign screaming CALGARY METAL, which never failed to make my heart happy, until you finally arrived at a cl.u.s.ter of absolutely unremarkable industrial parks, where businesses sold tractors and obscure parts for machines I'd never comprehend. Despite the oil boom, Calgary is still a cow town at heart. In its past life Slaughterhouse Studios had been a meat locker. Our practice room was behind the door of a giant walk-in refrigerator, one built for storing the cow and pig carca.s.ses that had once hung there.

We started rehearsing at Slaughterhouse in April 2011, but practically nothing there suggested that the twenty-first century had happened. h.e.l.l, not much at Slaughterhouse suggested that the late nineties had happened. I started hanging out in places like this in the eighties, and what a relief to find one where nothing had changed at all. In our practice s.p.a.ce were three defunct and decrepit seventies surburban-piano-teacher organs: fake wood, complicated speaker grilles, multicolored b.u.t.tons to nowhere. Also a mysterious Peavey tape deck that promised to strip vocals from ca.s.settes, a useful technology for a previous era. I plugged into a mutant Marshall half stack that coughed out a nasally, trebly s.h.i.+t-metal tone no matter how much you fiddled with the dials. In the lounge, cans of Canadian beer chilled in a vending machine, across the room from the smeary-screened Asteroids game or the sad, faded pool table. Cold concrete floors and unadorned Sheetrock walls in the narrow and claustrophobic hallway. The bathroom, back by the office, was appropriately disgusting. Years-old posters everywhere for a local Iron Maiden cover band that was named after Maiden's mascot: Eddie the Great, of course. And that slightly pickled scent, again, the one instantly familiar to anyone who's spent time in practice pads or recording studios run by not particularly fastidious guys. But we weren't looking to play somewhere sanitized. When it's time to create some culture, I like to have a little native yeast floating in the air.

On nice weekends Slaughterhouse's owner, Bob, rolled a grill into the cement yard and offered free hot dogs and hamburgers. Bob sported a drinker's reddened capillaries, an inveterate stoner's blown-out gaze, and the uptalk and heavy Canadian accent that always makes Americans giggle, eh? He was tall and thin and big-headed, like Big Bird, a mop of a mustache spreading above his upper lip and a wad of brown-green-hazel hair flopping over his forehead. Some late afternoons it started to smell very skunky up front, where Bob and his friends gathered. It was such a boy's clubhouse that it was hard to imagine any woman ever stopping by, but Bob's girlfriend sometimes did, to throw back beers and get roasted with Bob and his pals.

By now I'd known for a long time that the entire idea of performing this kind of rock music was inherently awkward and dorky-looking: grown men standing around, clutching instruments, making organized loud cras.h.i.+ng noises. (Turn off the sound on many older rock videos and squint a bit, and it looks like a bunch of thirtysomething fieldhands, slightly stiff from age and overwork, grimly performing farm ch.o.r.es.) But the vibe and gear at Slaughterhouse and the fact that no one younger than their late thirties was ever present often made me wonder if the entire idea of a rock band was a fossil from another epoch, something younger people no longer thought about, like doo-wop or electric typewriters. I knew hip-hop now occupied a lot of the cultural s.p.a.ce that rock once had, but was rock really this dead?