Free Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine

dregs of that lovely summer between junior and senior year. Orestes, who’d already graduated, was now living in Boston, working at a store that sold maps. Our first record,
Star Booty,
which we were putting out ourselves, would come out in a couple of weeks. In six months I’d turn twenty-one. Few things are as grand as being a young American male road-tripping on a glorious day in August, and I may even have realized this at the time.
    A few hastily dubbed cassettes of
Star Booty
had drummed up enough interest to get us a gig and some college radio airplay in Boston. A DJ from Harvard’s station wanted to interview us once we arrived. It wasn’t that we were excited by these first tendrils of attention reaching our way because we thought they meant that untold treasures awaited—that we’d soon sell tons of records and that fleshpots were quivering and ready, throughout the nation, across the world. That wasn’t it at all. We were excited because the fact of anyone, anywhere, listening was amazing. That we’d been invited to play in Boston, by some guy we didn’t know and had never met, felt like someone had found our message in a bottle. And in a sense he had, given the crates of demo tapes and records that every big-city booking agent watched their weary mailman haul in each day.
    In 1988 only a few mainstream outlets paid attention to our culture. (Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
was a rare perceptive observer at a major newspaper.) To most of the world this music was still hidden under rocks. But the biggest bands among us routinely drew several hundred people to their big-city shows and sold lots of records, too, though how many remained unknown, since virtually every indie label was fly-by-night, crooked, or mysterious about such data. (It was rumored that Hüsker Dü sold more than fifty thousand copies of
Zen Arcade
, which, pre-Nirvana, was a decent guess at what number represented the outer limits of the possible.) We were millions of miles from any of that, of course. But there were record labels interested in us. We’d turned down offers from a few after being warned off them, but getting a deal with one of the half-dozen half-decent independent labels was now thinkable. When we signed to one, we’d be advanced a couple thousand dollars, paid up front against future royalties, to make a record. Then the label would take over the scut work of getting it manufactured and distributed and promoting it to college radio stations, fanzines, and the college-radio trade outlets
CMJ
and
Rockpool
. Such minor forms of assistance sounded incredible, as did the fact that they seemed within reach. What I most wanted was to be known and respected—no,
adored
, I was far too hungry to settle for respect—by Fanzine USA and college radio and the people I most wanted to impress. My circle of friends, basically, times a few thousand. The people who loved music so much that they let it destroy their lives. And capacity crowds at the small clubs where we all gathered. Those were the most important stages in the world. To me, anyway.
    No music freak from an analog generation really gets over the bond formed with the records they listened to over and over again, but this was when listening to this music always involved a series of physical and intimate transactions. The thrill of entering the record store that most people overlooked, the tactile sensation of carrying a fresh stack of records home, tucked under your arm, in crinkled square brown paper bags. In your room you slit the plastic wrap and inhaled the new-vinyl-and-cardboard smell before slipping the record from its sleeve—gently, bracing the hole in the center with your middle finger—and carefully laying it onto your turntable. All that time we all spent crouched and kneeling in front of tiny stereos, doing nothing but
listening
, and maybe staring at the album cover. Looking back, it seems so