Free Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Page A

premillennial it may as well have been the Middle Ages, and all of us supplicants from another epoch. Knowing Bitch Magnet had even a chance to enter bloodstreams this way was deeply gratifying.
    We had no idea whether anyone would come see us in Boston, though I sensed some minor excitement stirring, a hint or a tingle that the show wouldn’t be like playing to five people in Youngstown, Ohio, or an empty room in Atlanta. But not even that mattered. Boston was a new city to us, and, new to the whole experience, we thrilled to each microdevelopment. Much later I asked Rose Marshack, the bassist in Poster Children, if she ever got dispirited by lousy shows or tiny audiences, and she got indignant at the very suggestion, insisting, “Every single show was exciting.” (Bear in mind that Poster Children toured nonstop for years and played close to a thousand shows.) It was an honor, she said, just to be able to throw your amps and drums and instruments in a van, drive for hours, and play, for any number of people, anywhere. In 1988 I believed this, too.
    I looked out the window at the shimmer of a late-summer afternoon, the sun lighting each leaf while we sped through some placeless place in Connecticut or central Massachusetts. I probably lit a cigarette. We still smoked. That, too, was fun, that summer.
    ***
    I’D LEARNED BY THEN HOW BEING IN A BAND ENTERED YOU into a conspiracy against the rest of the world. Sooyoung and I would search for each other among the carrels where everyone studied in Oberlin’s giant Brutalist library and motion each other into the badly lit stairways, all dark tile and raw concrete, to strategize our next moves: the next show, the next time we’d record, the flyers we needed to make, the gag Valentine’s Day cards we sent out one year (a badly drawn heart crudely colored with a green or brown crayon on the front, the inside inscribed “Life is painful. Love, Bitch Magnet”), the insert designs for the cassettes we sold for a few bucks and sent out to labels, and our worries that Orestes might not be in as deep as we were. Whenever we called him, he always insisted he was, but he also made clear how much he hated talking on the phone, so often we were left only with his absence and his word. But if you were as desperate as I was for any sort of rock to stand on, that was good enough. Sooyoung spent spring semester of our junior year away from Oberlin in North Carolina, working for his family’s business—the one he’d felt guilty leaving when we went to Atlanta—and we stayed in touch, mostly by letter. He wrote about the band, about being bored and lonely, made mordant jokes about the girls he had no luck with. The sort of stuff we didn’t really talk about much and that came out more easily for him in lyrics and letters.
    In June of ’88, after junior year ended, we all drove to Chicago and spent two or three days remixing
Star Booty
with Steve Albini at a place in Evanston called Studiomedia—roughly the same amount of time a studio down the hall from ours took to finish the voiceovers for a single radio commercial for an obscure Midwestern pizza chain called Edwardo’s. We recorded and mixed that record in three days that January at Oberlin’s antiquated 8-track studio, for the grand total of three hundred bucks. One guitar track was recorded so ineptly it was barely audible over the tape hiss. Even after remixing,
Star Booty
is a very strange aural experience. The guitar tone is probably best described as “phlegmy,” and Orestes sounds as if he’s hammering on a toy drum kit situated somewhere down the block, if not in an adjacent zip code. But it took a lot of work to get it even to that point.
    While in Chicago we played our first show there, at Batteries Not Included—the long-shuttered club, not the more-recently-shuttered dildo-and-lubricant shop—with a forgettable band still suffering from major