Free Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Page B

new-wave damage, called Birds at the End of the Road. Chicago was only about twenty minutes from becoming the epicenter of all indie culture and had already spawned a few generations of punk and post-hardcore bands, but its every practice space and studio was still thronged with asymmetric-haired hordes chasing implausible MTV-sized success. Their cluelessness was sort of heartbreaking, if you knew that their music was going out and another was coming in. Albini brought one or two pals to see us that night, so Batteries wasn’t entirely empty. At one point during the show I tried to shit-talk some jokes about a local fanzine editor—one of the few who’d written about us so far—as if there were even enough of a crowd there to rile. Real rock-star stuff.
    After we finished mixing, I drove to my parents’ house in New Jersey and worked for a construction company, where I was the most despised member of a broadly disrespected cleanup crew. One day I was instructed to dig a sizable hole, roughly four feet square and about as deep. I finished the following afternoon and stood wiping off sweat and guzzling water while some slightly-higher-ups eyed what I’d done, conferred amongst themselves, then told me to refill the hole. But each night I came home to a to-do list for getting
Star Booty
pressed and released: shipping artwork to printers, listening to test pressings, sending cassettes to distributors to drum up orders, and taking out a bank loan of three thousand bucks to finance all the above. Back then I was programmed for overexcitement even more than I am now, and each day’s progress and minor victories that Sooyoung and I reported to each other—One hundred records presold to a distributor in Chicago! Two hundred sold to another in Europe!—often left me revved too high to sleep, making me draggier and even more useless for the next day of work.
    In July the band reconvened at a studio close to a very pre-Disney Times Square called Sound on Sound. Friends worked there, and we recorded some newer songs for free. Well, not quite free. If those songs ever turned up on a record, we would owe the studio its standard hourly fee. Sound on Sound’s rates were industry standard—not at all cheap, in other words—and very soon we racked up some absolutely preposterous sum, probably over $5,000, which was more than we’d be advanced by any record company that might sign us. But we figured it was worth it to hear our newest songs in a more realized and recorded form. We were pretty excited about them.
    Generally no band I’ve ever been in has had enough money to record. Which means there isn’t nearly enough time in the studio, which means you eventually cave in to the reality of camping out there for several consecutive days to kamikaze straight through it, staying up as long as possible, sleeping only when absolutely unavoidable. Luckily if you provided Sound on Sound’s head engineer, Mike McMackin—a beefy redhead with a curly mullet and a mustache at least a decade out of date—with a steady supply of forty-ouncers of Bud, he had an absolutely heroic ability to transcend human fatigue, even while calmly negotiating the peculiar dynamics of a young band made up of very disparate personalities: the skilled and unflappable rhythm section, and the marginally skilled and quite flappable guitarist, who was in meltdown mode because his crappy amp and cheap distortion pedals sounded cloudy and diffuse and lacked any impact whatsoever when recorded in such a pro and pristine setting.
    Like a hospital, a recording studio is an artificially quiet and antiseptic environment. But its raison d’être is that of a casino: to insulate its inhabitants from any outside noise, light, or sense of time. Sound on Sound looked like the exact average of every such studio of the mid-eighties. The floors in the live rooms were a bright shade of oak. Its décor was like that of