Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine

conversing in one of the seven languages he knew, or rattling off incredibly baroque insults in Mandarin involving filthy chickens and your grandmother’s most private parts. He was serious about his drumming in a way I hadn’t really seen before—he was far more dedicated to his art than 90 percent of the art majors at a particularly artsy school. He was also a huge Zappa fan, but I didn’t hold it against him.
    Our early shows toggled between scraggly hardcore and a few sore-thumb pop songs. Even with Orestes we were still the annoying little brother band among our peers—too loud, still inept—and the fifteen people who saw us every other week started rolling their eyes when I ripped the strings off my guitar, one by one, to conclude each set. I needed those theatrics, because I was a terrible guitarist. There was a huge gap between what I heard in my head and what I could actually coax from my instrument, a gap I sometimes tried to bridge by throwing my guitar at the amp. Also, I couldn’t keep in tune for more than half a song. But it was also becoming clear that Sooyoung had bass and songwriting chops far beyond what a scraggly hardcore band required and that Orestes was by far the best drummer on campus and, honestly, one of the best drummers in the world. (I have played with a lot of great drummers and seen many more, and I do not throw that superlative around lightly.) His explanation for what he was even doing in Bitch Magnet was that he wanted to play in a loud and weird band and of all local contenders we best fit the bill. We were also well-behaved. Orestes was only twenty-one, but already he’d been in a band with someone who liked heroin too much. Orestes only had to take one look at Sooyoung and me to know that would never be a problem. (All this four-eyed nerdiness was finally good for something.) During my worst moments onstage, with the crowd and the sound and my gear and my hands all working against me, I’d sometimes look back at him and think,
We can’t be
that
bad if he’s there.
    Christ. I’m just getting started, and already this is getting sentimental. Don’t get the wrong idea. We were three extremely different individuals who shared one specific and important interest. I was in the midst of transitioning from
shy
to
angry, hormonal chatterbox
and
frankly obnoxious music geek.
Orestes was laconic and something of a loner. He was an only child whose father, whom he adored, was a percussionist. His earliest musical memory—one of his first memories, period—is sitting on his dad’s lap while his dad played congas with friends in an impromptu living room band. Then: cancer, and his father was gone at thirty-eight, when Orestes was only ten. Once you knew this, it confirmed what you thought you knew about Orestes, because there was always something slightly orphaned and apart about him. But he was destined to have a hard time fitting in anyway: part Mexican, part French, part Native American, part Turkish, part Greek, seriously built, a geology and French lit major, a drum and language savant.
    Sooyoung was the child of two driven Korean immigrants, the firstborn son from a culture in which that status carries significant weight. Five foot nine and punk-rock skinny, he was, like me, nearsighted almost to the point of requiring a seeing-eye dog. His aptitude for math and academics in general—for a shocking array of topics and skills, really—coexisted, often uneasily, with an equivalent facility for music. He started writing songs in high school, and more than once I heard him say, “It’s not that hard to write a song” or “It’s easy to start a band.” Despite being Bitch Magnet’s front man, he often was the most ambivalent member because of his kinky, conflicted, stop-and-start relationship with music and the role it would play in his life. Since before we could even drink legally, he always seemed