Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Page A

one tour or one record away from quitting music forever, and often said so outright. But he ended up playing in touring bands far longer than Orestes or I did. Over the years I’ve shared beds with Sooyoung—each of us in our own sleeping bag, but such intimacies came with the territory—spent long hours driving all night with him, and traveled through thirteen countries with him. I can recite a litany of his attributes—even-keeled, relentlessly logical, a long fuse but a big bomb, proud, quiet—and still feel like I’m fumfering around when I try to describe him accurately. I always thought I was the angrier one, but some of his early lyrics were full of guts and nuts, pissed and reeking from frustrated desire (“I could split your head in two,” “Each thrust out of love,” “A brick across the bean”). Then, on the last song of the record, he’d often slip in stuff full of longing for a girlfriend and a home. I’d see his ideas in his notebook, jotted in his precise geometric handwriting, and marvel at how he translated a stray observation or an overheard snippet into the lyrics of a song, like the plainly insane homeless woman cops at Port Authority led away while her pants were still pulled down to her ankles, who turned up in the first verse of “Americruiser.”
    All this may make him seem grim and overly serious, but his deadpan humor could tie you up in knots if you weren’t careful. Once a gleeful Sooyoung told me about yanking Linc’s chain for an entire conversation by insisting that the best new record at the radio station was that of Metal Church, the dire Northwestern speed-metal band. As Linc lathered himself into a full-on righteous indie rock frenzy tinged with dumbfounded disbelief, Sooyoung demanded, with a pitch-perfect blend of impatience and indignation, “Linc, have you even
heard
the new Metal Church record?”
    A Korean, a Mexican, and a Jew walk into a band
 . . . Orestes’s running joke was that no country club in the world would have us. The common thread running through our backgrounds, I think now, was an otherness and loneliness. Part of it was ethnic: on a certain level, all of us were outsiders in America. Then there was Sooyoung’s tension over which world he’d occupy, Orestes’s fatherlessness, and my sad-boy suburban yadayada at having being ignored or overlooked at home and at school and at camp and the subsequent determination to wreak revenge on my hometown and those there who had methodically kicked my ass year after year. We never admitted any of this to each other, of course, and even if we had, I doubt it would have been enough to unite us. Some bands are touchy-feely, huggy, always talking. Not us. But we didn’t have to talk much, because, when it came to music, we understood each other intuitively and absolutely, in a way that none of my other bands ever replicated. Sooyoung would write a song, and I’d practically see the guitar part appear and fall into place with perfect seamless logic. At practice we’d show Orestes a couple of parts and, nodding his head, he would instantly play the
exact
thing that pulled the song together and made it better. As with great sex, there was no need for discussion. No need for anything, really, other than a nod and a muttered “yeah.” Every band has a creation myth that ends with the right musicians finding one another and bursting out into daffy grins—it’s our equivalent of a shared orgasm. Clint Conley once told me that meeting his Mission of Burma co-founder Roger Miller, who thirty-five years later remains the most important musical collaborator of his life, was “not unlike falling in love. It’s so rare. And it’s very powerful. I just thought,
Wow. This is the guy I want to be with.
” I wanted to be with Sooyoung and Orestes. My secret was that I kept waiting for both of them to realize I