Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine Page B

had no business being in their band. But maybe if I put up a brash enough front, no one would ever find out.
    ***
    ONCE ORESTES JOINED BITCH MAGNET, THE MUSIC FELT BETTER and stronger. Like we were suddenly seeing everything in 3-D. The songs no longer seemed as if they were made from toothpicks and could be knocked over by doubt or a strong wind. It all felt
correct
. Songs are problems you set up and try to solve, and with Orestes a new and better logic snapped into place. Though we still had a long way to go. We recorded four songs just a few weeks after he joined—a terrible and thin-sounding recording that the world is better for never having heard, but underneath it all, Orestes was there. Making everything on that sad tape better. The best drummers always do.

Atlanta, ABBA, and Agnostic Front
    B ecause I had nothing worth doing at home, and since both Sooyoung and I knew you hang on to a great drummer with all you’ve got, Bitch Magnet spent the summer of 1987 in Atlanta, where Orestes was living with his girlfriend. Absolutely no one knew us in Atlanta, but since maybe two hundred people anywhere knew us at this point, one place seemed as good as another. The prior summer I lived with my parents and made $4.88 an hour working in a Dun & Bradstreet print room. Anything was better than that.
    My parents opposed everything about our plans, but I’d hit that crucial age when even slightly overbearing Jewish parents realize they can’t stop their children. We had one of those heartbreaking, nascent-adult conversations in which your parents try to convince you to do something or not do something and you stand firm and watch them—slowly, with sadness, the full weight of their age and then some pressing down upon them—give in. Sooyoung’s parents were against the entire idea, too, although I didn’t know that until I drove down to pick him up at their house in North Carolina, in suburban Charlotte. I arrived as his report card did. Atypically for him, some of his grades that last semester of sophomore year weren’t great, though they were still probably much better than mine, and this set off a huge conflagration. His dad—a compact, capable, and tightly wound man, an ex-smoker who was always chewing gum with real intensity and purpose—invited me to stay for a while, presumably to give them time to work on Sooyoung, but I politely cast my lot with Sooyoung, and he wanted to leave. As I pulled the car out I saw his Dad slump, as if with some huge, exhausting weight on his shoulders, running a hand over his face and forehead as if he were trying to mop off some trouble. Later Sooyoung told me that his parents were starting a business, and there were expectations that he’d stick around and pitch in. He felt guilty about splitting, but like me, he had to do it. The band had become that important, rickety and uncertain though it was.
    It rained very hard on the drive to Georgia, a Southern summer storm that doesn’t let up or blow over for a long time. As Sooyoung drove and the car slopped through the downpour, I said to him, “Remember this lyric:
Swimming to Atlanta
.” He glanced over at me but said nothing. He was kind enough not to point out that I hadn’t mastered writing songs or lyrics yet.
    Sooyoung and I found rooms in a house in Decatur, run by the kind of itinerant management consultant who names his dog after a favorite baseball player. Shortly after we arrived, we heard about a loft space downtown run by a guy who spelled his name Jhymn, a hippieish Butthole Surfers freak with long red hair and deep-set blue eyes. He put on a hardcore show one of the first nights we were in town featuring Porn Orchard, Dead Elvis, and General Revolt. (Which we thought would be the coolest name ever if they’d only change it to
Joe
Revolt.) We gave him a cassette, and he agreed to put us on an upcoming show and—even better—let us practice in the loft for