Fighting the indie rock wars (one blown eardrum at a time)

YOUR BAND SUCKS

By Jon Fine

302 pages

Viking Press

Every band — after all the fights, the dives, the poverty and the smoke clears — craves that Spinal Tap moment: the moment when the band reunites onstage. For Jon Fine of indie rock band Bitch Magnet, it may have happened in Manila. Or somewhere close to it.

Fine covers that moment, and the clusters of feedback and detuned riffs that led up to it, in his fine rock memoir Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear).

For Bitch Magnet, it was a reunion tour that led to SaGuijo, among other Asian destinations, in a last-chance re-engagement with rock semi-greatness.

When word comes that they will be touring Asia for one-off reunion gigs in 2012, Fine asks the reader: “Don’t you feel tears welling up at the end of This Is Spinal Tap? That love story about two old friends, dim-witted as they may be — when Nigel climbs onstage to rejoin the band?”

For Fine, it was really an on-off love triangle with bassist Sooyoung Park and drummer Orestes Morfin, three American dudes — a Korean, a Mexican and a Jew — weaned on Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Black Flag and Slint, who wanted to make a big, unsmiling noise that did to listeners what Bryan Adams could never do.

What Bitch Magnet wanted was to be loud and uncompromising, amid a similar flourishing (you could compare it to a concrete parking lot sprouting weeds) of like-minded Midwestern bands in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

What they sounded like: the close-miked churn of gears grinding on a Ford pickup truck. But so much better.

But they didn’t last long — despite early critical praise, three albums that collectively sold about what Taylor Swift sells in half a minute, and a devoted fan base — so devoted that Sandwich guitarist/DJ Diego Castillo helped shepherd them to Manila for one night of mayhem at SaGuijo. (Fine’s comment: “I’d never played in a venue where lizards crawl the walls.”)

Fine, who now subsists on writing gigs for BusinessWeek and Food & Wine instead of playing rock dives, was so tightly wound in those days he was actually invited to exit Bitch Magnet by the two other members after their third record came out — a move that should have put the kibosh on the remaining two-thirds of his memoir, yet in the way of many rock careers, a second act lurked in the wings.

Also, Fine has an excellent rock ‘n’ roll memory and a way with describing every fiber and stain of rock vans and clubs, not to mention a palpable anxiety about being out of tune onstage or missing out on a crumb of genuine fan affection. His is a likable voice, one full of self-effacing reflection and willing to go where few rock memoirists will. (Example: instead of the obligatory drug and groupie tales and rehab stints, Fine collects anecdotes from fellow indie rock musicians on the agonies of touring, such as a band member who refuses to bathe. “This is the smell of freedom,” said unwashed musician declares.)

Anyone who’s been in a band, or even close to one for large periods of time, will scarf up these tales like backstage buffet chow.

But what comes through even louder than the Spinal Tap moments is Fine’s genuine love for the music, and its power — something that gets him through crummy tours, road mishaps, empty clubs and band distemper. Only a deep love for Bitch Magnet’s core strengths could have kept his flame burning long past the moment when it seemed indie rock would rule forever. Asked to leave Bitch Magnet, he turns into a Brooklyn professional, long before the hipster invasion and rent hikes, and parties with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem (a band that sold out Madison Square Garden when it finally bowed out; compare that to Bitch Magnet’s SaGuijo-sized reunion party in Manila). He gets married, and takes an adult job that requires him to talk about Wall Street on television. Yet he never lets go of the dream of a band. And everyone’s first band, arguably, is the one that matters.

When a record company wants to reissue Bitch Magnet’s catalogue in the mid-2000s, it requires the band members to communicate; the question of doing supporting gigs naturally comes up (“Do not record a new album,” the label warns Bitch Magnet, good advice for a lot of bands tempted to desecrate their past glories), and before you know it, the band is playing in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong… and, let’s not forget, Manila.

Fine is led through SaGuijo’s sweaty backstreets by Castillo, a kind of Virgil figure in this Dante’s Inferno rewrite. Of course he sees some weird stuff — Manila’s famous for it — but he’s even more amazed by Castillo’s record collection, stuff going back to the late ’70s. He sees in Castillo the same kind of believer that led him to play uncompromising rock to begin with. A fellow traveler, if you will.

Those of us who were there for Bitch Magnet’s pocket-sized set at SaGuijo were gobsmacked and amazed — I’d heard of the band in my Boston days, though I didn’t know their music intimately. Sure, there were only 40 or so people in that room, but we were all hypnotized by the moment — the endless suspension of feedback-soaked notes, consumed by bass rumbles that led to seismic drum rolls, before slipping into three-four jazzy interludes. It all rocked, and we listened to the architecture fill the tiny, sweaty walls of that club like the ’90s had come back full force, a steamroller squashing flat all the Britney Spears and Ricky Martin albums in its wake.

And I don’t think Jon Fine smiled that night. But he may have, a little, inside.