Jon Fine’s “Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear).”
By DCist Contributor Alex Tebeleff
Your Band Sucks was a bit of an accident. Originally, author Jon Fine had a concept for a different book, but it was another story from Fine’s life that ended up grabbing his publisher’s interest. Bitch Magnet, Fine’s band from the ’80’s and early ’90’s, was about to go on an international reunion tour. The publisher was convinced that the real story was Fine’s life and perspective as a musician during the American indie music boom of that time. Luckily for us, a surprised Fine happily agreed.
Your Band Sucks is a compelling and fun personal memoir, and also as a document with remarkable detail about the birth of the “indie music” scene. The underground alternative rock scene in the 1980’s, established in the beginning by bands like Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Dead Kennedys, provided a wealth of some of the most imaginative rock bands ever; bands who worked tirelessly and independently to get their music out there with little support outside of their small but passionate communities.
Speaking with Fine, it’s clear that he’s someone fascinated with cultural movements. “I always felt that this was a fascinating, under-appreciated time in American cultural history,” he says. “The experience of the day-to-day, when you have to do everything yourself, no one else to help.”
Fine’s book begins with him as a bored teenager, getting his first guitar “bought with Bar Mitzvah money” in the “comfortable suburbs” of New Jersey. As Fine writes, “commercial radio and MTV were wastelands,” so resources were slim. “There was no culture that didn’t come from a television, a radio, or the mall’s movie theaters and record stores, and they all had such narrow ideas of what they could present,” he says.
The reaction against this period of pop music, the emergence and freedom of the punk ethic in the late ’70’s, and “the emotional extremes all outsiders know,” combined to create the energy that manifested itself in a serious underground artistic movement. But it wasn’t until Fine attended Oberlin College that he discovered there are others who think like him. Eventually, he found the right people to help create a band that was willing to put in the work to be artistically serious.
Many of the bands mentioned in the book you’ll likely have heard of before: Sonic Youth, Big Black, Mission of Burma, and Slint get plenty of mentions. But look deeper and this book is a wonderful resource to discover some great bands that even the most hardcore alternative music junkie might have missed, bands American Music Club, Slovenly, Squirrelbait, and Fine’s own Bitch Magnet.
The story arc of Bitch Magnet is enlightening not only as an insight into a great band, and the inner dynamics of being in a band that very few are privy too, but also because the story of Bitch Magnet is the story of so many bands from that time period.
Even a band as legendary as Mission of Burma is now, they struggled on the road after the release of their most well-known album, 1982’s Vs. Roger Miller himself details in the book to Fine how they’d play San Francisco one night in front of two hundred people, and then play in front of twelve people in Los Angeles the next. As Miller puts it, “you’d go from thinking, Wow! We are finally cool! to “oh, right. We aren’t cool.”
Learning how to properly practice and write, distribute your own records, and finding decent gigs out of town are universal experiences for any serious independent band, and that experience is put into fascinating and emotional detail through Fine’s writing. Much of these experiences were preserved thanks to the fact that Fine kept detailed notebooks of his experiences while in Bitch Magnet.
Fine will discuss his new book with Washingtonian Senior Editor (and ex-Eggs frontman) Andrew Beaujon tonight at the Brookland Busboys & Poets (625 Monroe Street NE). More info here.
