By Thor Christensen, Special Contributor
If you've watched enough of VH1's Behind the Music, you might think rock bands all have the same basic story: Rags to riches to rehab - followed by a breakup, a lucrative reunion tour and a happy ending.
In the real world, the rock lifestyle is far more tedious. It's a 700-mile drive in a cramped van headed for some roach-infested nightclub where your band will earn just enough gas money to get you to the next crummy club, year after year, until you decide to hang it up and get a real job.
This is the real story of rock 'n' roll: Youthful big dreams that dissolve into the realization your band is never going to make it - let alone change the world.
It's the tale told by Jon Fine in his funny, snarky and often poetic memoir Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear). Now an award-winning writer and executive editor at Inc. magazine, Fine started out as scrawny, angry "obnoxious music geek" growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. He fell madly in love with punk bands such as Hüsker Dü and the Dead Kennedys and grew to hate U2, Bruce Springsteen and anything remotely connected to the mainstream.
That intense loathing fueled his bumpy ride through rock's underground as a guitarist for the noise-punk trio Bitch Magnet, among other bands. Like a lot of his peers, Fine didn't want to make a million bucks, sign a major-label contract or be on MTV. He was perfectly content hanging out in the cool kids' clubhouse - "a swimming hole small enough, and secret enough, for you to know everyone in it."
The deeper his career digs into the underground of rock, the more Fine gets entrenched in the scene's reverse snobbism. Sometimes, his opinions are amusing, like his tirades against wimpy "twee-pop" bands - or when he gets all huffy at audience members who smile and bob their heads side to side instead of frowning and bobbing their heads up and down.
"I didn't want to see smiles in the audience. I wanted to see people looking slightly stunned, as if something very large had just struck them and they were trying to calculate whether that collision was very bad or very good," he writes. "I wanted awe, not affection."
But in his quest for awesomeness, Fine keeps stumbling into the age-old punk-rock trap of bashing musicians for the crime of being melodic - or worse, popular. He dismisses Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler as dullards and rails time and again against the Pixies. (Who's next? Nirvana? The Ramones?)
By the end of the '80s, Bitch Magnet had become "fanzine famous," playing "primarily to overly intense guys in glasses" around the country, Fine writes. Along the way, he gives us brilliant descriptions of the music (his own and others') and lots of vivid glimpses behind the scenes of a low-level touring rock band - the sublime, the scary and the just plain scatological. Some of what transpires inside the tour van would gross out even Beavis and Butthead.
Your Band Sucks benefits from the insights of Fine's fellow travelers on the underground highway. He interviews a dozen musicians from bands like Jesus Lizard, Urge Overkill and Mission of Burma, who offer their own perspectives on what it's like to pour your soul into a career that's rapidly losing steam. Lou Barlow of Sebadoh recalls selling out Dallas' 1,000-capacity Gypsy Tea Room one year, only to return the next year to play for a paltry crowd of 25: "I just thought, 'Message received.'"
Like so many bands of its era, Bitch Magnet broke up but eventually reunited - in their case, 21 years after they'd called it quits. The reunion chapters in Your Band Sucks often get sidetracked in tour-diary minutiae, but they also give Fine the chance to take stock of his life and his career outside music, where he's now actually able to make a living.
He never fully explores the sizable chip on his shoulder or the roots of his volatile personality that once caused his own band members to write "Jon Fine is an [expletive]" on bathroom walls before firing him. Only he and his shrink know what that's about.
By the end of the book, he's matured enough to admit that while a career in underground rock gave his life purpose for a while, it also led him into a dead end.
"What had started out as free and welcoming ended up becoming as rigid and rule-bound as everything I'd hoped it would replace," he writes. Later, he says: "What a relief it was when the fever finally broke .... I'm 42 and married. You can't keep running away to join the circus."
Especially when joining the circus means living on peanuts for the rest of your life.
Your Band Sucks
What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear)
By Jon Fine
