This is a book written by [a:Jon Fine|8333887|Jon Fine|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1428174673p2/8333887.jpg], where he is the protagonist. Hell, this is his life, as a musician, joining bands, travelling the world, recording, suffering, et cetera. To me, Fine comes across almost like the Jack Black character in the filmed version of "High Fidelity", a bit ADHD, very high-strung and obviously dedicated to his shit, especially where his passions lay.

I also love the fact that he often takes his own shit, so to speak, when writing this book. By this I mean that he's almost driven to the point of denigrating his own choices and options, but mostly, he seems straight forward and honest, even though I have no idea whether that's the truth.

However, we do smell our own.

This music was unafraid to color outside the lines unimaginative people thought defined what was acceptable in rock music. Because there were so many things you could do with rock music, once you started ignoring all the rules: What if a song had only one part? What if a song had only one chord? Why do we need choruses? Why not write songs where no parts repeat? What if we never play in 4/4 again? What if we distorted the bass and made it the lead instrument? Why do we need vocals? Everyone’s playing really fast, so why don’t we play really slow? I thought this music was the most important thing in the world. I probably would have died for it.

I mostly like how he writes in a seemingly stream-of-consciousness way, at times pointing out little thoughts inside parentheses, while detailing how near-impossible it was to get hold of music that said something to him, child of the late 1980s as he were:

I mean, if I’d grown up in an earlier era, maybe I could sing some paean to radio, the magic appliance through which you received secret transmissions from your true home planet, the best friend with whom you huddled in the dark, etc., but good God was radio awful in the eighties. Tears for Fears. Debbie Gibson. Billy Idol. George Thorogood. Genesis, after Peter Gabriel left, and Phil Collins’s entire solo career. Corey Hart, the poor man’s Bryan Adams in new wave sunglasses, while Bryan Adams was a poor man’s John Cougar Mellencamp, as if just being John Cougar Mellencamp weren’t brutal enough. Things were so bad we tried to get excited about John Fogerty’s first album in like ten years, even though any chemistry textbook was more exciting and contained no writing as horrendous as the lyrics to “Centerfield.” Survivor. Fucking Starship. Journey played on an endless loop, and no one acted like it was funny or weird. Howard Jones had a huge hit with “Things Can Only Get Better,” and no one called him out for lying. During one surpassingly strange fifteen or eighteen months, the ghastly and bouncy Men at Work was the biggest band in the world. Even the “quality” rock bands—those adored by critical consensus, like Bruce Springsteen and U2—were as wearying as algebra. Dog-faced with sincerity. Groaning with sanctimony. Their endless, applause-seeking urge to do the right thing. The great secret history of music, the stuff with some substance to it—Stooges, Suicide, Leonard Cohen, Can and Guru Guru and NEU! and the entirety of krautrock, Funkadelic, Blue Cheer, Albert Ayler, Magma, Wire, King Crimson, Joy Division, all the great mutant offshoots of disco, punk, hardcore, and psych—was so far out of reach in my suburb it might as well have been buried on Mars. Before breaking up in 1983, Mission of Burma had been desperately setting off signal flares up in Boston, where they practically invented the template for brainy and aggressive underground bands that’s still followed today: unusual song structures; melodic and powerful bass; distorted guitar serving more as sonic sculpture than mere notes and chords; relentless off-center drumming. But the local college radio playlists were still choked with synthy new wave and British imports, so, as with everything else going on with an entire founding generation of American punk rock, we had no way of knowing. [...] Sonic Youth lived and practiced thirty-five miles from my high school. They’d released two EPs and a full-length album by the end of my junior year, but no one around me had any idea.

At times, Fine writes of human stuff that I have seen little proof of, where other musicians have taken pen to paper:

I was learning that the bond between the bullied and the bully is strikingly intimate: odd, deeply sexual, confusing.

...and:

There’s a sheer sexual power when you fill a huge room with glorious, massive noise, playing through a guitar rig that behaves exactly as you want it. There’s a magical feeling when you believe—no, when you know—you can wave your hands or a guitar at the amp and the electrons inside instantly respond. Even after all these years it’s still the closest feeling to God that I know. And every time I got the tiniest taste of it, I understood why so many willingly ruin their lives for it.

Band names, playing music, writing songs, everything was completely new and nobody knew how to do it, except they had to:

Mr. Epp and the Calculations was another poster band, formed by a teenage Mark Arm in 1980, years before Green River and Mudhoney. Since they were, you know, in a band, Arm and another member split the cost of a cheap pawnshop guitar. “We didn’t know how to tune it,” Arm admitted and then corrected himself: “We didn’t know what tuning was.”

Speaking of musts:

Lou Barlow, famously and abruptly booted from Dinosaur Jr. in 1989, described that situation like this: “I was kicked out of the band because they didn’t like me.” But his reaction was “Who gives a shit whether you like me or not? The music we play—that’s the most important thing.”

His most known band, Bitch Magnet, were engineered by Steve Albini:

(An engineer recorded your band. A producer rewrote your songs and told you what to play. We learned the distinction after pissing off Albini by giving him a producer credit on the first pressing of Star Booty.)

What adds supreme distinction to this book, is Fine's own voice. Partly, it's also what makes the book fail, in my eyes, where other books, e.g. [a:Nick Soulsby|8324685|Nick Soulsby|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s "[b:I Found My Friends: The Oral History of Nirvana|23165893|I Found My Friends The Oral History of Nirvana|Nick Soulsby|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1410805028s/23165893.jpg|41989419]", is much more polished, but lacks the fervent first-person view. And the word is fervent.

Some people want a song to speak to them. I wanted to disappear into the sound. I know, I know, I’m supposed to say that you can’t crescendo at 125 decibels all the time, and there’s supposed to be that blend of light and shade, as Jimmy Page famously wanted for Led Zeppelin. But screw that. Because some of my favorite records, like Minor Threat’s first 7̋" or Slayer’s Reign in Blood or Prong’s Primitive Origins, do nothing but amp up every moment to the absolute max.

What I feel Fine has going for him, is the ability to not stop. It's not an inability to stop, mind you. What makes me feel this book should have been more reined-in is also what makes it carry an animus of its own, Fine's style. I like how he describes ATP, endless touring, gripes and wins, how Bitch Magnet reunites much like "Sugarman", which he plays over quickly (noting how that documentary, for sob-story value, skips the part where Rodriguez is actually famed elsewhere than in South Africa, before the documentary upped his artistic legend), before descending into old age and a tale of how touring and playing live suited him at the time of the reunion.

All in all, this book is a rollercoaster of sorts; you get bored at times, you feel some bitterness itch at you, but mostly, it's anecdote-and-story-packed, in a good way, told by a personal voce who does not seem to edit out too much. It's an intoxicating, fun, tragic and most of all human view of our existence, what makes us tick, what makes us hate, be passionate and love, all at the same time. And be bored, of course. But you won't get bored from this book. ( )

Back in the eighties, I was an avid follower of many obscure [and mostly] East Coast indie rock bands. Most of my favorites came out of scenes in Hoboken NJ, New Haven CT, Athens GA, Winston-Salem NC and Boston MA. I was the textbook music geek, on a first name basis with the clerks at my local independent record store, scouring the Goldmine magazine classifieds for choice bootlegs and avidly awaiting the next issue of Matter magazine (to which Bitch Magnet engineer Steve Albini was a frequent contributor) to get the latest info on bands like The Individuals, Oh-OK, Beat Rodeo, Winter Hours and The Chris Stamey Group, to name but a few. Pretty much every group I loved and came out to support at every dive bar and grotty club within reasonable driving distance never made it beyond playing these small venues for the same group of hardcore fans. Some went a bit farther up the food chain than others – notably The Bongos and Miracle Legion – but ultimately all of them fell into relative obscurity. The music industry playing field is littered with rock and roll’s also rans. And so it was with great interest that I picked up Jon Fine’s Your Band Sucks, which chronicles his years on the indie band circuit long before the days of the internet and social media. While my taste in music is extremely different than his (and I know he’d sneer at every last one of those bands I named), I’m sure the experience of being in a working rock band, on the lowest rung of the music industry ladder, is basically the same for all musicians.

At close to fifty, Fine’s take on the whole experience is well-considered and pretty philosophical. However, reading the early chapters, his dogmatic attitude regarding what constitutes good music vs. [basically] everything else, is a little tough to handle. Does one really have to experience all music in their “crotch” for it to be enjoyable? That seems a bit narrow to me, but my husband, a musician with similar experiences to Fine’s and equally strident in his opinions, suggested maybe Fine was writing from the perspective of his nineteen year-old self, so I cut him some slack and read on. The story of Fine’s musical career, particularly with his first and most well-known band, Bitch Magnet makes for interesting reading. As a self-published author (with a book that sold only 250 copies) and the wife of a journeyman guitarist who ultimately settled for an office job, so much of his experience was easy to relate to. In the chapter, “Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and your Sh***y Band,” Fine writes, “You still have to act like you believe, even though the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that no one else does. But that evidence gradually gnaws a hole in you.” It really speaks to the despair felt by any artist who just wants to get his work out there and feels that he’s only failed in so far as he was unable to reach the right people - the people who’ll get it.

The structure is interesting and for the most part makes for fun, easy reading. Roughly chronological, but not rigidly so, Fine is mostly interested in organizing the stories based on their relevance to a particular idea he’s trying to convey in each chapter (for example, “The Glory, the Madness and the Van,” hilariously focuses on the horrors of the typical band van) rather than its place on the timeline. Only occasionally did the jumping around confuse me. But I do think the book might be improved by a tighter focus (on Bitch Magnet alone) and, particularly toward the end, much less minutiae. I mean, does the pre-show dump really deserve a mention? Really? I think if Fine had left out some of the material about his subsequent bands and heavily edited the chapters chronicling the reunion tour, the book would be damn near perfect.

This is a really great read. Intelligent and introspective, brutally revealing at times and heartbreakingly relatable. If you’re interested in music, musicians or the music scene, this is worth checking out. ( )