Read Your Band Sucks for Free Online

and in off-campus living rooms amid the cornfields in our nowheresville. Flyers advertising upcoming shows fluttered from the overfilled bulletin boards in every public space. These bands got airplay on WOBC, on a kind of 8-track tape that DJs called “carts,” and they were the most important fact about this time and place, which is why I’m going to talk about one you’ve never heard of, called Pay the Man.
    No one outside Oberlin knows about Pay the Man, because ultimately they never did anything. They moved to Boston at the end of my freshman year, but then the drummer left, and they couldn’t replace him. Nothing they recorded was ever released. (They were supposed to do a four-song EP, “Gettin’ the Juke,” on the long-defunct Cleveland label St. Valentine Records, but it never happened.) But they were genuinely good, and not “good” as in “acceptable to hear in a friend’s basement” or “there’s a halfway decent song on the cassette they guilt-sold to their friends.” “Good” as in, you would listen to them if they were from San Francisco or Spokane or Madison or Amsterdam, because their songs stuck with you and got bigger with repeated listening. You looked forward to their shows. I’ve been carrying a bunch of their songs for decades, first on cassettes, now on a computer, and those songs hold up, beyond the way they scratch an old itch. Each of the guys in Pay the Man played better than he needed to and was smarter than necessary. Most crucially, their drummer, Orestes Delatorre, was a
lot
better than he needed to be. Mike Billingsley wrote the tougher and darker songs and played a fretless bass. The guitarist, Chris Brokaw, played actual solos, and played them well. (Chris went on to a long career in music, playing with everyone from Thalia Zedek to Steve Wynn to Bedhead to Thurston Moore.) By the time I was at Oberlin they’d been together for three years, and though they still played some of their early, ultrafast songs, it was clear they had grown beyond them. Like a lot of bands from the mid-eighties, they had commonalities with Hüsker Dü and early Soul Asylum without sounding like either—that is, another band that started out playing hardcore, then grew out of it without totally forsaking it.
    Aside from being really good, the guys in Pay the Man were also just
there
: walking to class, eating at the dining hall, hanging out at parties. I was generally too chickenshit to talk to any of them, though Chris went out of his way to be nice to me. He and Mike were as skinny as scarecrows, with long, straight high school stoner hair trailing down to the middle of their backs. Chris was a senior and an English major. I’d see him out and about, a bottle of Boone’s Farm sometimes dangling from a pocket of his army jacket, and something about the whole literate stoner-rocker vibe made me think,
Jesus. Too cool
.
    I didn’t have much going on that freshman year. No girlfriend, quite shy, absolutely virginal. I slept through my morning classes, shared delivery pizzas each night with friends in my dorm, listened to WOBC nonstop, and spent all the money I’d saved from the previous summer and then some on records. I went to parties only if bands played, and I drank keg beer while waiting for Pay the Man or the Full Bodied Gents or What Fell? to start their set, then jumped and thrashed around when they did. It was a release. Also easier than trying to talk to girls.
    Every local music culture needs a Pay the Man, the big-brother band that shows the way, the tentpole that holds everything up. It doesn’t have to be a band everyone likes, but it has to be sturdy and compelling enough to be the main organizing principle and have enough going on to warrant being the center of attention. Fall became winter, and murmurs started among the music obsessives that Pay the Man were good enough to crack the national