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circuit. We could invite our normal pals out to see them, and they could like the band, too, even if for them seeing Pay the Man wasn’t as huge as it was for me and my closest friends, those stalwarts at every show who could handle the crucial duty of holding my glasses when I went into the mosh pit.
    But understand this: no one outside Oberlin knew Pay the Man. Maybe a hundred people—at most—on campus cared deeply about them. The campus cover band that played faithful versions of current hits routinely drew more people. But any touring musician who ever had an unexpectedly great Tuesday night in Champaign, Illinois, or Lawrence, Kansas, or Morgantown, West Virginia, knows that forty excited people is more than enough to make a show memorable, and a local circle of a hundred fans can easily sustain a band. My first spring at Oberlin, Pay the Man had a hit on WOBC, a song Chris wrote called “When We Were Young.” (At the time, the band’s average age was twenty-one.) One warm night a few weeks before the school year ended, a few hundred beered-up college kids came to see Pay the Man play a party held in a sprawling sixties-era institutional dorm lounge. Winter was finally over, women were showing bare arms and legs again, and the crowd was rowdy and loud and enormously appreciative. At one point between songs Chris looked over to Mike and mouthed a delirious
WOW!
They played a long time that night.
    I still have the set list from that show hanging in my bedroom at my parents’ house, and sprinkled among the scrawled song titles are four oblique entries: C-1, C-2, C-3, and C-4—“C” as in “cover.” Near the end of the set, they began repeating the opening groove to “Hot Child in the City.” Mike struggled to sing the first verse and chorus, realized he didn’t know the lyrics, and, still thumping out the bassline, stepped to the mike and asked if anyone else did.
    Had it been an actual club with an actual stage, I wouldn’t have. Had there been even a couple of monitors in front of the band, or something—anything—to delineate where
we
were supposed to stand and where
they
were, I wouldn’t have. But I was only three feet away, stepped toward the band, grabbed the mike, and:
    So young
    To be loose
    And on her own
    I wasn’t born to sing, but I could carry a tune. Chris and I did the male-bonding back-to-back onstage thing, which we briefly considered, for some reason, to be the
ne plus ultra
of performance. Like the band, the crowd played along, as if they found it plausible, and that was more than enough.
    Come on down
    To my place
    Woman . . .
    I finished the song and stepped offstage, back into the crowd, glowing and flushed with adrenaline. Even now, more than a quarter-century later, I can still feel it. A needle finding a vein, and something new coursing through my bloodstream: the first rush of performance, the first hint of being in a band onstage. This was just a Saturday night party at a small college. Nothing remotely rock about the setting: a bulbous seventies TV suspended from the ceiling just behind the band, cinder-block walls painted beige, dull gray ceramic tile floors, truly horrible blue and green polyester curtain partially obscured by the dimmed lights. But a moment like this doesn’t have to happen at a stadium. Or in a bigger club in a bigger city, where famous punk rock bands played. Or in a legendary, beloved tiny shithole like CBGB or the Exit or the Rat. It could happen in your own backyard. No. The
whole point
was for the epiphany and the enlightenment to happen in your own backyard, among friends and the faces that you knew. This thing was spreading, and when it reached your town and you saw bands being bands, writing their own material, driving tired-looking generic vans from show to show, you realized:
I can do this, too.
No matter where you were. Everything else followed from that