Read Your Band Sucks for Free Online Page B

dawning.
    I’d spent much of that year trying to talk my friends into starting a band, but now I was as hot and desperate as a high schooler who’s been dry-humping his girlfriend all night. I had to do this.
    Much more important: I now knew anyone could.

This Is Not the Way to Start a Band
    I t made sense, our starting a band. Linc and I got geeky about the same music and had similar suburban upbringings. Above all, Linc was my best friend, and in my late teens I still hadn’t gotten over what I took to be the mythology surrounding the Replacements: a band is your gang, your drinking buddies, your best friends. (It wasn’t until much later that I tired of Paul Westerberg’s sappiness and learned that the Replacements weren’t best friends. Not even close.) But Linc didn’t play an instrument, so I spent most of freshman year talking him into learning to play drums. Finding the drummer is always the biggest problem. Demand far exceeds supply, because a drum set is a much bigger commitment than a guitar, and because parents prefer living with instruments that don’t sound like a car crash. Drums are also the hardest instrument to master, since drummers generally always have both hands and both feet going, often doing vastly different things with each.
    I had it all worked out: I’d play guitar and sing. Linc on drums, once he learned how. My other best friend, Roger, a classically trained pianist from Newt Gingrich’s congressional district in Georgia, who got me into AC/DC and was still parting his shaggy brown hair in the middle, would also play guitar. Doug, an earnest and strapping hardcore kid with a soft spot for Dylan, who neatly rolled up the sleeves of the flannel shirts he wore each day, would play bass, because he owned one, along with the saddest and weakest bass amp I ever heard.
    Everyone agreed. Sometimes that happens. We also agreed on a name, which, unfortunately, was Ribbons of Flesh. That summer between our freshman and sophomore years, Linc bought a drum set and started practicing. Doug, who lived twenty minutes from me in New Jersey, claimed he’d been practicing, too, though after we played in his parents’ basement I had a hard time believing him. Roger promised to bring his guitar and amp with him when school started. We’d already played together a bit, so I wasn’t worried about him. When I returned to Oberlin in late August, I brought along my lousy Peavey T-60 guitar and lousy Peavey Bandit amp, and presto: a band.
    But we didn’t have songs. Or a songwriter. I contributed one surf instrumental and one deeply embarrassing attempt at heartfelt guitar pop, which hinged on the brutally overused open D−to−open G chord change. (You gotta be Malcolm Young to make that sound good.) None of us knew how to start a band. None of us knew that a tentative, underpracticed rhythm section wouldn’t work in a loud rock band, for the same reason that structural engineers advise against building houses on unstable ground. None of us knew how to meld two guitars into a coherent-sounding whole. And we believed that the correct way to practice was (a) on a weekend night, (b) after plenty of pizza and beer, and (c) as loudly as humanly possible. On a good night, given a running start and a strong push downhill, we could make it through Judas Priest’s “Living After Midnight” before collapsing in a spent heap. Though I couldn’t play the guitar solo. Or any other guitar solo.
    There is no easy alchemy that just creates a credible rock band, and credible rock songs, once you throw together four friends, some gear, and a lot of cheap beer. We knew rock didn’t require virtuosity—that’s straight from Punk Rock 101—but we didn’t know the crucial corollary: you still needed to do something interesting with your instruments. Volume was great and powerful and necessary, but it made communicating during our