There have been a lot of remarkable reunion tours this past half-decade: Pavement, Sleater-Kinney, Neutral Milk Hotel, My Bloody Valentine, The Replacements, — and Bitch Magnet.
Yes, Bitch Magnet, an indie rock band from the late 1980s with an admittedly regrettable name, came back in 2011. After nearly a two decades of silence, they reissued three albums and toured Asia, Europe, and some cities in the US. If you’ve never heard the band before, their music is noisy, but calculated, like a carefully orchestrated car crash. There’s nothing tragic about them, but their music is loud, forceful, and has a twisted artistic quality to it. They know when to go hard and when to slow things down, when to let singer Sooyoung Park’s monotonous voice float behind their songs, and when to let the instruments drive the energy of their stories.
After coming down from (or perhaps still riding) the high that was Bitch Magnet’s extremely lucky and unforgettable reunion tour, Jon Fine, Bitch Magnet’s bassist—as well as a member of numerous other bands like Don Caballero and Coptic Light—turned his experiences into a new book, entitled YOUR BAND SUCKS: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear). Now settling into middle age, Fine is a professional writer and editor, with works published in The Atlantic, Inc., and GQ. His memoir, YOUR BAND SUCKS, is a firsthand account of this burgeoning music genre back in the 1980s and 90s, as well as his personal reflections on living and breathing the touring life. The names he drops may be familiar and reminiscent of a bygone era (Mission of Burma, Steve Albini, and Slint to name a few), but the lessons and experiences he describes still ring true today.
Allston Pudding: It’s always exciting for us to read about Boston, and in YOUR BAND SUCKS, you have a great passage about Bitch Magnet’s first time playing in Boston. What was it like for you?
Jon Fine: The world was much less interconnected in 1988. By that point, you knew there was stuff going on in other cities, but you didn’t quite know what it was. You knew that certain cities in america were unusually good for what we would have called “indie rock” without wincing. Chicago was good, Boston was good, but there was this weird thing going on in Boston where there was an unusual, almost European equivalence between underground bands and real bands. I don’t know if you guys realize this, but there is no other city in America where bands had radio tapes. Unsigned bands and independent bands would just make a cassette that radio stations would play that would then become local hits.
Boston was one of our first out of town shows and, without a doubt, one of our first out of town shows that people actually came to. Our first record was about to come out, the late Billy Ruane had somehow tracked us down—or we sent him a tape, I can’t remember—and he just sort of called me up. All these radio stations were playing this music really obsessively, like Emerson, Tufts, Harvard, WFNX, and six or seven more. It’s a small city but it was unusually good for this kind of music. Bands like ours in the 80s were playing on an unusually leveled playing field, which was really nice.
AP: What do you mean by calling something “indie rock without wincing”?
JF: [laughs] Indie rock without wincing… it’s kind of insulting to name an entire subgenre of music after the business model behind it, but there’s nothing else to call it. Until the 90s I was using punk rock and indie rock interchangeably because to me it was the same thing. It was a kind of music that was much closer to the ground—the underground basically. In the book I still kind of struggle with what to call it, and in the end I just kind of threw up my hands. I still much prefer the term punk rock, but [indie rock] is still what it’s most known as. I spend a lot of time amongst civilians and they get a much different picture from punk rock than I do. It’s difficult enough trying to explain this stuff, so you want it to be understood.
AP: What do you think Bitch Magnet’s music would be called today?
JF: All the terms that could be applied are wince-inducing. Honestly I have no fucking idea. I don’t remember what people said in the reviews when we re-released our records a few years ago. It would have to be indie rock almost by definition because any label insane enough to put out a Bitch Magnet record now would have to an indie label. What would you come up with?
AP: Well, I would definitely tack the word underground on there…
JF: [laughs] I can live with that.
AP: There’s a quote in your book that really struck a chord with me, because I think it still holds true today: “If you were in an indie rock band in the nineties and you sucked, you’d do well if you had the right friends.” Could you elaborate on that, or what’s your takeaway?
JF: That is a quote from Andy Cohen, the brilliant guitarist in the band Silkworm who were based in the Northwest and moved to Chicago. He was basically referring to how we’re all grownups now and we all understand that certain things happen in certain artistic circles. Crowds form, influential people arise, and power accrues to cliques and to certain people. I understand that now intellectually, but I didn’t understand that at the time. And it was frankly kind of a drag, mostly because there was the sense that things had been very wide open. Since indie music was very new, we thought it would be a relatively democratic thing, that everyone had a pretty equal shot. And then labels form, cliques form, and people start getting concerned with the social aspects of it, and the social aspects start taking over and if you know the right people it starts helping a lot.
Aside from that, it was just painful to see a subgenre kind of become more of an established thing. It was becoming a little more like everything else, but that’s what happens with movements though. However, there is still a network in place for really strange bands, and it’s probably easier for them to be heard now. I find that incredibly moving.
AP: Did you start writing this book as a therapeutic exercise in any way?
JF: [laughs] Well, it actually it wasn’t my idea. I went to an editor with a different book idea in 2011, but after I gave him the big spiel, really excited, he was like “ehhhhhh, nah…” and totally killed my buzz. So he asked what else I was working on, and I brought up how this band I was in the 80s and 90s, all of our records were just reissued, and we got asked to play at this festival in the UK. I said you know, we broke up 21 years ago, but I think we’re going to do it. And he was like ‘Really?! Tell me about that!’ We talk about it some more and he says, ‘That’s the book. Write that book.’
I wouldn’t really call it therapeutic though. It was an enormous privilege to be able to do. I don’t know if I could call it all a pleasure, but it’s pretty pleasurable right now, being about to talk about this stuff. This time was really close to my heart and it still is.
AP: What do you have planned for your discussion in Boston with Clint Conley (of Mission of Burma)?
JF: Clint and I are going to sit around talking and we still have to figure out how we’re going to do it [laughs]. I’m enormously thrilled that he’s doing it. Mission of Burma were a very important band to me, and I knew that I had to talk to them for the book. What I didn’t really realize until I got into the book was how important they’d be to the book. Because this book covers almost 20 years, they were there at the very beginning and they are there now. They’ve done challenging music in four or five decades, almost. There was no example previously for what they did. They reunited for a couple of shows and it turned into this second career. And after not playing together for 20 years, they’re still fucking unbelievable. Their second album after getting back together has some of their best songs on it, and they’re still doing all this crazy shit on stage. They’re a really singular band and story. I’m gobsmacked Clint is doing this. Nineteen-year-old me is peeing his pants right now. But he and I are due to have a conversation about this soon, but who knows, it could be completely improvised!