ROY EDROSO

Part Four: No Place for Good Guys

Now it was 1987. The country was in recession, and so--ever in sync with our times--were the Reverb Motherfuckers.

We were unemployable. Our demo tape was 30 minutes of incomprehensible noise covered with scrawled phone numbers that club owners never called. We performed, when we performed, in dark holes, accompanied by the metal-clangers and wild boys and girls. Mostly we rehearsed in our little space, where the amps and walls understood us.

In a way, we thrived on this lack of success. It really took a lot to be too much for the Lower East Side. We slagged bands like Sonic Youth, whose oeuvre was, by our standards, overly precious. We were hanging out with, playing with and for, people even more excluded, more maddened than we were--the squatters, the runaways, the antis of every stripe. They had covered the neighborhood in angry graffiti. They were turning Tompkins Square Park into some berserk, Mad Max version of a KOA; and they stood like a ragged phalanx in front of the yuppies (remember that word?) that were already infiltrating the neighborhood.

They were worse off than we were, and more free. We would not be them, but we took sustenance from their example, for our contempt spared not even our own egos, and we were honor-bound to hate ourselves along with everything else.

I took to wearing a filthy brown leather jacket with the legend RMF spray-painted across the back. I told anyone who would listen, and many who would not, that we were the greatest band in the world, and that we would blow any other band off the stage, had we a stage from which to blow them. This did not win many hearts and minds, but I was separated from my wife, living in a sublet, working temp jobs, and drinking heavily. It was my own heart and mind I was desperately trying to keep in order, and for the moment drunken belligerence seemed to be doing the trick.

At some party in some apartment, Big John made the acquaintance of a drummer named Ray. Ray had recently moved into the neighborhood, attracted by its wild, wide-open vibe, and was looking for something passionate with which to align himself. John passed him a tape and--as Johnson said of Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield when that poor drunk passed him the manuscript, while Goldsmith's landlady beat on the door--he saw the merit in it, and came to our little room to work with us.

Most drummers of Ray's ability would have quickly fled the scene. But Ray embraced the savagery of our music and shaped it--or, I should say, lathed it, as the sound we were spewing was as harsh and dense as rusted steel--and in a shower of sparks gave it a form it had heretofore lacked.

"You guys have got the shit," he said afterwards, wiping the sweat from his face.

"No, you do," I said, tripping over a guitar cable. "Oh, fuck. No but seriously. You're great and, um, let's play together again sometime, okay?"

Which meant he was in the band.

Ray was a good element to throw in. He had better social skills than the rest of us. When confronted, even mildly or with kindness, the rest of us responded in ways that kept people at a distance. Dave tended to throw up a cloud of intelligent banter. John fawned and accommodated until, disgusted with himself, he felt obliged to deliver a subtle verbal gut-punch which the victim, still high from the praise John had heaped upon him, felt only viscerally but still resented. I became a snarling asshole around the tenth line of dialogue, or fifth drink.

Ray smiled and shook hands and played well with others. But under this gladhanding we sensed something tightly coiled, something anti, which was connected, we knew, to his willingness to join our rampage.

"So whattaya think of Ray?" John asked me at my new apartment, a cramped shithole on Avenue B.

"He's fucking wild," I said, swigging a tall Bud. "He beats the shit out of the drums, and he seems into it. I don't think Whatshername likes him, though." (I was then on my 32nd comeback with my ex-wife. We'd meet at a show, have a few laughs, have violent sex and shortly thereafter a violent argument; whereupon, after a brief interruption, the cycle would repeat.)

"Hey, big guy," said John, loping his arm around my shoulder, "It's like Iggy said: You can't understand because you don't understand because you can't understand."

I understood, or rather I understood, or rather I understood. All the people and things that were disappointing me only aligned me more strongly with those few people and things who did not.

We started gigging more, and the added energy from Ray pushed us even further into the insanity of our purpose. We got on the bill at a performance at the Gas Station, a sort of Rivington School offshoot on Avenue B that had once been a garage. Around the unhoused blacktop where we were to perform loomed jagged, twisted metal sculpture and about sixty spectators, including some of our feral fans but also some local bohemian scenesters and opinion leaders. We had stumbled into an outlying district of the Zeitgeist. Others besides nascent bums were getting interested in post-post-punk or whatever we were we part of. You could spot them: They were the ones with the imported beer.

Our rehearsal spacemates Ritual Tension played before us and left me a nice present: When I opened my guitar case I found my instrument unstrung with a note: "Love, RT." With great difficulty I re-outfitted my Telecaster, squinting drunkenly as I aimed the ends of exceedingly thin strings at the maddeningly tiny peg-holes. "Goddamned motherfucking shit fuck," I growled, poking bloody holes in my fingers. "I'll show you. I'll show all you fuckers."

Fifteen minutes later we were beating the holy shit out of our centerpiece, an endless regurgitation of "Whole Lotta Love" called "Who Got Th' Crack?" As had become our method, we removed as much subtlety from the arrangement as possible. We just bashed those two chords while I screamed and Ray pounded and shattered the air with an ungodly cymbal racket. Every once in a while we would all stop, and just when the silence began to yield relief we would smash back into it, harder and faster than before. I kept dropping to my knees, which were torn up by whatever broken glass and medical waste lay on the blacktop.

Between numbers we heard an unfamiliar sound. Under the full-throated roars of our few fans--who always seemed more motivated by primal need than by anything we were doing--we heard the more polite sound of hands clapping and traditional rock imprecations (e.g. "Awright!"). Our response was delirious. We pushed our amps to the breaking point (the vocal amps were already broken) and the sound careened off the surrounding buildings. On the final blasts of "Jambalaya" I hurled myself against the ground, once, twice, three times. Skin tore from my arms, chips flew from my guitar. I heard screaming but I no longer knew if it was theirs, mine, or the amps.

When it was over the band helped me to my feet. People were talking to us. I wasn't sure what they were saying but it sounded good. Someone said something about making a record. Someone else poured beer on my wounds. It burned, but I was already on fire.

A few days later Dave came to the rehearsal space and quit. "This is just taking up too much of my time and energy," he explained, his gear piled on his back, his eyes tired. "I can't even do my laundry anymore."

We were polite and wished him well, for he had been a good soldier, and was (and remains) a good guy, but afterwards we referred to him as "Laundry" and laughed about it. People had begun to reach out to us, but our circle seemed to be shrinking. The band was becoming a place where laundry, and much else, would have to be jettisoned. Where we were bound was no place for good guys.

To be continued.