The End of the 00s: Hope You Enjoyed Your Brush With Rock 'n' Roll, by Leon Neyfakh

by The End of the 00s

I was in 10th grade when this decade started. I learned something that year, that spring specifically, that I’m glad to say I’ve never forgotten.

It started, as so many things did this decade, with an IM. The IM was from my friend Bennie, a guy who lived in Milwaukee that I knew from nerd camp the summer prior. Bennie was home-schooled and wore a floppy red knit hat all the time. Bennie and I kept in touch after camp via AIM and had taken the Amtrak to visit each other a couple of times at our respective homes. He was in a band called Road Reviews, and they were about to go on tour.

I loved Road Reviews. Bennie was the guitar player and he sent me everything they ever recorded, even acoustic demos he was working on by himself. For all that, I had never seen them live because prior to the tour that spring, which was going to take them south and east, they had only played around Milwaukee. I lived about an hour and a half away in Oak Park, IL, a suburb west of Chicago, home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, Ernest Hemingway, and the boy who played Dirk in Rushmore.

What Bennie wanted to know was whether I could possibly set up a show for Road Reviews in Oak Park the night before they were supposed to play in Chicago. “If you can’t, it’s fine,” he said. The idea was they’d leave for tour a day early and get an extra show in somewhere in the Chicagoland area. If I could do it, awesome, Bennie said. If not, no big deal. I told him I’d make a couple calls.

Three weeks later, on a Friday afternoon, I was going to the church across the street to talk to the guy who would be chaperoning the show that night. I had reserved the church basement for two hours, and had booked two acts in addition to Road Reviews. The cover charge was going to be five dollars.

I told the chaperone that the first act was going on at 8:30.

“It’s not going to get loud till 8:30 or so, and then it’ll probably be loud until 10,” I said.

The guy shook his head. “It can’t be loud after 10,” he said, firmly but not unkindly. “At 10 it’s gotta stop.”

He made that gesture with his hand where you pretend you’re cutting your head off. He was bald and looked about 60. Even if I hadn’t recognized him from past shows at the church, it would have been clear from his tone of voice that I wasn’t the first amateur concert promoter from the high school that he’d had the pleasure of dealing with.

“Just make sure everyone starts on time,” he said. “Control your people.”

The headliner, a six-man jam band from my school called Snowman Saffron, was chosen strategically. Which is to say, I thought they sucked but I also knew they were the most popular band at our school and would bring in a lot of people. When I asked Jack, the bass player from Snowman Saffron, if they’d do it, he said they would as long as they got at least 45 minutes and got to play last. I agreed to these conditions, hoping privately that that all those Snowman Saffron fans would come for the whole night and see Road Reviews even though they weren’t intending to. Certainly I could not count on my involvement to bring the crowd, and Road Reviews, while rather successful in their hometown, were like 17 years old and completely unknown to people at my school. I could count on my friends and their friends, maybe 20 people, and also the freshmen who came to every church concert no matter who was playing. But without Snowman Saffron, I was looking at a very small turnout.

My pitch when people asked me about the flyers I was putting up was that Road Reviews was this really great band with a rambunctious female vocalist, who wanted to make punk music that people could dance to. To me at least this sounded radical at the time. I was excited to be bringing it to Oak Park-introducing this band to my friends and being, in a very real way, the first stop on Road Reviews’s first national tour.

Though I owned their CD and listened to it several times a week, Bennie was the only person in the band I’d met. The rest I would see for the first time when they arrived at the church in their van. Two days before the show, Bennie told me that they had a friend coming with them, a 14-year-old boy who called himself Hamstain and who wanted on the bill. Bennie described him as a goofy, hyperactive rapper from Mequon, WI.-a natural born performer.

“This guy does not let anyone in the room ignore him,” Bennie said, over IM. “He gets in everyone’s face.”

At first I said I couldn’t. Posters were already up advertising Road Reviews and Snowman Saffron. I’d already told the chaperone who was going to play when. Adding another act would mean recalculating everyone’s time to allow for an extra set and an extra 15–20 minutes of setting up.

I put Hamstain on third, and made new posters for school that listed him as a surprise guest. Time was going to be tight but it looked like it was going to work out.

By the time they pulled up, I’d been walking up and down the block for 15 minutes, checking my watch cartoonishly like Doc Brown in Back to the Future when he’s pacing outside the clock tower waiting for Marty. Hamstain got out of the van first. He was tall and spindly and had tortoise shell glasses and an appalling haircut. He was chewing gum and carried a backpack on one shoulder. I introduced myself and he asked me if there was a bathroom inside. I said yes and he waddled toward the church, where you could see the chaperone sitting behind a table collecting everyone’s five dollars. I watched Hamstain interact with him and reach an understanding. Then he disappeared.

Bennie shook my hand bro-style, and introduced me to the rest of the band. They all said hello and then we started carrying equipment down to the basement. It took two trips.

The basement had low ceilings and a cold linoleum floor. There were thick columns in front of the stage on either side, and a basic light rig hanging from the ceiling. The way it worked was you went around to the back of the school, paid the chaperone at the door and then went downstairs into this little lair. It always felt slightly too big, such that no show ever felt full. While we set up a couple of my friends walked in and took seats on the floor in front of where everyone was going to play.

By the time Bennie was done plugging everything in and the drummer had set up his kit, it was half past eight, and I wanted them to get going. 30 minutes for Road Reviews, I figured, plus 15 minutes for Hamstain, meant I was cutting it damn close.

Just then Bennie asked came up to me and asked where there was a place nearby where they could get some food. “We’re starving,” he said. Hamstain burst out of the bathroom, wearing a navy blue jumpsuit and, I think but I’m not sure, a plastic gold crown around his head. “Can we go get some ‘za?” he said.

I stammered but had to say no. There was no time for pizza. Snowman Saffron had stipulated 45 minutes and the chaperone had stipulated 10pm. If everyone was going to go and get pizza now one or the other of those stipulations would have to be violated.

There were maybe 20 people in the room now, mostly still people I recognized but a few of them unmistakably members of the Snowman Saffron entourage. Hamstain noted, reasonably, that it seemed like they should wait to go on anyway so that the crowd could grow a little. I had to explain about the chaperone.

Ten minutes later Road Reviews took the stage and clicked off. About a third of the audience stood along the back wall, a third standing up towards the front, and the rest spread out in between. I stood off to the side and as they got going tried to shake my body in a manner that suggested I really wanted to dance but didn’t feel like cutting loose while on the job.

I looked around to see if people seemed into it. My friends up front were trying, I could tell, bouncing their shoulders and clapping along at some parts. But overall it was pretty subdued.

The singer, meanwhile, careened around the stage and screamed the words. After the first song was over she said “Hello and thanks for coming, we’re Road Reviews” and didn’t address the audience until she hit a breakdown a few songs later where the guitar drops out and it’s just bass and drums. “Come on, you guys, everyone clap along,” she said, demonstrating from the stage. I followed instructions but not everyone did.

Four songs in the singer got mad. “Just fucking dance, you guys,” she said, looking at my friends in the front of the room and gesturing with her hands. “It’s not that hard.”

I watched my friends in the front exchange bewildered looks and whisper things to each other. A couple of them went and sat down in the back. The rest stayed put but stood without moving, their arms crossed and their faces unamused. Two songs later: “This is gonna be our last one.”

Bennie and his band were still breaking down their set when Hamstain plugged his Discman into the PA system and took the microphone. “Hey,” he said, so loud that everyone’s hands went to their ears. “Someone please kill the lights.”

Someone did and Hamstain turned on his backing music. “Oak Park,” he said. “More like fucking Joke Park.”

From across the room I saw the chaperone peeking his head down from the stairway. About ten minutes later he’d make his way toward the stage to get a closer look and Hamstain would jump on his back.

When that happened, I had to end the set. The chaperone wasn’t hurt but he wasn’t happy either. “Ten,” he said to me before going back upstairs.

At 9:30 all six guys from Snowman Saffron were up on stage, about to launch into the first of what would have been three fifteen minute-long suites. The room was full now now; evidently all the SS fans had waited outside and come in only when someone told them it was time. I watched as Jack prepared to strike his first chord and when he did I swallowed with some relief and went over to get the cashbox from the chaperone. He gave it to me and I counted the money. $200 dollars, which meant 60 admits and $50 to each act.

$100 in hand, I went out front where Bennie and the rest of them were sitting cross-legged in a circle and eating a pizza. The van wasn’t packed yet but all their gear was in a pile on the lawn next to the curb. I sat down and handed Bennie the money. “Great set,” I said. They mumbled thanks and the singer lit a cigarette. “The crowd was kind of lame,” she said, exhaling and looking sideways at her sneakers, which she had written on. “Is that always how kids from your school are?”

I glanced at Bennie, cleared my throat, and paused as I tried to push the tightness out of my mouth and shape it into something resembling a smile. “Like the man said, I guess, Joke Park,” I said finally. “People here don’t really dance.”

Hamstain grinned ear to ear. “I coined that shit,” he said. “Just so you know, when I coin something it sticks.”

Before they left Bennie gave me a CDR with a bunch of new Road Reviews songs on it and a couple of demos he’d recorded on his computer. He didn’t know it then but it was the last set of songs the band would ever record, because at some point during the tour, rumor was it was in Indiana, the singer and the bass player started hooking up and a few months later the whole thing came to an end.

When they had their last amp in the back of the van I asked Bennie if he was sure they didn’t need a place to crash the next night after their show in Chicago proper. He said they were good. “We’ve got Oberlin the next day,” he said. “Thanks again for everything.”

Snowman Saffron were still playing when I came back inside. We were about to hit 10pm and I went up to the stage to make sure Jack knew it. When I stuck out my hand and pointed to my watch he nodded, and a few minutes later they were bowing. Jack gave me look as he broke down his gear, clearly unhappy about only getting to play three of the planned four suites.

As everyone filed out, I stayed back to clean. My friends, three of the ones who had stood out front and stuck around, helped. At 11 p.m. we killed the lights and all went home. I fell asleep thinking about what it’d be like to be in a band. How would you know if you were any good? And if the band broke up pretty quickly, would that be something you carried around with you forever?

Leon Neyfakh is a reporter at the New York Observer.