The Dirt

OWhen rock’n’roll dreams come true...and they’re just annoying BY DAVID MARCHESE

ur moment had finally come. The hours spent at dank practice s b t f s _mpaces, the petty arguments, the squandered dollars. All would e redeemed by blasting our heaviest song into the faces of he Teva-wearing bros and sweatpants-sporting brolitas who’d oolishly come to the show. Jeremy, our drummer, attacks his nares. Chris’ bass spews sludge. I pound out a doomy riff on y champagne-colored Les Paul knockoff. Adam, our rhythm guitarist, gets clocked in the head by a thrown water bottle.

Inciting a crowd to violence with one song: What could be more triumphantly
rock’n’roll than that? So what if the bottle-thrower was actually a middle-age
Canadian mom?
But I didn’t feel triumphant; I felt
totally hollow. Why? Isn’t this exactly
what I have been waiting to do my
entire life?

The band was born just a month earlier. I was 17 and in my senior year. One day at school, the four of us had been bullshitting in the art room, and amid the usual in-jokes, someone uttered the words “scream and die.” That was it. Jeremy said it sounded like a perfect band name. We had to do this.

I’d always wanted to be in a band. I loved songs that made playing in bands sound like the whole point of being young. When Bruce Springsteen sang about wanting to “Cut some place of our own / With these drums and these guitars,” in “No Surrender,” I understood. When Bryan Adams sang, “Those were the best days of my life,” in “Summer of ’ 69,” I envied him. Even a song like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” ostensibly about the downside of a band’s life, sounded like an endorsement. Steel horses? Saddle me up. Before we started Scream and Die, we were just friends. Now we were…unstoppable.

Before the lunch bell rang, we
debated album titles (Rehab Rehab,
Bonely the Lonely) and possible covers
(the pic: us as space giants, stomping
planet Earth). But regardless of its
packaging, our music was going to be so unrelentingly badass that it’d per-
manently harsh the mellow of the Hacky Sacking Phishheads at our suburban
Toronto school.
The next day, rather than hide in the art room, I walked up and down the
halls. I was wearing a white T-shirt. Scrawled across the front in black ink:
SCREAM AND DIE.
Now that we existed, we needed some songs. This was a problem. But if
Mudvayne had taught us anything, it’s that you can get by without talent, so
I swiped a riff from Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of” and
wrote a two-word lyric, which doubled as the song’s title: “Suck It.”
“Suck It” was more middle-finger than actual music, but Jeremy, Chris, and
Adam made it a song, adding an intro, a breakdown, and an outro. We quickly David Marchese is Spin’s assistant editor.
came up with another number. I ripped off Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void,” and
we took turns shouting the names of people we disliked (teachers, Oprah, Jon
Voight). We called this one “Consider Them Fucked.”

We rehearsed these bilious masterpieces and others at a graffiti-covered rehearsal studio in an industrial part of town. As a budding Felix Unger, spending time in a place that stank of cigarettes and flop sweat put me on edge. Adam and I bickered about volume. I struggled to play in time. I stewed over lending someone money. I regretted parking my parents’ car on a desolate side street.

And the more we practiced, the more frustrated I became. I’d be early. Someone else would be late. I was stingy. Someone would be short. I wrote songs, the other guys played them better. Practice began feeling like a chore that had to get done before we could do something fun, like driving around egging people or smoking up and listening to A Wizard, A True Star.

But if Scream and Die couldn’t be fun, it could at least be a spectacle. Jeremy booked us a pay-to-play gig on a Sunday afternoon at a crummy downtown club. The other act on the bill—also from our school—was a jam band. Perfect fodder for the fury Scream and Die was about to unleash. Finally, all my annoyances would melt away in a storm of swearing and shocked faces.

When we got to the club, a pushy mom demanded that we open for her son’s band, which meant a shortened set for us. Then someone stole Jeremy’s bass drum pedal, but we had to go on anyway. The crowd was sparse, mostly guys in ironic Morehead and Gamecocks caps and girls in camp T-shirts.

We started with “Suck It.”
Cue water bottle.

There’s a scene in the movie The Man Who Would Be King when a soldier (played by Sean Connery) who’d been worshipped as a god by a primitive tribe is caught bleeding, and thus reveals his mortality. I had a similar epiphany when the projectile bounced off Adam’s head: I wasn’t going to blow minds; I was only going to piss off some lady

and bore a bunch of budding yuppies. I thought I’d feel like a superhero; I
ended up feeling, well, nothing much, and that I could do at home. For free.
When the club manager cut us off after five songs, I was relieved.

In a fit of optimism, Jeremy booked a second show, but I knew it would be my last. I tried to liven things up by dressing as a pirate. It didn’t help. The crowd was all friends, and yelling dick jokes to a sympathetic audience proved even less inspiring than yelling them to an unsympathetic one. The lone highlight: a surly soundman bellowed, “Big fat tits!” during our cover of “Ballroom Blitz.”

The closest I came to transcendence was eating a killer falafel on the way
home. Then again, I never harbored any illusions about hummus.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MAT THE W SALACUSE