Jon Fine is the executive editor of Inc. magazine. As a guitarist in Bitch Magnet, Coptic Light, and Don Caballero, among others he s performed around the world and appeared on MTV. As a writer, Fine s long-running BusinessWeek column Media Centric won both American Society of Business Publication Editors and National Headliner awards, and his work for Food & Wine won a James Beard Award. He has served as an on-air contributor to CNBC, and his work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Details."
Praise for Your Band Sucks
[E]verything a cult-fave musician s memoir should be: It s a
seductively readable book that requires no previous knowledge of
the author, Bitch Magnet or any other band with which he s
played.
Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Jon Fine has produced as evocative a portrait of the underground
music scene as any wistful, graying post-punk could wish for. . . .
Fine can write, and because he doesn t mind making himself look
like a jerk, he summons up all the idealism and the cluelessness,
the talent and the posturing, that went with the territory . . .
Indie was, as Fine puts it, a culture that unorphaned you, and he s
especially good on the haven that post-punk music offered Gen X
misfits.
The Atlantic
The story of the indie rock era has rarely been told as well as it
has in Your Band Sucks . . . Written with both anthropological
detachment and deep romanticism about the making of music, Fine s
book belongs on the shelf alongside Michael Azerrad s Our Band
Could Be Your Life.
Salon
Jon Fine has done something miraculous: he managed to drag me
through a time in my life that I hated and made me actually miss
it. Both a hilarious personal memoir and an obsessive guide to that
weird moment in underground music before the great tsunami of the
Internet changed everything forever, Your Band Sucksreminds you
that one self-confessed rock-nerd s journey through rejection,
triumph, and cheap motels is as universal as any well-told
story.
James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem
The short shelf of great books on indie rock adds another an
unlikely memoir about an obscure band that somehow found demand for
its reunion in the Internet age . . . I don t regret a thing,
writes Fine, and neither will readers who live vicariously through
the author s eyes and memory.
Kirkus Reviews (starred)
For those of us who loved and lived indie rock in the 1990s, we
were never sure if our alienation meant we were part of a
revolution or just making the best of a chronic condition. Jon Fine
captures what it meant to find a home in the margins the dark
humor, instant camaraderie, and strange hope of loud music, grimy
road trips, bad food and worse booze. And then what it s like,
decades later, to find yourself a tourist in the same places, grown
up but still maturing.
Ana Marie Cox, Chief Political Correspondent, MTV News, author of
Dog Days
Like Anthony Bourdain s Kitchen Confidential, but for would-be rock
stars who live like train hobos and perform for dozens of fans a
night.
Men s Health
More striking than Fine s clever words is his incisive commentary,
which examines everything we ve come to know about music in the
digital age, from cyber communities to music streaming services to
major record labels.
Esquire.com
Your Band Sucks is a beautiful, balls-out, hilarious, rich memoir
about one guitarist s epic immersion in the world of indie music
but it s also the story of an entire generation and time. Has
anyone ever written a better book about indie music? I don t think
so.
Kate Christensen, author of PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel The
Great Man and Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My
Appetites
By telling his own story, warts, bruises, drug-induced facial tics,
and all, [Fine] has recaptured a time when music felt, for many
well-educated, middle-class kids now having achieved a certain age,
like something much more important than mere entertainment.
The Boston Globe
I never attended a Bitch Magnet concert, so I can't speak to
whether the band sucked. But this book is a funny, thoughtful,
frank, whip-smart and moving chronicle of being a particular kind
of young at a particular timein America. It definitely doesn't
suck.
Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360, author of True Believers
Your Band Sucksis a fantastic document of a culture-defining era of
rock music. It paints a detailed portrait of the scene before
corporations bought music s soul. A tremendous read.
Stuart Braithwaite, Mogwai
Funny, snarky, and often poetic . . . [Fine] gives us brilliant
descriptions of the music (his own and others ) and lots of vivid
glimpses behind the scenes of a low-level touring rock band the
sublime, the scary and the just plain scatological.
Dallas Morning News
If you want to know how indie rock rolled in the forlorn and
scorned mid 80s and early 90s, you won t find a more vividly
rendered, incisive, and self-deprecatingly humorous portrayal of it
than Jon Fine s Your Band Sucks.
The Stranger
Exhilarating. Like a song that appears out of nowhere to exactly
fill a hole in your life that was never apparent, Your Band Sucks
makes vividly real the ingredients that went into 80 s indie rock.
With a cultural critic s reach and an insider s self-critical
insights, Jon Fine has produced the definitively anthropological
why thousands of bands like his existed and what they
accomplished.
Ira Robbins, editor and publisher, Trouser Press
A deft stylist, Fine captures the uncompromising drive of
20-something men on a mission to change the world through music
played at high volume . . . . Fine has provided an immersion into a
lost indie world so vivid that you can smell the tour van.
Publishers Weekly
Captures the thrills of making music that connects with people, the
feeling that being in a band entered you into a conspiracy against
the rest of the world. . . . Fine can really write.
Philly.com
Fine knows his stuff, from back then and now, and he covers the
cover bands, the start-ups, and those who came and went, noting the
musicianship, the T-shirts, the joy of libido and an open road, and
the surprise of fame (or lack thereof), and his enthusiasm is
infectious and thrilling. This is a richly detailed walk through
the wild side of the underground music business. True fans will
recognize the bands, but anyone interested in the indie-rock
phenomenon will recognize many of the players, and the angst and
the joy will strike all readers.
Booklist
Fine looks back, in Your Band Sucks at the forces that propelled
him a shy Jewish kid on the nerd-freak-loser fringe to learn
guitar, start a band, and embrace a marginal musical culture. . . .
In vivid prose, Fine details the process of touring and
self-promotion wheat pasting, mass mailings, crappy food, sleep
deprivation as well as the exultation of rocking out before the
occasional packed house.
The Los Angeles Times
When we played festivals, we used to have this thing where we d
walk up to the other bands and ask, What shitty band are you in? I
would dare never have asked Bitch Magnet that same question. In
fact, I would probably have run and hid from them the same way I
would have from Wire or Iggy Pop, or a tear-streaked,
mascara-running Courtney Love, in her Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane? dress, being escorted through the backstage area on the arms
of a couple of police officers. Their music was that intimidatingly
good. And in Your Band Sucks, Jon Fine lovingly chronicles, with
strong accuracy, the zeitgeist in which his band excelled.
Robert Pollard, Guided by Voices
Your Band Sucks is a vital read, a snapshot of the 1980s and 90 s
music they don t talk about much on I Love the 80s
Austin American-Statesman
A fine-grained account of indie rock s conflicted mind-mess the mix
of boundless idealism and cynicism, lofty aspirations and
defeatism, absolute conviction and constant doubt, flashes of
transcendence and abject embarrassment. Best of all, Your Band
Sucks captures the delirious fun of joining up with a small group,
finding your way into a small scene, connecting to a larger family
of internationally networked and like-minded misfits, and taking on
the world knowing you ve already lost. This book makes me feel
lucky to have played a small part in this grand, doomed
endeavor.
Clint Conley, Mission of Burma
I imagine, in a small van, Jon Fine is very hard to take.
Amazon reviewer"
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