Adios, Motherfucker by Michael Ruffino

Author:Michael Ruffino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

17

WUNT DUNT DUNT

We were back in New York with a good cup of coffee listening to a bad idea.

“Anthrax.”

Eug laughed, hard. Matt said, “I don’t see it,” and it sounded crackers to me, too. Anthrax is a thrash metal band from Queens. It would never occur to me to go to an Anthrax show. Serious knucklehead convention. I’d have to be getting paid to go anywhere near it. Which was exactly what was being discussed. Lenny tried to show us the light.

“They have a kinda sorta crossover thing going on a little bit, that hit they had a few years back was kinda arena rock area, anthemy. The Anthrax kids’ll like you guys. I mean, the feedback from the Motörhead shows was great. And this is pretty much sorta the same kinda thing.”

“Definitely not the same thing,” Matt said. You want to get into it about the minutiae of heavy metal with Matt, good luck. “Why can’t we just go out on our own again?” Matt said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing wrong with it. It’s just there’s notalotta return on those small clubs, know what I mean? And we need to get a bang for our buck here, especially since you guys pretty much screwed the pooch with radio. Like, globally. Forever.”

Matt and I did spend an entire day in the office on telephones in adjacent cubicles, splitting a bottle of Smirnoff and a list of a hundred-plus radio stations, mega7-monster K-Rocks all the way down to hayseed closed-circuit outposts, calling each station to introduce ourselves to the station managers, DJs, whomever—attempting to cold-sell the album into rotation. Standard practice. By the end of that we were exhausted, and hammered, and for most of the family-style dinner that followed, down at Rodeo Bar with every radio heavy in the tri-state area, Matt and I were underneath the table doing key bumps and couldn’t be bothered. Where our album was concerned TVT’s radio department was daily making a long walk on a very short pier.

“Let me put it this way. You guys don’t gottalotta options here. I mean, we can try to get you on the BoyZone tour,” said Lenny, glancing off a genius idea, “but other than that, this is what it is. The Fu’s on for most of it, too, I think. So you’ll have a kind of, like a kind of a . . . you know—”

“Buffer.”

“Exactly.”

JANUARY 18 / NEW YORK CITY

In the early days in Newton there were community-organized shows in the gymnasium of one of the local elementary schools; your typical rudderless, amateur-hour clusterfucks, screeching amplifiers in a tiled room, pre-war PA, over and done in time for the chaperones to catch act two of Murder, She Wrote. We were playing one weekend—the night Mink first came to see us—and were standing around outside beforehand with the punk girls who chain-smoked cigarettes without inhaling when an eighteen-wheeler pulled up, trailed by a Taurus wagon.

A metal band, a five-piece with serious hair, gets out of the wagon and marches toward us.

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