"Look how happy they look," I said. "Maybe rock is good, after all."
"No, rock is very unfortunate," he said with a laugh.
"I've always thought so, but now I'm rethinking that."
They were mostly male, and in the dark they formed one unified body, like a bed of seaweed, lurching forward and then falling back.
Jim took me to a backstage room where chain-smoking rockers were leaning against the walls and tables, not quite talking but somehow communicating, heads tilted slightly to the side.
"I'm frightened," I whispered.
"Don't be frightened," he said.
I've been deathly afraid of rockers ever since I worked at Spin in the 80s and 90s. They weren't nice people at all. They had pale faces and their musical and political views were bound up in tiny, exact knots, which they used to assert their power and make other people feel bad. I felt bad for 10 solid years. I was never quite sure what I had done. Was it my very long interview with Pete Townshend, in which I asked him to elaborate in depth what he was really trying to communicate when he wrote Tommy?
I looked around the room and wondered what it all meant. There were plastic cups filled to the brim with cigarette butts, and empty beer bottles everywhere. We sat on a sofa, and Jim waited for his cue to go onstage.
After the show, Guided by Voices came tumbling in and everybody exchanged bear hugs.
"Those people were nice," I said to Jim afterward.
"They're Midwesterners," he said. "They're the nicest people in the world."
We discussed Bob Pollard's passionate love for the Who. This is one quick way to decipher people: their beliefs about the Who. My friend Brian once explained to me that rock sociology is all about "who has the broadest circles of disdain." The best way to get a brawl going at a table of rockers is to bring up the Who, and watch people dive for the earliest cut-off point in their faith.
That night last month, Jim explained: "If Bob Pollard heard anybody say anything bad about Who's Next…he'd kick their ass. That's the way it is in Dayton. You don't show up in Dayton and say anything snooty about Who's Next because Bob Pollard will kick your ass."
