Life on the road in an indie rock band can be rough, but that only intensifies the simple pleasures. A cold beer, the crack of a snare drum, the sunset on the horizon, the blue stage lights . . . It’s addictive, even when the show’s a total bust. Jon Fine still savors these moments. Now executive editor of Inc., Fine revisits his decades-long former life as an indie rocker, when he was a guitarist for Bitch Magnet, Vineland, and Coptic Light, in Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear), a rock memoir that’s worthy of the underground’s golden age, or at least the tour van library.

I reached out to Fine via e-mail with a few questions about Your Band Sucks.

I would not want to repeat much of the feeling of being in my late teens and early 20s. The highs were very high and the lows were unbelievably low. I experienced the world having lots of sharp edges, and, to steal the quote again from Dr. Thompson, my nerves were pretty close to the surface and everything registered.

Bitch Magnet’s getting back together was complicated by our geographics. I live in NYC. Orestes [Delatorre], our drummer, lived in Calgary at that time. Sooyoung [Park] lives in Singapore. It would have been very hard to envision getting back together without a big tentpole event like ATP to get our attention, especially given the substantial costs associated with just getting the three of us in the same room together.

When I interviewed the 60 or so bandmates/musicians/label people/booking agents/etc. I spoke to for the book, I was mostly looking to hear their own accounts of what they saw and what they did. I was interested in everyone’s story along the lines of the general narrative arc of the book: what were you like as a kid; how did you find all this stuff and how hard was that process; how did you form your first bands; what was your experience of the first time your band had a modicum of success in this world, what were your favorite and grossest tour stories. And, of course, what’s your relationship to music now—if you left, why did you and what drove that decision; if your band reunited, how did that happen and what was that like; if you’re still active now, how is it different now versus then?

At times, sure.