At a concert in New York, he instructed his bandmates to walk onstage and begin the set by destroying their instruments, since “everybody’s breaking their stuff at the end; who’s breaking it at the beginning?” Standing amid the wreckage, only then did it dawn on him that there would be an audience of people waiting. At other concerts, crowds were treated to twenty minutes of reggae or Miles Davis or jazz-punk iterations of “Loser.” He recalls looking up at the end of one show to see fewer than five people remaining. In a show in Los Angeles, he used a leaf blower to send leaves billowing into the crowd; he’d been preoccupied by Los Angeles’s obsession with manicuring lawns. This was after the riots, it was meant to say something important — “I can’t remember what exactly,” he says now. “Some civic speech” about “the streets running with blood.” It became a self-fulfilling narrative: the “Loser” acting out.