by Lewis Shiner
The truth of the electric guitar is that the electricity is contagious, passed from wall outlet to guitarist to audience if the emotional humidity is right. Laurie was too filled with her power to hang on to her anger with Skip, her money worries, anything, in fact, beyond the sound.
To her right, Jim had the DX7 at the lip of the stage. Laurie was in the middle with Gabe, Skip on her far left. It was the same configuration they’d been using in the garage for the last two weeks. Skip was duct-taping his effects box to the floor. Gabe was screwing in earplugs, and Dennis was stomping on his bass drum pedal with evident satisfaction.
“Hey, Dennis,” Jim yelled. “How can you tell if the drum riser is level?”
“I don’t know,” Dennis yelled back. “Who cares?”
“No,” Jim said, “it’s a joke. The answer is, ‘If the drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth. ’ ”
“That’s not funny, man.”
“Sure it is,” Jim said. “Trust me.”
Laurie walked to the center stage microphone and said, “Test, one, two.” Her voice boomed across the empty club.
Skip crossed in front of her. “Nice amp,” he said.
She wondered if he might be jealous, and found she liked the idea. “I’ve always depended,” she said, “on the kindness of strangers.”
Skip made a face and hit his low E string. Jim, like Pavlov’s piano player, answered with a low E from the keyboard and Skip tuned up. Ace got his levels and suddenly, finally, it was time to play.
Laurie turned to Dennis. “ ‘Get Ready,’ ” she said.
“I am ready.”
“Dennis, I swear to God…”
Dennis counted off. Laurie turned to the mike and laid into the opening chords.
The band sounded thin at first, and the monitors seemed comatose. Laurie didn’t care. She knew how the song was supposed to go. The greater danger was that people would think her simple-minded due to the idiot grin stretching her face. She remembered exactly how it felt to be an awkward 14-year-old at the Sunken Gardens in San Antonio, in love with a sound, and now that she was making that joyous, inexorable sound herself, it was everything she’d known it would be. It was over too soon, leaving her out of breath as she looked into the darkness and said, “Need a little more?”
“That’s plenty,” Ace said. “Sounds good, guys. See you tonight.”
She realized she’d been hoping for an excuse to go on, dreaming that Ace, who heard a couple of dozen bands every week, would be so blown away that he would ask for a personal encore. She laboriously shifted gears, put Dan’s amp on standby, and unplugged her guitar.
As she climbed down from the stage, Skip said, “You were rushing it a little.”
She turned to look at him. His hair was disarrayed and not especially clean. His once-black pearl-snap Western shirt had faded to a darkish gray except for the sweat stains under the arms. He held her eyes for a moment and then popped his guitar strap loose and laid his battered Gibson in its case. She thought about the different stages Skip had played on, from the Royal Albert Hall to the Hollywood Bowl, and for the first time it didn’t intimidate her.
This is the best band he’s ever been in, she thought, and he knows it.
“I’ll try to watch it,” she said. “And if I don’t? Just see if you can keep up.”
Opening night
It was the first official Band Dinner, all of them out together, so they took the van to the Rock and Roll Denny’s just down the street. Spirits were high, even Skip’s, right up until nine o’clock when they returned to an empty club for their nine-thirty start time. Not entirely empty—there were a dozen or so bored and listless drinkers at the back of the room—but no entourages, no expensive leather jackets, no AmEx cards waving in the smoky air.
“Don’t panic,” Jim said, unconvincingly. “These guys are notoriously late to everything.”
“If they’re much later,” Laurie said, “they’re going to miss us entirely.”
“Well,” Jim said. “We did what we could.”
Laurie went outside to sit on the curb and watch traffic on Sunset, trying to clear her head. The sound check had been great with no one there. What difference did it make who was in the audience now?
All the difference, of course. It made all the difference.
She didn’t notice Gabe standing behind her until she stood up and dusted herself off to go inside. “You all right?” he said.
“Yeah. Emotions running a bit high and fluttery tonight.”
“No shame in that. I wish Jim hadn’t said anything about those industry people. They’re a bunch of damn vultures is all. They never get onto a scene until it’s dead. They’re probably all out at some plastic punk club trying to find the next Green Day.”
“So who needs ’em?”
“Not us,” Gabe said. “We’re Laurie Moss and the Mossmen.”
The dressing room was the size of the guest room in a very cheap apartment, with dark paneling and dark, damaged carpet to make it look even smaller. There seemed to be a single 25-watt light. At nine-thirty, Ace knocked on the door and said, “Ready when you are.”
Dennis led the way, Gabe and Jim behind him. Guitar strapped on, holding its neck high to make it through the narrow door, Laurie followed them toward the stage, Skip bringing up the rear. It took a long time. She could hear her footsteps on the carpet, hear her own breath in her mouth. She tried again and again to swallow, though her constricted throat seemed to have forgotten how. Her eyes focused on Gabe’s short dreadlocks and the sheen of his gray polished cotton shirt; in the edges of her vision she saw empty tables and cavernous space.
They climbed onto the stage and she went straight to the red glowing light on Dan’s amp, found the jack at the end of her cord, ran it through her strap, and plugged it, with stiff and uncooperative fingers, into her guitar. When she looked up, she saw Jim run his fingers silently over the keys of his DX7, then rub his hands together with glee.
She turned to look at Gabe, his legs a shoulder’s width apart, fingers already poised to hit the first note, smiling, utterly calm and motionless. Even Dennis was eerily silent, the first drummer in her experience who didn’t make a nervous clatter at the start of a show. They all watched her, all waited for her, Skip included, and it became real to her for the first time that she was a second or two away from playing her own songs at one of the top clubs in LA, backed up by the band of her dreams, who were even now tuned, aligned, fueled, and ready for her to turn the key. Nothing else matters, she thought. Not right now.
She nodded to Dennis, and walked toward the mike as he clicked off the tempo. “How ya doin’?” she said to the empty house as Jim and Gabe dug into the first two irresistible bars of “Get Ready.” Dennis led into the third bar with a perfect Motown drag roll and she laid her guitar part squarely on top of the drums. Then came Skip with the string part, played Albert King style, hard and stinging. A spotlight hit her in the face, and she opened her mouth and started to sing.
The words were laid out in her head like cross ties, the music like rails, and she rode them for all she was worth, Skip, Gabe, and Jim throwing the weight of their voices behind her on the chorus until she no longer knew if it was in her power to stop, or to want to stop.
Skip played the sax solo on anguished guitar and together they roared into the final verse, into the final chord, and finally into the inevitable silence afterward, broken by applause and even a few whistles.
“Thanks,” Laurie said. “I’m Laurie Moss, and this is my band, the Mighty Moss-Tones.” A flurry of applause erupted from a table near the front of the stage. She squinted into the lights and saw Catherine, Molly, and L’Shondra with three or four friends. She was giddy, and she realized that if she wasn’t careful she could turn into the Medicated Elvis and not be able to shut up. So she stepped away from the mike and nodded for Dennis to count off “Brighter Day.”
Mark Ardrey
After the lead in “Carry On,” the la
st song, it dropped down to bass and drums, quiet enough for Laurie to introduce the band. When she got to Skip—carefully qualified as “sitting in with us tonight”—there were yelps of recognition from the audience, and a couple of requests for “Tender Hours.”
Skip stepped reluctantly up to his mike and said, “Not tonight. Tonight I’m just a Moss-Tone.” He nodded to Laurie and they started the build-up to the last verse and the end of the set. The applause was substantial, but by the time they’d said their thank-yous and unplugged, it was over.
The first thing Laurie noticed after she got offstage was the return of self-consciousness. She caught herself wondering, am I okay? Am I bummed that it’s over? She wouldn’t have asked those questions with the set actually in progress. But now that they’d come up, the answer seemed to be that she was fine. Suddenly, deeply tired, at the same time that she was buzzing with the pleasure of what she’d done.
They loaded the van while Estrogen’s drummer set up, the Best of Blondie blaring over the sound system. Okay, she admitted, an encore would have been nice. She knew an opening band getting an encore at a club would have been a miracle slightly more astonishing than raising Lazarus, but then, when did desire ever stop to figure the odds?
“Okay, that’s it,” Jim said, and Dennis waved and drove away down Sunset. Laurie stashed her practice amp and guitar in the dressing room and sat down at the table where Jim and Gabe had already joined L’Shondra and the others, adding a second concentric ring of chairs around the outside. Skip, apparently, had simply disappeared.
“You were incredible,” Catherine said, eyes shining. “You were good with Summer, but this, this was like a whole other level.”
“Thank you,” Laurie said, surprising herself yet again with sudden regret that she hadn’t invited Summer, with a completely unreasonable wish that Summer could have been there to share this.
L’Shondra reached across the table to squeeze her hand. “She’s right. Gabe’s played with about a hundred bands, but this is the best ever.”
“Thank you,” Laurie said. She smiled at L’Shondra and then couldn’t stop herself from looking behind her. “Did Skip just take off? Is Dennis coming back?”
Jim and Gabe gave each other a look that Laurie recognized. “All right, what’s going on? What is it you’re not telling me this time?”
“Dennis has another gig, down at the Teaszer,” Jim said.
“What, you’re saying Dennis is in another band?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Gabe said. “You’ve got your Saturday night thing with Summer, Dennis has a couple of other bands he plays with.”
The fact that they hadn’t told her upset her more than anything else. Don’t let this spoil things, she pleaded with herself. Please. “How many exactly?”
“It depends which week you ask,” Jim said. “This is LA. One band breaks up, the guitarist starts a second band, the bass player starts a third.”
“What happens if we have a gig?”
She could see Jim and Gabe both searching for the perfectly reassuring answer, but before either of them could get it out, a voice behind her said, “Is this a bad time?”
Laurie turned and saw what she at first took to be a plainclothes cop. He was medium height with short dark hair, black-rimmed glasses, black slacks and shoes, pressed white shirt, black knit tie. “I was wondering,” he said calmly, “if I could talk to you for a minute.”
A surge of panic sent her down a chain of associations: police, Skip, heroin, evidence accidentally in her guitar case, bungled trial, prison, despair, suicide. She noticed the man was holding out a business card and took it in suddenly clammy fingers.
“Mark Ardrey,” he said, offering his hand. She shook it limply, trying to read the card in the attenuated light. Gradually she began to realize that the logo behind his name consisted of a G and an R crushed together to form a circle.
“General Records?” she said. “For real?”
“For real,” he said. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Now that she had a moment, he looked less like a cop than a shoe salesman from 1959. If he’d looked the way he was supposed to—silk shirt, mousse, unstructured jacket—she was sure she would have been falling all over herself. As it was, she couldn’t seem to take him seriously. “Sure,” she said. “Pull up a chair.”
Laurie had been reading Rolling Stone since the age of 12, and she knew the history of General Records the same way she knew about Hank Williams or the Moog synthesizer. General had been a bona-fide major label through the early 60s, then gone under, as so many had, in the wake of the Beatles. Warner had bought their back catalog in 1965 and then, in the late 80s, revived the name as a boutique label under the Warner/Elektra/Atlantic umbrella.
“Jim,” she said, “Gabe, this is Mark…”
“Ardrey,” the man said, leaning across the table to shake hands. “General Records.” To Gabe he said, “I’ve seen you around town. You’re really good.” To Jim he said, “You produced the Kindness EP, right?”
“That was me,” Jim agreed.
“So I was talking with Brett Gurewitz yesterday, you guys know Brett? Bad Religion, Epitaph records?”
“I know him,” Jim said.
“Well, he told me he was going to be here to check you guys out tonight, only he never showed up. I kinda feel stood up, here.”
“You and me both,” Jim said.
“I mean, I feel like I’m missing the boat, you know, that these guys are all off at some A-list party and they didn’t tell me about it.”
“Sorry you got stuck listening to us,” Laurie said. She’d let the words out thinking they’d come off as mildly ironic and amusing, but she’d apparently misjudged. The high from playing was slowly receding, the train disappearing down the track without her. She could barely hear its whistle.
“No, hey, you guys were terrific. I didn’t mean it like that.” He signaled to a waitress, who ignored him. “Have you been playing out much?”
“This was our first gig,” Gabe said.
“You’re kidding.”
“We’ve been holed up in a garage in Whittier for four months,” Laurie said.
“Whittier? No kidding. I live in Whittier. How long have you been together?”
“Laurie’s been with us since January,” Gabe said. “The original stuff is all hers. The rest of us have been jamming together off and on for a couple of years.”
“Including Skip?”
Gabe looked at Laurie and said, “Off and on.”
“Where do you know him from?”
“I met him at a jingle session,” Gabe said. “We got along, and I brought him over to Jim’s.”
“What’s he like?” Ardrey asked. He was leaning forward now, elbows on the table, genuinely interested.
Discussing Skip had fallen off the list of things for which Laurie was in the mood. She excused herself and went over to the table where Dan Villanueva was selling Estrogen CDs and T-shirts.
“When are you guys up?” she asked him.
“Any minute. I caught the end of your set. You guys are hot.”
“Thanks. Your amp made a big difference.” She picked up one of their CDs. The cover art looked like it had been thrown together in a couple of minutes in Photoshop. “Do you guys sell a lot of these?”
“Couple of thousand in the last year.”
“Wow, that’s good.”
“Not exactly major label numbers, but the profit margin’s better. We made back what they cost in a couple of weeks. I can give you all the info if you want.” He looked over at her table. “Speaking of major labels, is that Mark Ardrey over there?”
“You know him?”
“He hangs around the scene a lot. He never signed anybody that I knew personally.”
“But he’s for real?”
“He does A&R for General, at least this week. The word on the street is they’re looking for an excuse to get rid of him. Just thought you should know that. I mean, the fact that he’s
here tonight shows how out of it he is. Everybody else is at the Viper Room to hear Random Axe.”
“You were talking about them earlier.”
“Yeah, everybody says they’re going to be the next Green Day.”
“Which explains what happened to everybody who was supposed to come hear us.”
“This business sucks. I love playing, but the business sucks.” He looked at his watch. “Sorry. My wife was supposed to be here 15 minutes ago to run the table while we play.”
Laurie wondered if he’d brought up his wife to distance her. She was embarrassed that he might have thought she was coming on to him. “Got any kids?”
“Two. Makes it hard sometimes, but I wouldn’t trade ’em for anything. Ah, there she is.” He got out from behind the table and then paused on his way to the stage. “Don’t take my word on this Ardrey business. Maybe he can help you. He sure can’t hurt, as long as you don’t get your hopes up too high.”
“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “He can’t even seem to get waited on.”
Laurie went back to the table. As Dan had promised, Estrogen was indeed “way better now.” Without talking or looking at each other they segued crisply from one tight, disciplined song to the next.
After ten minutes Ardrey said, “I like these guys. They got a lot of heart.” It struck Laurie as an unusual thing for him to say. “You guys were better, but they’re good.”
“We’re not better,” Laurie said. “Not yet.”
“I actually don’t know a lot about this business,” Ardrey said. He’d moved closer to her to talk into her ear, almost shouting to make himself heard. “Which is okay, because nobody does, and the people who say they do are lying. But my point is this: there is only one universal currency in this business, and that is melody. It’s the great unsolved mystery. It doesn’t translate into any other art form. You can’t write about it, you can’t paint it, you can’t sculpt it. Nobody knows where it comes from, or why one pattern of notes will lock into your brain and another one just blows away. Whatever the hell it is, you’ve got it.”
