Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Volume One

by Cecilia Tan

  Daron’s Guitar Chronicles

  Volume 1

  A story of rock and roll, coming out, and coming of age in the 1980s

  by Cecilia Tan

  Daron’s Guitar Chronicles

  Copyright © 2010 by Cecilia Tan

  All Rights Reserved

  Contents of this ebook were serialized online at Daron’s Guitar Chronicles (http://daron.ceciliatan.com) between November 2009 and February 2010. There may be slight variations in the text from the serialized version and the ebook version.

  No reproduction without permission.

  Kindle Edition

  This electronic version was prepared by the author using NeoOffice and coding the HTML by hand before conversion to Kindle format using Amazon’s Digital Text Platform.

  License Notes

  Please do not support online piracy of copyrighted works. This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the purchaser only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people, even if you received it as part of a free ebook promotion. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with or direct that person to a legitimate download site. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the Kindle store or one the many other online retailers and purchase your own copy.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Info

  PART ONE: Summer 1986

  1. I Love Rock and Roll

  2. Invisible Touch

  3. Another Lost Classic

  4. Always Something There to Remind Me

  5. Promises, Promises

  6. Jet Airliner

  7. I Love L.A.

  8. Look at Little Sister

  9. More Than A Feeling

  10. I Ran

  11. I Fought the Law (And the Law Won)

  12. Message In A Bottle

  13. Old Man Down the Road

  14. Heart of Glass

  15. One Thing Leads to Another

  16. It’s Only a Northern Song

  17. Owner of a Lonely Heart

  18. Moody Blues

  19. The Logical Song

  20. You Gotta Look Sharp

  21. That’s What Friends Are For

  22. I Know What Boys Like

  23. The Cure

  24. All the Young Dudes

  25. No Time Left for You

  26. Suddenly, Last Summer

  PART TWO: December 1986

  27. Life In a Northern Town

  28. Don’t Do Me Like That

  29. Tell The Moon-Dog

  30. Tell the March Hare

  31. You Got Another Thing Coming

  32. Goody Two Shoes

  33. Welcome to the Machine

  34. Let’s Dance

  35. Electric Light Orchestra

  36. Everybody Wants to Rule the World

  37. Unguarded Minute

  38. Sweet Hitch-hiker

  39. You’re All I’ve Got Tonight

  40. Bring Me Some Water

  More Daron’s Guitar Chronicles

  About DGC

  About the Author

  Part One

  Summer 1986

  I Love Rock and Roll

  After soundcheck me and Tollman and Doug smoked a little weed in the back room. That is, they smoked and I faked it. Tollman handed me the joint, and I cupped it and did what I thought was a pretty convincing inhaling act. Tollman wasted his toke talking mile-a-minute like always, but that was Tollman for you.

  “... should be a hoppin’ crowd tonight, boy, you see all them hogs out there?” he said. His stringy blond bangs hung over his eyes and you could never tell where he was looking. Tollman was a head case. He grew up in Providence, went to the Quaker prep school over the hill, did maybe a couple of years of college. Now, Mr. Alexander Tollman did everything anti-preppie, like calling motorcycles “hogs” and singing in a metal band. “They all out there with them hogbitch girlfriends on the back,” he was saying. Jeez.

  Doug took a deep drag and nodded while he held his smoke. I pretended to.

  “You ready?” Tollman said, pointing at me with the joint before pinching it up to his lips.

  I nodded some more. As long as I kept thinking I was relaxed and that everything was going smoothly, then it probably was. Not like this was a difficult gig, two twelve song sets of cover songs and some originals that sounded just like them. One night only, cash under the table. I’d told them I’d do it this afternoon when Tollman had stopped by the Aquarium to pick up some demo tapes.

  That’s why I wasn’t toking with the guys. Weed sometimes flips me into this kind of paranoid nothing-is-right headspace. And that was something I didn’t want tonight, easy gig or no.

  I passed the roach to Doug, slid off the stack of beer cases I was sitting on, and my feet hit the ground kind of hard.

  “Hey, where you going?” Tollman.

  I made a tuning peg twist with my empty fingers.

  “We got to get you dressed, cowboy.” With his eyes curtained behind his hair, his smile was wicked.

  “Right now?”

  “Come on.” He looked me up and down. I was in my usual clothes—canvas hi-tops, blue jeans, plain black t-shirt. My denim jacket was tied by the arms around my waist.

  “What size feet ya got?”

  “Nine?” I hedged.

  “Doug, you a nine?”

  Doug, who was considerably taller and heftier than either Tollman or me, held up his hands and laughed. “Try eleven and a half.”

  “Shit. Here, try these on.” Tollman dug a pair of short, flat-heeled black boots out of his gym bag and held them out to me. I took them. Up close, Tollman had wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He acted twenty five, but I was pretty sure we were talking more like forty. Scary, to think that he was twice my age and still playing Van Halen and AC/DC covers in places like this. The other reason I thought him older was his wife picked him up at the Aquarium the other day in a stationwagon—two almost-teen type kids in the backseat. Okay, he could be like thirty two, if he’d spawned when he was like twenty. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know.

  I put the boots on. They fit, and didn’t even look that bad.

  “Dunno, Alex. Kinda new wave-y,” Doug said, his face tilted like he was trying to look at the boots without actually looking at them.

  “They’re better than what he had on,” Tollman put in. “And what’s new wave-y about them?”

  “Aren’t those the boots you used to wear in—”

  “What else do you think he needs?” Tollman tapped his own booted foot on the floor and talked extra loud in an obvious attempt to change the subject. He’d gotten dressed before sound check and was already in skin tight spandex with a leopard print vest. “The jeans and shirt are kinda dumpy.”

  “Jeans look okay tucked into the boots,” Doug said, “even if the boots are a little... Huey Lewis.”

  “Look,” Tollman said to me. “Just keep the boots. I never wear ’em anymore.” He had buckskin color suede ones on now, with a pointy toe and a bit of a heel that clicked when he walked. “Take off your shirt.” He rummaged in the bag and pulled out something that looked like a loose butterfly net.

  I hadn’t moved.

  “Go on, try it.”

  I pulled my shirt off and accepted the net. When I held it up I could make out arm holes. It was some kind of string vest and when it was drawn tight it made me look like I’d played cat’s cradle in a tornado.

  “Jeez, Tollman, he’s as skinny as you.”

  “Well, he’ll fit right in.”

  I hoped the dim b
ackroom bulb hid my blushing. There was, shall we say, something intensely uncomfortable about about standing there with them staring at me.

  “I still say the jeans are faggy,” Tollman said and I felt a lump in my throat. What was I going to say?

  Doug snorted. “You gonna lend him some spandex, too? Or maybe just a sock?”

  We all laughed at that—if it hadn’t been about me I might have even thought it was funny. Somewhere in my brain I was trying to come up a witty comeback but all I could really think was: jeezus but heavy metal guys have the weirdest sense of what’s "faggy" and what’s not.

  Tollman had his hand on his chin, like that helped him think. Then his hand migrated up his face and held his hair on the top of his head, which probably did help him see. “I don’t know.”

  Doug yawned. “Jeezus, Tollman, it’s just for one night. You won’t even see half of him behind the guitar.”

  “All right. Fine.” He rummaged in his bag again. “Now for makeup.” He held up a handful of round plastic tubes.

  Doug gave me a slap on the back with his meaty bass-player hand. I must have looked sort of ill because he said, “Don’t worry, it don’t hurt.”

  There was a mirror in the men’s room and they marched me to it like I was going to the gallows.

  Invisible Touch

  I always thought that eye makeup would be as garish and obvious to the wearer as it was to an onlooker—like horn-rimmed glasses or mirror shades or something. I was wrong; once the mascara and eyeliner and eyebrow pencil and whatever else were on, I forgot about them. Which meant that I got a mild shock every time I glimpsed my cats-cradled self in the men’s room mirror. My hair wasn’t long enough for head-banging and not the slightest bit wavy, so Tollman had slicked it back with some sort of goop. He’d tied a brightly colored scarf to each of my upper arms, too. I may be scrawny but if there’s one thing playing a lot of guitar gives you it’s biceps.

  I tried to be invisible as I searched along the back of the stage in the dim lights for a good place to tape a set list for myself. The crowd was out there, drinking, smoking, laughing, on the other side of a chain link fence that separated stage from dance floor. The club was called “The Cage” and I felt like a circus animal up there, dressed in orange and fluorescent pink, getting ready to play a gig with a band with the fucked-up-edly spelled name of Tygerz Claw. (I think the theory was that if it worked for Def Leppard, and Led Zeppelin before them, it could work for these guys, but I didn’t ask.) The Cage was a far cry from the home town bar where I’d played as a kid; in fact I’d call it downright scuzzy. They had Metal Night every Thursday, and Doors and Zep cover bands on weekends, and punk all-ages shows on Sunday afternoons, and for a town like Providence—which had a lot of local music and some legendary great clubs—the Cage was about as low as it got prestige-wise.

  All of which I was trying hard not to think about, and which I would forget as soon as we started to play. I taped down my set list and took a quick look at my guitar in the stand, a Korean-made Fender Strat that had been mine since Jersey. It was the kind of guitar a teenager could afford by working after school at a dinky suburban music store, trading work for equipment and lessons because there was no one else around to teach him and because he wanted to spend as little time at home as possible. I resisted the urge to pick the guitar up and play a little, just to make sure everything was working right. The clock on the wall, caged in its own round mesh like the clocks on school basketball courts, said it was 8:35.

  The set times were listed as 9pm and 11pm but of course the management wouldn’t let us on until ten, on the universal night-club theory that people would drink more while waiting around. I stood off to the side of the stage while fully-clothed bouncers and stage crew type guys, with heavy bundles of keys hung from their belts, went up there from time to time with self-important strides. I wished I was wearing a shirt and jeans. I wished I had something to do to kill the time. I didn’t want to approach the bar for a beer and risk getting asked for I.D. They didn’t know me in here and the bartenders didn’t know I was in the band. That left me with two options—stand out here in the jukebox noise shuffling my feet, or sit in the backroom with the guys more. I’d never learned to smoke (cigarettes, that is) and vaguely wished I’d brought my other guitar, my school guitar, an $800 Yamaha classical with rosewood fretboard and faux ivory pegs, to play. (I’d have to be crazy to bring it to a place like this, though.)

  I decided standing around brooding about what to do other than stand around was another easy way to get sucked into a downward spiral, so I went back to the guys. Dave, the guitar player who’d broken his hand and who I was replacing tonight, had arrived and was regaling the others with the story of a motorcycle accident. From what he was saying this wasn’t the accident that hurt his hand but was from a couple of years ago. He waved a Rolling Rock in the hand that had no cast. Dave wasn’t gigging tonight but he was dressed like he could have been, a scarf around his hair, artfully ripped jeans over colorful tights, a red tank top cut down the sides. Ron, the drummer, was tapping his sticks on his thighs like he was playing along to a Walkman, though he wasn’t wearing one. The song coming from the overtaxed PA system in the club was Quiet Riot “Cum On Feel the Noize” (fucked up spelling not being limited to band names) and I could see that wasn’t what Ron was playing. Dave and Doug got talking about some other people they knew, and Tollman wanted to know how Dave’s brother was doing in the machine shop where he worked, and so on and so forth. I was pretty used to sitting around with a bunch of people a lot older than me, listening to them talk, I guess. I sat there, occasionally laughing in the right places, while the other three shot the shit, Ron counted out time on his leg and we all waited for ten o’clock to roll around.

  Later, I would stand at the sink wondering what to do about the mess all the inevitable head thrashing and sweat had made of my hair. By halfway through the second song the arrangement of goop disintegrated, leaving my hair hanging in pointy, wet-looking strands all around my head that poked me once the stuff dried. I would stand there at the mirror and debate the merits of running my wet hands through it or just dunking my head into the sink. Add to this the fact that as we we’d come off stage I’d made a terrible mistake: rubbing the sweat out of my eye with the back of my hand and, not knowing better, giving myself a raccoon eye. This would all happen before midnight. The set itself was fine.

  Another Lost Classic

  I was just wadding up a piece of toilet paper and wiping it under my eye when the door to the men’s room opened, bringing a blast of club/bar noise with it: jukebox pumped through the PA, bottles clinking, people talking in that rowdy bar way. The wad of paper came away from my skin horrifyingly sooty-looking. Sigh. Despite having played a pretty fucking good set, actually, and having abstained from drugs, I was feeling pretty low at that moment, tired, unsure why I was there, exactly the mindset I’d been trying to avoid. Fuck that, I was telling myself. Don’t be so fucking serious all the time. It was a ripping fun stupid wild set, full of gut-punching guitar solos like nobody writes anymore, and bikers’ girfriends danced on the floor with plastic cups of beer in their hands while the bikers themselves nodded their heads with the riffs. It was the most fun I’d had in weeks. What’s wrong with that?

  That’s what I was thinking when I looked up and saw who had come into the restroom. Two guys, one was Dave, who had to put his beer down before he could start trying to unzip his fly with his one good hand. The other one was someone I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  He was staring at me in shock and my face probably went through the same contortions, from disbelief (holy shit) through a kind of happy (well, gosh...) to a kind of guarded look (long time no see, huh pal?).

  “Remo,” I said. He looked like he hadn’t changed, same buckskin-colored denim jacket and jeans, his hair and skin sandy to match the jacket, his eyes blue to match the pants. Remo was perpetually thirty nine.

  “Daron,” he replied. Then he took a step
closer and held out his hand and we shook, which felt stupidly formal. I mean, Remo wasn’t the huggy type anyway, and maybe he was afraid to get soot all over himself, but for someone who had once been like my uncle or my godfather or at least a friend, goddammit, the handshake was wrong. We were both smiling those fake smiles that just curl your lips and nothing else. It had been what, four years since we’d seen each other? But it felt like forty.

  I started it. “Jeez, Rem’, whatcha doing here?” Meaning, what are you doing in Providence and also, what are you doing in a dumpy beer bar like The Cage. I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping my voice neutral, but I found myself high strung with anger. We hadn’t parted on great terms and in four years I was pretty sure I had graduated from surly teen to genuine angry young man. "Didn’t think this’d be your kind of place."

  “I was going to say the same thing to you,” he said, his head a little sideways, giving me the same look Doug had given those fucking boots. Askance.

  Anger doesn’t lend itself to a witty rejoinder. I said something like “Fuck you,” and Doug’s head whipped toward us.

  “Whoa son, I know you’re still sore...”

  “Don’t call me son, and don’t be giving me that judgemental look, you...”

  “...at least give me a chance to say something before you tear me a new...”

  “...what do you have to say about it anyway? Or did you think I was going to play blues all my life after you took off?” Sore was a good word for how I felt, kind of rubbed raw and stiff.

  Doug stepped up behind me, though his big-brotherish stance was kind of ruined by his ineffectual attempts to zip himself back up. “You know this guy?”

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t sure how to describe who Remo was in relation to me. It was easy, though, to describe him in general terms. Public terms. “This is Remo Cutler, from Nomad.”

  Dave’s mouth opened and he went from tough guy to pussycat in an instant. “No shit, man, pleased to meet you! I listen to the Gary’s Garage album all the time. I’m Dave.” He held out the hand with the cast on it and then pulled it back and offered his left. Remo shook.