by Lewis Shiner
Green, rocky road
They got to Baltimore at one in the afternoon of that same Monday, October 9. Laurie called Melinda to tell her Jim had left and Skip was fading. “Can you get us in the club early so we can rehearse?”
“Your pal Sid the Shark got you that gig. Shouldn’t you be talking to him?”
“He’s not my pal and I need one right now, okay?”
Melinda sighed. “Okay. Call me back in thirty minutes and I’ll let you know. Sorry about Jim, but I do have some good news. I kept riding Ardrey and he’s got us a release date. We’ve got the last Tuesday in October, the 31st. It’s quicker than I thought they’d do it, and now we won’t get lost in the Christmas flood or the barrens of January.”
“Halloween,” Laurie said. “We may be a ghost band by then.”
“Cheer up. And call me in half an hour.”
Melinda set things up with the club, and the band spent three hours reworking their arrangements around the looming, Jim-shaped silence. Laurie elected to play keyboards on four of the songs; the rest worked adequately with two guitars. Skip dragged his feet every step of the way, making all of them regret the few times he condescended to actually speak. When it was over, perhaps a little before it should have been—at the moment that Skip abruptly shut off his amp and walked out—Laurie paused to search her heart for any remaining trace of tenderness toward him and came up empty.
The rest of them piled into the van and drove to One Market Place, a mall on Chesapeake Bay near the aquarium and the convention center. Between the early morning, the drive, the rehearsal, and their own individual regrets, they were all stumbling with fatigue. The mall seemed to them like a stranded alien space station made of glass and primary-colored steel, and Laurie found herself puzzled more than offended by the expensive toys in the shop windows.
They didn’t talk much over their various ethnic food court meals. One of them might try an experimental line like, “It didn’t sound so bad with just two guitars,” and then the silence would rise again like a tidal wave and smother all replies. From where they sat, Laurie could see the perfect blue of the ocean and clouds of seagulls that would suddenly break apart into individual birds that soared high out over the water and were gone.
They had a new energy that night, not necessarily better, but different. Laurie concentrated on ignoring Skip and keeping her parts simple on the songs where she played keyboards. The crowd helped. Once again Laurie was struck by how disconnected she was. One town was like another to her because it had a Motel 6 and a Wendy’s and a Texaco, and the radio played Aerosmith or Mariah Carey. Yet each crowd brought its own unpredictable context, whether it was too many days of rain or somebody dead in the local scene keeping the room sparse and quiet, or else it was the local sports franchise in the playoffs or a sprawling birthday party that had everyone galvanized before she took the stage. In Baltimore they applauded wildly at the first mention of Laurie’s name, stayed on their feet for the entire set, and cheered every song. It was the kind of night that she couldn’t help feeling was the start of something, though she knew she was usually wrong.
For his part, Skip utterly failed to pick up on the prevailing mood. His few moments of actually giving a damn coincided with Laurie’s mistakes on keyboards, which nobody in the audience seemed to mind. They played two encores, and as they left a kid jumped up on stage and gave Laurie a hug before diving back into the crowd.
In the dressing room, Skip put his guitar in its case and wiped the strings down, moving as stiffly as a dog that was about to bite. “What utter shit,” he said.
“Got a problem, Skip?” Laurie asked.
“Me?” He slammed the guitar case. “I don’t have a problem. This band has a problem, but I don’t. This band sucks without Jim in it, is the problem, and I can’t play guitar and keyboards both.”
Laurie looked at Gabe. She felt cold and lucid and unhurried, though she seemed to have misplaced her self-control. “Am I just crazy, then?” she said. “Because I thought we were pretty good tonight. All things considered. And I thought we really went over.”
Gabe looked at Skip, then back at Laurie. There was a fine sheen of sweat on the cocoa skin of his forehead that Laurie couldn’t remember seeing before. “No,” he told her. “You’re not crazy.”
“So it’s me that’s crazy, then, right?” Skip said, at just less than shouting volume. “As fucking usual. I mean, what the fuck do I know?”
“Well,” Laurie said, counting on her fingers, “you know how to feel sorry for yourself. You know how to get drunk. You know how to shoot smack. You know how to let people down.”
He took a step toward her like he might actually hit her. Laurie found herself leaning forward, into the potential blow. “What?” she said. “What?”
Skip froze. Though nothing moved in his face, she could see his eyes slowly disconnect. She was left looking at a mask.
He turned back to his guitar case and closed all the latches. “I’m too old for this shit,” he said. “Way, way too old.”
Laurie watched from the wings while he packed up his amp and pedals. She’d had a boyfriend once who got up in the middle of a fight and gathered up everything he’d left in her apartment over the last month and a half—a toothbrush, a couple of books, some T-shirts, a pair of swimming trunks—and packed it neatly into a plastic H.E.B. grocery bag and then walked out without saying goodbye. Skip had the same set to his shoulders. He rolled his amp through the crowd and out the door into the night.
Laurie turned to find Chuck Ford smiling at her. “We sold six CDs and four tapes,” he said. “You guys were great.”
She nodded and went back to the dressing room.
“Did he take his amp?” Gabe said.
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on?” Chuck asked.
“I think Skip quit,” she said.
“He’s just strung out,” Gabe said. “He’ll be back.”
“Not this time,” Laurie said. “If he came back I’d fire him, and he knows it. He’s gone.”
“Hey,” Gabe said. “You guys’ll work it out. It’ll be okay.”
Suddenly she was angrier at Gabe than she’d ever been at Skip. “Will you stop? Sometimes things don’t work out, okay? You don’t have to keep crawling back and kissing up to some asshole to make them work out. You just…let…go.”
She went outside and got in the van and slammed the door. With her back against the side of the van and her legs stretched out across the farthest rear seat, she folded her arms and thought black thoughts. She didn’t offer to help load out the equipment and during the infinitely long drive to the motel no one attempted to break her adamantine silence.
Triage
She had a room to herself that night, and the worst of it was visualizing the others all together, lying in the darkness, talking about her.
She barely slept. She contemplated returning to her computer job in LA, singing with Summer at the Duck again, starting all over again from scratch. That managed to bring a few hot, thick tears out onto her pillow.
Then she pictured herself getting off a plane in San Antonio, with Grandpa Bill half-walking, half-running to meet her and throwing his arms around her. She could smell the starch that Slater-White Cleaners put in his shirt and feel the stubble on his chin. She’d talked to him on Sunday before the gig in Wilmington, before Jim quit, before Skip walked out, all of what, thirty hours ago? How unimaginably wonderful to be in San Antonio, to stay in her old room and get up only to eat real food and shower and wash her hair and then crawl back into bed again.
Instead she got up in the morning to open the door to her room and lie in a patch of sunlight on the bed while she wrote a new set list, scrapping “Don’t Make Promises” and restoring “Tried and True,” dropping everything that depended on guitar flash and going back to two-part harmonies and verses, choruses, and bridges.
Then, in the early afternoon, she drove the van to the Northwest quadrant of Washington, DC, whi
le Gabe and Dennis read over the set list.
“We could do ‘Walk Don’t Run,’ ” Dennis said.
“I redid the set list because our guitar player quit,” Laurie explained, again.
“Okay,” Dennis said. “I can take a hint.”
“He maybe quit,” Gabe said.
When Laurie stepped out to the front of the stage at the Black Cat to start the show and Skip had not, in fact, shown up, she was more relieved than anything else. An hour after that, when they had somehow made it through the night and Skip had not even turned up to gloat, she felt a brief pang of loss, more for the idea of Skip than the reality. They cleared their equipment off the stage and loaded the van and went to the dressing room to get something to drink. There Laurie’s knees buckled with exhaustion and she sank to the stained brown carpet of the dressing room floor.
“It was different,” Chuck said. “Not horrible, we even sold a couple of CDs.”
“What about tomorrow?” Dennis said. He sounded like he was afraid to hear the answer.
“Tomorrow we’ve got the day off to drive to Columbus,” Laurie said. “But I take your point.”
“Skip’s not coming back, is he?” Dennis said.
“No,” Laurie told him. “Skip’s not coming back.”
They sat in silence while on the other side of the door the club’s PA played “God Save the Queen” and Johnny Rotten sang “no future” over and over.
“We have to call Mitch,” Gabe said. “Crunch, if you say anything about his hair I swear to God I’ll kill you, here and now.”
“I didn’t say anything about his hair.”
“It doesn’t have to be forever. Just to get us through until we can find somebody else. He already knows the songs, he could start Thursday night if we got him out here.”
“All right.”
“I mean, you have to think about the rest of us, too. If we’re a band and not just—what did you say?”
“I said, ‘All right.’ ”
“I’ve got at least another half hour’s worth of arguments. Are you sure you don’t want to hear them?”
“Maybe you could write them all down and I could go over them later. Do you have his number on you?”
He shook his head. “I’m sure Melinda’s got it. I didn’t think I was going to talk you into it.”
“And if you hadn’t?”
“Are you asking me if I was going to quit?”
“Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that.”
“Well, the answer is no. I wasn’t going to quit. But then again I probably wouldn’t have had to.”
Epiphany
Thursday morning in Columbus. The town didn’t seem to exist beyond High Street and the Ohio State campus. Everything was red and white and covered with exhortations to the Buckeyes. Alumni were already streaming into town for Saturday’s football game.
Laurie woke to a phone call from the front desk telling her a FedEx had arrived for the band. She opened it in the lobby to find proofs of the General Records version of the inserts for the CD and cassette. It was Dennis’s art with better reproduction, on heavier, coated stock. In her room, after the others had gone out, Laurie put the new pieces into one of their garage version jewel boxes and fell asleep holding it.
At three that afternoon she woke to a furious knocking with no idea of where she was and the guilty conviction that she’d missed a history final or a job interview. She staggered out of bed and opened her door to see Gabe and Chuck standing on either side of a person she didn’t recognize. This person had blond hair pulled into a pony tail, battered jeans, Chuck Taylors, and a Sonic Youth T-shirt with Japanese lettering.
“Hey,” the stranger said. “You want alternative? I can do alternative. No sweat.”
“Mitch?” she asked foggily. He grinned and held out his hand and she shook it. “Thanks for coming out,” she said.
“I’ve been listening to that tape Skip gave me all the way out here on the plane. It may take me a couple of nights to get the fine points, but I’m ready to play.”
He seemed devoid of guile or cynicism. “We’re not a cover band,” Laurie said, “and you don’t have to play what Skip played. Just play what you feel.”
“No sweat,” Mitch said. “I can do that.”
And so it was that Mitch Gaines became the lead guitar player for Laurie Moss and the Ticks. Laurie spent the first week gently discouraging some of his least appropriate habits: bump-and-grind theatrics, high-speed scales, shimmering chorus effects. “Sure,” he’d say to whatever she suggested. “I can go with that.” A limitless supply of Diet Coke seemed his only requirement.
It finally came together in a place called Club Toast in Burlington, Vermont. He’d bought a cheap Boss distortion box at Advance Music, a hangout he remembered from some previous tour, and he punched it in for the solo on “Carry On.” As he got toward the end he squeezed a huge, fat, blistering note out of his B string and stood there and watched it hang in the air, and instead of chasing it with a flurry of 32nd notes, he let it decay into a whoop of feedback and then he slowly took it home, making every stroke of the pick count. The crowd liked it better than anything else he’d done all night, and their applause lit him up like a pinball machine.
“Mitch Gaines, everybody,” Laurie said. “He gave up a lucrative career in junk bonds to be in my band. Let him know he did the right thing.”
After the show, Mitch introduced them to the Waffle House tradition. There was not, in fact, a Waffle House in Burlington, but Mitch explained that even a Denny’s would do in a pinch, and they found one in South Burlington. Laurie, who had never cared for breakfast, discovered that she’d simply been eating it at the wrong time of day. Dennis got a trencherman’s platter with ham and eggs and toast, Gabe got an English muffin, and everyone else, including the two Trinity College girls who’d appeared in the van, got waffles.
“That was weird, tonight,” Mitch said with his mouth full, holding up his Diet Coke glass for another refill.
“ ‘Carry On?’ ” Laurie asked.
“Yeah. It was like I was trying to paint a portrait with a four-inch brush. My guitar teacher would have hated it.”
“I don’t think you need a guitar teacher,” one of the girls said. She’d left the club with Dennis, then somehow ended up sitting next to Mitch. Dennis kept staring at Laurie like it was her fault.
“Yeah,” Mitch said, “but the thing is, it was fun. I can’t remember the last time it was that much fun.”
Now that he mentioned it, Laurie thought, it hadn’t been much fun for any of them for a while. Waiting every night to see what kind of mood—artificial or otherwise—Skip was going to be in, watching Jim slowly sink in despair, worried more about hassling with the managers than how the band sounded, waiting for the inevitable end.
And now the unimaginable had happened and it turned out not to be the end after all.
Laurie wound up with Dennis and Gabe in her motel room that night. As with the other infrequent nights when sex became an issue, the band seemed to mysteriously work out the details so that Laurie was in the other room when it happened. But it was happening more often as the band generated word of mouth, and soon, she thought, things might become interesting.
By 11:00 the next morning the girls were gone and the van and the trailer were packed. They pulled out of the parking lot and Mitch said, “So, like, where to now?”
In a week it had become Mitch’s daily ritual, at first annoying and already indispensable, his refusal to look at an itinerary no more than a symptom of his ability to live completely in the moment. “Red Bank, New Jersey,” Chuck said.
“Cool. Let’s do it.”
In another week the band had gelled around Mitch in a way that had not been possible with Skip, the Living Legend, who drove his own car and did no dog and pony shows. “No sweat” had become the band’s mantra, Diet Coke au van its official drink, and Laurie found herself fantasizing about waffles and syrup as soon as she stepped
off the stage every night. Mitch’s interests were diverse and inexplicable, and the band found themselves on outings—to the Harley Davidson plant and museum outside York, PA, where Laurie thought of Blue; to Freebody Park in Newport, Rhode Island, where Dylan had turned the Folk Festival on its ear; to every aquarium within an hour’s drive of their itinerary.
But the real difference was on stage, where the songs got tighter as the band loosened up, talking to each other and to the audience, finding the rhythm of their new composite personality. They added a couple of 80s teen anthems that Skip had always refused to consider: Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” on odd-numbered nights, Pat Benatar’s “Love Is A Battlefield” on evens. They dropped “Tried and True” and “Fool’s Cap” and “September 19th” and Laurie wrote new, faster songs to replace them.
Suddenly the crowds were bigger and women were following them to the local Waffle House equivalent almost every night. If Laurie had permitted them the slightest opening, there would have been boys following her there as well. Skip had left a bad taste in her mouth, however, that she preferred to nurse with waffles rather than something from the dessert cart. Meanwhile, in the motel room afterward, that which had once promised to be interesting went all the way to disruptive, and she eventually learned to sleep with a pillow over her head.
Notices
In York on Monday, October 23, Melinda faxed their first batch of reviews to a Kinko’s where Laurie read them in amazement. Out of the six, four were very good, one was mixed, and the LA Reader was a full-on rave:
“Of The Same Name doesn’t defy trends, it refutes them. It’s as timeless as the Band’s second album or Crowded House’s first, a seamless, heartfelt pop record that deserves to be popular, gigantically so.”
Rolling Stone gave it three and a half stars and called it “a promising debut marred only by a certain narrative distance and a lack of cohesion among the songs.” They noted that “songwriting legend Skip Shaw makes an unexpected appearance, co-writing three tracks and contributing tasteful, stinging guitar.” Laurie’s voice, “at its best, as on ‘Carry On,’ ‘Neither Are We,’ and ‘Angel Dust,’ conveys late-night weariness, wisdom, and a wealth of compassion.”