by JL Bryan
Chapter Four
The stage at The Monkey Paw didn’t have a curtain, just a door at the back, below the DJ booth. Jason stood just inside the door and watched Dred and Mitch set up the drum kit and keyboard arrangement. The lighting currently pointed out toward the dance floor while the DJ played a dance mix for the crowd of University of Wisconsin students.
The silver harp Jason stole from Faerie had become a silver keyboard with opal and onyx keys, and it had sprouted silver wires that took over Mitch’s other keyboards, plus the laptop he used along with them. Not only had they all turned silver, but they now ran on magic instead of electricity. This made their set-up and tear-down faster than most bands.
“How do I look?” Erin asked behind him. She’d put on her stage makeup, which was exaggerated and brightly colored, as if to complement the green and blue streaks dyed into her hair.
“Amazing,” he said.
“Ha, I doubt that. I just hope I don’t look like a freak.” She looked at spotlights swooping across the crowd.
“Not to me.”
“Sure.” Erin touched his arm. “So, I hope it didn’t weird you out when I kissed you the other night. Did it? I was just really...you know.”
“Impressed?” Jason suggested.
“I was going to say grateful. And pretty impressed, yeah. So, I don’t want to make a big deal out of that. Did it freak you out?”
“I don’t really remember. Try it again now and I’ll tell you.”
Erin laughed.
“I’m serious,” he said.
“Jason! You know I have a boyfriend. I’m not a cheater.” She frowned.
“It’s not cheating if you break up with him, though,” Jason said.
“He doesn’t deserve to get dumped. That would be mean.”
“I think he’ll survive.”
“Why are we even having this conversation right before a show?” Erin asked. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“So, we’re just going to be bandmates and nothing else?” Jason asked.
“We’re friends.”
“Friends don’t drive each other insane,” Jason said. He picked up his guitar and walked out onstage.
“Yes, they do!” Erin said.
Jason was feeling a weird mix of things—disappointed, angry, confused. It helped when they started warming up and he could focus on the glimmering strings of his guitar. The fairy magic in the music soothed him, made him forget his problems, made him forget everything but the rich supernatural tones humming in the air around him. He closed his eyes.
They played a simple set, mostly Erin’s songs, plus a cover of “Not Fade Away,” a song they’d all agreed was too mild to set off the destructive forces inside their instruments. Jason never felt the flood of charged energy that had gathered around them at the music festival, probably because tonight’s crowd was only four hundred instead of ten thousand. His guitar gave no warning signals of blistering heat.
The Assorted Zebras played with as little effort as they could manage, trying to keep their instruments’ powers reined in. Still, the crowd lapped it up, dancing up close in a dense mob against the stage, screaming and cheering and stomping between songs. Jason got a big boost from that, and for a while all four of them seemed in a good mood, casually making music and soaking in the applause.
The show had sold out fast, and apparently the mob of hundreds outside were just hoping for an extra ticket to become available. Jason had been amazed when the club manager told them that.
Their set went off without any trouble, and ended with a long ovation from the crowd.
The lights went down and the DJ took over again.
“Good stuff,” Mitch said. “If we can package and sell it just like that, no fireworks, no destruction, we’re golden.”
The club manager walked onto the stage. She didn’t look the way Jason might have pictured the manager of the most famous nightclub in Madison. She was in her fifties, with chunky earrings and thick, angular glasses. She looked like someone who would host folk-art festivals instead of rock, punk and hip-hop nights at The Monkey Paw.
“I have some exciting news,” she said. “My friend Zig Kaplan is here. He owns Squid Ink Records—you’ve heard of them, haven’t you?”
“Of course!” Erin said.
“He wants to speak with you backstage. You can leave your set-up here, if you like.”
“We’d better not,” Jason said, thinking of the fairies who were searching for them. “These instruments have a way of getting stolen.”
“We’ll break down fast,” Mitch said. “Tell him we’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Minutes,” Dred added, as the club manager smiled and walked away.
“She knows I meant minutes.”
“Yeah, but you’d sound less dorky if you just said ‘fifteen minutes,’” Dred told him. “‘We’ll be there in fifteen.’ You’re getting so pretentious.”
They broke down their instruments and carried them back with the help of Grizlemor, who once more appeared as a diminutive human roadie.
The green room behind the stage was furnished with a scattering of worn sofas and mismatched old chairs. Decades of graffiti stained the walls.
Three people sat on a torn leather couch behind a coffee table covered in burns and names and dates carved with knives over the years. Jason recognized the famous Madison rock producer Zig Kaplan right away, a man who looked like he was in his fifties, with gray streaks in his long black ponytail. His ears were stippled with the scars of old earrings, long since removed, and he wore a dark turtleneck shirt. Kaplan stood when the band entered.
The two people who’d been sitting on the couch with him did not rise. They were a grayhaired woman in a gypsy dress who looked like she might be asleep behind her dark sunglasses, and a bearded younger man who kept lighting matches and watching them burn down, ignoring everything else in the room.
“Amazing show,” Kaplan said, clapping his hands a couple of times and shaking his head. “You know, all kinds of people have been sending me links to your videos. I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear you kids were playing tonight. And I was just completely blown away by what I heard in there.”
“Thank you,” Erin said, and everyone else hurried to echo her.
“I don’t want to sound corny here, guys, but this music really sounds like it’s from out of this world. Like there are invisible chords we’ve never heard before. Like it’s coming from a whole other place. You know what I mean?” Kaplan asked.
Jason found himself nodding, thinking of the world of Faerie. He’d had dreams of that place almost every night. Though his short trip there had been a confusing and scary experience, part of him craved a return visit, just to see the intense, vibrant colors, and feel the magic crackling in the air.
“...don’t know what exactly you’re doing here, but I’d love to just take you guys into a studio for a day and see what might happen,” Kaplan was saying when Jason shook off his reverie and started paying attention again. “I mean, no pressure, you know? No contracts or anything formal, just seeing where the process takes us. Whatever’s happening here, I just want to help cultivate it into the best sound it can be. You’ve got something extraordinary inside you, and I can see it.” The record producer was looking at Erin as he said this, and Jason felt another little twinge of jealousy. He wished he could have said something like that to Erin.
“Well, we definitely appreciate the offer,” Dred said. “We’ll have to discuss—”
“Appreciate it?” Mitch interrupted. “We love it. We’re doing it. Right?”
“It sounds good to me,” Erin said. “Squid Ink puts out great stuff. Like Paperhat. Not like all that cheesy stuff on the radio.”
“Our stuff gets on the radio,” Kaplan said. “Sometimes it’s college radio, but some major markets, too. Like Chicago. And...Denver. And we could help you tour all over the Midwest, maybe the West Coast. W
e’ve had a couple of bands go national in our day. Anyone remember the Velvet Billys?”
“Oh, yeah, they had that one song everybody still covers,” Erin said.
“‘Don’t Go River Tonight’?” Kaplan said.
“Yeah! What does that song mean?” Erin asked. “Nobody ever knows.”
“That’s why everybody likes it,” Kaplan said. “It’s an exercise in verbal irrationality.”
“Like one of those ink-blot tests that test whether you’re crazy,” Mitch said.
“This guy knows what he’s talking about.” Kaplan clapped Mitch’s shoulder. “So what do you say, everyone? Call my office tomorrow, we’ll schedule a little low-key recording session, see what we come up with?”
Kaplan held out his business card, and Mitch took it.
“You bet,” Mitch said. “We’re so ready to do this.”
“Can I have a card, too, please?” Dred asked. “In case Mitchell here loses that one?”
“Mick.”
“Oh, you’re Mitchell?” Kaplan shook Mitch’s hand. “I forgot to get your names.”
“I’m Mick,” Mitch said.
Dred, Jason, and Erin introduced themselves.
“Yeah, weird moment, ending the conversation with the introductions,” Kaplan said. “But hey, that’s rock and roll, right? Get in touch.” Kaplan walked out of the room, and the two people on the couch slowly rose to follow him. The grayhaired lady wasn’t asleep behind those glasses, after all.
“This is the best day I’ve ever had,” Mitch said, after closing the door. “We’re going to be produced by a legend.”
“Yeah,” Dred said, “But he seems a little burned-out, don’t you think?”
“What?” Mitch replied. “Squid Ink Records is still putting out the best stuff.”
“He does seem like he cares about making good music,” Erin said. “I think we could trust him, you know?”
“But I think this fairy-music stuff could go big,” Dred said.
“I think the music itself will take care of that, once people hear it,” Jason said. “He could give it a big enough push to get things going.”
“Yeah, and he’s Zig Kaplan,” Mitch said. “I mean, come on!”
“We know who he is,” Dred said. “But he’s more of a regional guy these days.”
“But this could be his comeback project,” Jason said. “It could be good for him, too.”
“I think we should do it,” Erin said, and Jason nodded.
“So only Dred is against this idea?” Mitch asked.
“I don’t want to feel like I’m the one holding everybody back,” Dred said.
“Just think about it overnight,” Erin said. “See if you feel like making a record with Squid Ink tomorrow.”
Dred smiled. “Thanks.”
They began carrying their gear out to the van in the back alley. Jason packed his guitar inside, then noticed a patch of clover growing beside a drainpipe. He stood over it and stared for a few minutes, looking from one clover to the next, but they all seemed to have three leaves.
“What are you doing?” Erin walked up beside him.
“I’m trying to find a four-leaf clover.”
“Oh.” Erin looked up and down the alley, then she walked about fifteen feet away and plucked something out of a crack in the street. She returned with a big smile, then placed it in his hand. The elusive four-leaf clover.
“Holy cow!” Jason said. “How did you do that?”
Erin shrugged. “Easy. I can always find them, if there’s one around.”
“But that fast?”
“Right away,” Erin said. “You’re welcome. Let me know if you need another one.”
“Thanks.”
Erin smiled at him again before walking back into the club.
Jason walked over to the van, where Grizlemor sat on a stack of instrument cases, reading a newspaper printed in what looked like chicken-scratch marks. This was Gobleese, the native goblin language. Jason recognized it from Grizlemor's books.
“What are you reading?” Jason asked.
“The South Goblin Democrat-Gazette,” Grizlemor said. “It’s not really the same since it got bought up by that leprechaun conglomerate. But I’m glad they kept the Dave Barry column.”
“Any big news in the goblin world?”
“Not if we can avoid it. We goblins try to do as little as possible, and to take as much time as possible doing it. It’s a philosophical choice.”
“Look at this.” Jason held out the four-leaf clover. “Erin found it in like two seconds.”
“I did notice that particular event.” Grizlemor held the four-leaf clover up to the van’s interior light and squinted, inspecting it like a diamond. “Yes, a perfectly formed luck-clover. Now I can get around to making your healing potion sometime.”
“Soon would be nice,” Jason said.
“Yes, it would,” Grizlemor agreed. He craned his head to peer at the loading dock door. “There’s something special about that girl, isn’t there?”
“Yeah. There definitely is,” Jason said.