The first band began to play, an all woman four piece called Moby K. Dick. They were young enough to be my kids, which meant young enough they had never known any scene but this one. The bassist played from a sporty little wheelchair, her back to the audience, like she was having a one-on-one conversation with the drummer’s high hat. At first, I thought she was shy, but I gradually realized she was just really into the music. The drummer doubled as singer, hiding behind a curtain of dreadlocks that lifted and dropped back onto her face with every beat. They played something that sounded like sea chanties done double time and double volume, but the lyrics were all about whales and dolphins taking revenge on people. It was pretty fantastic.
I gave all the bands we played with a chance to win me over. They were the only live music we ever got to hear, being on the road full time. The few friends we still had doing the same circuit were playing the same nights as us in other towns, rotating through; the others were doing StageHolo and we didn’t talk much anymore. It used to be we’d sometimes even wind up in the same cities on the same night, so we’d miss each other and split the audience. That didn’t happen much anymore with so few places to play.
Moby K. Dick earned my full attention, but the second band lost me pretty quickly. They all played adapted console-game instruments except the drummer. No strings, all buttons, all programmed to trigger samples. I’d seen bands like that before that were decent; this one was not my thing.
The women from the first band were hanging out by the drink cooler, so I made my way back there. I thrust my hand into the ice and came out with a water bottle. Most venues like this one were alcohol-free and all ages. There was probably a secret beer cooler hidden somewhere, but I wasn’t in the mood to find it.
“I liked your stuff,” I said to the bassist. Up close, she looked slightly older than she had on stage. Mid-twenties, probably. “My name’s Luce.”
She grinned. “I know! I mean, I’m Truly. And yes, that’s really my name. Nice to meet you. And really? You liked it? That’s so cool! We begged to be on this bill with you. I’ve been listening to Cassis Fire my whole life. I’ve got ‘Manifest Independence’ written on my wall at home. It’s my mantra.”
I winced but held steady under the barrage and the age implication. She continued. “My parents have all your music. They like the stuff with Marcia Januarie on drums best, when you had the second guitarist, but I think your current lineup is more streamlined.”
“Thanks.” I waited for her to point her parents out in the room, and for them to be younger than me. When she thankfully didn’t volunteer that information, I asked, “Do you guys have anything recorded?”
“We’ve been recording our shows, but mostly we just want to play. You could take us on the road with you, if you wanted. Opening act.”
She said the last bit jokingly, but I was pretty sure the request was real, so I treated it that way. “We used to be able to, but not these days. It’s hard enough to keep ourselves fed and moving to the next gig. I’m happy to give you advice, though. Have you seen our van?”
Her eyes widened. She was kind of adorable in her enthusiasm. Part of me considered making a pass at her, but we only had a few minutes before I had to be onstage, and I didn’t want to confuse things. Sometimes I hated being the responsible one.
“It’s right outside. They’ll find me when it’s our turn to play. Come on.”
The crowd parted for her wheelchair as we made our way through. I held the door for her and she navigated the tiny rise in the doorframe with practiced ease.
“We call her Daisy,” I said, introducing Truly to the van. I searched my pockets for the keys and realized Silva had them. So much for that idea. “She’s a fifteen seater, but we took out the middle seats for a bed and the back to make a cage for the drums and stuff so they don’t kill us if we stop short.”
“What’s the mpg?” she asked. I saw her gears spinning as she tried to figure out logistics. I liked her focus. She was starting to remind me of me, though, which was the turnoff I needed.
I beckoned her to the hood, which popped by latch, no keys necessary. “That’s the best part of all.”
She locked her chair and pushed herself up to lean against Daisy’s frame. At my look, she explained, “I don’t need it all the time, but playing usually makes me pretty tired. And I don’t like getting pushed around in crowds.”
“Oh, that’s cool,” I said. “And if you buy a van of your own, that’s one less conversion you’ll have to make, if you can climb in without a lift. I had been trying to figure out if you’d have room for four people and gear and a chair lift.”
“Nah, you can go back to the part where we wonder how I’m going to afford a van, straight up. Right now we just borrow my sister’s family Chauffeur. It’s just barely big enough for all our gear, but the mileage is crap and there’s no room for clothes or swag or anything.”
“Well, if you can find a way to pay for an old van like Daisy, the beauty of running on fry oil is the money you’ll save on fuel. As long as you like takeout food, you get used to the smell . . .”
Silva stuck his head out the door, then came over to us. I made introductions. He unlocked the van; I saw Truly wince when the smell hit her. He reached under the bed, back toward the wheel well, and emerged with a bottle of whiskey in hand. Took a long swig, and passed it to me. I had a smaller sip, just enough to feel the burn in my throat, the lazy singer’s warm-up.
Truly followed my lead. “Promise you’ll give me pointers if I manage to get a van?”
I promised. The kid wasn’t just like me; she practically was me, with the misfortune to have been born twenty years too late to possibly make it work.
I made Silva tap phones with her. “I would do it myself, but . . .”
“I know,” she said. “I’d be Non-comm if I could, but my parents won’t let me. Emergencies and all that.”
Did we play extra well, or did it just feel like it? Moby K. Dick had helped; it was always nice to be reminded that what you did mattered. I had a mental buzz even with only a sip of whiskey, the combination of music and possibilities and an enthusiastic crowd eager to take whatever we gave them.
On a good night like this, when we locked in with each other, it was like I was a time traveler for an hour. Every night we’d ever played a song overlapped with every night we’d ever play it again, even though I was fully in the moment. My fingers made shapes, ran steel strings over magnets, ran signals through wires to the amplifier behind me, which blasted those shapes back over me in waves. Glorious, cathartic, bone-deep noise.
On stage, I forgot how long I’d been doing this. I could still be the kid playing in her parents’ basement, or the young woman with the hit single and the major label, the one called the next Joan Jett, the second coming of riot grrl, not that I wanted to be the young version of me anymore. I had to work to remember that if I slid on my knees I might not get up again. I was a better guitar player now, a better singer, a better songwriter. I had years of righteous rage to channel. When I talked, I sometimes felt like a pissed off grump, stuck in the past. Given time to express it all in music, I came across better.
Moby K. Dick pushed through to the front when we played “Manifest Independence,” singing along at the top of their lungs. They must have been babies when I released that song, but it might as well have been written for them. It was as true for them as it had been for me.
That was what the young punks and the old punks all responded to; they knew I believed what I was singing. We all shared the same indignation that we were losing everything that made us distinct, that nothing special happened anymore, that the new world replacing the old one wasn’t nearly as good, that everyone was hungry and everything was broken and that we’d fix it if we could find the right tools. My job was to give it all a voice. Add to that the sweet old-school crunch of my Les Paul played through Marshall tubes, Silva’s sinuous bass lines, Jacky’s tricky beats, and we could be the best live band you ever hear
d. Made sweeter by the fact that you had to be there to get the full effect.
We didn’t have rehearsed moves or light shows or spotlights to hit like the StageHolos, but we knew how to play it up for the crowd. To make it seem like we were playing for one person, and playing for all of them, and playing just for them, because this night was different and would only ever happen once. People danced and pogoed and leaned into the music. A few of the dancers had ultraviolet tattoos, which always looked pretty awesome from my vantage point, a secret performance for the performers. I nudged Silva to look at one of them, a glowing phoenix spread wingtip to wingtip across a dancer’s bare shoulders and arms.
A couple of tiny screens also lit the audience: people recording us with Bracertabs, arms held aloft. I was fine with that. Everyone at the show knew how it felt to be there; they’d come back, as long as there were places for us to play. The only market for a non-Holo recording was other people like this audience, and it would only inspire them to come out again the next time.
Toward the end of the set, I dedicated “Our Lady of the Open Road” to Daisy. At the tail of the last chorus, Jacky rolled through his toms in a way he never had before, cracking the song open wide, making it clear he wasn’t coming in for a landing where he was supposed to. Silva and I exchanged glances, a wordless “this is going to be interesting,” then followed Jacky’s lead. The only way to do that was to make it bigger than usual, keep it going, make it a monster. I punched my gain pedal and turned to my amp to ride the feedback. Our lady of the open road, get me through another night.
Through some miracle of communication we managed to end the song together, clean enough that it sounded planned. I’d kill Jacky later, but at that moment I loved him. The crowd screamed.
I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my shoulder. “We’ve got one more for you. Thanks so much for being here tonight.” I hoped “Better to Laugh” wouldn’t sound like an afterthought.
That was when the power went out.
“Police!” somebody shouted. The crowd began to push toward the door.
“Not the police!” someone else yelled. “Just a blackout.”
“Just a blackout!” I repeated into the mic as if it were still on, then louder into the front row, hoping they were still listening to me. “Pass it on.”
The message rippled through the audience. A tense moment passed with everyone listening for sirens, ready to scatter. Then they began to debate whether the blackout was the city or the building, whether the power bill had been paid, whether it was a plot to shut the place down.
Emma pushed her way through the crowd to talk to us. “They shut this neighborhood’s power down whenever the circuits overload uptown. We’re trying to get somebody to bring it up in city council. I’m so sorry.”
I leaned in to give her a sweaty hug. “Don’t worry about it. It happens.”
We waited, hoping for the rock gods to smile upon us. The room started to heat up, and somebody propped the outside doors, which cooled things down slightly. After twenty minutes, we put our instruments down. At least we had made it through most of our set. I had no doubt the collective would pay us, and no concern people would say they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth. I dug the hotel towel out of my backpack to wipe my dripping face.
A few people made their way over to talk to us and buy t-shirts and patches and even LPs and download codes, even though you could find most of our songs free online. That was part of the beauty of these kids. They were all broke as hell, but they still wanted to support us, even if it was just a patch or a pin or a password most of them were capable of hacking in two seconds flat. And they all believed in cash, bless them. We used the light of their phone screens to make change.
The girls from Moby K. Dick all bought t-shirts. Truly bought an LP as well—it figured she was into vinyl—and I signed it “To my favorite new band, good luck.” She wheeled out with her band, no parents in sight. I wondered if they’d decided they were too old for live music, then chided myself. I couldn’t have it both ways, mad that they were probably my age and mad that they weren’t there. Besides, they might have just left separately from their kid. I knew I must be tired if I was getting hung up on something like that.
“You look like you need some water,” somebody said to me in the darkness. A bottle pressed into my hand, damp with condensation.
“Thanks,” I said. “Though I don’t know how you can say I look like anything with the lights out.”
At that moment, the overheads hummed on again. I had left my guitar leaning face down on my amp, and it started to build up a squeal of feedback. I tossed the water back, wiped my hands on my pants, and slammed the standby switch. The squeal trailed away.
“Sorry, you were saying?” I asked, returning to the stranger, who still stood with bottle in hand. I took it from her again. I thought maybe I’d know her in the light, but she didn’t look familiar. Mid-thirties, maybe, tall and tan, with a blandly friendly face, toned arms, Bracertab strapped to one forearm. She wore a Magnificent Beefeaters T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. We used to play shows with them, before they got big.
“I was saying you looked like you were thirsty, by which I mean you looked like that before the lights went out, so I guessed you probably still looked like that after.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, I wanted to say good show. One of your best I’ve seen.”
“Have you seen a lot?” It was a bit of a rude question, with an implication I didn’t recognize her. Bad for business. Everybody should believe they were an integral part of the experience. But really, I didn’t think I’d seen her before, and it wasn’t the worst question, unless the answer was she’d been following us for the last six months.
“I’ve been following you for the last six months,” she said. “But mostly live audience uploads. I was at your last Columbus show, though, and up in Rochester.”
Rochester had been a huge warehouse. I didn’t feel as bad.
“Thanks for coming. And, uh, for the water.” I tried to redeem myself.
“My pleasure,” she said. “I really like your sound. Nikki Kellerman.”
She held her arm out in the universal ‘tap to exchange virtual business cards’ gesture.
“Sorry, I’m Non-comm,” I said.
She looked surprised, but I couldn’t tell if it was surprise that I was Non-comm, or that she didn’t know the term. The latter didn’t seem likely. I’d have said a third of the audience at our shows these days were people who had given up their devices and all the corporate tracking that went along with them.
She unstrapped the tablet, peeled a thin wallet off her damp arm, and drew a paper business card from inside it.
I read it out loud. “Nikki Kellerman, A & R, StageHolo Productions.” I handed it back to her.
“Hear me out,” she said.
“Okay, Artists & Repertoire. You can talk at me while I pack up.”
I opened the swag tub and started piling the t-shirts back into it. Usually we took the time to separate them by size so they’d be right the next time, but now I tossed them in, hoping to get away as soon as possible.
“As you probably know, we’ve been doing very well with getting StageHolo into venues across the country. Bringing live music into places that previously didn’t have it.”
“There are about seven things wrong with that statement,” I said without looking up.
She continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Our biggest selling acts are arena rock, pop, rap, and Spanish pop. We now reach nine in ten bars and clubs. One in four with StageHolo AtHome.”
“You can stop the presentation there. Don’t you dare talk to me about StageHolo AtHome.” My voice rose. Silva stood in the corner chatting with some bike kids, but I saw him throw a worried look my way. “‘All the excitement of live entertainment without leaving your living room.’ ‘Stay AtHome with John Legend tonight.’”
I clapped the lid onto the swag box and carried it to the door. Wh
en I went to pack up my stage gear, she followed.
“I think you’re not understanding the potential, Luce. We’re looking to diversify, to reach new audiences: punk, folk, metal, musical theater.” She listed a few more genres they hadn’t completely destroyed yet.
I would punch her soon. I was not a violent person, but I knew for a fact I would punch her soon. “You’re standing in front of me, asking me to help ruin my livelihood.”
“No! Not ruin it. I’m inviting you to a better life. You’d still play shows. You’d still have audiences.”
“Audiences of extras paid to be there? Audiences in your studios?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“Yes and no. We can set up at your shows, but that’s harder. Not a problem in an arena setting, but I think you’d find the 3D array distracting in a place like this. We’d book you some theaters, arenas. Fill in the crowds if we needed to. You could still do this in between if you wanted, but . . .” she shrugged to indicate she couldn’t see why I would want.
“Hey, Luce. A little help over here?” I looked down to see my hands throttling my mic instead of putting it back in its box. Looked up at Silva struggling to get his bass amp on the dolly, like he didn’t do it on his own every night of the week. Clearly an offer of rescue.
“Gotta go,” I said to the devil’s A & R person. “Have your people call my people.”
Turning the bass rig into a two-person job took all of our acting skills. We walked to the door in exaggerated slow motion. Lifting it into the van genuinely did take two, but usually my back and knee ruled me out. I gritted my teeth and hoisted.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 Page 15