by Stephen King
I took the guitar and sat down on Con’s bed. I didn’t touch the strings at first, just thought about that song some more. I knew it would sound good on Connie’s acoustic because “Cherry, Cherry” is built around an acoustic riff (not that I knew the word then). I listened to it in my head and was astounded to realize I could see the chord changes as well as hear them. I knew everything about them except where they were hiding on the fretboard.
I grabbed an issue of Sing Out! at random and looked for a blues, any blues. I found one called “Turn Your Money Green,” saw how to make an E (All this shit starts with E, Hector the Barber had told Con and Ronnie), and played it on the guitar. The sound was muffled but true. The Gibson was a fine instrument that had stayed in tune even though it had been neglected. I pushed down harder with the first three fingers of my left hand. It hurt, but I didn’t care. Because E was right. E was divine. It matched the sound in my head perfectly.
It took Con six months to learn “The House of the Rising Sun,” and he was never able to go from the D to the F without a hesitation as he arranged his fingers. I learned the three-chord “Cherry, Cherry” riff—E to A to D and back to A—in ten minutes, then realized I could use the same three chords to play “Gloria,” by Shadows of Knight, and “Louie, Louie,” by the Kingsmen. I played until my fingertips were howling with pain and I could hardly unbend my left hand. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because I wanted to but because I had to. And I couldn’t wait to start again. I didn’t care about the New Christy Minstrels, or Ian and Sylvia, or any of those folk-singing assholes, but I could have played “Cherry, Cherry” all day: it had the way to move me.
If I could learn to play well enough, I thought, Astrid Soderberg might look at me as something other than just a homework source. Yet even that was a secondary consideration, because playing filled that hole in me. It was its own thing, an emotional truth. Playing made me feel like a real person again.
• • •
Three weeks later, on another Saturday afternoon, Con came home early after the football game instead of staying for the traditional post-game cookout put on by the boosters. I was sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs, scratching out “Wild Thing.” I thought he’d go nuts and grab his guitar away from me, maybe accuse me of sacrilege for playing three-chord idiocy by the Troggs on an instrument meant for such sensitive songs of protest as “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
But Con had scored three TDs that day, he’d set a school record for yards gained rushing, and the Gators were headed for the Class C playoffs. All he said was, “That’s just about the stupidest song to ever get on the radio.”
“No,” I said. “I think the prize goes to ‘Surfin’ Bird.’ I can play that one, too, if you want to hear it.”
“Jesus, no.” He could curse because Mom was out in the garden, Dad and Terry were in the garage, working on Road Rocket III, and our religion-minded older brother no longer lived at home. Like Claire, Andy was now attending the University of Maine (which, he claimed, was full of “useless hippies”).
“But you don’t mind if I play it, Con?”
“Knock yourself out,” he said, passing me on the stairs. There was a gaudy bruise on one cheek and he smelled of football sweat. “But if you break it, you’re paying for it.”
“I won’t break it.”
I didn’t, either, but I busted a lot of strings. Rock and roll is tougher on strings than folk music.
• • •
In 1970, I started high school across the Androscoggin River in Gates Falls. Con, now a senior and a genuine Big Deal thanks to his athletic prowess and Honor Roll grades, took no notice of me. That was okay; that was fine. Unfortunately, neither did Astrid Soderberg, although she sat one row behind me in homeroom and right next to me in Freshman English. She wore her hair in a ponytail and her skirts at least two inches above the knee. Every time she crossed her legs I died. My crush was bigger than ever, but I had eavesdropped on her and her girlfriends as they sat together on the gym bleachers during lunch, and I knew the only boys they had eyes for were upperclassmen. I was just another extra in the grand epic of their newly minted high school lives.
Someone took notice of me, though—a lanky, long-haired senior who looked like one of Andy’s useless hippies. He sought me out one day when I was eating my own lunch in the gym, two bleachers up from Astrid and her posse of gigglers.
“You Jamie Morton?” he asked.
I owned up to it cautiously. He was wearing baggy jeans with patches on the knees, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as if he was getting by on two or three hours’ sleep a night. Or whacking off a lot.
“Come down to the Band Room,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I said so, freshie.”
I followed him, weaving my way through the thronging students who were laughing, yelling, pushing, and banging their lockers. I hoped I wasn’t going to get beaten up. I could imagine getting beaten up by a sophomore for some trifling reason—freshman hazing by sophomores was forbidden in principle but lavishly practiced in fact—but not by a senior. Seniors rarely noticed freshies were alive, my brother being a case in point.
The Band Room was empty. That was a relief. If this guy intended to tune up on me, at least he didn’t have a bunch of friends to help him do it. Instead of beating me up, he held out his hand. I shook it. His fingers were limp and clammy. “Norm Irving.”
“Nice to meet you.” I didn’t know if it was or not.
“I hear you play guitar, freshie.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your brother. Mr. Football.” Norm Irving opened a storage cabinet filled with cased guitars. He pulled one out, flicked the catches, and revealed a gorgeous dead-black electric Yamaha.
“SA 30,” he said briefly. “Got it two years ago. Painted houses all summer with my dad. Turn on that amp. No, not the big one, the Bullnose right in front of you.”
I went to the mini-amp, looked around for a switch or a button, and didn’t see any.
“On the back, freshie.”
“Oh.” I found a rocker switch and flipped it. A red light came on, and there was a low hum. I liked that hum from the very first. It was the sound of power.
Norm scrounged a cord from the guitar cabinet and plugged in. His fingers brushed the strings, and a brief BRONK sound came from the little amp. It was atonal, unmusical, and completely beautiful. He held the guitar out to me.
“What?” I was both alarmed and excited.
“Your brother says you play rhythm. So play some rhythm.”
I took the guitar, and that BRONK sound came again from the little Bullnose amp at my feet. The guitar was a lot heavier than my brother’s acoustic. “I’ve never played an electric,” I said.
“It’s the same.”
“What do you want me to play?”
“How about ‘Green River.’ Can you play that?” He reached into the watch pocket of his baggy jeans and held out a pick.
I managed to take it without dropping it. “Key of E?” As if I had to ask. All that shit starts with E.
“You decide, freshie.”
I slipped the strap over my head and settled the pad on my shoulder. The Yammie hung way low—Norman Irving was a lot taller than I was—but I was too nervous to even think of adjusting it. I played an E chord and jumped at how loud it was in the closed Band Room. That made him grin, and the grin—which revealed teeth that were going to give him a lot of problems in the future if he didn’t start taking care of them—made me feel better.
“Door’s shut, freshie. Turn it up and jam out.”
The volume was set at 5. I turned it up to 7, and the resulting WHANGGG was satisfyingly loud.
“I can’t sing worth a crap,” I said.
“You don’t have to sing. I sing. You just have to play rhythm.”
“Green River” has a basic rock-and-roll beat—not quite like “Cherry, Cherry,” but close. I hit E again, listening to the first phrase of the song in my head and deciding it was right. Norman began to sing. His voice was almost buried by the sound of the guitar, but I could hear enough to tell he had good pipes. “Take me back down where cool water flows, yeah . . .”
I switched to A, and he stopped.
“Stays E, doesn’t it?” I said. “Sorry, sorry.”
The first three lines were all in E, but when I switched to A again, where most basic rock goes, it was still wrong.
“Where?” I asked Norman.
He just looked at me, hands in his back pockets. I listened in my head, then began again. When I got to the fourth line, I went to C, and that was right. I had to start over once more, but after that it was a cinch. All we needed was drums, a bass . . . and some lead guitar, of course. John Fogerty of Creedence hammered that lead in a way I never could in my wildest dreams.
“Gimme the ax,” Norman said.
I handed it over, disappointed to let it go. “Thanks for letting me play it,” I said, and headed for the door.
“Wait a minute, Morton.” It wasn’t much of a change, but at least I had been promoted from freshie. “Audition’s not over.”
Audition?
From the storage cabinet he took a smaller case, opened it, and produced a scratched-up Kay semi-hollowbody—a 900G, if you’re keeping score.
“Plug into the big amp, but turn it down to four. That Kay feeds back like a motherfucker.”
I did as instructed. The Kay fit my body better than the Yammie; I wouldn’t have to hunch over to play it. There was a pick threaded into the strings and I took it out.
“Ready?”
I nodded.
“One . . . two . . . one-two-three-and . . .”
I was nervous while I was working out the simple rhythm progression of “Green River,” but if I’d known how well Norman could play, I don’t think I could have played at all; I would simply have fled the room. He hit the Fogerty lead just right, playing the same licks as on that old Fantasy single. As it was, I was swept along.
“Louder!” he shouted at me. “Jack it and fuck the feedback!”
I turned the big amp up to 8 and kicked it back in. With both guitars playing and the amp feeding back like a police whistle, Norm’s voice was lost in the sound. It didn’t matter. I stuck the groove and let his lead carry me. It was like surfing a glassy wave that rolled on without breaking for two and a half minutes.
It ended and silence crashed back in. My ears were ringing. Norm stared up at the ceiling, considering, then nodded. “Not great, but not terrible. With a little practice, you might be better than Snuffy.”
“Who’s Snuffy?” I asked. My ears were ringing.
“A guy who’s moving to Assachusetts,” he said. “Let’s try ‘Needles and Pins.’ You know, the Searchers?”
“E?”
“No, this one’s D, but not straight D. You gotta diddle it.” He demonstrated how I was supposed to hammer high E with my pinky, and I picked it up right away. It didn’t sound exactly like the record, but it was in the ballpark. When we finished I was dripping with sweat.
“Okay,” he said, unslinging the guitar. “Let’s go out to the SA. I need a butt.”
• • •
The smoking area was behind the vocational tech building. It was where the burns and hippies hung out, along with girls who wore tight skirts, dangly earrings, and too much makeup. Two guys were squatting at the far end of the metal shop. I’d seen them around, as I had Norman, but didn’t know them. One had sandy blond hair and a lot of acne. The other had a kinky pad of red hair that stuck out in nine different directions. They looked like losers, but I didn’t care. Norman Irving also looked like a loser, but he was the best guitar player I’d ever heard who wasn’t on a record.
“How is he?” the sandy blond asked. This turned out to be Kenny Laughlin.
“Better than Snuffy,” Norman said.
The one with the crazy red hair grinned. “That ain’t sayin shit.”
“Yeah, but we need someone, or we can’t play the Grange on Saturday night.” He produced a pack of Kools and tipped it my way. “Smoke?”
“I don’t,” I said. And then, feeling absurd but not able to help myself, “Sorry.”
Norman ignored that and lit up with a Zippo that had a snake and DON’T TREAD ON ME engraved on the side. “This is Kenny Laughlin. Plays bass. The redhead is Paul Bouchard. Drums. This shrimp is Connie Morton’s brother.”
“Jamie,” I said. I desperately wanted these guys to like me—to let me in—but I didn’t want to start whatever relationship we might have as nothing more than Mr. Football’s kid brother. “I’m Jamie.” I held out my hand.
Their shakes were as limp as Norman’s had been. I’ve gigged with hundreds of players since the day Norman Irving auditioned me in the GFHS Band Room, and almost every guy I ever worked with had the same dead-fish shake. It’s as if rockers feel they have to save all their strength for work.
“So what do you say?” Norman asked. “Wanna be in a band?”
Did I? If he’d told me I had to eat my own shoelaces as an initiation rite, I would have pulled them from the eyelets immediately and started chewing.
“Sure, but I can’t play in any places where they serve booze. I’m only fourteen.”
They looked at each other, surprised, then laughed.
“We’ll worry about playing the Holly and the Deuce-Four once we get a rep,” Norman said, jetting smoke from his nostrils. “For now we’re just playing teen dances. Like the one at the Eureka Grange. That’s where you’re from, right? Harlow?”
“How-Low,” Kenny Laughlin said, snickering. “That’s what we call it. As in How-Low can you shitkickers go?”
“Listen, you want to play, right?” Norm said. He lifted his leg so he could bogart his cigarette on one of his battered old Beatle boots. “Your brother says you’re playing his Gibson, which doesn’t have a pickup, but you can use the Kay.”
“The Music Department won’t care?”
“The Music Department won’t know. Come to the Grange on Thursday afternoon. I’ll bring the Kay. Just don’t break the stupid feedbacky fucker. We’ll set up and rehearse. Bring a notebook so you can write down the chords.”
The bell rang. Kids butted their smokes and started drifting back toward the school. As one of the girls passed, she kissed Norman on the cheek and patted him on the butt of his sagging jeans. He seemed not to notice her, which struck me as incredibly sophisticated. My respect for him went up another notch.
None of my fellow bandmates showed any signs of heeding the bell, so I started off on my own. Then another thought crossed my mind, and I turned back.
“What’s the name of the band?”
Norm said, “We used to call ourselves the Gunslingers, but people thought that was a little too, you know, militaristic. So now we’re Chrome Roses. Kenny thought it up while we were stoned and watching a gardening show at my dad’s place. Cool, huh?”
In the quarter century that followed, I played with the J-Tones, Robin and the Jays, and the Hey-Jays (all led by a snazzy guitarist named Jay Pederson). I played with the Heaters, the Stiffs, the Undertakers, Last Call, and the Andersonville Rockers. During the flowering of punk I played with Patsy Cline’s Lipstick, the Test Tube Babies, Afterbirth, and The World Is Full of Bricks. I even played with a rockabilly group called Duzz Duzz Call the Fuzz. But there was never a better name for a band, in my opinion, than Chrome Roses.
• • •
“I don’t know,” Mom said. She didn’t look mad, she looked like she was coming down with a headache. “You’re only fourteen, Jamie. Conrad says those boys are much older.” We were at the dinner table, which looked a lot bigger with Claire and Andy gone. “Do they
smoke?”
“No,” I said.
My mother turned to Con. “Do they?”
Con, who was passing the creamed corn to Terry, didn’t miss a beat. “Nope.”
I could have hugged him. We’d had our differences over the years, as all brothers do, but brothers also have a way of sticking together when the chips are down.
“It’s not bars, or anything, Mom,” I said . . . knowing in some intuitive way that it would be bars, and probably long before the most junior member of Chrome Roses turned twenty-one. “Just the Grange. We have rehearsal this Thursday.”
“You’ll need plenty,” Terry said snidely. “Gimme another pork chop.”
“Say please, Terence,” my mother said distractedly.
“Please gimme another pork chop.”
Dad passed the platter. He hadn’t said anything. That could be good or bad.
“How will you get to rehearsal? For that matter, how will you get to these . . . these gigs?”
“Norm’s got a VW microbus. Well, it’s his dad’s, but he let Norm paint the band’s name on the side!”
“This Norm can’t be more than eighteen,” Mom said. She had stopped eating her food. “How do I know he’s a safe driver?”
“Mom, they need me! Their rhythm guy moved to Massachusetts. With no rhythm guy, they’ll lose the gig Saturday night!” A thought blazed across my mind like a meteor: Astrid Soderberg might be at that dance. “It’s important! It’s a big deal!”
“I don’t like it.” Now she was rubbing her temples.
My father spoke up at last. “Let him do it, Laura. I know you’re worried, but it’s what he’s good at.”
She sighed. “All right. I guess.”
“Thanks, Mom! Thanks, Dad!”
My mother picked up her fork, then put it down. “Promise me that you won’t smoke cigarettes or marijuana, and that you won’t drink.”
“I promise,” I said, and that was a promise I kept for two years.
Or thereabouts.
• • •
What I remember best about that first gig at Eureka Grange No. 7 was the stench of my own sweat as the four of us trooped onto the bandstand. When it comes to sweat, nobody can beat an adolescent of fourteen. I had showered for twenty minutes before my maiden show—until the hot water ran out—but when I bent to pick up my borrowed guitar, I reeked of fear. The Kay seemed to weigh at least two hundred pounds when I slung it over my shoulder. I had good reason to be scared. Even taking the inherent simplicity of rock and roll into account, the task Norm Irving set me—learning thirty songs between Thursday afternoon and Saturday night—was impossible, and I told him so.