by Dave Reidy
To keep things interesting, I started manually adjusting the speed and depth of my organ’s vibrato between songs. Whenever the guitarists took a few moments to tune down, I would lift the lid off my organ and manually adjust the trimmer pots, setting the vibrato to the levels I thought would work best in the next song. Chances were good that hardly anyone could hear the difference and, to my ears, the results were mixed. But when the adjustments worked, I felt almost as good as I had helping Sod Off Shotgun win over an audience of strangers.
An audience of strangers, however, was something Chicago still could not offer me. I was playing with the same bands for the same people—that bearded guy’s poetry had gotten no better, and the bandanna-wearing biker was still giving set-long two-finger rock salutes to the musicians. But somehow, everything felt different. Maybe it was because I had been out on the road. Maybe it was because I was exploring new sounds with my instrument. Whatever the reason, despite all the sameness, playing in Chicago that winter didn’t feel the same as it had before.
Then, all of a sudden, the sameness started to eat at me. Every note I played on the organ felt like an act of despair. Flat and sharp, syncopated and sustained—they all sounded the same. I did a weeklong residence at the Green Mill with a jazz combo and sat in during Happy Hour at a piano bar, but nothing I did changed anything.
One night in early April, during an undeserved encore with a local band, I held down a single note—a discordant C flat—for an entire song. When the song was over, the lead guitarist stared at me as I packed up my instrument. He was trying to look angry, but mostly he seemed hurt. Neither of us said a word.
As I headed for the club’s door, carrying my organ case in one hand and the stand in the other, the bandana-wearing biker leaned out of a conversation he was having, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Sounded great, man.” He nodded once for emphasis before turning back to his conversation.
I stared at him. Then I hit him in the back of the knee with my organ case.
He grunted and fell to the floor. Holding his knee, he yelled, “What the fuck, man?”
Having sabotaged my ride’s encore, I hailed a cab. The driver was about my age. He wore black, horn-rimmed glasses and a brimmed wool cap that mushroomed on the crown of his head. Strands of thick, straight brown hair covered his ears. The car stereo was tuned to the local college radio station, a favorite of Chicago music fans who had grown up on radio but outgrown corporate playlists. I had been a regular listener myself, but the nervous college-age DJs had started making me nervous with their hemming and hawing, so I’d gone back to listening to CDs.
As the cab turned left onto Western Avenue, I heard an energetic blast of horns and Jamie Hyde’s growl coming from the speakers. I had never heard this song before—was it an old one that Sod Off Shotgun didn’t play live anymore?
When the driver pulled up to the address I had given him, Jamie was singing the chorus after the second verse. I sat on the edge of the backseat and asked the driver, if he didn’t mind, to wait. I figured it was worth the extra fifty cents to hear the song out. It wasn’t every day I heard a band I had played with on the radio.
After the second time through the chorus, the organ solo began.
I inhaled sharply. The solo had been recorded on a Vox Continental—just like mine—and stuck pretty close to the melody line. But whoever had played it had added accents, little flicks of fifths and sevenths, and used the drawbars to silence a few notes of the solo’s concluding, descending run. The performance was subtle, skillful, and just right for the song. I could have played a more difficult solo, but I could not have played a better one.
After the final cymbal crash faded, the boyish DJ ran down the list of bands that he had just played—Guided By Voices, Papas Fritas, Ween. “And that last track was a new one from Sod Off Shotgun, a song called ‘Fundamental Physic.’ Sod Off Shotgun will be in town next month at the Metro with Silkworm so, if you liked that song, or even if you didn’t, head over to the Metro and check them out.”
Jamie had written a new song with an organ solo. He’d recorded it and planned a tour.
And he hadn’t called me.
I paid the driver and pulled my organ and its stand from the trunk of the cab. I stood in front of my friend’s apartment for a few moments, then flipped open the latches of the case, took the organ in my hands, and hurled it against the crumbling brick façade of the three-flat, just above the main door. The organ fell to the ground drawbar-side first, bouncing once and spitting keys and transistor components around my feet.
I surveyed the destruction for a moment, kicking a couple of plastic pieces into the grass of the parkway. Then I walked into the three-flat’s main door, leaving the stand, the case, and what was left of my instrument on the sidewalk.
As I trudged up the stairs, it hit me that I didn’t have an organ anymore. And that, at least, was something different.
A few weeks later, the friend I was staying with shook me out of an afternoon nap on the couch and put the cordless phone in my face.
“Hello?” I said, still half asleep
“Dale. It’s Jamie.”
“Hey Jamie.”
“How’ve you been, man?”
“Fine.”
“Good,” Jamie said. “So here’s the deal. We’re going out on the road again—”
“I heard.”
Jamie paused. Maybe he had detected the edge in my voice. “You didn’t hear about this,” he said. “News just came down today. We’re playing the festival circuit this summer. H.O.R.D.E., Lollapalooza, a few others.”
“That’s great,” I said, taking care not to sound like I meant it.
“Yeah,” Jamie continued. “Our single was used in a movie soundtrack, that got it on commercial radio, and the new album went gold last week.”
“Wow.”
“The movie’s terrible. Horn Balls. Have you seen it?”
“No.”
“Yeah. You’re not exactly the demo. Basically, these kids in the high-school marching band start a ska band and become cool.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I mean, I appreciate what it’s done for us but—it’s a terrible movie. Anyway, the band’s sounding tighter than ever—”
I actually winced when he said that.
“—but we’ve never played for twenty-thousand people before and I’m looking to stack the deck. I want you to come on the road this summer and dance like you did on our last tour.”
As soon as Jamie had mentioned the festivals, I had begun to hope that he had decided to bring another organist on tour, or that the organist who had played on “Fundamental Physic” had been electrocuted or hit by a bus. I had never imagined he had called about the dancing. I said nothing.
“Look,” Jamie said, “I know you’d rather be playing—and I think you’re a hell of an organ player—but we need you to dance. Most of the crowd will be there to see some other band on the bill, and I don’t want to be the act people skip to get a fucking henna tattoo. The dancing buys us time. While the crowd’s watching you and maybe dancing along, we get a two- or three-song window to show them we can play. And right now that’s all we need. You see what I mean?”
I did see. But I didn’t want to say so.
“I can pay you three times what you made on the last tour and, if you want me to, I can try to get you some session work in L.A. this fall.”
Session work. You had to know someone to get it, and Jamie was saying he would be that someone for me. I wanted to believe he could do it—as the frontman of a band with a gold record, he was the biggest music-industry figure I knew—but I wasn’t sure he had the clout to drop an unknown into a paying session gig. “Do you think you can do that?”
“I think I can.”
Those carefully chosen words sounded like “no” to me, and they made Jamie sound desperate. But was I any less desperate? I had destroyed my organ, and with it my only means of making a living. I had played only two gigs in the pas
t six weeks, both on borrowed synthesizers that sounded like toys. I hadn’t eaten yet that day, and given the rough way in which he’d shaken me awake, it seemed that I was wearing out my welcome at my friend’s place. If I went out on the road with Jamie, I would get three meals a day and earn enough money to buy a new organ. Maybe Jamie would get me session work, maybe he wouldn’t. But I would make sure he tried, and even if I moved to L.A. for a few months and played only live gigs, at least the regulars out there would be new to me.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Jamie told me where to pick up my plane ticket and hung up. I pulled my gray suit off the floor of my friend’s closet and borrowed ten dollars to have it dry cleaned. Walking down the stairs with the suit in a rumpled ball under my arm, it felt good to be doing something, and to have a plan.
I had almost reached the main door of the three-flat when I realized that, to make my plan happen, I would have to share a stage with the organist Jamie had chosen over me, and dance as if I were thrilled to do it.
I arrived at the Desert Sky Pavilion in Phoenix and gave the guard at the load-in area my name. He dragged his index finger slowly down the first page of the list on his clipboard, then flipped to the second and did the same thing. Halfway down the third page, his finger stopped and he waved me in. I exhaled and walked in the direction of the arrow on a wall-mounted sign that read “Backstage.”
On my way to the greenroom, I ran into the drummer and bassist for Sod Off Shotgun and shook their hands. I felt a little awkward at first, but it was good to see those guys, and they seemed happy to see me. When I opened the greenroom door, Jamie and the horn section were inside.
Jamie got up immediately, shook my hand, and wrapped his free arm around my back. “Good to see you, man. Thanks for coming out.”
“No problem,” I said. The horn section kept their seats. I nodded to them. “Hey guys.”
“Welcome back, twinkletoes,” said Tom, the trombonist.
“Thanks, Horn Ball,” I said.
Tom narrowed his eyes at me.
“Relax, fellas,” Jamie said. “Get into your suit, Dale. We’re on in twenty minutes.”
Just outside the greenroom, I found a door labeled “Dressing Room C.” I knocked twice, waited a moment for a response, and opened the door. Dressing Room C was a closet with a vanity. A row of light bulbs ran across the top of a mirror that was marred by a four-inch crack in the lower-left corner. On the shallow Formica counter, a steel-mesh cup held a blue pen, a mascara tube, and a pair of orange-handled fabric shears.
I hung my suit on a hook on the back of the door and got undressed. As I stood in my boxers and white socks with sweat prickling on my forehead and glistening in the yellow vanity light, I stared at the hanging suit and found that I just couldn’t bring myself to put it on. The desert heat, the exchange with Tom, having to dance—all of it made me want to put on my own clothes, walk out of that closet, and disappear into the thousands assembled to see the show. But I didn’t. Instead, I took the orange-handled shears, cut off the pant legs just below the knee, and got into what was left of my suit, hoping that with bare calves, white socks, and my usual shoes, I would feel just a little more like myself, even wearing a jacket and tie, even without my organ in front of me. Even dancing.
I found Sod Off Shotgun assembled in the wings, watching the emcee work the crowd with pot jokes. I assumed that the guy I didn’t recognize was the new organist. No one bothered to introduce me. He was tall and had the easy good looks of a surfer, with curly, dirty blond hair, tanned skin, and a wide, toothy smile. And though he might have felt more at home in a pair of board shorts, he looked perfectly at ease in a suit. I envied him that, too. I was still eyeing my replacement—that’s how I thought of him—when Jamie noticed my pants.
“Dale.”
I looked at him, and the rest of the band looked back at me.
“What the fuck is this?” he asked, gesturing toward my bare legs, white socks, and green suede Vans.
“I’ll be able to bring my knees up higher,” I said. I shrugged as if I thought the answer were obvious.
I could tell by the way he clenched his jaw that Jamie wasn’t happy. But before he could say anything more, the emcee introduced the band, and Jamie waved the rest of us on ahead of him.
We went on to the half-hearted cheers of maybe fifteen thousand people, including those milling around on the lawn. The stage was bigger than any I had ever played on before. I took my place at the right edge, in front and a little to the right of my replacement.
When the band started playing, I started moving. From the first slide step, I paid little attention to how I felt or what I might have looked like. Instead, I focused on the sound of the organ. My replacement’s monitor was right in front of me, and I heard every note he played. The subtle accents he added to the melody line confirmed that it had been him on the recording I had heard in the cab. And though I didn’t quite believe my own ears, it seemed that he was varying the depth and speed of his vibrato during the song. How was he doing that without taking the organ’s lid off and getting at the innards? I rotated ninety degrees—slowly, dancing all the way—and saw him turning something above the drawbars with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand while he played the keys with his right. Had he rigged knobs to the trimmers? Whatever he had done, he was changing the organ’s vibrato on the fly, and with precision.
Even with all his talent and technological wizardry, my replacement never added anything that subtracted from the sound—he seemed to know how much was too much. As I rotated back toward the audience, I wondered where his organ was in the sound mix; could the crowd hear it as well as I could? I lifted my bare knees into the gleam of the stage lights, one after the other, over and over again, slowly gutting myself with a feeling I wanted to deny but couldn’t: I hoped nobody was missing a note of this guy’s playing.
While I wondered what they could or couldn’t hear, the kids in the crowd showed me what they could see. Out on the lawn beyond the assigned pavilion seats, several hundred were dancing by their blankets. During the third song of the set, a group of dancers gathered in the aisle directly in front of me. Security tried to shoo them away at first, but the kids kept coming and when the beefy, yellow-shirted guards saw that all they had in mind was dancing, they let them be. The dancing kids pointed at me and waved, as if they wanted me to acknowledge them. I just kept moving, watching them out of the corner of my eye and wondering what I could possibly mean to them.
The crowd swelled continuously during the fifty-minute set, and by the end there were only a few hundred empty seats in the pavilion. Sod Off Shotgun played an encore—no other supporting act played one that day—and left the stage to a roar that dwarfed the half-hearted cheers that had welcomed them.
After the set, the band gathered in the greenroom. Everyone seemed to feel pretty good about the performance and, despite my role, I felt all right, too—good enough, in fact, to introduce myself to my replacement.
“Hey man,” he said. “Tyson Jakes.”
“Good to meet you,” I said. We nodded at each other for a moment as I worked up the determination to say what needed to be said next. “You sounded great today. Your monitor was right in front of me and, you know, I liked what I heard.”
He smiled broadly. “Thanks, man. I’m just trying to get by out there, really. I mean, the tunes are new to me, and these guys have been together for a while. They’re tight. I’m just trying not to stick out like a sore thumb, you know?”
I heard Tyson asking for a musician’s empathy, and I gratefully gave him mine. “I do,” I said. “But you fit in really well.”
“Well, I hope so.”
To be addressed this way—as a musician, as an equal—felt like recognition of who I really was, a recognition no one else in this band had made since Athens. Between his humble, easy-going nature and his chops on the organ, my replacement was proving difficult to hate.
“Well, I’m going to c
hange out of this suit,” I said. I think I actually clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll see you on the bus.”
As I made for the greenroom door, Tyson yelled out, “I got to tell you, man. I love watching you dance.” At that, the other conversations in the room petered out. Feeling the eyes of the rest of the band on me, I smiled to show Tyson that he didn’t owe me a compliment, that the one I had paid him had been freely given. I opened the door to leave, hoping he would leave well enough alone.
“It really gets the crowd going,” Tyson continued, “and that makes things so much easier for the musicians.”
I heard Tom the trombonist snicker as I closed the door behind me. Even then, I knew that Tyson’s remark had been innocently made. Surely no one had told him that I played organ, and that I had played for this very band. But innocent or not, from the moment he said “for the musicians” as if I weren’t one, hating Tyson Jakes was easy.
As the tour continued, Sod Off Shotgun won over bigger and bigger audiences, and my dancing was a big reason why. No organ player could have carried the crowds the way I did. From the very first song of the band’s set, thousands of kids mirrored my movements. If I let my arms dangle at my side or swabbed my sweaty forehead with my forearm, they did, too. Once, when I raised my palms in the air during a drum solo, thousands of hands suddenly appeared in unison above the heads in the crowd.
Nobody in the band said anything to me about the crowd’s devotion—I’m not entirely sure anyone else noticed it besides me. Even so, I started to worry that Jamie would think that I was trying to show up the band. So, when we played in Oklahoma City, instead of facing the audience as I danced, I faced the musicians, pointing myself where the crowd’s attention was due: toward Jamie when he was singing, toward the other guys—even Tyson—during their solos. When I checked the crowd at various points during the show, they were watching the band instead of me.
From then on, the dancing kids did what I did and watched what I watched, but I didn’t understand why until we played a festival outside of Kansas City. I was facing the trumpet player during a solo and glanced at the crowd to find—as by then I expected to—that the dancing kids were focused on him. Squinting into the middle distance, the trumpet player picked his spots in and around the scales, departing from them at just the right moments with just the right notes. I marveled at his range and imagined matching him note for note on the organ, hitting the keys in rapid succession like a one-handed typist.