by Dave Reidy
That was when I realized why the kids had latched onto me. While few of them would ever have the chops to match the trumpet player’s solo on any instrument, almost all of them could dance as well as I could. That made me the shortest path to seeing themselves on stage. In the eyes of the dancing kids, I was them—so far as they could tell, there was nothing I could do that they couldn’t. And after every set, I left the stage to their cheers, wishing I’d had a chance to show them otherwise.
We were drinking bourbon and beer backstage after our final show of the tour when Jamie came out of the greenroom. “Fellas,” he said, “we’ve got one more show to do.”
“What?” Tom the trombonist said.
The drummer lowered himself to the cement floor and sat Indian style with his beer between his legs. My heart dropped with him. Just twenty minutes ago, I had waved to the cheering crowd and run off stage toward what I hoped lay ahead for me: Los Angeles, a lovingly rehabbed organ, and—with any luck—some session work. But the linchpin of that plan had other plans for me.
“Mercury Rev was scheduled to play a support slot at a Tibetan Freedom gig outside Denver tomorrow. They canceled to go out on their own tour, and the label asked us to step in for them. As much as possible, I want the label feeling like they owe us one, so I said we’d do it. It’s for charity, so we’re not being paid, but I got the label to match your per diems and pay for any travel rearrangements you have to make. Nobody goes in the hole on this one. If you do, let me know.” He looked at his wristwatch. “We leave in two hours. I’ll see you on the bus.”
The trumpet player swore under his breath, and the bassist smiled at Jamie’s retreating figure with anger in his eyes. Nobody liked the idea of playing for free at the end of a long tour, but nobody argued, either. Jamie had spoken.
As Jamie walked away, Tom yelled out, “Who are we opening for?”
Jamie kept walking, but looked back over his shoulder and raised his voice over the muffled vocals bleeding in from the pavilion. “R.E.M.”
I blinked, trying to get my head around what Jamie had just told us: we were opening for R.E.M. Just when I had had that realization long enough to start enjoying it, I remembered that I would have to dance again tomorrow, and that R.E.M. would have every opportunity to watch me.
I had one thought on my mind as I joined Sod Off Shotgun in the wings before our set: please, please don’t let R.E.M. see this. I looked across the stage for any sign of them in the opposite wings—they were empty. Behind me a bald stage-hand was securing a ragged curtain to a brick wall, but there was no sign of the headliners. I hoped that they had decided to boycott the flavor-of-the-month ska-rock band the label had stuck them with, or that they had been poisoned by the buffet and were taking turns heaving into the green-room toilet. Whatever the case, I didn’t want R.E.M anywhere near the stage until they were ready to take it.
Then another thought occurred to me—once I went on, I would have no idea who was standing in the darkness of the wings. Michael Stipe could watch my every move—my only move—without my knowing he was there.
The house lights went down and Sod Off Shotgun went on. I moved with big, bold motions from the first note, hoping that everyone—both in the audience and backstage—would think that my dancing was ironic, a joke that we were all in on. Halfway through the first song, however, I realized that nobody in the audience was getting the message because no one was watching us. Traffic in the aisles of the theater was constant, and more people were heading for the lobby than returning from it. I counted at least twenty people standing with their backs to the stage, talking to friends in the row behind their own. In the third row, two girls had their heads down over a magazine. Jamie thundered away at the audience with all the menace he could muster, leaning forward over the faces in the front rows and back to connect with the eyes in the balcony, and the band played fast and tight behind him, nailing the notes and keeping perfect time. But no one was bothering to watch.
After the third song of the set, Jamie told the band to play “Fundamental Physic,” which was usually our closer. Hoping to make Jamie’s gamble pay off, I dropped the ironic body language and started dancing like hell, but the audience still wasn’t paying any attention. Nothing we did could compete with “Free Tibet” pamphlets, shouted conversations, and the lure of R.E.M. merchandise for sale in the lobby.
The scene could have pleased me—after a summer of winning over festival crowds with my help, Sod Off Shotgun was being taken down a peg by a crowd of indifferent R.E.M. fans. But I wasn’t pleased—I was confused and a little angry. Why weren’t these kids looking at me? Why weren’t they dancing?
During the next song, I left my position at stage right and danced toward the center of the stage, thrusting my palms in the air and screaming, “Come on!” to the crowd. A few dozen people looked up and cheered my outburst, but that wasn’t enough for me. So I pointed at groups of uninterested chatters until the kids around them tapped them on the shoulders and they turned toward the stage. I kept pointing until almost everyone in the crowd was watching me.
As I migrated back to my usual position on stage, the eyes of the audience stayed on me. No one was dancing, but everyone was watching the dancer now. I faced the crowd, basking for just a moment in their attention. Then I turned and dutifully faced Jamie as he sang. That, I thought, should do it.
But when I checked the crowd a minute later, the kids were still looking at me. I held out my right arm and pointed at Jamie until my shoulder began to burn, but pointing did no good—I couldn’t direct their eyes where I wanted them. And no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get anyone to dance.
When the set was finally over, Jamie threw down the microphone stand and stalked off stage. I followed without waving goodbye to the crowd. From the moment I entered the wings, I scanned for any sign of R.E.M. but, to my relief, I saw only stagehands and roadies.
Jamie stood near the back wall of our dressing room and stared into a mirror, seething. In the overhead fluorescent light, the rest of the band looked pale and exhausted. I felt for them. They were good musicians who had played a charity show and been treated shabbily by the audience. That was no way to end what had been a successful tour.
As we stood around in silence, I began to worry that the band might blame me for the way the set had gone. What if they thought that everything I’d done had been a vengeful grab at the spotlight? What if, instead of setting me up for session work, Jamie vowed to do everything in his power to ensure that I would never work in L.A.? But I had pointed at him. I had tried to shift the attention where it belonged. Then I remembered that no one knew I had been directing the eyeballs of the audience for the past few weeks. All Jamie and the band knew for certain was that their shows had been going great until the dancer started pointing and waving his arms and moving all over the stage.
Suddenly, I was too anxious to be in the same room with the rest of them. I threw my suit jacket in the corner, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed for the door. As I opened the door, Jamie said my name. I looked over my shoulder at him, holding the doorknob in my right hand. He was still standing in front of the mirror, but he was staring at the ground now, supporting his weight with his fists on the Formica counter. Without lifting his eyes, he said, “You did everything you could.”
I nodded and closed the door behind me. Jamie had said the right thing—but I wasn’t sure he had meant what he had said.
I roamed the backstage passageways in my untucked button-down and cut-off suit pants, occasionally flattening myself against a wall to avoid being bowled over by beefy, sweaty members of R.E.M.’s road crew as they hustled between the load-in area and the stage. I felt a little lost now that the tour was over. I tried to focus on what lie ahead, but when I envisioned arriving in L.A.—even with money in my pocket and an organ—the possibility of building the life I wanted seemed, at best, remote.
I turned down a long, narrow corridor directly behind the stage and plunged into relative darknes
s. The only light was a yellow bulb in a socket high on the wall at the passage’s middle point. The moment my eyes adjusted, I saw an egg-shaped head silhouetted against the light of the load-in area beyond. I knew immediately who it was.
We entered the bulb’s glow from opposite directions. His cheeks were pockmarked and darkened by stubble. Glitter at the outer corner of his left eye caught the faint yellow light. His thin green sweater had been stretched into shapelessness.
He was almost past me when, emboldened by the dim lighting, I touched his elbow. “Excuse me,” I said.
Michael Stipe recoiled slightly, pulling his elbow against his side, and walked a few more steps before stopping.
“I just wanted to say that Reckoning is one of my favorite albums, and that I really like what you do. It’s an honor being on the same bill with you.”
He looked at me for a moment. “Who are you with?” he asked, quietly.
“Oh,” I said. “Sod Off Shotgun.”
He blinked and nodded. “And what do you play for them?”
If he had asked, “what do you play?” I would have said organ right away. But that wasn’t what he had asked. I knew then that he had watched our set from the wings, and that he had seen me dance. As I stood there in the faint light, my mouth forming words I couldn’t speak, Michael Stipe walked away.
I hurried back toward the relative safety of Sod Off Shotgun’s greenroom and made it without humiliating myself any further. When I burst through the door, Sod Off Shotgun’s horn and rhythm sections were gone. A tall, balding man wearing a loose silk shirt, dark jeans and black boots was stooped over Jamie, talking to him. Tyson stood next to Jamie with an arm across his stomach, working the edge of his thumbnail between his front teeth.
“The whole point of these shows is to road test their new material,” the man said, “and it’s built around keyboards. They can play all older stuff if they have to, but they don’t want to.” He looked at Tyson. “Just the first eight songs. The new songs. That’s it. They’ll take it from there. ”
“I thought Mills played keyboards,” Jamie said.
“On the albums,” the man said. “Live, he plays bass.”
“And where’s their touring player?”
“The airport. His wife and daughter were in a car accident.”
“Right,” Jamie said. “You said that.”
The man looked at Tyson again. “So what do you say?”
“When do you want to go on?” Tyson asked, wincing.
The man checked his watch. “An hour from now at the latest,” he said.
That’s when I realized that the guy was R.E.M.’s road manager.
Tyson shook his head. “If you wanted a guy to play the right chords in the background, I could do it. But eight new songs built around keyboards? In an hour?” Tyson held up his hands as if being mugged. “I’m sorry, man. I’d love to, but I can’t help you.”
“That’s too bad,” the road manager said. He stared at Tyson, trying to shame him into playing.
Jamie lifted his index finger in my direction. “This guy might be able to help you.”
The road manager looked at me, then looked back at Jamie with a pained expression. He must have seen our set, too.
“He started out playing organ for us,” Jamie continued. “I gave him a tape and he learned our set overnight.”
“He won’t have that long this time.”
“I’m telling you,” Jamie said, “the guy can play. He’d still be playing for us if we hadn’t lost his organ and found out what his dancing did for us.”
I didn’t look at Tyson, but it occurred to me that he was probably learning for the first time that I played the same instrument he did.
The road manager stared at me, biting his upper lip. “If I got you a CD of R.E.M.’s new material,” he said, “could you learn the keyboard parts in an hour?”
I didn’t want to play—not after what had happened with Stipe. But I wouldn’t deny that I could. “Yes,” I said.
The road manager nodded at Jamie and started walking toward the door. “Thanks for your help.”
“No problem,” Jamie said.
The road manager put his fingertips in the middle of my back and guided me out the door ahead of him. “Where are your pants?” he asked.
“I might have a pair on the bus.”
“Forget it,” he said. “Come on.”
I followed him through the corridors to R.E.M.’s dressing room. He opened the door and told me to wait outside. Then he closed the door behind him. A few moments later, he emerged with a Discman and a pair of headphones. Handing them to me, he said, “They’ll play the first eight songs on this disc in order. The last song has a keyboard solo. If you don’t want it, tell me before you go on stage.”
“OK,” I said.
The road manager’s forehead was beaded with sweat. “Don’t go too far,” he said. “We’re on in fifty minutes.”
That I would be onstage behind a keyboard for the first time in weeks—in less than an hour—playing songs I had just learned—with R.E.M.—on the same day I had embarrassed myself—twice—in front of Michael Stipe—presented more potential disaster than I could process. Luckily, I didn’t have any time to try. I sat down beside a concrete pillar and started listening. I played the first track. Then I listened to it again, fingering notes on an imaginary keyboard. When it was over, I moved on to the second song and listened to it twice.
By the time I had made it through the first seven songs, I had heard a Moog, a Mellotron and a Farfisa. Two of the songs featured four measures of synthesizer in the clear before the rest of the band joined in. The last song on the disc—the one with the keyboard solo—was an up-tempo rocker that sounded more like Reckoning-era R.E.M. than any of the other songs. The solo was compelling and relatively simple, and I knew as soon as I had heard it that, when the time came, I would play it.
As I was listening to the eighth song for a second time, the road manager nudged my foot with his own. “Let’s go,” he said.
He headed for the stage and I followed him.
“Does the band know I’m playing with them?” I asked.
He didn’t respond.
We were about ten steps from the wings when he suddenly ran ahead of me and shouted, “OK, you’re on!”
By the time I reached him, the house lights were down and the crowd was screaming. “Where are the keyboards?” I yelled.
“In the back, stage left,” he said.
Taking small, careful steps across the darkened stage, I headed toward a tubular bulb hovering in the blackness at the far side. When I reached the light, I found that it illuminated one side of a three-sided bank of keyboards. I surveyed the various instruments at my disposal, running my hand gently over the playing surfaces. I had played each of the instruments before, but had never seen all of them in one place outside of a store.
Inside the keyboard fortress I felt protected, but isolated. I was ten feet to the left of the drummer—the one who’d replaced Bill Berry after his retirement—and five feet behind him. Fans in the fifth row were closer to the front of the stage than I was.
Suddenly, white spotlights ignited above each member of the band and the crowd’s roar intensified. Except for the light from the tiny hooded bulb, I remained in the dark. Apparently, I hadn’t needed to hide behind that pillar—R.E.M.’s road manager was doing everything he could to ensure that the band never saw me.
The drummer counted off the first song and I came in on cue. Having missed sound check, I was relieved to find that I could hear the synthesizer in my monitor. I hoped I could hear the rest of the keyboards just as well. I was nervous, but by the second chorus of the first song, I felt the music loosening me up.
R.E.M. had probably recorded the new songs one track at a time over a few weeks, with each member showing up at his appointed time and recording his parts alone, his band mates present only in the playback in his headphones. Now, on stage, that piecemeal process was over
and R.E.M. was a musical whole. When Buck went for texture on the guitar, Mills played the melody on bass, and the two of them kept time when the drummer took a fill. Stipe phrased his lyrics in and around the gaps they left, and not a single word or note felt out of place. As I listened, the music they made shepherded my hands to the right backing chords and single-note chirps. I believed that their playing rendered me incapable of making a mistake, and that belief freed me to pour some feeling into the songs.
Then, during the synthesizer-only opening of the fourth song, I made a mistake. I played Em-C-G-F instead of Am-C-G-F, but I didn’t realize I had botched the chord progression until the rest of the band came in and Mills yanked me back in line with an exaggerated pull on his A string. I got the message, but the attempt to slip me onstage without the band noticing had been foiled.
After the second chorus, during Buck’s solo, Stipe walked off the stage. My eyes followed his slouching silhouette into the wings, where he found the road manager and began rolling his finger—he never quite pointed—at the taller man. The manager held his palms up, probably apologizing and asking what else he could have done. Stipe waved him off and retook the stage at a run, reaching the mike just in time to sing the third verse.
The mistake gutted me. Never mind that I hadn’t had much time to learn the songs. Never mind that the slip-up was certainly lost on an audience hearing the tune for the first time. I had messed up and I knew it and R.E.M. knew it. That was enough.