As she descended the basement stairs for the third time, she decided it was okay to be scared, but not to let fear keep her from the music she’d come to hear. Fear of bees was reasonable, but running from bees got you stung. Fear of crowds was reasonable, too, or so she’d been taught. Crowds spread disease. Crowds concealed attackers. Crowds attracted the attention of people who might do you harm. She could worry about all that or walk downstairs and do her job.
She still aimed for her protected spot below the stairs, armed with her mother’s invisible bubble, for whatever good that did. She had no illusion she’d stay calm in a crush, but maybe she could extend the limits of what was panic-worthy and make it through one full show.
She stood in her safe zone. She had been so focused on the room in the past—the stage, the musicians, the nearest exits—that she’d never taken a close look at the crowd before. It struck her that part of the job involved gauging the audience, too. It wasn’t only about her assessment of the band, her reaction to the music. Who did the audience respond to? Who made them dance, or press closer to the stage? A puzzle piece clicked into place. She thought back to the bands from the first night, tried to remember what the crowd reactions had been.
The audience had an even wider age variety tonight, or a wider variety than she remembered. In her mind, the menace of the second night’s crowd clouded everything. They were big, young, broad-shouldered, heavy-footed, in her recollection. Tonight a few people leaned against the walls, chatting with each other. More gray hair than she remembered. Nobody who wanted to hurt her. Not deliberately, anyway.
Joni came around the corner and stopped beside her. “Rosemary! Back for more punishment?”
“Desensitization. Are you playing tonight?”
“Nah. I don’t want people to get sick of us.”
“How could they? You were wonderful. I was hoping to see you again.”
“Thanks. I’m flattered.”
Someone touched Rosemary’s arm. She flinched, turned.
“You came through the front door this time, I hope?” asked Luce. “How’s the head?”
Rosemary put her hand to the adhesive bandage at her hairline. “Much better, thanks.”
“So you think you’ll make it through a whole set?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Good. It’s nice playing for new people. Just stand your ground, so I don’t have to clean you off the floor again. Stand firm and people will bounce off you.”
Luce melted into the crowd.
“So how come she can play practically every time this place is open, but not you? Because she owns the place?”
“No, she can play because her band is amazing and she spends all her time writing new stuff and experimenting musically and no two shows are ever alike. We don’t have enough material to play more than one show a month. We’ve only been together for a year.”
“I’d never have guessed.”
“That’s because you heard us once. Come back in a month, and it’ll be the exact same songs. Maybe one new one if you’re lucky. We don’t have time to work up more. Most of the bands here are on a one-month rotation, except Luce’s. She calls it her ‘extended residency.’”
Rosemary didn’t know what that meant, but she nodded. If that was the case, if she wouldn’t see some of these bands again for weeks, she’d have to practice making faster decisions on which she thought were StageHoloLive material.
She had another question. “Is the crowd mostly the same night after night, or do people turn up for specific bands? I asked somebody the first night I was here who she’d come to see, and she said ‘everyone.’”
Joni shrugged. “A mix. I think Luce is smart to only open the place twice a week. There are regulars who are here every night it opens, and musicians like me whose bands play monthly, but we come out other nights, too. I sit in with some of the others if they need cello. Then there are friends and family members and big-F Fans who only come for the bands they love. Luce tries to juggle the combinations so Fans hear different bands when they turn out for the ones they know, so maybe they’ll fall for somebody else as well. Cross-pollination, she says.”
The first act started, and they both turned their attention to the stage. An elderly black woman stood there on her own, wielding a sleek burgundy electric bass twice as long as she was tall. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, and a fringed red and black shirt. How old was she? Seventies, maybe even eighties, her hair a silver cloud around a lined face. She looked familiar.
From the clothing, Rosemary expected country, but from the first notes she realized her impression was wrong. The woman had some sort of effects station. She started a bass loop, sinuous and funky. Put down the bass, the loop continuing, and picked up an electric guitar. She attacked it in the same way she had the bass, echoing the line and embellishing it in a higher range.
When she sang, her voice had the same rich timbre as the bass. She shaped notes in her mouth, pushed them out from somewhere deeper, drawing out vowels and then clipping them off. She layered and looped the vocals as well, harmonizing with herself, making sounds that were words and not words. Each time Rosemary thought the song was as full as it could get, another part came in. Her ear followed the layers, seeking specific sounds, delighting when they appeared, reaching a strange and thrilling completeness when certain phrases resolved.
When a solid wall of harmony and guitar had built, the musician hit her foot pedal. Everything stopped.
“This is the sentence we brought on ourselves,” she whisper-sang. Her guitar echoed the melody, then punctuated the line like a challenge. “We did nothing to stop it / We shaped it / We bought it / We gave it a home and a name.” She hit the foot pedal again and the loop wall rushed back in to fill the silence. She took off the guitar, laid it strings-down against her amp, where a growl of feedback began to form beneath the music. She looped that noise, too. Noise on top of noise. She hit one more foot trigger and walked away, leaving the layers to loop and loop and then stop. The room stayed silent for a moment, then erupted in cheers.
“Who. Was. That?” Rosemary asked Joni, eyes still on the empty stage.
“Mary Hastings. She’s been playing in Baltimore for decades. She’s not in any rotation, though. She plays when she feels like it. Sometimes it’s six months, sometimes it’s two weeks. We always make room for her. Amazing, isn’t she?”
“Completely amazing.” Rosemary tried to figure out why the woman looked familiar. “Wait—does she work at the diner up the street?”
“Yeah, she and her sister and brother own it. She gives us all discounts on the nights we play.”
“Does she always play one long song?”
“She plays whatever she wants. One song or three, ten minutes or an hour. I’ve never heard her do a song the same way twice. I’ve never seen her do one song with no verse or chorus before, either, but that was badass.”
Somebody—not Mary Hastings—started putting her guitars into cases. The performer stood chatting in a corner. Rosemary wandered over to the merchandise table, but there wasn’t anything labeled “Mary Hastings.”
She tried to picture the woman on an SHL stage. She could command a room, that was for sure; Rosemary still had goose bumps. She had the charisma, the presence, the musical chops, but Rosemary wasn’t sure about that mainstream appeal factor she was supposed to consider. Nothing too political, they’d said, and this had felt political even if the only lyrics were five whispered lines.
Her biggest concern was Joni’s comment that Mary Hastings never played the same song the same way twice. She remembered what had happened when Magritte had gone off script. SHL wanted musicians to bring something special, but maybe there was a different kind of control to their brand of special. In any case, now she had four very different bands to tell them about.
And perhaps she would have a fifth? The next band looked mo
re conventional than any she had seen here. Drums, bass, two guitars. The lead singer was a good-looking guy, blond and tall enough to touch the ceiling without straightening his arm. The bassist had heavy pox scars on every visible patch of skin. The drummer looked older than the others, around fifty, maybe, bald. The second guitarist leaned over and whispered to him, and he barked a laugh.
They tested their instruments, then started playing. It was the closest sound to Patent Medicine she’d heard since arriving, enough so that she realized she’d been wondering for a while now how a band that conventional had come from this scene. Their first song was a love song, three minutes of catchy, straightforward pop. Rosemary waited for some trick, some hint they were making a comment on politics or taxes or art, but the next song didn’t have any deeper meaning, either. Pure candy.
Joni leaned toward Rosemary. “The bassist and drummer are the rhythm section your buddy Aran left behind.”
Rosemary appraised them again with the knowledge that this was the original Patent Medicine. The SHL version was much better looking, and their moves were more polished, but underneath they had similar blueprints.
She actually preferred this singer’s voice to Aran’s. It held a bluesy richness, a worn quality. She would have recommended this band based on their sound, but she wasn’t sure if that was wise if they had already refused to go audition for StageHolo when Aran stormed the gates.
“They’re better than Patent Medicine,” Rosemary whispered into Joni’s ear. “This guy is better than Aran.”
Joni stayed silent for a moment, then turned to her again with a sly look. “I probably shouldn’t say this and spoil your impression, but there’s this game I play watching some of these bands. It’s a friend’s theory she told me a long time ago, that musicians make love the way they play their instruments. When I see certain people play, I can’t help but—” She pointed at the drummer, partially obscured by the singer. Rosemary hadn’t taken a good look at him before, but his movement was oddly loose and frenetic, like he was playing with more limbs than could be seen.
“He’s an octopus. I don’t think I want to picture . . .”
“Exactly.” They both laughed. Rosemary looked at the others in the band using that same lens, then considered the other bands she had seen so far. The frantic players, the intense ones. Joni and her cello, her warm, sure hands. She looked away in case Joni could read her thoughts on her face.
The people in front of her started dancing. Rosemary felt the urge to join them, but she remembered the other night and knew she’d be better off taking baby steps. Get through one full night on the room’s edge before venturing into the middle. She tapped her toe and stayed put. The band—the Handsome Mosquitoes, by their own introduction—played a ten-song set, crisp and punchy. Ten perfect pop songs, all exuding mainstream appeal.
Rosemary pictured the Bloom Bar crowd leaping to buy all their merchandise as they finished a show. Their T-shirts looked like they had been hand silk-screened, and the art on the download card was amateur at best, a juvenile pun on a juvenile album name. Nothing like their polished songs. Hopefully the album’s production quality was as good as their show, but if not, SHL producers could help, and their professional graphics people would design a better logo for the merchandise. If. If she recommended them, and if SHL was willing to look past the rougher aspects.
Luce’s band took the stage. They started with a song they hadn’t played at the previous show. It launched from nothing: no audible count, no instrumental intro. Drums, bass, guitar, and straight into a chorus, zero to sixty with no warning, the sonic opposite of Mary Hastings’s slow build, hooky without being poppy, loud and loose and ragged.
It was strange to reconcile the woman she had chatted so easily with a few nights before with the person onstage now, staring down her audience like she didn’t care what anybody thought of her, like she dared them to disagree with what she was singing, dared them to look away. Nobody did.
“Was that new?” someone asked from somewhere near Rosemary as the song slid to a stop.
“I haven’t heard it before,” said someone else. “Damn.”
She recognized the second piece from the previous show, before she had gone stupid. It was hard to believe they could ramp up from the first song, but this was the one that had run away with her a few days before. It threatened to do the same again. The beat was close to a heartbeat but not quite, inviting her body to adapt itself to the song rather than the other way around.
Rosemary remembered her panic from the other night, but it felt distant now, like she’d decided to be a different person. Rosemary had been replaced with someone who was okay in crowds, someone who didn’t grow up under a failing Hoodie in the middle of nowhere. City Rosemary, with drums for a heartbeat and bass for a pulse. The volume that had felt crushing wasn’t crushing at all. It pushed from underneath her skin, making her stronger, pushing the bad stuff out. She needed to put it on repeat until it became her own personal armor. What had Luce called it? “Choose.” She pulled up her Hoodie to record.
The song ended, and its absence nagged at Rosemary like a missing tooth. The third one was quieter, a respite. The fourth song had a spoken-word interlude, preplanned but stream-of-consciousness, with a rhythm to it. Luce came across both tough and vulnerable, inviting the audience in. Nobody in the crowd talked, even though they’d all heard this band dozens of times.
Rosemary found herself wishing that she played an instrument. Bass, maybe. That rooting of the song, the tight communication between bassist and drummer. How long would she have to stay here before some band accepted her, let her play with them? Or maybe she’d buy a bass and go home and practice and return in a few months or a year. She had a job to do, but the two weren’t mutually exclusive.
The last song ended with an extended coda. The drummer and second guitarist had a wordless la la part, echoing the melody Luce had been carrying. Luce stalked the stage. She climbed onto her amp, then stretched one foot out to rest on the bass drum. She stood there, balanced between amp and drum, head inches below the ceiling, strumming harder and harder. One of her strings broke and she pulled it loose to dangle from her guitar. Another string, then another, all three trailing from her headstock, whipping with her movement, flashing when they caught light.
The guitar became more and more discordant, but it didn’t matter. None of it felt like performance, though she posed unanswered questions of how she didn’t fall over, how the bass drum didn’t crack or spill her, how she played that hard in that precarious a position without losing her footing or looking like she cared about anything other than the sounds she dragged out of her guitar. It was as if Luce had become a conduit for something bigger than her, and it didn’t matter what she wanted or where she was or how she had gotten there.
At the last possible moment, as the song built to its inevitable conclusion, she pushed off the drum, knocking it into the drummer, who leaped backward off his throne but managed still to bring his sticks down on the cymbals for one last crash. The whole band cracked up in laughter; they all looked surprised-pleased-relieved it had ended as well as it had.
Rosemary dragged herself back to the analytical. She was supposed to pay attention to the whole package, not just her own response, the better to explain what she was selling—what she was buying—when she talked to her employers. She thought she knew how to pitch it. Sure, they were political, but maybe that was acceptable, as long as she’d play “Blood and Diamonds,” too? Their songs were catchy, and they were compelling to watch. Everything she could ask for.
“That was amazing,” she told Luce after the show. “What you said the other night—about wanting to make people realize they want to make something themselves? I think I get it.”
Luce looked exhausted, though she’d been full of energy a minute before. “Thanks. Glad you made it through one. You going to hang out a while?”
“Uh,
this is the first time I’ve gotten to the end, so I didn’t know that was a thing. People hang out now?”
“Some do. At the Heatwave. You’re welcome to join us.” She paused, cocked her head. “I’d like that.”
Rosemary nodded and retreated to the back of the basement while the musicians packed their gear. She started to offer help, but their movements were so precise she knew she’d be in the way; she preferred keeping to the edge while the audience exited, in any case. Luce packed up her merchandise last, folding the case and sliding it into the alcove behind the table.
“The benefits of playing in my own house.” Luce grinned. “Let’s get out of here.”
The end-of-night stragglers headed up the street. Luce’s band walked together, speaking in low voices; the other band chatted with the two strangers, leaving Rosemary alone. If she dropped out of the group and headed back to her hotel nobody would notice.
“Rosemary, catch up. I want you to meet people.”
Or not. She walked faster, and allowed Luce to introduce her around. The guy with the tattoos, the drummer, was Dor. The teenage bassist, in a yellow sundress over jeans, with supermodel cheekbones and a cascade of chestnut hair, Andy.
“You’re all so intense onstage,” Rosemary said.
“That’s because we have to concentrate on not being killed by our singer.” Dor drew his face into a caricature of sheer concentration.
“You look constipated,” said Luce. “I hope that isn’t what you look like onstage behind my back.”
“Nah, he’s more like this.” Andy made a worse face.
It was hard to be intimidated by people who mocked each other so lovingly. Rosemary smiled and kept quiet, happy to be included.
The shades were drawn at the Heatwave. Rosemary waited for someone to say it was closed, but when the door swung open, she realized the place was full, even though the city curfew was fast approaching. There were at least fifteen or twenty people inside, some she recognized by sight, if not by name.
A Song for a New Day Page 21