3. The First Day
IAN
“Ian!” Mal barked. “Dude. If you’re going to bounce your knee like that, you’ve got to stay in one rhythm. You’re killing me.”
I hadn’t even realized I was bouncing my knee. No wonder, I guess. I felt twitchy. Like my skin was the wrong size. There was a maddening itch between my shoulder blades. I had a few too many amps of energy running through my system. Potential overload there.
“We’re playing our first-ever stadium gig in twenty-eight hours, and you’re worried about me bouncing my knee out of time?”
Mal, usually a very chill guy, rolled his eyes at me. “Seriously? If you can’t keep time with your fucking knee?—”
Archer lost his temper. He was coiled up tight on the kitchen-bench thing. “Mal, shut up. Ian, if you won’t go take a nap, then get your fucking guitar back.”
“You’re the one who told me to put it away!” I stood to retrieve my Olson from the back, a nap definitely being out of the question, but lurched when the bus changed lanes.
“Pit stop,” Ken called from up front. “Anyone else need to drop a log?”
The phrase, which I hadn’t heard since grade school, surprised an unwilling chuckle out of me. It made Mal and Archer snigger too. I could tell without even looking at them that our fight was over but made a mental note to avoid annoying them if I could. We were all on edge. We regularly played clubs with several thousand people in the audience, and we’d done a couple local festivals where the crowd was supposed to be six to eight thousand, but the Atlanta venue held seventy-five thousand fans.
Seventy-five thousand.
And tomorrow night’s concert was sold out.
Jesus.
I was running through The Ventures’ version of “Perfidia,” hoping the early surf-guitar vibes would bring me back into a regulated voltage when the cheerleader bounced on board again.
Automatically, I swiveled to keep my face turned away from her, but she was buzzing with energy and never even looked at me.
“You’re going to be my capstone project!”
She was looking at Archer, excitement fizzing out of her. She should have had sparks crackling from the end of her ponytail.
“Me? I am?” Archer sat up straighter and grinned. Nothing Archer liked better than all the attention. Made him an ideal front man.
“Well, all of you.” She slid into the banquette and included Mal in her smile. Her gaze darted to me briefly, but I was a thundercloud in this girl’s rainbow world, and she looked back to the pair at the table. “Aftermath! I get to do your PR and make a T-shirt that will be sold alongside all the Sheree merch for the entire month of July!”
Mal’s feet thumped down as he leaned forward. “Merch? We get merch? That’s not in our contract, is it?”
I fumbled for my phone. Morey needed to get in on this discussion.
Archer looked like a classic dumb blond, but that was a false front. He was as smart as anyone when he cared to pay attention. “It is not,” he said. “We didn’t get merch rights. What are you saying, honey?”
Nicky fumbled under the intensity of his regard, but she did her best. “It’s my capstone project? For my MBA? I get to do a T-shirt for you guys, and I’m supposed to do your PR. And the two have to go together, right?”
Mal was blinking at her. “We need our manager in on this.”
I slapped my phone down on the table, startling them. Morey’s voice spoke through the speaker. “What’s going on? Have you guys been fired already? I knew I should have taken a leave of absence and gone with you.”
Morey was a stand-up guy, but he had other musical acts besides us that he had to take care of. He’d told us we’d have to trade up to a bigger agent if this tour went well, but we trusted him. “Shut up, Morey,” I barked at the phone. “Listen to this.”
I made Nicky slow down and explain the whole thing to Morey, who said he needed to review any contract before we signed. Even I grinned at that. The opportunity to get a portion of merch sales on a Sheree tour? What, like we were going to turn that down?
The tour rolled down I-81 while Nicky and Morey traded phone calls. She’d been given permission to access the Lyre Records contracts drive, and their conversations rapidly became unintelligible to the rest of us. The girl also had several phone calls with her adviser at the University of Pennsylvania, who had been trapped in a phone call with that Bruce guy, the tour manager.
The upshot, as near as I cared to pay attention, was that Bouncy Ponytail was now getting a personal stake in our T-shirt, and we had the potential to make as much off one month of T-shirt sales as we did being on the tour.
“You may make money off this—if that girl can do any public relations and marketing,” Morey warned me when I spoke with him through earbuds. (No on-speaker conversations, so we didn’t depress the enthusiasm of the Perpetual Motion Generator.) “You know I don’t have the time to do good PR for you,” he said. Morey spent most of his time apologizing. It was annoying. “If she’ll take it on, then do what she says. You’ll tell the guys?”
I would. Morey knew as well as I did that I wouldn’t have to tell them. I’d just browbeat them until they did what Nicky wanted.
“I got it,” I mumbled.
“Okay, then. And Ian, for fuck’s sake. Get some sleep before the show tomorrow.”
“Bye, Morey.”
I appreciated his caution, but I did my own assessment. If we could have hooked Nicky’s energy into the bus electrical system, she would have powered us over the state border and into Virginia.
I switched to the Nat King Cole version of “Perfidia.” Nicky sat beside Archer, looking up at him shyly as he walked her through our videos, including the three that had gone viral.
“Okay,” Archer said, “this was our first good one. Mal wrote it. It’s called ‘Lizabella.’ One point seven million views. Not bad, huh?”
They watched the dance song together, bent over her phone. He couldn’t help drawing her in. It was his nature. Archer basked in attention.
I left “Perfidia” behind and shaped the chords of “Lizabella” as they watched the video, made with much hilarity in a happier time before I’d had my accident and lost the ability to sleep. Her toe was tapping, and that pert butt was moving on the bench as she did her unconscious chair dancing. Mal had written a hit, and we’d be performing it to seventy-five thousand people tomorrow night.
No. No one ever got to a concert in time to hear the opener. If we played to twenty thousand, it would be a miracle.
Shit. Twenty thousand. My fingers missed and the strings twanged. No one noticed.
“Now, this one is ‘Blood Burn,’” Archer went on. “That’s Ian’s. Full of angst and anger. This was the song that told the male population we were more than a dance band. See? This one has five million views.”
“Wow,” Nicky breathed, looking at Archer as if he were a god. Which he liked.
“I know. Good, right?”
They played the song I’d written after the last fight with my father. Not the final fight—I felt like there were plenty more of those in my future.
This time, she was dancing with her shoulders. It did have a powerful groove, I’d admit it. It wasn’t bad. Mal did a hell of a job.
“But here’s the one that landed us on the tour. This is ‘The Salesman.’ I wrote the words, but we all wrote the music. You haven’t seen it yet?” She shook her pretty head, big eyes wide, and he forgave her with a benevolent smile. “You’re the only one, then. Sixteen point seven million views—no, point eight. We’re up again, guys.”
The video had caught. Every person who’d ever been in any kind of customer service apparently thought Archer was singing on their behalf. It was a funny, bitter earworm of a song, a spoken-word poem—no rhymes, but undeniable rhythm—held up by a sly wink of a tune in which we passed the shreds of a melody between my lead guitar, Archer’s bass, and by the end, even Mal’s drums. The final couplet (“Get you a latte? This is a mattress store, Karen / Darling, do your worst, you blackhearted turd”) had captured brains across the nation and was being shouted along with us when we played it live.
Nicky loved it too. She made him play it again, and then a third time while she took notes. Then she looked up, and there was no hiding her surprise.
“You guys are—” she broke off, a flush of red riding on her high cheekbones.
“Yeah?” Archer asked. Poor girl didn’t know that if there had been a single other woman on the bus, she might not have gotten his most intense attention. She didn’t know it, and she did fall for it.
“You’re . . . musicians,” she said shyly. “I thought you were, like, rock stars.”
Archer sat back with a smile, and Mal laughed out loud. “How did you think we got here?” Mal asked.
Nicky glanced quickly at Archer, and it was clear she’d thought we were riding on Archer’s looks. I snorted and fanned my fingers crisply over the strings in the opening chord of our regular warm-up. The guys were drawn into it without conscious thought.
The old song “Perfidia,” this time as performed in 1944 by Los Panchos. Every strolling mariachi band at the local shopping mall’s Mexican restaurant tried to copy the sound of Los Panchos—their perfect guitarwork, their intense three-part harmony. My boys and I had been working on this version since we’d formed our band in ninth grade.
I took the bass line. Archer’s voice soared on the tenor. And Mal, who really was our best musician, fitted in between in a harmony so tight, you could walk across a river on the sound.
I should’ve been used to it now, but I was continually amazed at how well we blended. At the nape of my neck, beneath by the long fall of my hide-the-scar camouflage, tiny hairs prickled against my skin. I leaned into the voices, into the sound, into the relief of embracing an old friend.
The song was short. It left me smiling.
It left Nicky wide-eyed. “What was that?” she asked.
Archer flicked a gentle knuckle under her chin. “Gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s a Spanish song Ian found on an old album.”
It was a Mexican song by Alberto Dominguez and had been recorded by dozens of artists in dozens of styles, but close enough.
“Do it again!”
I snorted and went back to scales. But I found I was playing in E, not E-minor, so obviously my spirit had brightened a little. Interesting.
What point had I been trying to make? Right. We were musicians. I felt I’d made my case pretty conclusively.
Nicky turned to asking Archer about our marketing, which was entertaining for Mal and me, since Archer knew a lot less than we did. But we let him swim around in her worshipful regard for a while before bailing him out.
She asked for access to our TikTok and Instagram. Archer and Mal looked at me, and I nodded. Morey had said to do as she said, so we’d do as she said.
“Newsletter? Fan club? Contact with social media influencers? What about the music press—any ins there? What has Lyre done for you?”
It took her until we pulled into Blacksburg to finish slapping one idea after another at us about marketing. By the time we got to the parking lot where Sheree’s drop-in would be staged, Nicky had made it very clear that the genius brains of Aftermath hadn’t done shit to help ourselves.
I was back to E-minor.
It was a relief to get off the bus.
The early June air was warm but not brutally moist yet. Sunset was beginning to make its presence felt in the west. We found ourselves in a forest of buses, drawn like lemmings to some unknown cliff. We followed beautiful strangers to where a tall man with a comb-over waited.
He introduced himself as Bruce Cantrell, the tour manager, and shouted that if we wanted to watch, we could follow some squirt named Dean with a mustache that all but advertised he was masking a micropenis.
Did I want to watch the world’s most famous recording artist show up unannounced on a college campus to sing a dozen of her hits? Songs so pervasive in our culture that every human could now sing along word for word?
Yeah, I guess I could make time for that.
Dean walked our crowd a few blocks through a college campus. Two motorcycles passed us, each driven by a big male in black leather, each bearing a small woman in similar clothing, long red hair blowing in the breeze behind a smoked-out full-face helmet.
“Sheree,” Archer said by my side, “and a decoy. Smart. I’ll bet the decoy is a special forces badass too.”
“There she goes,” Mal said with an excited grin. “Damn! That’s Sheree!” His grin was infectious. We were on tour with that woman.
With Sheree.
We belonged here.
Even I was grinning, with my half a mouth.
We ended up on a large rectangle of lawn surrounded by university buildings, paved pathways in all directions to make a motorcycle escape simple, and a few roads within sight. The security team was on full alert.
Bruce, the tour manager, was talking to a small cluster of men and women in suits. Based on their shifting and peering around, I’d say they were Virginia Tech administration and barely keeping their excitement in check.
We stood on the fringes as someone put a stool and a microphone on the pavement in front of a large building while students busily on their way from here to there looked up with indifference.
And then there she was.
Sheree.
She held a guitar. An Olson, of course. The finest guitar. I felt kinship with her.
She sat on the stool as if she were nothing more than a sidewalk busker and strummed the opening chord of “Untethered,” her most recent chart-topper.
The hair on the back of my head was prickling again. The woman who would hold seventy-five thousand people (all of whom were lucky to have scored tickets) in the palm of her hand tomorrow was now singing for no more than twenty souls crossing the lawn and paying no attention at all.
And then one of them shrieked.
Three women broke for Sheree, and her security moved to block them. But Sheree stared at the women and broke from her song long enough to say, “Sit.”
The women were halted in their flight as if an invisible hook had caught them from behind. One even doubled forward as if her upper body couldn’t stop as quickly as her feet. Then they sat, eyes wide and phones out to record this miracle.
That was all it took. After that, students came from every corner of the campus . . . but they came with a strange sort of reverence. No one rushed Sheree. No one attempted to break through the cordon of large men in black leather.
They sat. They listened. They sang along.
They took photos. They texted friends. And they cheered until I thought they’d go hoarse.
“She’s incredible,” Archer breathed. I nodded.
Sheree finished a song and smiled at the students before her, who had now grown to cover almost every inch of the lawn. “Thanks for letting me drop in,” she said simply, and they freaked out with screams and cheers. “I’m a big fan of Virginia Tech,” she went on. Was that where we were? I’d completely lost track of reality. Shit—she was good.
“Do you all mind if I ask my guitarist to join me?” Obviously, no one minded. I waggled an eyebrow appreciatively. Kai Takahashi was something of a hero of mine, and I was hoping I could meet him on this trip.
He played a spectacular flat-top Martin. It looked like a D-18 with the mellow varnish that made me think it might be an original from 1937. The sound was warm as honey and complimented her voice as if they were made for each other.
By the time the crowd threatened to overwhelm the space, she had her percussionist playing a handsome set of bongos. “Gavin Shasta,” Mal muttered. “He’s awesome.”
She was looking around as if she wanted to bring out her entire horn section when one of the largest guys in black shook his head at her.
“Can you guys give me a minute?” she asked the crowd. They could. They were very willing. But when two motorcycles roared up two different pathways and one of the guys in black retrieved her guitar, the crowd realized they’d been fooled. They rose to their feet and stood in confusion, wondering where she’d gone.
And then, in keeping with her kindness and the mood she’d left the crowd in, the mob mentality flashed away, and they were students once again, laughing and slapping each other and talking about going for coffee.
“Damn,” Archer said. “She did it. She survived a drop-in.”
“She’s not going to get away with that ‘give me a moment’ trick again,” Mal said. “The word will spread.”
“They’ll come up with something.” I was watching Kai, who was calmly shaking hands with the students who’d come up to him. He’d probably shake my hand . . . but no. I wanted him to see me—to see us—as equals. Maybe not equals, but someone who could share the stage with him.
Archer was moving back to the bus, and Mal and I followed him. He was eyeing a cluster of women who’d walked over with us. They looked like dancers. Archer had spotted some new hearts to conquer.
Come to think of it, where was little Nicky?