By Glenn Gooodspeed (September, 1999)
(Limited Volvo content.)
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a musician. I didn't really know it then, but there were indications. When I was eight years old, my brother and I went off to summer camp for the first time. My favorite camp counselor's name was Gale, and I can still picture him leading songs in the camp lodge with the other counselors. They all played guitars, and I noticed that Gale strummed with his thumb, while the others seemed to be using their index fingers. Looking back on it now, it seems the kind of detail that only a musician would notice.
We lived in England for a couple of years when I was young, and every morning I had toast with Robinson's jam for breakfast. Each jar of Robinson's had a small cartoon figure called a Gollywog printed on paper and glued to the lid. For a time, anyone who saved up six Gollies and sent them to the company received a choice of one of four cloisonne pins. Each pin depicted a Gollywog in a different occupational outfit. There were police, doctor and hardhat Gollies, and a Golly with a guitar. I remember having to decide which one to choose, and it didn't take long. The musical Gollywog arrived a few weeks later.
Even so, I never expressed an interest in playing a musical instrument until I was a teenager. During the late sixties, pop music took such a serious turn that we called it "underground." Once I got used to the new sound, I couldn't hear enough of the Small Faces, Cream, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix. Puberty and psychedelia hit me at the same time. Rock music was the perfect outlet for my youthful energy, and I saved my allowance for months to purchase a cheap electric guitar.
More than anything, I wanted to be like Eric Clapton, to have a three-piece band with monster amplifiers and play in front of thousands of screaming, idolatrous fans; to make piles of money and spend it on fast cars, large houses and psychedelic drugs. One night I set up a portable record player next to my bed so that it would play "Crossroads" and "Spoonful" all night long. I thought maybe I would pick up some of Clapton's licks in my sleep. It didn't work, but I got pretty good with the guitar by the time I was in high school. I tried to start a band, but being a bit of a loner, I never met enough other kids who could stick with it long enough to learn more than a few songs.
In college, I became even more independent socially, and I used the guitar and lots of marijuana to fill the time that most other youths spent with their friends. In the evenings I went to the little nightclubs that surrounded the campus to drink beer and listen to music. In my sophomore year, I posted an ad on the bulletin board in the Music Building to try to attract some other musicians. I found a drummer and a bass player. Like me, they had no real band experience, but we had nothing better to do, so we practiced five nights a week until we had twenty-odd rock and blues songs together, and then we started to play for a few dollars in some of the local bars.
The band lasted about six months, and then for the rest of my college career and several years afterward, I was in and out of more bands than I can count, few of which ever made it to a paying gig. I was married soon after college. There was no income from my music, so to contribute to the joint coffers, I parleyed my experience with electronic sound equipment into a day job as a television repair technician.
As the years piled up, I lost hope of ever becoming like Eric Clapton, and I eventually stopped practicing the guitar and joined a church choir just for something to do. I didn't dwell on it, but I was disappointed that I couldn't make music the way I wanted to. I spent a lot of time at work listening to jazz, and I began to drink too much at home.
After a while, the choir director found out I had been a guitar player, and she asked me if I would accompany the choir as a volunteer. I was delighted, and I brought my guitar to the next practice. The choir was skeptical of the flashy red and chrome instrument and the electronic amplifier, but as soon as they heard it, they were hooked.
I was a disciplined type who believed that a good musician could play anything, and since I thought of myself as a good musician, I took the church music seriously, cut back on the alcohol and practiced hard. I made my own jazz-styled interpretation of the music, a more refined approach than the "boom-chukka" sound of the acoustic players who sometimes sat in at the church. I kept to the background and let the traditional keyboards cover the foreground, but my guitar-playing added a sparkle that several parishioners complimented.
I was enjoying myself, and so was the keyboard player. After a few months, I began to think she had more than a casual interest in me. Pretty silly, since we were both married and in the church choir, but my suspicion awakened a more personal interest in her. She was an exquisite musician with a gentle touch and natural feeling, one of the rare ones who does not try to dominate musically. To me, making music together is much better than making music in spite of each other. When I play with someone who tries to play with me, or at least doesn't try to drown me out, that's when I make the best music. Before long, I became infatuated with Deb, much to my own surprise and irritation. Life was difficult enough without a love affair, and I did not intend to start one, but I enjoyed the music too much to quit.
As my feelings for her intensified, I struggled to overcome not only the temptations of intimacy, but also the silly, self-conscious awkwardness that I hadn't felt since I was a teenager. During the church service, there was a time when we were invited to greet our neighbors with a "sign of peace," meaning a hug or a handshake. I wanted to give her a big hug, but she was a foot shorter than I, and I had to bend over to get my arms around her. This put my collarbone right at the level of her cheekbone, and they sometimes collided forcefully. Sort of symbolic, I suppose.
We were quite different in our musical and personal tastes. I had raised myself on underground rock and blues, and I had the earrings and long hair to prove it. She, on the other hand, was a classically-trained piano teacher who gave lessons to the church kids. Although she was pretty and had a good figure, she dressed like people our parents' age and seemed to think like them, too. Not so much old-fashioned as just straight. I used to tease her with verbal and musical references to jazz and rock music, about which she seemed clueless. She probably thought I was a bit of a know-it-all.
One odd thing about Deb was her car. It didn't seem like the kind of car she would own, and I asked her about it once when I walked her out to the parking lot at church. It was a swoopy little sports wagon that resembled a classic Jaguar or Ferrari. It had lustrous white paint and a blue leather interior. Deb explained that the car was not really hers. Her brother had asked her to keep it while he was overseas on an extended tour for the Marine Corps. She said it was a 1973 Volvo P1800ES. "It's such a bother," she said. "People are always stopping and asking me about it." She had her own car, but it had an expensive mechanical problem, so she drove the Volvo instead.
Even though an affair was out of the question, I wanted to try to be friends. I went to as many church services as I could just to see her and play with her. I would drive by her house whenever my route passed through her neighborhood, and once stopped because I saw her working in the yard. I called her sometimes on a pretext, but after a while she seemed to grow impatient with my attempts at friendship. Since I'm not naturally outgoing to begin with, it was an effort for me to do that much, and I was unsure what else to do. I always sent her a birthday card, because her birthday was on Halloween, and I could say it was easy to remember. We played together for a few years, and I was still pretty much stuck on her when she moved to another town for a better-paying job at a Methodist church.
Our new piano player, Michael, was an unmitigated prissy queen, so I decided to learn the electric bass at his expense. I bought a cheap bass and a small amp and kept it low enough so no one was bothered except him.
I had always wanted to learn the bass, but never could spare the time from the guitar. Now, with no incentive to keep playing guitar, the time was right. I got my fingers accustomed to the fretboard and strings by playing the root notes of the guitar chords. After a while, I got good enough to be bored with this method and began to improvise bass parts. Michael kept getting more irritating. He often decided to play songs of his own choosing rather than the ones that were scheduled for mass, and sometimes he substituted songs so abruptly that I couldn't find the sheet music before he started playing. He also had an annoying habit of telling me not to play on a lot of the songs. I guess he thought he was too good for me, and this might have been true, but he told other musicians not to play, too.
I began to think it would be more fun to try putting a band together. This was a big step for me, because it had been several years since I gave up the idea of ever being a professional musician, and if it hadn't been for the church, I probably would not be playing as an amateur. I'd always had difficulty finding bass players when I played guitar, and guitar players were a dime a dozen, so I figured I had a marketable skill now.
I bought some decent equipment, put up notices on bulletin boards at local music stores and started looking at ads in the newspaper. I had one or two false starts, and then fell in with a "classic rock" group that looked like it might go somewhere. They already had played a dance gig before they lost their bass player, and they had about thirty songs worked out. My repertoire added more songs, so we were ready to play out after a few weeks of practice.
My new band had three players besides myself. Jose, the guitar player, was a huge Mexican-American guy my own age (thirty-eight). He had wonderful technique from many years of practice, and he could play scalding improvised lead solos along the lines of Carlos Santana. He also was absent-minded and sometimes forgot parts of songs, so it was fortunate that he had a gift for improvisation. Ricky, the keyboard player, was twenty-five. He was good with the keys, and could sing backup on some songs. The drummer, Johnny, was the leader of the band, and he sang the lead vocals on almost all of the songs. He was Ricky's age, so already there was a line between them and me and Jose.
Johnny was a spoiled brat. That's the best way to put it. We practiced in the garage at his parents' house, where he lived with them and his own young wife and kid. His dad lay around on a couch in front of the TV set all the time with a beer handy. His mom was normal-looking and very sweet, but she treated Johnny like he was a precious three-year-old who didn't know any better. Johnny had the biggest drum set I've ever seen outside of a Led Zeppelin concert, and it was all brand-new, shiny Ludwig stuff, not cheap, so I know he didn't buy it on his day salary as a shoe salesman.
One evening during practice Johnny demanded that we play an instrumental part in the middle of a song when the rest of us agreed that it belonged at the end. When he saw he was outnumbered, he threw his drumsticks on the floor and stomped out of the garage. We all just stood around looking at each other for a few minutes, and then he came back in and said, "O.K., we'll do it your way." For the rest of the evening, he pouted. No chitchat, no breaks, and he pounded the drums even on soft songs.
Ricky was a good keyboard player and easier to work with, but he lived in a town twenty miles away, and he had no transportation. Johnny picked him up for practice twice a week and drove him home afterward. Johnny liked to tell the story of how they did the dance gig with the former bass player, and by the time they packed up all the equipment and dropped off Ricky, the sun was rising. I kept thinking, no way am I going to be chauffeuring musicians at five in the morning, no matter what gigs we get. Jose asked him how come he didn't get a job and buy a car, and Ricky said he was too busy with his music. He also lived with his parents.
Jose was real easygoing. He'd do anything we asked if it wasn't too much trouble and if he could remember it. It's good to have people like that in a band. If everyone has to lead, the band gets pulled apart. Of course, if no one leads, it falls apart. I've always been a leader, but I was still a novice bass player with a lot to learn, so I just hung back and practiced my parts without trying to direct things. I was a better vocalist than Johnny, which was pretty obvious the first time I sang, but I let him decide who sang what while I honed my bass technique.
One of the rites of band formation is choosing the name. I had been through so many name debates by the time I joined these guys that I didn't really care what name we had. I don't think I even made any suggestions, but just waited for the outcome, which was "Spiral Face," one of the stupider choices, I thought. Usually the name debate is accelerated by the need to promote the band. We were ready to play, so we needed to be able to tell people who we were.
A geeky friend of Ricky's came and took pictures of our faces and put them on a poster with a spiral design. Johnny took a dozen of them to the owner of the Ox and Elf, a small nightclub that had a reputation for hiring unknown bands, and secured our first engagement. When you're unknown, you usually have to play weeknights for ridiculous pay, and the Ox was famous among musicians for paying almost nothing. The deal was that the bartender or waitress would pass the hat around the bar. The bar would match whatever was in the hat at the end of the night. Well, it was obviously a hoax. All you'd have to do would be to have several people put in twenty-dollar bills and theoretically you could pay them back and make a profit. We never tried that, though, because it was rumored that Tosh, the bartender, took out whatever seemed excessive. No one was ever brave enough to argue with Tosh, who looked like he belonged in the pro wrestling ring.
Our first gig was on a Wednesday night. It went pretty well. There were a dozen people, some of them danced, and Johnny's parents came and stayed the whole night. It was the first time I had seen his dad in anything but a T-shirt. We played a couple more weeknights to successively smaller crowds, and then they finally booked us for a Friday night. I think we made eighty dollars that night, but Johnny was in one of his little brat snits. Jim, a friend of Jose's, had helped haul the equipment to the bar with his pickup truck, but he had to leave early. Now we were having trouble finding places to put all the instruments, speakers and amplifiers in the three cars we had between us. Johnny was angry that Jim had left, although there was no reason to expect him to help us haul equipment at 2:30 in the morning. Then he sat and pouted, saying nothing, doing nothing. There were two bulky drum cases left on the ground and no place to put them.
I asked Johnny if he could rearrange the load in his car. No answer. I asked him if he thought pouting would help. No answer. I asked if he planned to spend the night in the parking lot. No answer. I was ready to leave, so I grabbed a couple of extension cords, lashed the drum cases to the door handles of my car and pulled the car up to where Johnny was still pouting. "I hope there aren't any thieves loose in your neighborhood, because I'm leaving all your shit in the front yard," I said, and left. Well, what do you know, they all showed up five minutes after I began unloading.
We had a few more gigs at local dives, none of which paid well, and by now Johnny and Ricky thought they were famous rock stars. They said they were busy writing original songs and they were going to have enough to record a CD soon. They kept their material secret, though, as if it were so valuable that Jose or I might steal it if we heard it. They pressured Jose to stop forgetting his guitar parts, which just made him worse. He never complained, but you could see that his confidence was vaporizing. One night he dropped by my house, came in and sat down on the couch in the living room. It creaked under his weight. He sat wordless, a dour expression on his face.
"What's up, Jose?" I asked.
"He pisses me off. I don't want to talk to him no more."
"Who? Johnny?"
"Yeah, that little prick-head pendejo. I don't even want to talk to him. It makes me mad just to think about him."
"You going to quit the band, Jose?"
"I don't even want to see him any more. He pisses me off."
"Have you tried talking to him about this?"
"Talking won't do no good. He's made up his mind."
My wife had been cooking supper, and it was ready, so I asked Jose if he'd join us, but he said no. I excused myself and went into the kitchen to eat. By the time we finished, we could hear him snoring loudly. Jose could sleep anywhere, any time. He was still sitting upright on the couch. I suggested we do the dishes before waking him. When I walked back into the living room, he was awake again.
"You want a drink, Jose?" I asked.
"Naw. I gotta go." He stood up.
"You coming to practice tomorrow?"
"Yeah, I guess." He left.
The next day, Johnny called and told me they had fired Jose, and they were looking for another guitar player. I already had decided to quit if they fired Jose, so I told Johnny I'd be over to pick up my stuff. He wasn't too happy about it. He tried to convince me that I'd be better off sticking with them, because they were much better musicians than Jose, and they were going to get a recording contract with their original material, blah, blah, blah. When I got to his house, Ricky answered the door and asked me what I wanted. He wouldn't let me in, but made me itemize the things I wanted to pick up so he could get them and bring them to the door.
The following day I called Jose, and we agreed to start our own band. I had a little garage apartment in back of the house that we could use for practice space, and between us we had an almost complete sound system in addition to our instruments. I felt very lucky to have hooked up with Jose. Rock and blues musicians are such a flaky lot. For every dozen aspiring players, there are only one or two who have what it takes: dedication, ability, financial stability and personality, among other things. Jose was talented, never missed a practice, had a good day job, and he would play anything I wanted. More important, I liked him, and I couldn't say that about most people. With the two of us as a foundation, I knew I could build a working band that would be good enough to play any bar in town, and possibly progress to even bigger things. I could do more of the vocal work, and I could choose songs that I liked.
Although I knew we could make it with the addition of a drummer, I wanted another guitar player, too, someone who could remember all the parts. I didn't tell Jose this in so many words, because I was trying to rebuild his confidence. I did tell him over and over in different ways what I thought of his guitar-playing, which was truly excellent. There is a point in musicianship when the player has learned enough about the instrument that no technical improvement is necessary or perhaps even possible. A player who has mastered the instrument to this level is no longer playing notes, strings or frets. Rather, the music flows from some other place beyond the real world through the musician and out of the instrument. It is more the music playing the musician than the other way around, and this is how Jose could play when conditions were right. However, we still needed someone who could remember the basics and reproduce the licks that people expected to hear "just like the record." Besides, a three-piece band is never as entertaining as a four-piece.
We built the band a piece at a time, first adding another guitar player, practicing for a couple months, then adding a drummer. The guitar player, Brett, was an engineer with an aerospace company. He was younger than us and inexperienced, but he was willing to work and he had a knack for reproducing the recorded phrases that made people recognize their favorite songs. He also brought plenty of fresh material to the songlist, as he was a fan of current pop and alternative rock, and he was interested in singing. I encouraged him to sing. He didn't have a great voice, but singing is much more technique than voice, and I could help him with the technique. Besides, I was not keen on doing all the singing myself, and Jose was not a singer. Rock music is very hard on the voice, and I had to be careful or I would be hoarse by the end of the evening.
Our new drummer, Denny, was a woman. I wasn't crazy about the idea of a woman drummer, but she was the first drummer we auditioned who knew what she was doing and acted like she would stick with it. She also said she knew some of the local bar owners and could get us gigs, which was a big advantage. Hustling gigs is the most dreaded task for many musicians, who tend to be introspective and sensitive, not the type to go around readily glad-handing tough bar owners and facing routine rejection. Maybe it was easier for a woman, or maybe it was that Denny truly knew every bar owner in town, but she did pull in the gigs for us. We called the band the Insiders.
Our first job was one of the best we ever got, $200 a night, two weekends in a row. To boot, the club, the Wildwood Lounge, was only a mile from my house. The Woody, as we called it, was pretty standard fare for a small-time bar band. Packed tight, it would have held seventy-five people. Normally on a weekend, the crowd numbered about fifty. None of the places we played could have been considered classy. The Woody probably started out as a hamburger joint in the fifties and had been "remodeled" several times, meaning it had layers of cheap plywood paneling tacked to the walls and a thick coat of filthy dark carpeting on the floor. Someone had added a plywood porch and a swinging inner door at the back, no doubt to shield the nearby residences from the amplified music as people came and went. The swinging door had a peculiar grinding squeak.
The Woody had changed hands frequently, and every owner added another feature, so the overall effect, although shabby and disjointed, could also be considered eclectic and intimate. It had a broad "L" shape, and there was a tiny stage at the foot of the "L." The stage was too small for a four-piece band, so Jose stood on the floor next to stage right. At his elbow was a large, powerful jukebox. The walls behind and to the left of the stage were tiled with smoked mirrors, and the mirrors were almost hidden by strings of multi-colored plastic beads hung from above. There were a few stage lights made from old coffee cans loosely attached to the ceiling. A panel in the wall at stage left held a number of switches and dimmers, some of which worked the lights and some of which did nothing. Everything was covered with the hazy patina of settled cigarette smoke and spilled beer, a combination that lends its humid aroma to all cheap lounges. The ventilation system was so inadequate that our eyes watered from the cigarette smoke. The Woody's crowning glory was the mirror ball that hung over a sunken dance floor no bigger than the stage.
We started at nine-thirty each night and played forty-five-minute sets with a fifteen-minute break after each set. It was a good crowd of local working men and women, and they liked us, which made us play harder. Sometimes people would get up and dance, but mostly they just sat and drank and yelled at each other over the music, which we played pretty loud. For Denny to do a good job, the music had to be loud enough that she could hit the drums hard if she wanted to without drowning out the rest of the band. In a rock band, each musician is continually changing sounds and volume and trying to be heard, so in many bands the music keeps getting louder until it is ear-splitting by the end of the night. I preached to my band-mates often about making audio space for each other, and it must have worked, because our overall level remained fairly constant. I was proud of us. I felt we had potential.
We practiced two nights a week, from seven to ten o'clock. Gigs substituted for practice nights when we had them, which was about twice a month. We played all kinds of places, from squeaky-clean sports bars to hole-in-the wall biker joints where all the patrons were missing some of their front teeth. One of these, the Anvil, was a cinder-block cube in Mineral Wells, about two hours west of our hometown of Fort Worth. I would never have considered driving clear to Mineral Wells for a gig, but Jose knew some people there from his high school days, including the owner of the Anvil. It was better than practicing at home, so we loaded up and set out right after work one Friday in April.
Most of the sound system and the larger amplifiers were packed in Brett's pickup truck and covered with a tarp. Jose rode with me in my new Honda Civic, and Denny drove herself. Denny never rode with the rest of us. She seemed afraid that we would try to take advantage of her. At least that was the only explanation I could come up with. You'd think that after knowing us for almost a year, she would lighten up, but she never did.
About ten miles west of town, we could see an ugly black cloud approaching. I briefly considered trying to navigate around it, as springtime thunderstorms in Texas can be violent, but we were already late. Besides, it looked like we would have to drive a long way to get around this one. Soon it began to rain hard and the wind blew in gusts that threatened to force the little Honda off the road. I slowed down but kept moving. Then it began to hail, and did it ever! The hailstones were the size of golf balls, and they fell so fast that I couldn't see the road in front of the car. The din was so loud as they crashed into the roof and hood of the car that Jose and I had to yell at each other to be heard. I was afraid the windshield would break.
I stopped for a minute or two, but then I figured we'd be better off if we kept moving, so I told Jose to watch for cars in front while I steered the car by watching for the road stripes out the side window. It seemed like forever, but in fifteen minutes we were clear of the storm. My new Honda was bashed up pretty bad. Jose laughed at the irony of destroying a $10,000 car for a $180 gig, but I wasn't quite ready to laugh about it yet.
We pulled up at the Anvil a couple hours later and drew a crowd of onlookers with the dented cars and the story. The bartender told us the storm had got worse as it crossed Fort Worth. It caused a lot of damage, floods and power failures. An outdoor art festival had been destroyed by hailstones the size of baseballs. Some people had been hospitalized for hailstone injuries.
We still had a gig to do, so we dried off things as best we could and set up quickly. The acoustics inside the cinder block building were the worst ever. There was no carpet, nothing on the walls, not even a false ceiling. If the place had been quiet, the sound of a pin dropping would probably have reverberated audibly for thirty seconds. It took half the first set to get the sound adjusted, and even then it was pretty poor. At least the crowd liked it. More people arrived, and by eleven o'clock, the place was about full with thirty or forty bikers in their usual denim, leather, chains, tatoos and colorful bandanas.
I don't know what it is about bikers. They are so fierce-looking that no one in their right mind would ever mess with one, but to the members of the band they were courteous and appreciative. There was one guy who stood in front of us all night and danced, if you could call it that. He kept his feet in one place and moved his body in time to the music, but never enough to spill the mug of beer in his hand. Sometimes at the end of a song he would cheer.
Another one, a tall, muscular man with bright eyes and a full beard, danced with a girl who must have been underage. She looked no older than sixteen, and she was about half his size, small and thin. Their dance was almost embarrassingly sexual. The strong man, swaying with the music, picked up the girl and slowly rubbed her slight body against him like a towel. Sometimes he laughed heartily. The girl showed little expression, smiling rarely.
Between sets I was in the restroom when the strong man came in and stood at the urinal next to me. I was surprised when he spoke with a French accent. He told me he really liked it around here, because it was so easy to find work. I asked him what he did, and he said "oilfield work."
At the end of the night, we loaded up the equipment. Jose was busy with someone out in the parking lot, so I went in to pick up our pay. Steve, the owner, was talking with the barmaid. I leaned up against one of the steel poles that held up the roof while I waited for a chance to speak with him. After a minute, he asked me, "What do you want?"
"Just come to pick up what you owe us," I said.
He looked blank. "I don't owe you nothin'," he said emphatically. As I looked at him, I realized that in spite of the fact that I had just spent four hours standing in front of him playing music, he did not know who I was. The lights in the place were dim, but still you'd think he would recognize me. As I was thinking, his look began to change from blank to annoyed.
"I'm with the band," I said.
His annoyance suddenly turned to anger, I guess because I had rightly contradicted him. He looked at me for a moment, seething, and then swung hard with his open hand and smacked the pole next to my head. I didn't flinch. "O.K.," he said, "I'll get your money."
We did pretty well for almost a year, but then things started to unravel. I was not surprised. Every band has personality clashes, and as soon as people get to know each other and loosen up a little, the clashes get serious.
Brett, with a little experience under his belt, was now getting the swelled head. Having seldom been through the formation and breakup of a band, he did not understand how difficult it was to put one together and make it work. He took my leadership for granted, and maybe I was too subtle a leader. It was my style to encourage and foster without cracking the whip or policing. Whatever needed doing, I would call on the appropriate person to take it on. At the same time, I held up my end of the music with a lot of hard work and individual practice. I never actually claimed to be the leader of the band, but we all knew I was. Brett just decided to try to run things himself anyway.
I usually prepared songlists of six or seven songs for the short, unpaid demo performances we did to convince bar owners to hire us. I planned the content carefully around factors like the type of place we were auditioning in, the expected crowd, whether the songs were fast or slow, and in particular, who was singing. I always made sure that Brett and I got equal time singing, not only because we both liked to sing, but because it made more variety for the audience. At one practice session the night before a demo, Brett showed up with his own songlist, which contained only songs that showcased his guitar playing and on which he sang the lead vocals. It took several minutes of arguing to convince him that we needed to vary the list, and he only agreed to change it because I was adamant. This was a small thing, but it reflected Brett's growing attitude that he was more valuable to the band than Jose or I.
Denny was wearing on me in another way. She had strong opinions about many aspects of the band that I didn't care enough about to argue with, such as whether to market ourselves as a blues band or a rock band. But the things we disagreed on seemingly could not be resolved. She wanted me to mike her drums and amplify them through the sound system. I explained carefully that the drums must not be amplified, because at most of the places we played, the owner or bartender at some point would tell us to turn the music down. The drums were the loudest instruments in the band, and adding them to the sound system would only make them louder. The explanation was lost on her, and she kept asking me to mike the drums. I almost set up mikes just to keep her happy, thinking I could always leave the volume at zero, but the extra work did not seem worth it.
Denny often brutally expressed opinions that did more harm than good, and usually they were aimed at me. She arrived late to practice one night when I and the others were trying to work out a new song. I was nowhere near to having learned the vocal part, as she should have known, but the first thing she said as she walked in the door was, "I could hear you outside, and you sound like you're just hollering." Between Denny's jibes and Brett's attitude, I was ready for a change. We still had one good gig left on the calendar, so I decided to hold out until we finished that one. Then I intended to quit the band and rest up until I felt ready to start again with some new musicians. I didn't tell the others of my plan for fear it would affect the quality of the music.
The last gig promised to be a good one. It was on Halloween, traditionally a big party night in bars, and it was at a popular Irish-theme bar called the Shamrock. The Shamrock was known for its hard-drinking, hard-partying regulars. We had visited on "jam night" a couple months previously, and the crowd was large and raucous. We made up special handbills showing ghostly figures with the caption, "Appearing mysteriously at the Shamrock." The day before the gig, Denny and Brett went to a party store and bought a bunch of Halloween decorations. After setting up our equipment, we decorated the stage with skeletons, spider webs, bats and other strange things. We had already spent more than half our pay for the night, but the stage was magnificent.
Of course, on Halloween, costumes are expected, and the bar was sponsoring a costume contest. I dressed as a pirate with a big, gold earring, an eye patch and a bandana tied around my head. Denny rented a comical Cat in the Hat outfit. Jose put on traditional Mexican clothes and a huge sombrero, while Brett claimed to be a cold-war spy in trench coat, homburg and dark glasses.
The crowd was ready to party, and the small dance floor was packed all night. Brett threw Silly String containers into the crowd, and everyone shot the stuff at each other. Jose's nephew brought his beautiful young girlfriend, who won the costume contest simply by opening the long Dracula-style cape she wore, revealing a bright red, sparingly cut bodysuit over black fishnet stockings and a figure that belonged in a movie.
I always enjoyed watching dancers, but this night was special. There were so many women in alluring costumes that it was difficult at times to concentrate on the music. One in particular caught my eye, not because she was especially attractive, but because she was alone. She had been standing at the bar when we arrived to set up the stage, and she had not moved or spoken with anyone. Her costume covered her head completely, so that even if you knew her, you could not identify her. Her mask bore the face of some imaginary ghoul, like a skull, but with the appearance of pale skin over it. A piece of black cloth was fastened to the mask on all sides and pulled back to cover her head.
Halfway through our second set, when the dance floor was nearly full, I saw the mystery woman dancing. She was near the edge of the floor, dancing not with abandon, but giving herself gently to the music. She seemed entranced, almost in slow motion. She wore a skin-tight, black skirt that came down to her knees, but was slit up the front to mid-thigh height. She swayed and bent as naturally as grass in a breeze. I saw her dancing from time to time throughout the evening, always alone. During one song, she stood directly in front of me and danced in her slow, graceful style. I could not help staring at her legs moving inside the slit skirt. At one point, I looked right into the eyes of the ghoulish mask and was surprised to find calm, blue and very human eyes searching mine.
When the night was over, I forgot about the dancing woman in the rush to get everything broken down and moved out the back entrance to the cars. Then I went in and sat down at the bar to wait for the owner to pay us. I saw the woman still sitting at the same spot. I might have spoken to her, but the owner arrived with the money, and I went out to pay my band-mates. I got in my car to leave. As I pulled around the building, I suddenly realized who the woman must be. She was the right size and shape, and the blue eyes were a match. And her car was parked right there by the front entrance. It was Deb, the church keyboard player!
I turned quickly and pulled into the adjacent space. I looked into the Volvo for some confirmation, and there it was, a Methodist hymnal and a bunch of sheet music for the organ. I went to the front door, but it was locked. I sprinted around to the back, and nearly gave the waitress a heart attack as I yanked open the door she had almost closed. "'Scuse me," I muttered, pushing past her. The woman was gone from the bar. The owner looked at me, puzzled. "Hey," I said, "what happened to her?" I motioned at her stool. "Just left," he said, pointing to the front door. I walked quickly to the door and pushed it open, but I was too late. The white Volvo was already halfway down the street, its mellow exhaust note exaggerated by the early morning stillness. I stood in the parking lot for a few minutes trying to sort it out in my mind. I've been trying to sort it out ever since. I called her a couple of times, but she never returned my calls.
I quit the band the day after Halloween. They tried to find another bass player who could sing, but it fell apart after a few weeks. I knew it would -- it was my band. It's been a couple of years now, and I'm thinking about getting back into it. Not that I'd call Denny anyway, but I heard she quit playing. Brett moved to California. I'll probably call Jose, and we'll start over. I always liked Jose.
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