Layla and Liam had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary when a scout from Minneapolis showed up at Connie’s one night and quietly, unobtrusively, watched the band’s first and second sets. Not even Scotty had known he was coming, which pissed him off when he found out about it after the fact. But as she would soon find out, this wasn’t really about Storm Warning; it was about Layla.
She never did find out how the scout, whose name was Michael, had gotten her number, but he called her four days later and left a message on the answering machine. She’d been standing right next to it when the call came in, and if her hands hadn’t been full of the mail she’d grabbed on her way in, she’d have answered it. But instead she stood beside the phone listening to the message as it came through. She dropped the mail right before it ended, picked up the phone, and said, “Hey, it’s Layla. I just walked in the door.”
Layla drove to Minneapolis to meet with Michael two days later. They convened at a nondescript office building that looked a lot less rock-and-roll and a lot more corporate than she’d anticipated. The scout also looked like nothing Layla had expected him to. He was dressed casually, his handshake was firm, and his eyes were kind.
That was her first mistaken assumption.
They shook hands and then he introduced her to the other man who’d accompanied him into the room. “This is Neal.” Layla would describe Neal’s eyes as calculating. He looked her up and down as if cataloguing her physical characteristics, which was exactly what he was doing.
Layla slid a CD in a plastic case across the table. “We don’t have a demo yet. This is just something we recorded live one night. And I can sing anything you want.”
Neal held up his hands as if he thought she might belt out a tune right there in her seat. “Michael has heard you sing. You’ve got a great voice.”
“Thanks,” she said, and she waited to hear what he would say, because why in the hell was she even here?
“You guys would do fine playing Steve Miller covers for the college crowds, but your original stuff isn’t going to fly; it’s not distinct enough. There’s no hook.”
Layla wanted to point out that they rarely played Steve Miller Band covers and their fan base was not composed entirely of college students, but that wasn’t the point, so she didn’t. “I can’t really help with the original part. I don’t write. I just perform.”
“You’ve actually got a really great stage presence. When you’re singing and playing it really electrifies your look. It elevates it. You could do something with that. The others can’t because they don’t have it, but you could.”
So, the fact that she didn’t write her own music didn’t matter at all. And thank goodness for the spotlight, because apparently she leveled up when she was under it. She’d probably be at the mercy of a producer who planned to take this lump of female unformed clay and turn it into a pop singer. They’d tell her what to wear, how to look, and they’d wrap it in a sparkly bow like it was a gift and wasn’t she lucky? Would she be required to dye her hair? Wear contacts that punched up the blue in her eyes. Implants? The list of ways Layla’s current look wouldn’t fly was probably a mile long. Would she be expected to dance onstage? That wasn’t as bad as hearing that her physical attributes were such a disappointment, but it would be problematic because she wasn’t a great dancer. The thought of standing on a stage doing choreographed moves while wearing a headset was too ridiculous to contemplate.
“I guess I’d have to think about that. I was really hoping there might be something for us as a band.”
“I don’t see that happening,” Neal said. It was the kind of news he probably delivered once a week and he had probably forgotten how soul-crushing it felt to the recipient. Or he knew exactly and didn’t care. The music industry wasn’t for the faint of heart, and she liked to think she was realistic enough to understand that. In Rochester, the band was at the top of the food chain and she was its star attraction. In Minneapolis, she was just another cute girl with a guitar who could be molded into something better.
Little fish, big pond.
Had she really expected to leave the meeting with a recording deal? In her wildest fantasies, maybe. But at the very least she’d preemptively been thinking about how she’d announce the fantastic news to Liam, to the band. That she’d made some inroads and they were finally going to inch forward and become something more than a bar band. There was also a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, a very conflicted sensation when she thought about what might happen if she decided to grab the opportunity and leave the others behind. Wasn’t this exactly what she wanted? To be onstage singing to a crowd? Hearing the applause? Seeing the looks on their faces? Fame and fortune and everything that came with it? She dyed her hair all the time. Colored contacts weren’t so bad. She’d draw the line at implants, but maybe the other things wouldn’t be a deal breaker.
She’d promised Michael and Neal that she’d think about it, so maybe she’d take a week or so and really contemplate the crossroads she found herself at.
When she got home, she called Scotty and asked him to meet her for a drink. She told him everything, because she wanted to head off the possibility of the news somehow getting back to him or the band and she wanted to make sure he heard it directly from her.
“He’s right, you know,” Scotty said. “You guys just aren’t there yet with the original stuff. Don’t get me wrong, you’re getting there. You need more songs like the one you sang at your wedding. That was good. Crowds love that shit.”
“What about the things he said about me?” She had a hard time looking Scotty in the eye when she asked it.
“All true,” Scotty said. “Pop stars are not born; they’re made in a studio.” Layla didn’t think that was one hundred percent accurate. Plenty of female singers had made it big on their own merits—Ann and Nancy Wilson came to mind. But that was in the seventies, and the turn of the century had brought disruptive changes to the entertainment industry. Things were different now.
“There are lots of things the band can do that we haven’t even tried yet,” she told Scotty.
“Yeah, and they’ll either work, or they won’t,” he said, always the pragmatist. “Only time will tell.”
* * *
The sound of Norton whining in protest when Josh tried to coax him from his warm dog bed startled her. “I’m sorry,” Layla said. “I got lost in a memory there for a minute.”
“Thinking about the glory days?” Josh asked as he leaned down to pick up the bed that Norton had reluctantly vacated.
“Yeah, something like that.”
chapter 28
Layla
Layla and Tonya were standing at the curb the next morning trying not to freeze. Layla wouldn’t have minded being able to feel her extremities, but she was happy to get back into a routine and it would have been futile to complain. “So, I took your advice and Norton and I went to PetSmart.”
“And you struck up a conversation with a nice man and you’re meeting him for a drink this weekend?”
“Or, I ran into Josh’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, who was there with his daughter buying a hamster.”