SEVENTEEN
I started playing in my first band, Infinity 89, when I was fourteen years old. Our first show was at a house party near the college campus. All three of us in the band—me on guitar, my friend Nate on bass, and his older brother Jonah on drums—sucked. None of us had been playing for long, and after the gig we found out that Jonah had bribed the host of the party to let us play. It’s a little-known fact that Adam Wilde’s first foray into playing rock music in front of an audience might never have happened had Jonah Hamilton not pitched in for a keg.
The keg turned out to be the best thing about that show. We were so nervous that we turned the amps up too loud, creating a frenzy of feedback that made the neighbors complain, and then we overcompensated by playing so low that we couldn’t hear one another’s instruments.
What I could hear in the pauses between songs was the sound of the party: the din of beer bottles clinking, of mindless chatter, of people laughing, and, I swear, in the back room of the house, people watching American Idol. The point is, I could hear all this because our band was so crappy that no one bothered to acknowledge that we were playing. We weren’t worth cheering. We were too bad to even boo. We were simply ignored. When we finished playing, the party carried on as if we’d never gone on.
We got better. Never great, but better. And never good enough to play anything but house parties. Then Jonah went off to college, and Nate and I were left without a drummer, and that was the end of Infinity 89.
Thus began my brief stint as a lone singer-songwriter about town, playing in coffeehouses, mostly. Doing the café circuit was marginally better than the house parties. With just me and a guitar, I didn’t need to up the volume that much, and people in the audience were mostly respectful. But as I played, I was still distracted by the sounds of things other than the music: the hiss of the cappuccino maker, the intellectual college students’ hushed conversations about Important Things, the giggles of girls. After the show, the giggles grew louder as the girls came up to me to talk, to ask me about my inspiration, to offer me mix CDs they’d made, and sometimes to offer other things.
One girl was different. She had ropy muscled arms and a fierce look in her eyes. The first time she spoke to me she said only: “You’re wasted.”
“Nope. Sober as a stone,” I replied.
“Not that kind of wasted,” she said, arching her pierced eyebrow. “You’re wasted on acoustic. I saw you play before in that terrible band of yours, but you were really good, even for a child such as yourself.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“You’re welcome. I’m not here for flattery. I’m here for recruitment.”
“Sorry. I’m a pacifist.”
“Funny! I’m a dyke, one who likes to ask and tell, so I’m also ill-suited for the military. No, I’m putting together a band. I think you’re an outrageously talented guitar player so I’m here to rob the cradle, artistically speaking.”
I was barely sixteen years old and a little bit intimidated by this ballsy chick, but I’d said why not. “Who else is in the band?”
“Me on drums. You on guitar.”
“And?”
“Those are the most important parts, don’t you think? Fantastic drummers and singing guitar players don’t grow on trees, not even in Oregon. Don’t worry, I’ll fill in the blanks. I’m Liz by the way.” She stuck out her hand. It was crusted with calluses, always a good sign on a drummer.
Within a month, Liz had drafted Fitzy and Mike, and we’d christened ourselves Shooting Star and started writing songs together. A month after that, we had our first gig. It was another house party, but nothing like the ones I’d played with Infinity 89. Right from the get-go, something was different. When I slashed out my first chord, it was like turning off a light. Everything just fell silent. We had people’s attention and we kept it. In the empty space between songs, people cheered and then got quiet, anticipating our next song. Over time, they’d start shouting requests. After a while, they got to know our lyrics so well that they’d sing along, which was handy when I spaced a lyric.
Pretty soon, we moved on to playing in bigger clubs. I could sometimes make out bar sounds in the background—the clink of glasses, the shouts of orders to a bartender. I also started to hear people scream my name for the first time. “Adam!” “Over here!” A lot of those voices belonged to girls.
The girls I mostly ignored. At this point, I’d started obsessing about a girl who never came to our shows but who I’d seen playing cello at school. And when Mia had become my girlfriend, and then started coming to my shows—and to my surprise, seemed to actually enjoy, if not the gigs, then at least our music—I sometimes listened for her. I wanted to hear her voice calling out my name, even though I knew that was something she’d never do. She was a reluctant plus-one. She tended to hang backstage and watch me with a solemn intensity. Even when she loosened up enough to sometimes watch the show like a normal person, from the audience, she remained pretty reserved. But still, I listened for the sound of her voice. It never seemed to matter that I didn’t hear it. Listening for her was half the fun.
As the band got bigger and the shows got bigger, the cheers just grew louder. And then for a while, it all went quiet. There was no music. No band. No fans. No Mia.
When it came back—the music, the gigs, the crowds—it all sounded different. Even during that two-week tour right on the heels of Collateral Damage’s release, I could tell how much had changed just by how different everything sounded. The wall of sound as we played enveloped the band, almost as if we were playing in a bubble made of nothing other than our own noise. And in between the songs, there was this screaming and shrieking. Soon, much sooner than I ever could’ve imagined, we were playing these enormous venues: arenas and stadiums, to more than fifteen thousand fans.
At these venues, there are just so many people, and so much sound, that it’s almost impossible to differentiate a specific voice. All I hear, aside from our own instruments now blaring out of the most powerful speakers available, is that wild scream from the crowd when we’re backstage and the lights go down right before we go out. And once we’re onstage, the constant shrieking of the crowd melds so it sounds like the furious howl of a hurricane; some nights I swear I can feel the breath of those fifteen thousand screams.
I don’t like this sound. I find the monolithic nature of it disorienting. For a few gigs, we traded our wedge monitors for in-ear pieces. It was perfect sound, as though we were in the studio, the roar of the crowd blocked off. But that was even worse in a way. I feel so disconnected from the crowds as it is, by the distance between them and us, a distance separated by a vast expanse of stage and an army of security keeping fans from bounding up to touch us or stage-dive the way they used to. But more than that, I don’t like that it’s so hard to hear any one single voice break through. I dunno. Maybe I’m still listening for that one voice.
Every so often during a show, though, as me or Mike pause to retune our guitars or someone takes a swig from a bottle of water, I’ll pause and strain to pick out a voice from the crowd. And every so often, I can. Can hear someone shouting for a specific song or screaming I love you! Or chanting my name.
As I stand here on the Brooklyn Bridge I’m thinking about those stadium shows, of their hurricane wail of white noise. Because all I can hear now is a roaring in my head, a wordless howl as Mia disappears and I try to let her.
But there’s something else, too. A small voice trying to break through, to puncture the roar of nothingness. And the voice grows stronger and stronger, and it’s my voice this time and it’s asking a question: How does she know?