Rock All Night

88




Speaking of stories in major national magazines, I had one to write. So I got started on it.

It was, without question, the hardest thing I’d ever attempted.

Part of it was the pressure. When you’re writing crap articles for crap indie papers for crap money, you don’t place any particular importance on them. It’s not that you half-ass them (although, yes, I’ve done that once or twice); it’s that you’re waiting for your Big Break, so anything that’s not your Big Break, you don’t fret over. Most of the stuff I had written in the past I didn’t attach any world-shaking importance to, I just did it. Without thinking, without worrying – I just did it. Like a rookie quarterback who gets shoved into the game without expecting it at all, so he has no time to develop nerves and sabotage himself.

But the Big Break was finally here.


And I couldn’t stop fretting about it.

Glen was right, in his assholish way: despite the repetition and the grind of the Road, I was living out a sort of fantasy vacation. I was sleeping with the man of my dreams, I was hanging out with the hottest rock band in the world, and I was writing for the biggest music magazine ever.

It was the ‘writing’ part that was the problem.

There were sooooo many things to distract me. (One of them was tattooed and very, very sexy.) And so I let them distract me, because it was easier than gearing down and actually doing the work.

Because the possibility of failure was terrifying.

I was like the rookie football player in his first pro game ever – but they’d told him a couple of weeks beforehand. And he’d taken every opportunity in that time to worry, and obsess, and convince himself how bad he was going to suck.

And now it was time to dress out for the game, and he was a nervous wreck.

I tried to write the article. I did. I started it five dozen times, and scrapped every single one of them.

In desperation, I looked at other Rolling Stone articles online and… well… I’m not proud to admit it, but kinda, sorta copied their opening passages. As a way of jumping into the story. They fell into a dozen different categories: the Big Pronouncement. (“Bigger is arguably the hottest band in the world right now… and I am watching them implode before my very eyes.”) The In Media Res. (“We are walking down the concrete passageways of the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, and the roar of the crowd reverberates all around us like the crashing waves of the ocean.”) The Stolen Detail, with a bit of Poetic License thrown in for good measure. (“Derek Kane’s eyes glimmer in the late-afternoon sunlight as he reads the lyrics he has just written. His irises are emerald green, and breathtakingly beautiful – a fact which his millions of female fans do not know, because he’s never taken off his sunglasses in front of them. Until now.”)

And so on and so forth.

But none of it felt right. It felt… artificial. Fake. Blegh.

Now you know why I deleted them all. (Especially after you’ve read them.)

When I couldn’t get the beginning, I decided to try to write bits and pieces from the middle and patch them together later. I wrote huge swaths, thousands upon thousands of words – about the concerts. About the song-writing session I’d witnessed (and later got chewed out for). About the tour bus and the after-parties and the fans.

All of it felt like crap. Like I was a sophomore back at Syracuse, struggling through my first Journalism 101 class, trying to string together two sentences that didn’t sound like I was fresh off the high school paper writing about an ‘awesome’ pep rally.

So I put it off. With sex with Derek. With fights with Derek. With make-up sex with Derek. With talks with Ryan. With listening to Killian improvise. With concerts. With after-concert partying. With long, bored stretches of staring out the tour bus windows as rural countryside flew past.

And with the one last thing I felt I had to do, which was probably going to be even harder than writing the article itself:

Interviewing Riley.