“C’mon, what?” Johnny answered, laughing. “Did you see how much they liked it?” He was sitting on the bench, pulling on the custom-made sock that sat in the socket of his real prosthetic leg.
“Yeah, well, maybe you two idiots could’ve warned me first.” Harry was trying hard to stifle a laugh. Johnny wasn’t even trying; he was doubled over, the jerk.
“I didn’t know, either,” Richie offered, all serious. Then he burst out laughing too, adding, “But it was fucking awesome! How many times did you guys practice that?”
I was pissed off and I was hurt, so I left the dressing room and went out front while Mud played their set.
Like I said, they weren’t much to watch. The five members of the band—two guitars, bass, drums, vocal—all had Beatlesque haircuts, flannel shirts, jeans, and ratty sneakers. It was a uniform for alt rockers that had already become a cliché. They pranced around the stage like it was some weird kind of ballet. I was embarrassed for them.
They were playing a song called “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.” The lead singer, so pleased with how clever the lyric was, could barely contain his smirk as he sang that line over and over again. And the guitar player, who moved like he was double-jointed—by that, I mean like a real spaz—kept winking at me. Actually winking. I mean, who does that?
Anyway, right at that exact moment, the entire world stopped spinning.
Or maybe my brain sped up, I don’t know.
Each beat of the snare echoed and boomed for an eternity.
Every wink of that creepy guitar player’s eyelid was like a curtain slowly coming down.
Every word that singer sang was a drawn-out slur.
Time did everything it could to stop.
Sitting at that crusty, crappy table in the cesspit that is CBGB’s, on the heels of a great Scar Boys set, after Johnny and Harry had played their trick that had so pissed me off, in the middle of the ridiculousness of “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired” by Chemicals Made of Mud, the dumbest band in the history of dumb bands, I felt the baby move for the first time.
Holy shit, the baby—my baby—was moving.
I knew without any trace of doubt I was going to keep it.
PART THREE,
NOVEMBER 1986
A ballad once in a while doesn’t go amiss.
—Chrissie Hynde
Who are your musical influences?
HARBINGER JONES
The Bay City Rollers.
CHEYENNE BELLE
The Bay City Rollers.
RICHIE MCGILL
Let me guess, the other guys said the Bay City Rollers?
Yeah, we all hate that question. It’s, like, the most unoriginal question in the universe, and we swore that if anyone ever asked it, we would all always say the Bay City Rollers.
But I kind of like you, so I’m gonna give you a break and give you my real answer.
You ready?
The Bay City Rollers.
HARBINGER JONES
We decided to take the next day off from rehearsal.
But I never take a day off from the guitar. I was hanging out in the basement in my parents’ house, watching The Price is Right, the guitar on my lap.
After a while I found myself picking the same riff over and over again. It was kind of beautiful. Maybe that sounds immodest, but it’s the only word I can use to describe what I was hearing. Everything around me dropped away. The TV became a blur of muted color, the cheering of the game-show audience faded to static. The only thing I could hear was that riff.
That’s kind of amazing because my guitar wasn’t even plugged in. When you play the electric guitar, you can barely hear it if it’s not plugged in. But when you play often enough, your brain interprets what little sound there is and compensates for it. It’s like my brain engaged some sort of organic alpha-wave amplifier that allowed me to hear that riff with perfect clarity.
I played it over and over again until it had the rhythm and cadence of a slow-moving train. Next thing I knew, my hands shifted to a chord progression built off the line I’d been playing, and I knew I had a song.
I started singing, the words more or less coming to me without interruption.
I bet when authors write books, they probably get into a zone where whole chapters pour out of them without ever once needing Wite-Out. That’s what happened to me.
A song. This song. It was just floating in the air or in my brain, or maybe in the background hum of Bob Barker hawking everyday household items, and somehow it came out of my hands and out of my mouth. It was a kind of magic.
When I was done, I turned the TV off and called Johnny. Someone needed to hear this.
“Yeah,” Johnny said when I called him. “C’mon over, I’m just listening to music.”