I followed him to the crowded stairs, wondering if Bart was up there as we worked our way up between the people loitering there and the people trying to come down. I tripped on my own foot and fell hard into two people necking on the landing. One of them pushed me by the shoulder back into the person behind me.

That’s when I saw who it was on the landing, who had pushed me. Ziggy gave me a crooked smile and said “Watch where you’re going.”

“I…” The flow of the crowd pushed me forward and past him but I turned to see him bending to kiss her again. Blonde, upturned nose, couldn’t see much more than that. When I got to the top of the stairs I wanted to go back down and confront him but I had to wait for a break in the stream of people coming up, and by the time I had a chance, I couldn’t think of what I was going to say to him anyway. Get real, Daron, what are you going to do, call her a bitch and tell her to stay away from him, he’s yours? Yeah right.

No, I wanted to know why he blew off rehearsal today without telling anyone. I wanted to know where he thinks he gets off blowing off that responsibility. I wanted to know how he expected me to react to something like that.

I got a few steps down the stairs and realized they were no longer on the landing. Oh fuck it. I retreated to Thrash Rat’s cubbyhole backstage, trying to pretend I hadn’t seen a thing.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s going on in your head, Daron?” He put his bass down and sat on the rug across from me. “You’ve been totally moody this whole week. In fact, you’ve been like this ever since New York.”

“Like what?”

“Like… I don’t know. You didn’t used to be so… uneasy, opaque, distracted, glum.” The string of words hit me like slaps.

I wrapped my arms around the guitar and rested my head on the neck. “I’ll feel better when we get this record done and hit the road again.”

“I think you’ll feel better if you get out of the fucking house. Have you even left here for five minutes this week?”

Well… “No.”

He knocked me on the shoulder like he always did. “You know Colin’s band is playing tonight at Axis? Ziggy’s not going to show–it’s Friday night and he’s blowing us off, how much you want to bet? Let’s go down there and blow our eardrums out.”

“Is it 18+?”

“Oh, come on, everyone knows you there. We won’t even have to pay to get in. Colin’s your housemate forgodsake.”

“I hate it when you talk sense.” I’d had four hours of sleep and could not let go of the fact I wanted them to hear the tape of Midnight. But he was right, Ziggy wasn’t going to show, and staying home wasn’t likely to make anything better.

“So come on, let’s go. Tidewater’s headlining.” He stood up. “I’ll call Michelle to come get us.”

“Alright, alright. Let me change my clothes.”

Colin’s band, which changed names every few months, was a kind of post-punk retro band with mohawks and nose rings. Chris and I would sometimes kid him around the house about how Sid Vicious had been dead for ten years already, but actually I kind of liked their thrashy, noisy stuff. They used to practice in our basement too before their drummer moved to a bigger place. Tonight they were calling themselves Thrash Rat Brigade. I changed from blue jeans to black, put on my black high tops, put a flannel shirt on over my T-shirt and my leather jacket over the whole thing.

Bart was right, we didn’t have to pay to get in. Tidewater were local, but bigtime local and so who knew, maybe there’d be a crowd. I even had a CD of theirs. The three of us went into the alley where the load-in doors were. Colin was sitting on the wet concrete smoking a cigarette. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said as we walked up. “The artistes emerge at last. Follow me.”

We did, up the cramped back stairway to the “backstage” area. Security barely gave us a glance, and Colin gave us each a beer out of his band’s stash. “Sorry it’s only Miller,” he said, “but this is only a $75 gig.” I carried my beer downstairs to see what was happening: one band was already on stage, and there would be two more after Thrash Rat Brigade. The club’s booker’d had the good sense to put other thrash bands on the Tidewater bill. Maybe by the time the headliner came on the pit would be full of mohawked figures in leather and engineer boots, but right now the floor was sparse. I stood on the edge with my beer, wishing for my ear plugs. The sound here was so loud it battered me physically like a strong wind, but you know it was sort of soothing too, wearing off my rough edges and making me feel numb.

I finished my beer around the time Reggie, Thrash Rat’s drummer, started lugging his kit to set up in front of where the headliner’s drum kit sat pre-set on the stage. I went and gave him a hand while Colin and the rest tuned up. “Don’t know why I bother,” Colin joked over the music being piped through the PA. “Two seconds into the first song I’m going to be all out of whack anyway.”

“No no,” Reggie said as he tightened a cymbal, “I’m the one who does the whacking.”

I put Reggie’s stool down with one hand and his high hat with the other. “I think that’s everything.”

He looked over the assemblage of percussion. “Yeah, looks like. You know, I’m really a metalhead at heart. If I was a real punk, I’d just have a kick, a snare and maybe one crash. Instead I’ve got all this.” His set-up was still small compared to Christian’s ever-growing collection. Reggie circled around the gear moving things and positioning microphones.

“So how’s the stuff going?” Colin said before I could jump off the riser. “I mean, the rehearsal and stuff.”

“Pretty good. Never know what’s going to happen, though.” I took a step off the riser. “Talk to you after.”

Something about Colin’s question made me feel conspicuous. I was becoming aware there was something different about us from the other bands we knew. We had a major label deal and everyone was curious about it. Don’t ask me for advice, I thought, because I’m just making it up as I go along. In another year we could be back to playing $75 gigs, third on the bill, too… well, I didn’t quite believe that.

Thrash Rat were loud, fast, raucous, and funny. Marilynne split singing duties with Colin, and she put her all into growling and spitting out ironic lyrics with sometimes intentionally terrible rhymes. By their fourth song the pit was filling up. Maybe next time they’d play second on the bill for $100.

I realized I’d lost track of Bart and Michelle a while ago.

I pulled open the door and he thrust an oversize envelope into my hands. “What is it?”

“That’s what I want to know, stud. It’s got your name on it personally so I didn’t open it.”

The address label said it came from an office in New York and was made out to “Daron M., Moondog Three HQ” and our Allston street address, not our PO Box. “It’s gotta be from Jonathan.” I tore open the envelope and four slick copies of Spin magazine spilled out into my hands.

Ziggy’s quizzical face stared out at me. I barely recognized myself standing behind him a little to his left. Bart and Christian were shoulder to shoulder way in the back and to the right. “What a weird shot,” I murmured.

Chris looked at his own copy. “Yeah, funny. This wasn’t even posed–looks almost like an accidental shot that went off while we were standing around casually.”

“It probably is.” I put the magazines down on top of the pile of milk crates that held my tapes, albums and CDs. (Did I mention working in a record store is dangerous?)

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“Maybe later.”

Christian shrugged and took his copy into the living room. I took a shower and went to the basement to play around some more on steel string acoustic. It was frigid down there and I turned on the electric heater. The place would be warmed up by the time the others arrived.

Michelle dropped Bart off around two with Kentucky Fried Chicken in a bucket and we sat in the living room eating while Chris badgered me about reading the article. (“I’ll read it when I’m fucking ready to read it, alright?”) Bart read it, closed the magazine without expression and said “Let’s go downstairs.”

Chris said he’d come downstairs when Ziggy showed, so Bart and I went down and jammed almost the way we used to. We came up for air about two hours later and Ziggy still hadn’t arrived. I wanted to wait until he was there before playing the others the tape of what I’d done last night. I’d multi-tracked a demo with a drum machine part and bass line, and sung what words I’d written. I was, actually, pretty damn happy with how it sounded. But I wanted to wait until he came to share it. The song was, in my mind, now called “Midnight.”

We went back downstairs and Bart slung his bass over his shoulder, then sat down on a milkcrate and said “Why won’t you read the article?”

“I will.”

“It’s interesting the spin they put on things.”

“Things? And was that a pun?”

“OK, the spin they put on everything, anything. You never know how what you said is going to be presented.”

“No lie, bwana. That’s what I’m afraid of.” I ran my fingers along the strings of the Ovation, making them squeak. “What did you say in it?”

“Why don’t you just read it?”

“Alright, alright.” I tromped back up the stairs and sat down on the couch and started to read.

The article began simply enough, a description of one of the bus legs of the trip, when Jonathan had ridden with us, some snippets of conversation. After some about what our live show was like, it went into sections about our personalities and biography. Ziggy first–I learned some things about him that I hadn’t known before: his father was Latin American and his mother was some kind of mediterranean mix of Greek and Italian and Turkish. (Turkish?) He spent part of his childhood in Florida, and then the family moved to Baltimore, then when his parents divorced he and his mother had moved to New York City. So many things I’d never asked him about because I didn’t want to tell him the answers to the same questions. And then my eyes skipped down the column to the direct Q&A section and Ziggy saying “I can’t complain. It’s brought me a host of new experiences. It’s a lifestyle which encourages experimentation.”

Let them think he’s talking about drugs, I thought to myself. Please.

Next came the section about me and I had to stop.

P.S. SOME SITE NEWS:
So August is Web Serial Writing Month. It’s like NaNoWriMo except it’s WeSeWriMo. To participate, we’ll be posting three times a week in the month of August, AND there will be at least two liner notes posts! The bonus rule will still apply, though — each time the tip jar reaches $25, an additional post will be triggered. (Ahem, btw, it’s been a while since a bonus post was triggered. Just sayin. You can always buy Daron a beer.) So some weeks there could be up to FIVE posts, four story posts and a liner note. Wouldn’t that be cool?

We now return you to your regular web reading experience! Enjoy!

I was looking at the strings and not at him when I said “Why?”

“So I can go home and write words for it, and then bring it back. Save a lot of time instead of me sitting here.”

I gave him a blank look. Of course that made perfect sense. But I resisted. “What if it changes?”

“At least it’ll give me an idea. I can tweak the line lengths or what have you later.”

God, he sounded so professional at that moment, with a pencil behind his ear and a clipboard in his hand. A half-black half-blond strand hung between his eyes while he stared at me. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I just do,” I said, which was half a lie, because I was starting to realize why I didn’t want him going off and writing the words. Because I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to be there, trying to bring the vague idea that had started to coalesce in my head into the open. I didn’t want him to… to what? Interfere? “Give it another day, okay?”

All three of them looked at me like it was obvious there was a lot more going on in my head than I was saying. But hey, wasn’t that always the case? “Let’s run through some of the old set.”

They all agreed on that, as if playing the old stuff would bring us back onto the same page with each other. I’d mainly wanted to change the subject, and regretted it. Ziggy let loose like all this rehearsal had only wound him up tighter and he pranced and growled and twisted his way through the songs in that tiny basement, in such close proximity to me, that I tried to back off my playing to bring the energy level down. But I couldn’t really, and the others had picked up the feel from him by then, and ran away with it like spooked horses with a carriage. And then we were packing up and he said good night and bounded up the stairs and I wished, wished, wished, there was some way I could ask him or tell him or in some way convey a message to him that I wanted him, that I wanted him to come to my window, that I wanted something more. But he was gone, and what would I have said?

Bart didn’t hang around long after. We stood talking by his car in the driveway for a couple of minutes. I tortured myself after he left with scenarios of me trying to tell him about me and Ziggy until I felt sick to my stomach.

When everyone had gone, I went back into the basement with the four track, the drum machine, and flamenco on my tongue. With an acoustic guitar and headphones I could play down there all night and not wake anyone. Which is pretty much what I did.

Bart drank some Yoo Hoo and looked at me. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” He was still looking at me when he said “Do you think you’ll ever see your parents again?”

I didn’t answer him right away. Bart knew more about me than anyone else I knew. Well, except Remo, who was there for most of it. I answered him as honestly as I could. “I don’t know. Part of me wishes that some day down the road I’ll, you know, meet my mother again and … and we’ll have an understanding of each other, like they always do at the ends of movies. But it’ll never happen. I’ve got no idea where she is now or anything. And Digger…” I had to pause to breathe, like I’d sucked too much air in. “I kind of hope he’ll keep to himself.”

“Why?”

“Because…” Thin clouds reflected the city glow around the eastern horizon and I turned my head to the west. “You know, I’m kind of afraid of him.”

“Why?” Bart said again, this time more incredulous than curious.

“You tell me,” I said, shaking my head. “What’s your Grand Bart Theory about that?”

That got him brainstorming a little. “Because you’re afraid he’ll take over your life, or that he won’t approve of you, or that he’ll fuck things up for you, or that you’ll find out you hate him. Or you’ll find out you don’t hate him as much as you think. How’m I doing so far?”

I tried to laugh but it just came out a choke. Bart was the master of pop psych but I wasn’t sure how often he knew he hit home. “Better just say all of the above to be on the safe side,” I said. “Someday he’ll turn up, and I’m sure he’ll want something. You know, he called on the phone…. ugh.” I cracked my knuckles. “Creepy. I wonder if he knows where I live.”

Bart opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, then changed his mind and knocked me on the shoulder. “Yeah,” he said instead of whatever it was. “He’ll want a piece of your publishing rights. Every song about parental angst he’ll want royalties for.”

Ziggy’s the one writing parental angst songs, I almost said, but I couldn’t deny that I had a couple in the hopper myself. “You know, every song we do can’t be about fucked up people and fucked up relationships.”

“Candlelight isn’t about fucked up people or relationships.”

“No, it’s about death.”

“It isn’t really.”

“Yes it is, it’s about being in church and thinking about your own funeral.”

“Only that one verse. I think the overall theme is about finding joy and beauty in unexpected places.” He gestured with the bottle toward the sky glow. The far off hush of cars rushing down the Mass Pike and Soldier’s Field Road ran in the background. “Don’t you think?”

What I thought was that I couldn’t remember now which lyrics Ziggy had written and which ones I had written, and that there was a pretty fine line between optimism and pessimism. It was a sad fucking song no matter what. “Whatever.” I hunched down inside that leather coat Belle had given me in New York. “I’m getting cold.”

“Me too.”

We went inside and Bart took off soon after. I sat down in the living room and watched part of a movie with Christian–some western where some guy was getting whipped to death. Lovely. I decided I had seen enough and went to my room.

When I couldn’t sleep I got out my classical guitar and played until my brain stopped working and the tips of my fingers burned.

That first day was rough going. Something was changing and shifting right out from under my feet, I felt, and no one was on firm ground anymore. Even Bart and I were clashing rather than meshing, even when we had the chord progression set out. By dinner time Chris pointed out that maybe the three of us ought to work some things out first, and then bring him back in when we were really ready to go full volume. He went and got Vietnamese take out from the place down the street and after we had eaten, me and Bart and Ziggy sat on the matted, thick orange rug in the basement and tossed things back and forth. We put a couple of sketches onto cassette tape with Christian’s boom box and called it quits around midnight. I wasn’t sleepy, but I went to bed anyway, tired and sapped of energy.

In the morning I sat down by myself with a steel string guitar and the tape and filled in the structure of two songs. Bart came over for lunch, and drank half a six pack of Yoo Hoo while I taught him those two all the way through with electric guitar and bass. Ziggy showed up around four–I heard a car pull up but I didn’t see who dropped him off–and we started working on the first of the two, an A minor thing that began ballady and ended somewhat more intense.

Ziggy listened through it once and made some notes in his book. “What happens if you play it more fuzzy?”

“What do you mean?”

He squinted his eyes and made a buzzsaw sound effect. “More like that.”

“I can try it.” I cranked the distortion and played through the first verse.

Ziggy was nodding, his hair bobbing in his eyes where he hadn’t bothered to style it out of the way. “Now what if I sang a verse like this.” He rattled off two quick lines:

Call me crazy, call me insane
But there’s more to life than playing your games

“But if we mix my voice up real close, so I sing soft, but it’s loud, on top.”

“Ooo,” Bart said. “I like that.”

Bart and I looked at each other. I shrugged. “I think it’d sound kind of cool. But we won’t know until we really start producing the tracks…”

“I’ll remember,” Ziggy said, and made a note. “Let’s try and figure out this chorus, though–you guys are doing something funky and I can’t quite fit words to it.”

We played the whole thing through several times in a row, while Ziggy sang without a microphone stuff that only he could hear. Bart and I kept going around while he scribbled to himself and after a while we began to forget he was there. We chased each other through that progression, spiraling in toward each other tighter and tighter until one of us would break away and add another riff on top.

Ziggy had to wave his arms at us to get us to stop. “I think I got it now.” I plugged a microphone in for him and pointed the monitor toward us. “Let’s go from the beginning.”

He sang straight through to the chorus without looking at his lyric sheet and then glanced down to sing:

I won’t live your way of life
I won’t give your way a chance
On my knees in broken glass
I have no sight, I have no past.

When we hit the repeat of the chorus he just stuck with “I won’t live your way of life” over and over, and Bart and I kept repeating it until finally Bart stopped playing and shouted, “Okay, alright, fade out.”

He was nodding but he said, “‘I won’t live your way of life?’ Does that make grammatical sense?”

I shrugged. Ziggy said “I dunno. It fits, though, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it fits.” I picked through the melody on my top strings. “So what are we going to call it?”

“Broken Glass,” Bart said, but we both knew he was joking.

“Way of Life,” Ziggy said. And that seemed to fit.

We ordered in a pizza and by eight or so we were ready to have Christian come and try the tune. By ten we were all a little sick of it, though, and the bridge seemed to be mutating toward something else.

I taught everybody what we had for that second tune, and then midnight rolled around and we had to knock off or our neighbors would call our landlord. Ziggy called someone for a ride home, and took off while Bart and I sat on the back porch watching our breath fog and finishing off the last two Yoo Hoos.

“So,” he said to me, “What the fuck is that song about anyway?”

I was only aware of having fallen asleep after I woke up–I opened my eyes to find the overhead light still on and my hair still damp. I got up from my mattress to shut the light off. Something tapped against the window like rain. My fogged brain had some recollection of that sound–the sound that woke me. I went to the window.

Now that I was listening for it, the noise was clearly driveway gravel hitting the glass. I turned off the light so I could see outside and there was Ziggy, about to lob another handful at me. I turned the light back on and opened the window.

Cold air made me shiver. “What are you…”

He silenced me with a finger to his lips and disappeared into the bushes a few yards to the left, then reappeared on the fire escape ladder. In a few moments he was inside, the window shut, while I had retreated under my blankets.

He let his leather jacket slump to the floor as he looked at me. I didn’t want another round of our staring contest, so I started to say what I had said before and got even less far. “What..?”

His eyes flicked toward the door to the hallway.

“Christian’s passed out on the couch. I’m pretty sure Colin’s asleep–haven’t seen Lars all week.” That is, if you’re here to fuck, I thought. I watched him peel off the rest of his clothes, so it seemed that he was. I didn’t feel the need to ask any more questions, and he didn’t say anything as he slid under the blankets with me.

Honestly? I think we both enjoyed trying to keep quiet–maybe even that tense moment when I heard Christian’s heavy step as he climbed the third floor stairs to his room. I resorted to biting the pillow while Zig fucked me and I didn’t even care it was a cliche or a stereotype or anything, it was necessary.

When it was over we lay there damp and groggy for what seemed like a long time. Questions returned to my mind: would we do this again? would I ask him to? or would I ask him not to? what made him come to me tonight? how could I tell when to expect him? and, would he be leaving soon, before anyone might notice? Before I mustered the nerve or energy or wherewithal to speak out loud, he got up, got dressed, and climbed back out the window.

Not even so much as a goodnight kiss, I thought as I closed the window after he was gone.

“Do you think he’s right?” I asked.

Ziggy just kept staring. In the weeks since we’d come home I’d hardly seen him. Not that I’d expected to. Being home was a harsher reality. As he took another swig, I began to feel the throbbing low-level hunger I had for him, like some kind of nagging headache or injury that I couldn’t forget.

Could we really go back to the way we’d been? Ignoring each other?

As he sat there, drinking and staring at me, I let my mind run in circles. What if he did want me, what then? We couldn’t very well do anything here in the house, not and keep it a secret. And where could we go? Neither of us had a car. And what would happen if the others found out? Bart might be okay at first, but I could envision the dynamic of the foursome changing to the two of us and the two of them, and that felt bad to me, wrong, looming disaster.

Ziggy finished the beer and got up to put it in the box with the other empties. The bottle hit the others with a clink and he shook his head and walked out of the room.

Christian’s drums rumbled through the floor from the basement. He and Bart were probably working on something right now. I should have gone to join them. Ziggy probably had. But instead I sat there, looking at the table and wondering what to do with myself.

The next thing I knew I was carrying a guitar case down the stairs.

–
(OK, so today’s title comes from the following song… but I also had to link you to this blog also called In Search of the Lost Chord which seems pretty hip and my kind of place. So check it out.)

The others sat around the table while I sat on the counter and swung my legs against cabinet doors that had been repainted dozens of times. Christian signed and we celebrated with a case of beer Bart provided. Then I brought the rest of them up to date on our tour plans, or, as the case was, our lack of them.

“BNC don’t want us to tour.”

Bart frowned, Michelle looked puzzled, Chris looked non-plussed. Ziggy asked “Why?”

I forced myself to keep my eyes on them and not on the beer in my hand. “Mills wants us to get to work on a follow up album right away, and to save ourselves until that one’s done to hit the road again. He doesn’t want us playing small venues because it will decrease our perceived image or some bullshit like that.” Think big, he’d told me, no more of this piddly shit, or we’d drag ourselves down to that level. We want to do everything possible to break you up to the next level, don’t work against us like this… I was tired.

Chris shrugged. “And if our agent could get us bigger places?”

This was putting aside the fact that we didn’t yet have a booking agent. “They won’t give us the tour support we need for a larger scale–not unless they pick up the next album, which as you know they have the option on, but won’t decide on until we deliver the product.” Now they all knew what I’d known for several days. I hopped down to the floor, turned a vinyl-covered chair around backwards and leaned my head on my forearms. The simple fact of it was we’d been off the road only a month, and I wanted to be back out there, already.

Colin, on his way up to his room, stuck his head in. “Can I have one of those?”

Bart gave him a beer and a little twitch of the face that told him to make himself scarce. When he was gone, Bart said “Maybe Mills is right.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just can’t see how playing out could hurt us. What if this re-release doesn’t do so well? Can we really depend on them? Jonathan said Spin will be on the stands soon. By February, what if the buzz is over? Who do you think BNC is going to blame if the album doesn’t sell as well as they project? Us. I think we have to do something. And playing out is all I can think of to do.”

Chris was nodding but he said “Well, we do need to record the new stuff.”

“I don’t deny that. But you know it won’t take us long to do it.” I ran down quickly for them how long I thought it would take–which was maybe two months at the most. “Mills says, IF they like what we send them, IF they take the option, the soonest they’d put us on the road would be the end of next summer.” In reality the timetable could be even slower, and I imagined iron balls chained to my ankles. “So what do we do the next six months to a year? Sit on our butts? Go back to day jobs? What if they don’t take the album?” I could not picture not performing for six months. “And,” I added, “I’ll go fucking nuts.”

Everyone sat or stood back just a fraction, like they always did when I said something I really fucking meant.

Christian shrugged. “Do they care if we play around here?”

“I don’t know.” Now my eyes fixated on the worn spot in the middle of the Formica top table.

Ziggy cracked open another beer. “Well, they don’t want us to. But does that mean we can’t?”

“Well, no…”

“Then why don’t we do it, and they’ll see when the record comes out how hot it will be.”

But that’s the problem, I was thinking. I’m not fucking sure about anything anymore. I didn’t know where I stood with Ziggy now, I didn’t know what was going to happen with BNC. I was doubting the deal more every time I spoke to Mills… I lay my head on the table.

Christian put a hand on my shoulder. “I say we don’t fucking worry about it for now. Let’s get started on new stuff and forget BNC and touring for a week or two.”

Michelle asked what I was thinking. “Why?”

Chris stood up. “I never met a suit who didn’t run hot and cold. If you back off, by next week maybe he’ll be begging us to hit the road. No use stressing about it. Let’s do our part of the job first.”

I heard Bart’s chair scrape the floor as he stood up, too.

“Meeting adjourned,” I said into my arms but I don’t think anyone heard me.

“Oh, no,” I croaked, “I always get up ten hours before I have to do anything.” Fortunately, the phone was on a milk crate beside my bed and I lay down with the phone on my ear. Vague thoughts went through my mind like: maybe I should buy some furniture now while I had a little money in the bank.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Jonathan was saying, “that the issue hits the stands next week. You should be getting some copies in the mail soon. Maybe today or tomorrow.”

“Wow, so it’s really happening.” A feature article in Spin.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Merry Christmas.”

There was a pause where he didn’t make motions to hang up and I didn’t know quite what to say next. “So, what did you say about us?”

“You’ll have to read it. I think you’ll like it. At least, I hope so.”

“Me, too,” I said automatically. “Hey, what happened to journalistic objectivity?”

“You don’t have to trash somebody to be ‘objective.’ And who the fuck cares? People want to read an entertaining article. I want to write a good story. If I also happen to like the band a lot–bonus.” He was more vehement than I expected, maybe more than he meant to be.

“Well,” I said, “I’ll read it.”

There was another one of those pauses. Then he said, “I’ll be in Boston next week. What are you up to?”

“Fucking off, mostly. BNC is hinting strongly they want to hear demos of the next album so they can extend our deal. I’m still pushing for another tour. We’ve got people doing ground work while we rehearse new material.”

“So you’re free.”

“Yeah, I guess. Do you want to hear some of the new stuff?”

“That would be great.”

“Give me a call when you get here and I’ll give you directions to the rehearsal space.” I didn’t tell him we still rehearsed in our basement. I figured he’d get a kick out of seeing it, though.