STORIES OF THE ROAD: BRITNEY SPEARSES
The point that I thought for years was my career apex came in
We had a pretty good thing going on: we’d head out for a couple of weeks, play a few frat parties, maybe a festival, maybe an opening gig at a university theater, and if we were lucky, we’d get an interview on a college radio station. I could tell you how I hooked that up, but then, I'd have to kill you.
The college circuit was treating us very well. Along the way, of course, we’d hit the local clubs for gigs and mid-week showcases, de rigueur for a traveling band.
I felt really bad for the touring bands we’d see at the off-campus bars when we’d play showcases and industry nights. Showcases are a real racket for the club owners, who will get four or five bands in one evening and then give them a fraction of the door receipts to split at the end of the night – a band might get out of there with $100 to split 4 or 5 ways if they’re lucky. All this for the chance to play at a club where there might, maybe -- just maybe -- be someone from a label or management company. Assuming, of course, that said industry person had nothing better to do on a Wednesday night then wander out to a club because said club had arbitrarily deemed that particular Wednesday to be "Industry Night."
Usually, on a night like this, we’d just give up our take and let the other bands work it out. More times than I can count, we’d give our share to the other band that was on the road if there was another touring act. A hundred bucks goes a long way when it’s twice what you expected.
Some of these touring acts were signed to majors. There was a dress code for the major-label baby bands, and in the year 2000 it involved a 15-passenger white rental van with bench seats, a U-haul trailer, and a hangdog expression that involved lots of sighing at the end of the night as we were splitting up the take.
Conversely, a frat party would typically pay us $2000. Usually this was for three sets, and we could play covers – other people’s songs – if we wanted to. It was light-hearted – we referred to it as “rehearsal” – as there were no industry types to impress. We sold a lot of T-shirts and a lot of CD’s. We built up a substantial mailing list. We got free alcohol, free food, and the attention of so many girls that after the first six months I’d hammered together a sponsorship proposal and submitted it to Trojan, going so far as to even suggest the slogan, “The Trojan Concert Series: Where the Rubber Meets the Road.”
They didn’t go for it. We got sponsored by Pabst, instead. For better or for worse.
And festivals? A thousand bucks for a 45-minute set. Ditto, opening gigs at campus halls and theaters. We had a day where we made a grand for 45 minutes’ work, and that same afternoon I got to play a song onstage with Lenny Kravitz.
This is why I am not bitter about never having been a rock star by any popular or convenient definition, nor my place now, living in the woods writing this all down. I had five glorious, self-indulgent years of this.
Best of all, we had a tourbus: The Beast, a tired but spirited magenta and black Bluebird custom with two million miles on her chassis and half that on her 300-horse Cummins. But she was a runner. She had four bunk beds, a leather couch, a TV with DVD player, a kickin’ stereo with headphone outlets throughout, and a real kitchen and a chemical toilet. The Beast looked sweet, and best of all, she was a real Goddamned tourbus. We’d leased her from Gypsy Jack’s U-Drive RV Rentals in
We would pull up at these aforementioned showcases in The Beast, making our presence known with a hiss of airbrakes and the coughing rumble of the Cummins nodding off. “’Sup,” we’d say, spilling out in sunglasses, black T-shirts, and chains with a bevy of giggling coeds on our heels. “Is this the gig?”
We were dicks.
So. It was a beautiful
Yes, all this can be yours, with hard work. Have a Pabst.
One of the guys from the opening band had mentioned that a local radio station was doing a promo at the club that night, but he didn’t know what it was all about. Giving away tickets to some concert, or something.
Cool, we thought. Local radio involvement is a good thing. To a struggling band, just getting your gig mentioned on a pop radio station is as big a rush as hearing Kasey Kasem announce the title of your new hit. And Manson, our singer, was a charismatic fella; he could usually weasel his way into some kind of interview.
We were slated to be the second band, with a
“Get dressed, and get in there,” he ordered. “Now. Right now.”
“Huh?” I asked.
“Are we up?” asked somebody.
“No. Just get in there. Now.”
“Dude, we’ve got time.”
“Get your clothes on!” he shouted. “Move! Now! Trust me! Move! Move!”
We dressed – which involved spiking our hair, throwing on an open black dress shirt over our black T-shirts, and a round of deodorant and a couple of extra necklaces --and charged out the door, Nicky behind the last of us and shoving, “Go! Go! Go!” as if we were a chalk of commandos rappelling from a Blackhawk.
A line of people extended from the door past the back end of the bus but we didn’t think much of it. Lines were good things. Lines meant money. More importantly, lines meant faces in front of the stage. We played many, many showcase gigs for very, very few people. We had come to like lines.
"Wow, that's quite a line."
In retrospect, I should have taken a better look at the line, for something had clearly gone amiss inside the club.
Not afoul, mind you. Amiss.
Spectacularly, beautifully, amiss.
We worked our way past security, got stamped, came around the corner, and stopped dead in our tracks.
The guys piled into me, and I held my hands up, arms out in a Christ pose, bringing us all to a halt. “Whoa-whoa-whoa! Just look,” I said, as they tried to swarm around me. “Appreciate the moment, gentlemen. Breathe.”
“Whoa,” Manson breathed, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head.
“By the power of Grayskull,”
Mick clenched his fists and bounced up and down, grinning like a kid on Christmas Morning. “Yes! Yes!”
“I told you,” said Nicky.
What our associate in the first band had neglected to remember was that the local pop radio station was holding a Britney Spears Look-Alike contest that night. At our gig. First prize: backstage passes to Britney Spears at Qualcomm Stadium. Keep in mind, this was back in the year 2000, when Britney Spears was at the top of her game and so ridiculously hot that she gave off shimmers like asphalt in the summer.
The club was packed -- no exaggeration, here: packed absolutely elbow-to-elbow -- with blonde, tanned, extremely-scantily-clad teenage girls. About four hundred of them. All sporting that early-Britney trademark of slutty and innocent blended on HIGH and thrown into a very, very hot oven.
I had never seen anything like it. I never have, since.
The band before us was having a blast. I mean, how could they not? The girls were loving it, even though the band's drummer sucked. Every time he did a fill he barely came out of it alive, so it was like watching a car taking corners on two wheels. Their singer overplayed to the crowd -- I can't really blame him on that count -- but he wasn't very skilled at it; he was flirting with one girl in particular, which in this case came off as creepy and desperate to the other 399 girls in the room.
The trick -- here's some of The Saint's stagecraft, by the way -- is to flirt with the whole room simultaneously. You unfocus your eyes and don't make any actual eye contact; you make all your winks, smiles, and suggestive moves into the spotlight. If you flirt to just one girl in the room from the stage, every other girl in the audience will think you're just another horny douchebag with a guitar. Flirt with the whole room, though, and the girls in the audience will compete for you.
I was sure that the view from up there was going to be something I’d tell my grandkids about, someday. I could not wait to get onstage. We were going to tear the roof off.
Of course, those fuckers played an encore.
We have never set up our gear so efficiently. We scrambled to help the first band load their gear off, and rolled ours up from backline with the crisp efficiency of a pit crew at the Indy 500. Having to set up both my sax and my keyboards, my gear took the longest.
Chad, normally quiet, reserved – the Mister Spock of our outfit – turned to look at me, a blushing, dopey grin on his lantern jaw as I blew a couple of quiet notes into my horn and waited for my sampler to load. “If there’s a heaven, and it doesn’t look just like this?” he said, motioning toward the sea of blonde with the neck of his black-cherry Paul Reed Smith, “I’m gonna be really disappointed.”
“Look alive,” Manson called out. “We may never see this again.”
“Un-fuckin’-believable,” Blake said to me, looking out at all the babes. “This is like. . . I don’t know.”
“Me either, buddy,” I said. The Akai sampler blinked blue in its rack. "Okay, I'm good. Let's make a joyous noise, gentlemen."
I took another look – a long, long look – across the crowd. I closed my eyes, trying to burn it into my retinas like a glance at the sun.
Our pre-gig ritual was to belt out a few choruses of Drift Away, usually backstage or outside, to warm up our voices and get our chi in sync – everyone in the band sang, and we prided ourselves on our harmonies, as it was one thing that separated us from the drop-tune barre-chord "we play, like, aggro but it's, like, melodic" dorks on the circuit – but tonight we had skipped it. We wanted to get going as soon as possible.
“Mike check?” asked the soundman. Manson started into Drift Away, his soulful, leather-lunged tenor grinding out, "Gimme the beat, boys, and free my soul. . . ." and we each joined in, and – my heart is racing as I type this – the girls started singing along with us.
That was power. The club held five hundred people and there must’ve been four hundred Britneys, all right there in sync with us. Certainly not in tune, but in sync. It was an electric moment.
“Got your levels,” came the soundman’s voice through the monitors. We gave the OK and kept singing, a couple more choruses, right up into our
They weren’t stopping; we weren’t stopping.
We sang “Drift Away” in G, and our first song started with a sample-and-hold keyboard riff in Em. I punched up the patch, took the moment of breath between choruses, and stabbed my finger down to launch the first song.
Mick clicked off four, the band exploded, the lights came up, and four hundred Britney Spearses rushed the stage.
Glory.
