“What the fuck, dude?” Kurt snarled at Mike.
The band had just come off stage at the Olde 95 in Cicero, outside Chicago, and were crammed together in the storage closet that passed for the dressing room. Kurt played Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx and was the leader of the band. He was almost ten years younger than Mike and a really good musician. Theatre of Pain and teaching guitar lessons was the only thing standing between him and getting a real job.
“Learn the fuckin’ words!”
Mike fought to meet Kurt’s anger, but the cocksure character he played onstage melted fast. “He dropped a fucking beat! It threw me.”
Rod, the drummer, just shrugged dimly at the accusation as he pulled off his wig and dug through his bag for a pipe. Glenn, who played guitar, fidgeted edgily until Rod came up with the dope.
“Don’t fuckin’ pass it off on him. You haven’t gotten through a set yet without fuckin’ up the words!” Kurt shouted.
Mike felt himself give up the fight as D.J., the band’s manager, came in with a wad of cash.
“This is fucked, man,” Kurt snapped at D.J. as he pointed at Mike. “It’s fuckin’ Mötley, it ain’t Shakespeare. If the dude’s too fried to remember the fuckin’ words—”
“Shut the fuck up,” the manager sneered, peeling off some money and stuffing it into Kurt’s hand. “Go buy some Midol.”
The bassist stomped out of the dressing room. Rod sparked up his pipe as Glenn waited his turn. The woozy bonfire scent of the burning weed stirred something primal in Mike. His nights, like that smoke, traditionally drifted away with the first appearance of the intoxicants.
D.J. paid Rod and Glenn their share of the earnings, and took a hit off the pipe in return. He then offered Mike his pay, but pulled it away as Mike reached for it.
“You still got the voice, man, but you’re makin’ us look bad out there,” D.J. said. “You said you were going to study up. The lyrics are all out there on the internet.”
Mike squirmed. At forty-five years old, he had barely touched a computer, let alone the internet. Back in the mid-nineties, when everyone else his age was all about emails and chat rooms and web pages, Mike was beginning his prison stint. Once he got out, in between all the shorter trips to jail, it was all he could do to hang onto a place to sleep. Besides, computers were for assholes.
“Don’t worry about me. Once I get ’em down, ain’t gonna be a problem,” he said. “Anyway, the acoustics in this shithole have always sucked. Nobody’s gonna hear if I get the words right or not.”
“The owner heard. We pack this place every time we play. Sell more beer for him than any other tribute act on the circuit. He ain’t gonna fuck up his good thing with a Vince Neil who needs cue cards. So get it together.”
D.J. frowned sternly and handed Mike $175, his cut after the rest of the band, D.J., Bob who helped lug the amps and drums, and gas were taken care of. Having gone long stretches when a spare twenty bucks felt like a fortune, the bills felt good in his hand. But he knew this was chump change. And even then, nothing was guaranteed.
The band had seven more gigs scheduled. After that, Mike could be out on his ass. He couldn’t remember the words, and he didn’t really look like Vince Neil. His gut was losing its rock star tautness, and he struggled to get the hair right. He overheard the bartenders laughing and saying that his hair, bottle blond and teased to ratty heights, made him look like an old whore. If Mike were just a guy in the crowd, checking out the new Vince, he probably would’ve said worse. He clocked a half-assed Jimmy Page in the head with a bottle of beer once when there was a hack Zeppelin playing the tribute band circuit.
D.J. and the others left the dressing room to break down the gear and see if any girls had stuck around. Mike felt a headache coming on in the wretched little room. The cushions on the two thrift store couches were slashed and duct-taped about a hundred times. Fist-sized holes cratered the walls.
Mike grabbed Rod’s bag and rooted around for whatever he could find. That pot smelled fine and would’ve taken the edge off, but Rod disappeared with the pipe. Instead, he found an Altoids tin filled with an assortment of pills and some candy corn. He found a blue pill—maybe Adderall, but the markings were faded—and he washed it down with beer. The candy corn was stale.
It was 2:30 in the morning. It felt like he pulled something in his back during the show, but he knew that if he didn’t help the band haul its crap out to the van it wouldn’t help him keep the gig. After that, there was still a two-hour drive back to Wisconsin in his mother’s car to the bed waiting for him in his mother’s house. All to make 175 bucks.
* * *
The first serious talk about a record contract for Gravel Rash had come from Razor Records in the spring of ’91, right before Mike turned twenty-one. An A&R guy named Eddie Kingsolver had been tracking the band for about six months, showing up unannounced at the band’s gigs throughout the Midwest. Heavy metal was in one of its usual transitions, from the hair band glory of the Crüe to the seedy Hollywood grit of Guns N’ Roses to the seething jackhammer barrage of Pantera and Slayer, and all of the record companies tried to stay ahead of the trends.
Gravel Rash was already something of a throwback; Guns N’ Roses, its most obvious influence, had become a cliché for the band’s dope-addled determination to plow their multiplatinum act into the ground. But Eddie knew that particularly in the dull-minded middle part of the country, there would always be a market for the kind of blues-based debauchery Gravel Rash traded in. Signed at the right price without a lot of perks, there was a buck to be made on Gravel Rash.
Mike Husted, the band’s lead singer, was a genuine talent: charismatic, fearless, and possessed with a voice that wrung a kind of debased beauty from the sound of vocal cords straining to rip loose from their moorings. Eddie knew that Mike, along with the rest of the band, was seriously fucked up. He worked with young metal bands long enough to recognize the dope-and-excess template that reached backward from Guns to Mötley to Aerosmith to Sabbath to Zeppelin, ending in that great wellspring of rock decadence, the Stones. Most never find a career, many die seedy addict deaths while trying, but just enough bands beat the odds and make the Big Time to keep all the rock star wannabes playing the same deadly game.
Eddie knew that in the few months he was checking out Gravel Rash, heroin found its way into the band’s bloodstream. When Eddie returned to Chicago that spring to take Mike aside and tell him that his bosses at the label were just tweaking the numbers before a contract was drawn up, he flew in from New York with a taste of Persian Brown meant only for the lead singer. The record company man was careful with these Midwestern bands—the dope in the hick markets was always weaker there, you could trigger an OD with the finer East Coast product—but he sensed Mike could handle it.
If the band took off, the dope would eventually have its way. There would be firings, interventions, and the predictable plunge into flaccid, unwanted music. Record companies gambled that it wouldn’t come until sometime after the third album, after enough units were sold to clean up on a final “Greatest Hits” album to put a bow on the artist’s career.
The label would move on to the next fresh new thing, and the discarded artist would spend his time between rehab and sad attempts at career resurrection, clinging to royalty statements and wondering where it all went. If he ended up dying young in some interesting way, his estate would see a bump in record sales.
* * *
But this was all just a best-case scenario when Eddie Kingsolver took Mike out for a four a.m. breakfast after a particularly fearsome Gravel Rash show at the American Legion Hall in South Beloit. The band did fewer and fewer bar gigs because of the size of the crowds they drew, and in that rundown theater the record company man saw glimpses of what could be—with some label reshaping—a credible arena band.
Mike liked Eddie. He was older—close to forty, it seemed to Mike—with that funny New York accent that Mike knew only from TV shows and movies. Eddie knew all about the music business, casually dropping the names of all the major acts he said he knew through the label. He seemed to really care about Mike, singling him out from the rest of the band and never blaming him when fuckups occurred on stage. And he got Mike high—really, really high. That showed how much he cared.
“How long you known Matt?” Eddie asked as Mike devoured a plate of pancakes. The surge from the sugary syrup rattled interestingly with the heroin bump Eddie provided him.
Matt Kirkwood was the second guitar player in Gravel Rash, behind Jay Taggert. Together with Kyle Lucht on bass and Terry Lemon on drums, the five had been Gravel Rash for nearly two years. It was precisely the sound and the look Mike honed since high school, and their ascent through the clubs to the point where Mike now sat across a table at Denny’s from a guy with Razor Records was a direct result of the chemistry they had forged and the murderous pace they had maintained.
“Dunno,” Mike pondered. “Matty’s been with us for, maybe, a year and a half?”
Eddie shrugged as he lit a cigarette. “Throw a stick in any direction in New York, you’ll hit a better rhythm guitar than him.”
The slight to his bandmate knifed through Mike’s fog. “Fuck, man,” he flinched. “Him and Taggert, they’re tight. Like Izzy and Slash, or Perry and Whitford. You pull him out, we’re a whole other band.”
“Maybe,” Eddie said. “But you and Taggert are the franchise. You write all the songs. If we get a record into the stores, you two are going to see all the publishing money. It’s not like splitting a grand five ways from Al’s Bar on a Saturday night. You make the majors, things change.”
“We’re a band,” Mike insisted weakly. He hated the air of big business that was pressing in on his rock-and-roll party.
Eddie cocked his head with a grin to lighten the mood. “Don’t sweat it. But I know the label is considering some things. I mean, it’s their money, right? So just promise me, you’ll hear them out if they come at you with some ideas. Promise?”
“I guess.”
“You trust me, right? I don’t do business with people who don’t trust me.”
“I trust you,” Mike grinned. He had no choice but to put his faith in Eddie. Despite his swagger and the years he had invested in his music career, Mike didn’t have a clue what he was doing. If they offered him a contract, he knew he’d have to find a lawyer and he had no idea how to go about that. His mother was useless, and the adults he knew through his parents were all doctors. Like any of them would help Larry Husted’s fuck-up son, anyway.
Eddie said he’d find him someone to look over the deal, and Mike figured that would be good enough. What mattered was that everything felt within reach.
“It’s really gonna happen?” Mike asked, fighting the giddiness that strained to seep through. Big money was being teased for his ability to pose like an outlaw, so it wouldn’t help to show that he was feeling like a little kid doubting the arrival of Santa Claus the next morning.
“It’s happening now,” Eddie said cockily through a swirl of smoke. “Believe it, it’s happening.”