The Teenage Brainwashers’ set was coming along. I was getting the hang of playing one song while thinking another, and we’d managed to alter the arrangements so they matched our own songs more closely with less trouble than I’d expected. Even Shinefield, as a math guy, could understand that we had to shorten all of these six-minute songs if we wanted to do more than five of them in a thirty-minute set, plus two for the obligatory encore. We got rid of most of the nonessential bits of “Live Wire” till “Fiona” was a short, sharp blast of concise mooning over an imaginary girl, just like it was supposed to be. But I decided I couldn’t resist keeping Bon Scott’s “Oh stick this in your fuse box”—that really fit in, if you know what I mean. (If you don’t, it has to do with sex.)
One thing we hadn’t anticipated, though maybe we should have, was that Shinefield eventually noticed that our whole set was, as far as he knew, covers.
“Let’s play some of our songs,” Shinefield would say, meaning my songs, little knowing that that was exactly what we’d been doing all along. “They’re actually pretty good.” My eyes said, “Gee, ya think, stoner boy?” but fortunately Shinefield was not much of an eye-reader.
The whole thing almost blew up in our faces when it came to convincing him to play “Cat Scratch Fever” three times in the same set, and twice in a row, without the guitar intro. Even the dimmest, most stoned-out-of-his-skull hippie skater in the world would have smelled a rat there, and Shinefield was not nearly as dim as he was cracked up to be. I knew we were pushing it, but Sam Hellerman had insisted. “Which one would we cut?” he had asked me. “ ‘Sadistic Masochism’? Be serious.”
He didn’t have to convince me to be serious about “Sadistic Masochism,” but Shinefield was another story.
“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, when Shinefield’s disgruntlement had risen too close to the surface to push it back under all that easily, “I didn’t want to tell you this till it was for sure, but see, there’s a show. Well, not a show. I mean, it is a show, but it’s also kind of a contest.…”
“Another battle of the bands?” said Shinefield, his eyes lighting up. He had loved the Chi-Mos’ terrible Battle of the Bands performance at Hillmont High School last year (about which, see my previous explanations, and laugh all you want to: it was the best we could do at the time, and plus, what terrible B. o. t. B. performances have you done lately?). He was always bringing it up and saying things like “That’s how I first got into you guys,” and he had made it very clear that he’d like nothing better than to experience some of that terribleness himself one day.
Yes, Sam Hellerman had explained. It was kind of like a battle of the bands. Sort of. But more like a real show, too, where bands were supposed to do covers, and the band that got the biggest audience response would win … this really great thing. Sam Hellerman apologized for not having all the details committed to memory, but as far as he could recall it included things like a small amount of money and possible studio time at a, you know, studio. And, Sam Hellerman thought he remembered, hats, maybe. Oh, and also a lifetime supply of Mountain Dew.
“Are you serious?” Shinefield sounded almost giddy. “A lifetime supply? For each of us?”
“No,” Sam Hellerman had said with a slightly worried tone. “Between the three of us. Still, that’s pretty good.”
And Shinefield had readily agreed: one-third of a lifetime supply of Mountain Dew was pretty good. But of course, Sam Hellerman had added, the real benefit was the opportunity to show off how good our band was before a receptive audience, not to mention all the free publicity we would get.
But Sam Hellerman had had Shinefield at “lifetime supply of Mountain Dew.” He was, in an instant, the compliant and cooperative drummer once again. For a bit of Mountain Dew, it seemed, Shinefield would play “Cat Scratch Fever” all you wanted till the cows came home. It was kind of weird, actually. But what can I say? The guy just happened to like Mountain Dew. A lot.
Could this possibly end well? It was difficult to see how. But the songs were sounding so good, and I was, as ever, Sam Hellerman’s faithful and obedient servant, so I really had no choice but to roll with it and leave everything in Sam Hellerman’s capable, if slightly sinister, hands. God help us all.
At first I had half wondered if there might have been any basis at all to the story Sam Hellerman had told Shinefield, because you never could tell with that guy. For all I knew, there really could have been some kind of covers contest Mountain Dew show with free hats. But it had soon become apparent that he was making it up as he went along.
“What are we going to do,” I asked Sam Hellerman afterward, “when Phil figures out there’s no show?” Because we had started calling Shinefield “Phil” in honor of Phil Rudd, his kind of patron saint.
“Oh, there will be a show,” said Sam Hellerman, his eyes shining with an unearthly light behind his glasses. “Of that I can assure you.”
And that was how I learned that Sam Hellerman, having inadvertently talked his way into the concert promotion and soft drink public relations business, intended to go through with it. But where? But how? But who? He wouldn’t give me any details, as usual, and I think it pretty likely that he didn’t know any details himself at that point. But I could as good as see the machinery grinding in his odd but retardedly brilliant little head, and I knew better than to interrupt a genius at work. Plus, he said the thing that always silences further discussion.
“Leave it to me, Henderson,” he said.
And of course, as always, I left it to him as directed. I was all too happy to have someone to leave it to, and it might as well be him. And really, what choice did I have?