It’s already two months into my year-long commitment to the Featherless Bipeds, and overall it’s been going fairly well. My father has left a couple of messages on my answering machine to ask if I’ve been killed by a drunk in a bar yet. Thankfully, the answer is no.
I’ve only had one scrape with violence so far, when an intoxicated middle-aged woman offered to “show me a good time” at her place after our final set was finished. When I declined, she attempted to throw what was left of her drink in my face, but slammed me in the forehead with her glass instead, nearly knocking me out.
Since this gig was on one of the nights when Lola had other commitments, Tristan, Akim and I all suspect that Jimmy T may have accepted the offer that I declined. None of us has mentioned this episode to Lola. We figure she’ll catch Jimmy T in the act eventually, and then she’ll have to decide whether she prefers honesty and fidelity in a man, or money, a Mercedes and a James Bond apartment downtown.
Jimmy T, for his part, continues to be nearly useless as a guitar player, but as a booking agent he’s been doing well. He land us regular gigs, and we get paid enough to survive, so Tristan, Akim and I have been able to spend the daylight hours writing a lot of new songs, rather than working day jobs at the local McDonald’s like some other bar musicians we’ve run across. A few of the bars where we’ve played have even booked us to come back in a couple of months. Usually these have been the gigs where Lola has been on stage as the lead vocalist. The rebooking rate for the shows where Jimmy T, Tristan and I share the spotlight has been significantly lower.
Once again, Lola isn’t able to make it to tonight’s gig because of a Women’s Issues Commission event, but that’s okay, because Tristan, Akim and I have written a bunch of new songs over the past month or so, and we’re using this show as a chance to test them out live before we get Lola to learn the vocal parts. After the gig, we’ll watch Tristan’s videotape of the show, and we’ll adjust the songs if they don’t play back well.
We’re playing at a place called V.O.S., a trendy, converted back-road barn filled with a typical crowd of loud underaged drinkers, and a bunch of middle-aged guys with leather jackets, thinning hair and jeans pulled up to their navels, who are trying to pick up girls who are probably the same age as their estranged daughters. Playing unfamiliar songs is not as risky here at V.O.S. as it can be at other places, since the drunken teenaged crowd would probably dance along to somebody slapping the side of a plastic trash can with a two-by-four. Nobody knows what V.O.S. is supposed to stand for, but they’re sure it must be something deep.
It’s half-past midnight, time for our third and final set of the evening. Akim and Tristan are already onstage, tuning their guitars and tweaking the controls on their amps. As I climb behind my drums, my stomach gurgles painfully from the ultra-spicy “meat ‘n’ bean” burritos I ordered from the bar during our first intermission. Jimmy T waves to a couple of girls seated at the edge of the dance floor nearest to the band. The high school girls smile, giggle, and wave back to him.
“When are you going to play one of your songs for us, Jimmy T?” the girls coo from the sidelines, their cartoon-like voices barely audible over the rumble of slurred barroom conversations and pool-table fist-fight preludes.
“Right away, babes,” says Jimmy T.
I hope, for Jimmy’s sake, that when those girls said “your songs”, they meant the band’s songs, and not Jimmy’s own material. Jimmy has taken to describing himself as the band’s “agent, front man, and leader,” so it will really bug me if he is passing my lyrics off as his own.
From his position front and centre on the stage, Jimmy T nods to the guy behind the soundboard, and the stage lights go up. In his rush to impress the babes in front of him, he has forgotten to tune his guitar — not that it makes much difference to the sound of his feeble rhythm playing. Jimmy’s upgraded his gear to include a six thousand dollar Signature custom and a Marshall stack for amplification, which just means that we all have to play extra loud to drown him out.
For our last set of the night, we follow our standard routine of playing a half-dozen cover tunes before sneaking in one of our originals. I am about to introduce the song, but Jimmy cuts in with, “Thank you! Now here’s a Featherless Bipeds original, that we call ‘I Want Your Embrace’, and it’s about men and women gettin’ together!”
The young girls at the front table cheer. Obviously, Jimmy wants to get together with them if he can get away with it. And the song is actually just called “Your Embrace.” Whatever. I just shrug and count us in. I am about to start singing when, half a beat early, Jimmy T starts crooning instead. The girls scream. Naturally, I like to sing the lyrics I write, but the bad burrito pains in my stomach are making it difficult to care much. Maybe Jimmy is doing me a favour. At least he’s getting the lyrics right:
If I said to you I’m running low on crazy dreams
Would you kindly turn away
And return with your arms full
Of something that inspires
I sing the harmony line that Jimmy T is normally supposed to:
This is your embrace
This time, this place
Your Embrace
Your smile, your face
Your embrace
As he sings the next line, Jimmy T’s face contorts like he’s having an abdominal cramp. He’s really pouring on the cheese for his teenaged fan club:
And if I begged for one last breath
Would you part with one of yours
Would you put your lips to mine
And bring me back again
As I join in on the next chorus, my own face contorts because I actually am having an abdominal cramp, thanks to those burritos.
This is your embrace
This time, this place
Your Embrace
Your smile, your face
Your embrace
If some tragic current
Pulled me deep beneath the surface
Would you pull me up
Would you give me something I could cling to
Up to this point, it’s an easygoing, mid-tempo song, but then, right here, right now, we double the tempo, and Akim wails out on guitar, and Tristan produces some astonishing bass runs, and I polish the whole thing off with some thundering drumming. It’s the optimistic ending that musically drives home the point that the lyrics make — this part was Tristan’s idea.
And if a frantic wind
Pulled me up into it’s fury
Would you bring me down to earth
Would you give me life again
This is your embrace
This time, this place
Your Embrace
Your smile, your face
Your embrace
Tristan and I join in on the vocal harmonies, repeating the words “Your Embrace” over and over and over again to the song’s Beatlesque conclusion. Akim, without his usual sarcasm, has dubbed Your Embrace “our first top ten radio hit”.
The young girls scream so hard I’m afraid they might wet themselves, but their cheering has the effect of getting some of the other patrons going as well. The applause builds to an almost flattering level.
“Glad you liked that!” Jimmy T shouts, “Here’s another one of our original tunes, called . . . ”
“Great Unanswered Questions of History,” I interrupt, just to annoy him. And, sure enough, the moment I kick into the propulsive beat of the song, which is one of our funkiest, the two young girls are flailing away in front of Jimmy. By the time I’m into the first verse, nearly all the other girls in the joint have joined them.
I wonder if Shakespeare was ever eighteen
Did he work at a gas bar, tell stories for free?
Did he hike to the East side to the beatnik cafe?
To hide in the shadows and drink underage?
The girls scream like sirens when Tristan and Jimmy join in on the three-part harmony on the chorus.
These are the great unanswered questions of history
The great unanswered questions of history
I wonder when Plato got his first kiss
When she offered her lips, did he pucker and miss?
Did he make up tall tales to tell loafers at school?
Did he put on black leather, pretend to be cool?
Then something amazing happens. Akim, who never sings a note, steps up to his usually redundant mike, and, adds a deep, resonant fourth harmony line on the chorus. Cool! I am playing in a band that can sing four-part harmonies! When the girls scream this time around, I feel like joining them! I dig into my drums, and really give it on the vocals this time.
These are the great unanswered questions of history
The great unanswered questions of history
I wonder if Einstein ever worried about
The zits on his face, while he made out
Had the cops in the campground heard the noise in the tent?
Had he saved enough money for his college rent?
These are the great unanswered questions of history
The great unanswered questions of history
I wonder if Freud got weak in the knees
When a girl like you began to tease
Would you be there beside him when he woke up?
Would you head for the sunset with him in his pickup truck?
Here tomorrow, gone today
History seems to work that way
Here today, just you and me
As for History, we’ll just wait and see
“Whoa!” cheers Tristan, “That was great!”
Jimmy nods, “Not bad, but . . . ”
“Not bad?” I yelp, “That was amazing! Who knew that we had four singers in the band?”
“Five, including Lola,” Jimmy T is quick to add. Usually he only sucks up to her when she’s around to hear him; maybe he’s feeling a subconscious twinge of guilt for flirting with the chickadees.
Now my stomach is telling me that I may have played too hard on that last song. I am sweating profusely, and my digestive system sends a few pre-emptive discharges of bile up my throat, which taste like those super-spicy ‘meat ‘n’ bean ‘ burritos. In the days before refrigeration, people used to use spices to cover up the taste of rotten meat. Uuurp . . .
The small crowd remains on the dance floor, and, since the original songs seem to be working well with them, I start us into another, called Yearbook, by singing a cappella:
I’m looking at the inside cover of my grade twelve yearbook
I’m reading the inscriptions from the girls I thought I loved
I whack my snare drum, and we kick into the song in earnest.
Here’s one from Margaret — We’d already broken up
I thought we had a good thing, but I somehow screwed it up
“Hey” she wrote on the page, “One day I’m gonna blow right past you”
Then she scribbled out the word “blow” — she didn’t wanna leave any innuendo
Akim tosses in another bassy harmony line on the chorus, and it sounds great. He sounds like a leaner, meaner version of Barry White.
Here’s to you Margaret — When I say this I really mean it
Any girl that woulda had me then,
I wouldn’t wanna know right now, anyhow
Here’s another one from Cindy — a handwritten confessional
She talked a lot about God, but used her hands like a professional
She wrote “We had a lot of fun,
Together we attained a lot of knowledge”
I took her to the prom — she dumped me for a guy at Bible College
Here’s to you, Cindy — When I say this I really mean it
Any girl that woulda had me then,
I wouldn’t wanna know right now,anyhow
Oh no . . . when I sang that last “anyhow”, I nearly spewed on the mike. I am sweating buckets now, and it’s all I can do to keep the Mount Vesuvius in my gut from erupting full force. I’ll never order a burrito in a bar again for as long as I live! I sing on, gulping down the pre-eruption bile, begging my stomach to be still.
Today I bumped into a girl named Angela
We split a beer and talked about the future (uurp . . . )
The only thing she wrote in my yearbook
Was “Good Luck” (ulp . . . )
We’ve still got a lot of things to talk about
Here’s to us, Angela
You thought I was a clown (glurp . . . )
So you didn’t like me then —
here’s to now
The band flies into a great instrumental bit, and I realize there is no longer any way to stop the vomit comet from bursting through. Not wanting to puke all over my entire drum set, I grab frantically with one hand at my open-bottomed floor tom, and flip it upside down on the stage beside me. I stop drumming for a few beats as I hurl liquid fire into my drum-turned-bucket. I manage to kick my bass drum to the beat as the second volley hits the drum skin. I wipe my mouth, grab a fresh pair of sticks, and manage to finish the song the way it’s supposed to end.
Jimmy flashes an annoyed look in my direction, then he turns to his mike and says, “Well, folks, our drummer really screwed up on that one! Hey, I’ve got a joke for ya . . . what do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? — A drummer!”
A few people in the crowd laugh.
“Why are the band’s breaks limited to thirty minutes?” Jimmy continues. “So you don’t have to retrain the drummer!”
So he’s a stand-up comedian, is he? Well, now that I’ve unloaded the poison that was once in my stomach, my strength is returning. I start kicking a rhythm on my bass drum . . .
Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom
I begin chanting into my microphone, along with the rhythm I’m creating with my right foot:
“You know how to make a drummer’s girlfriend drive really fast? — Put his drums in the middle of the road!”
More people in the crowd laugh, a few more gather on the dance floor to listen — they think this is part of the show. Jimmy T does not look impressed that I am stealing his thunder, which is incentive enough for me to continue. I speed up the rhythm a little.
Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom
“What did the drummer get on his IQ test? — Drool! How can you tell when the drum riser is level? — Drool comes out of both sides of the drummer’s mouth!”
With that, I toss in a wild Buddy Rich snare fill. People hoot and cheer. Many of them have begun to clap along to the bass beat, and newcomers are heading straight to the dance floor to watch and listen. Tristan and Akim nod along, grinning, clapping to the beat. Jimmy T stands off to one side of the stage, feigning boredom. His girlfriends are clapping along, too.
Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom
“You know how to stop a drummer from playing? — Put some sheet music in front of him! What’s the difference between a trampoline and a drummer? — You take your shoes off to jump on the trampoline!”
I throw in a monstrous fill here, hitting toms, cowbells, cymbals, and rims . . . a tricky bit I learned by listening to Neil Peart drum solos over and over and over again as a teenager. The crowd is becoming frenzied . . . I love it! Akim has put his guitar down now, and is standing on the right-hand side of my drum set, clanging out a simple beat on the ride cymbal with a stick he’s grabbed from inside my gig bag. To my left, Tristan is clapping his hands over his head along with my drumming, leading the audience along. Jimmy T removes his guitar and leaves the stage.
Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom,
“What’s the difference between a drummer and a vacuum cleaner? — You have to plug one of them in before it sucks! Aaaaaaaaand. . . . ”
(I throw in a HUGE drumroll here . . . )
“Last but not least . . . How is a drum solo like a sneeze? — You can tell it’s coming, but you can’t do anything about it!”
And with that, I cut into the biggest, fattest, loudest drum solo I’ve ever played; there’s some Neil Peart, there’s some Ginger Baker, there’s some Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, there’s a little bit of every drummer I’ve ever studied.
As I bring the solo to a climax, Jimmy T climbs back onto the stage in front of my drums, if only to absorb a bit of the applause for himself.
“And here’s one for the road, before we leave you for the night,” I add, feeling that my vengeance is not totally complete, “How is a drummer like a stagecoach driver? Both sit behind a horses’ ass!”
Jimmy T scowls. There is applause and laughter as we step down from the stage. The place is loud with hooting, clapping, beer bottles clinking on the bar tables. We’ll get an encore call for sure.
“We’ll be right back in a few minutes, folks!” Tristan shouts into his mike.
Jimmy storms from the stage, does his best Hyde-to-Jeckyl transformation, then joins the two girls at their table, grinning suavely. As I walk past them with my floor tom full of vomit, one of the girls shouts out, “Hey drummer! That was awesome!”
“Thanks!” I say, giving her a Jimmyesque wink, which I know will bug him.
I am almost to the stage door, when I hear the other girl say, “Jeeze, Jimmy, you’re a great songwriter, and it sure was nice of you to let the drummer sing a couple of your songs!”
“Well,” mutters Jimmy, quietly enough to sound modest (and also to avoid being overheard by me), “it’s his birthday.”
I set the floor tom down by the door and stomp back over to where Jimmy and the girls sit.
“My birthday is in December, you idiot!” I bark, then, to the girls I say, “Sorry to disappoint you, ladies, but I write the lyrics, and Akim and Tristan over there write the music. Jimmy can’t write a friggin’ set list. ”
Illusions are shattered. The two girls wanted so badly to believe that the good-looking guy with the nice clothes wrote all the songs. They look like they might cry. Jimmy, on the other hand, looks really pissed off, because his chances of fondling their young breasts have just decreased significantly.
“Anyone can write a rock song!” he rages, “Anyone! You think you’re such hot shit! You’re just a drummer. A damn metronome! I could write a better song than you in five minutes if I felt like it.”
I reach into the back pocket of my jeans, and toss a stub of pencil onto the napkin in front of him.
“Okay,” I say, “you’ve got five minutes.”
The two girls look hopeful. They believe that their handsome hero can do it. I walk outside to empty the barf out of my floor tom.
Jimmy does, in fact, have something written on the napkin when I return. He waves it at me as I approach.
“See, I told you anyone could write a song in five minutes. And what’s more, we’re gonna play it tonight.”
“Oh, come off it, Jimmy,” I say. “We can’t write music that fast.”
“Oh yeah?” He hollers out to Tristan, who is cleaning his guitar on-stage. “Tristan! Come here!”
Tristan must be finished tuning his bass, because he walks over immediately, which reinforces the Leader-of-the-Band image Jimmy is trying to cultivate with his two young groupies.
“For our encore, wanna play the blues with some lyrics I wrote?”
“Well, I guess,” says Tristan hesitantly, “but let’s see the lyrics, first.”
“Let me read ’em to you,” Jimmy says. He clears his throat and recites:
Girls are hot
like ’em a lot
I like ’em a lot
yeah, girls are hot
I like ’em in skirts
I like ’em in jeans
I like ’em on their backs
or down on their knees
I like girls
when they moan
I like girls
on the phone
“Wait! Wait!” Jimmy T hollers, scribbling out the last line on the napkin, “I’ve got something even better! Listen to this!’
He continues:
I like girls
when they moan
I’m a dog
and they gimme a bone!
He crosses his arms and waits for the chorus of admiration.
“What the hell was that?” laughs Akim, who has wandered over to the table, “Horton Gets Horny, by Dr. Seuss?”
“Well, Jimmy,” says Tristan, in an attempt at diplomacy, “I’m not sure it fits our musical style. Maybe you can sell those lyrics to Aerosmith or something.”
“C’mon, Tristan!” Jimmy says, “It’s the blues! We can do the blues!”
I decide to put an end to the horror. The crowd is chanting for an encore, and I suppose Jimmy has suffered enough for his sins. All he wants is to impress the girls, so I’ll let him have his wish.
“Hey, listen, Jimmy, for our encore I think you should do most of the singing . . . my throat is pretty scorched from puking onstage, you know.”
“Oh. Okay. I can do that. Hear that, girls . . . I’ll be singing lead for the rest of the night.” Then he looks back at me. “You puked onstage? When?”