Chapter 19

Get 27

IT IS A FACT universally acknowledged that a young man in a foreign city, with a healthy ego and too much time on his hands, will eventually find himself fronting a rock band. Whether we sing in the shower, air-guitar around the living room, or use a hairbrush as a microphone in front of the mirror, there’s a rock star lying dormant in all of us. All it takes to wake the sleeping beast is an unusual amount of self-possession and a whole lot of chutzpah: two qualities that James and I had in spades.

It was a Thursday evening in February, just after my third anniversary in Paris. James and I were propping up the bar at the Connétable, sipping whiskeys while the greater population of Freaksville, Paris, stumbled around us. Marie was tending bar in her inimitable Gallic fashion—cigarette in hand, look of abject boredom on her face, pointedly ignoring customer requests for a beverage. As the night wore on and the whiskeys took hold, the banter turned to bravado, and we revisited a favorite, recurring drunken conversational theme: the formation of a band.

Possessed as we were of an unshakable belief in our own musical talent, we reasoned that it was not only possible to create a band for the public performance of what my mother calls “young people’s music” but more crucially, it was our sworn duty to do so. We owed it to Paris to foist our complete lack of musical ability upon the city. We owed it to France to liberate the country from the grasp of the awful music it seemed determined to consume. And by god, one day, we were going to make it happen.

In her most expressive gesture for probably the entire week, Marie rolled her eyes. She had heard it all before. How many more bottles of whiskey would be consumed, she wondered, before these big-talking foreigners put their questionable musical talent where their mouths were and actually formed a band? Bored by the drunken gibberish, she took the Connétable booking schedule from a shelf behind the bar, opened it to April 18, and scrawled at the bottom of the page, “Bryce et James—concert.”

The gauntlet had been thrown down. The die had been cast. And even through the Johnnie Walker haze, we both knew that once the Connétable publicity and promotions juggernaut had been set in motion (a poster on the door and a few flyers on the bar), we would be powerless to stop it. Le Connétable, by virtue of its popularity among long-haired musical types, had already played host to some of our earliest drunken performances. Invariably comprising a tunelessly rendered version of Robbie Williams’s “Angels”—James on acoustic guitar, me on the stairwell with vocals—our performances had never failed to inspire total silence among our audience. We took this to be quiet contemplation of the raw power of our musical talent. Now it was time to take our act to the next level.

Finding other members for the band proved relatively easy. Prerequisites for band membership included: vague musical ability, an oversize ego, and an unquestioning belief in one’s own attractiveness to the opposite sex. Claudio immediately sprang to mind.

Hailing as he did from Conegliano, in the northern Italian hills above Venice, Claudio, like many of his countrymen, dedicated a large amount of his time and energy to the dual activities of pursuing women and preening. Employing a Latin charm that we Anglos could only look on with envy and awe, he could woo a woman at twenty paces. And in the odd instance where his Italian charm failed, his flawless sense of humor and his propensity to perform usually picked up the slack. Claudio was such a comic, such a natural ham, and so effortlessly charismatic, he had earned the nickname Coco—as in “clown.” If for no other reason than to entertain us during rehearsals, he would be a perfect addition to the band.

Since I had already selflessly claimed the lead singer role (an uncharacteristic gesture of narcissism on my part) and James had declared an interest in the lead guitarist role, Claudio’s rudimentary ability to pluck a guitar string made him an excellent choice for rhythm guitarist. It took little in the way of persuasion to convince Claudio to join the band. The prospect of what he confidently predicted would be screaming hordes of panting groupies appeared to sway his decision.

The recruitment of a bass guitarist and drummer was less straightforward. Stefan was a highly accomplished computer geek from Indiana whom I had recently hired as the “webmaster” at ICC. Renowned for his higher-than-average intelligence and a firm conviction that just about everything in life was part of a CIA conspiracy, Stefan was also a dab hand on the bass guitar. If we could distract him long enough from his Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore dogma, I figured, he might just be able to provide the all-important bass lines to the ragtag cover tunes we were planning to massacre. He also appeared to have an unlimited supply of very powerful dope, which was going to be vital to the rehearsal process.

So that left only the recruitment of a drummer. Anyone who has ever had anything to do with a band will know that the drummer is by far the most important member. A drummer’s syncopation, sense of rhythm, and ability to maintain a beat are the foundations upon which the band relies. Our drummer, we decided, would need to have the added ability to play loud enough to drown out the rest of our questionable musical talents.

Enter Maurizio. Though he was in his early forties, Maurizio, also of Italian origin, exuded the enthusiasm and lust for life of a teenager. Unfailingly generous, gentle, and polite, the perpetually happy proprietor of his very own Italian restaurant, Maurizio was one of those Latinos who made you feel warm just by being around. He also happened to be a convicted criminal, a political exile, and was wanted in his home country for crimes he committed as a teenager in the service of the Red Brigade, a Communist terror group. In the mid-1980s, as one of some twenty former Red Brigade members who had been granted asylum by French president François Mitterrand, Maurizio had arrived in France as an asylum-seeking fugitive. He had previously served six years of an eighteen-year prison sentence in Italy for his role in several bank robberies in the late seventies, and faced certain prosecution should he ever set foot back in his homeland.

Now he and his wonderful wife Concetta carved a hardworking, honest living out of a small restaurant, La Baraonda, in the tenth arrondissement. Purveyors of delicious homemade pasta, seafood, and tiramisu, they spent almost as much time plying their trade as they did receiving random members of their neighborhood for long chats over espresso coffees.

With Maurizio on board, the band was complete: a self-obssessed Aussie, a preening English bovver boy, a philandering Venetian, a conspiracy theorist American, and a bona-fide Italian terrorist. We were ready to make music.

Rehearsals were initially staged in the tiny basement bar of Le Connétable. A dank, stone-lined hole under the main bar area, the basement stank of mildew and stale cigarettes—perfect conditions for the gestation of a rock phenomenon. James and I would meet there after work, take off our ties, plug in his guitar and my microphone, and work through a collection of randomly selected songs. From Oasis to Van Morrison, Radiohead to the Strokes, Robbie Williams to R.E.M., Beck to Britney—we left no musical stone unturned in our quest for the perfect cover tune playlist.

As the weeks ticked by and the inaugural gig fast approached, we toiled away in the dark. With each passing day we became ever more acutely aware of how supremely lacking in natural talent we were.

The additions of Claudio and Stefan, rather than bolster the rehearsal sessions, only seemed to confuse the issue, invariably ending in argument and bruised egos all round. Whether a song was in C or G, whether one of the guitarists was playing out of tune, whether we should stick to the song as it was originally recorded or play it with our own signature twist, all became the subject of heated debate. In composing the playlist we had to constantly, delicately compromise between Claudio’s insistence on including bossa nova classics and James’s preference for belting Brit rock. And all the while the great unspoken truth that all of us felt but none dared mention was that whatever that noise was we were making each week, it was patently unsuitable for public consumption. Still, the concert was locked in. What we lacked in musical prowess, we would simply have to make up for in bravado.

A week before our concert night, the dingy rehearsal studios where we had moved in the grungy twentieth arrondissement began to resemble a war zone. In broken French (the only language we all spoke in common) a hypersensitive Italian clashed with a no-nonsense Englishman who snapped at a bossy Australian who picked on a guileless American. It was like trying to build the Tower of Babel without bricks and mortar.

We wrestled with the finer nuances of the Britney Spears classic “Baby, One More Time” and rendered barely recognizable such worldwide hits as Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” With increasing frustration we tripped clumsily over the chords, breaks, and melodies of such guaranteed crowd-pleasers as Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl,” Radiohead’s “Creep,” and the Strokes’ “Someday.” While the rhythm guitarist pouted, the lead guitarist belted out long-winded solos. While the singer missed his cues, the perma-stoned bass guitarist plucked happily away inside his own noxious smoke cloud. The drummer, for his part, spent most of the time looking on in total bemusement. Yet for reasons that still escape me, we would emerge from each session fantasizing about the size of the check Sony Records would undoubtedly throw at us the minute we were unleashed on Paris’s unsuspecting public.

But before we could attain rock supersuperstardom, we needed to come up with a catchy name. Choosing a name for a band is a delicate exercise. You have to pick something that’s clever without being smartass. Obtuse without being pretentious. Accessible without being obvious. It has to appeal to your audience, say something about your style of music, and look good on the cover of Rolling Stone when inevitably you are featured there. In our case, it also had to be bilingual—and preferably serve as a sufficiently witty or enigmatic distraction from the fact that none of us could properly play musical instruments. We settled on Get 27 (or jet vingt-sept, as it is pronounced in France). It was a name that rolled easily off the tongue, borrowed heavily from the Blink 182/Matchbox 20 school of word-number band name combinations—and happened to also be the name of a foul-tasting mint liqueur often to be found gathering dust on the top shelves of French bars. None of us particularly liked the liqueur, but we all liked the fact that it was favored by aging professional alcoholics, the kind of men whose bent frames could often be seen hunkered at the bar of the Connétable. The kind of men we all feared Paris would eventually turn us into.

Working on the smoke-and-mirrors principle of rock goddery—namely, that any old tripe will pass as music as long as it is marketed properly—I set to work straightaway on creating a Get 27 website. Within three days, thanks to the Web-manipulating skills of a friend at the OECD (whose international civil servant job seemed to entail little more than watching the clock, making coffee, and not paying tax), the World Wide Web became just that little bit wider with the addition of the Get 27 homepage, complete with detailed biographies that almost made us sound legit.

A website was fine and well, but no amount of online verbosity would disguise the fact that when the day of our debut performance finally arrived, we were spectacularly unprepared.

That day our final rehearsal only served to emphasize how much more polishing our act needed. A playlist that ran the musical spectrum from Gloria Gaynor to the Libertines was only half-formed. The break between choruses in our rendition of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” was an unmitigated disaster, and despite our best efforts, we hadn’t even come close to nailing the ending of at least six of our thirteen songs. The hours ticked by as we strummed and toiled. When night rolled around, we were, to a person, a bundle of nerves. Sure we were only playing the tiny basement bar of the Connétable, and yes, the audience would consist exclusively of supportive, drunken friends. But so successful had we been in convincing those friends that we were actually “not that bad,” we now had to pull something special out of the bag.

Invoking a strategy that had served countless rock bands before us, we realized there was only one thing to do. We had to get stonkingly, irreversibly drunk. At a pregig dinner upstairs at the Connétable, the five band members were notable for their terrified looks and propensity to drink entire glasses of fine red wine in one furtive gulp. While downstairs the crowd was swelling—causing Marie, the bartender, the distinct inconvenience of actually having to serve drinks—upstairs our stomachs were churning. What were we thinking? Who were we kidding? Did we really believe we could pull this off?