Daron's Guitar Chronicles

My butt was numb against the bench by the time a punk in blue combat boots took up a position across the street. I crossed to his side, and walked up next to him. There was probably some elaborate ritual we were supposed to go through, like in a bar but more complex. I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted or how much to pay for it. But I had seventy five dollars in cash, I figured that was good for something.

“You’re just a kid,” I said.

He looked at me like he’d just seen me now, like he hadn’t watched me cross the way. His eyes were blue, but I could see the burnt strawberry tinge to his hair — bad bleach job. “Yeah, so are you,” he said back, tapping a cigarette against his leg.

“Don’t light that.” I leaned against the smooth stone of the building. He looked annoyed. “Tell me what you’re worth.”
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It didn’t take long to get our first gig as a threesome–in early summer I sent out the demo tapes and had booked the gig within a week. So it was that a few weeks later we had our debut at this hole in the wall place in Jamaica Plain, one of those places whose legend is larger than the dance floor. It was a weeknight, maybe fifty people scattered themselves around the place. I barely noticed them. It was almost as if there were just the three of us, and yet it was nothing like a rehearsal. Ziggy came to life, howling and leaping off the low stage, then climbing back up like a four-legged spider, and never missed a note. I got so caught up in watching him that I almost missed hitting my footpedal before the solo in our third song. I closed my eyes, then, letting the solo carry me through to the other side where I passed the strand of melody back to his voice. I opened my eyes. He was lying on the floor between my legs, making like the microphone was an ice cream cone. Or something else. I felt my breath go ragged as I closed my eyes again, felt him brush my calf as he crawled away.
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We had our first rehearsal as a threesome late one night at a practice room somewhere on the Emerson campus, where I guess theater arts majors could come to write show tunes if they wanted or something. Michelle still had friends there who signed us in and we settled ourselves into a cramped room with a small chalk board and upright piano. Crumbly white acoustic tile, the kind gridded with tiny holes, covered the walls, a few fluorescent flyers for campus concerts and events thumbtacked to it. We had carted with us two milkcrate-sized amps, two guitars, one electric bass and a table top drum machine, just in case.

The Ovation would have been friendlier to the little room, but I could still play much more fluidly on the Strat, so I started with that. I plugged the guitar in and started to warm my fingers up. Bart did the same across from me, while Ziggy sat on the piano stool and looked a little lost in the crossfire of notes. We were dressed almost alike–jeans, T-shirt, flannel long sleeve shirt–but what looked mundane on me looked hip on him. He had tightly laced Doc Martens on his feet, fashionably scuffed. He had lost the eyeliner since the last time we’d seen him. While Bart and I ran through a few riffs, he began to spin on the stool slowly, like a doll in a music box.

“What do you want to start with?” I said to Bart.

Bart shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

“How about ‘Welcome.’”

Ziggy giggled. “Seems appropriate.”
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It was a long, dull winter in Boston. Bart and Michelle moved into a nice one bedroom in Allston, right on the T line, while I got myself a cheap studio sublet in the Fenway from a Berklee student who was abroad until September. Michelle worked at Tower and got me a job there as a clerk by telling them I knew something about jazz. As it turned out, I did know more than most of the other clerks. Bart spent much of the winter doing some studio backing musician type gigs while I worked six days a week. Most days I punched in at 1pm and worked until 9pm, others I worked 4pm to store closing at midnight. It took me exactly eleven minutes to walk from my apartment to the store, unless my clock at home was wrong, which was always a possibility. A bus ran from the corner of Queensberry right to Newbury Street, but because of the weird fucked up way that Boston’s streets run, it sometimes took longer to ride the bus than to walk. Besides, I could never get a bus that got me there exactly at 1pm, which meant I walked in the snow and winter rain and other weather-type crap, but this was not a big deal compared to the amount of walking I did in Providence. My walk took me right past Jack’s Drum Shop, where despite them name they also sell guitars and other instruments, and the Berklee Performance Center.

Technically I worked in the jazz department, on the third floor separated from the classical music section by glass partitions which are meant to be soundproof but really aren’t. Thing is, there wasn’t always that much to do in jazz, other than stand at the cash register. The questions people tended to ask me fell into one of two categories, those that showed how very little the customer knew about jazz (like “Do you have a trumpet section? I’m looking for a really famous trumpet player.” Me: “Do you remember the name?” Them: “Oh, let me see, it was… wait, I got it. Benny Goodman.”) and those that showed how very little I knew about jazz. (I’ll never again send someone to the hip hop section looking for Herbie Hancock. Promise.) Lucky for me, all the time I spent in school ignoring what was being said had made tons of room for the memorization of the smallest trivial details about pretty much every recording artist I cared to read the liner notes on. Management let me play what I wanted out of the new releases, and with all the classic rereleases coming out on CD, I got a pretty good jazz education pretty fast.

But when things were especially slow in jazz, which was about every other day, they pulled me or the other guy who sometimes worked with me (an art school student named Jay) down to the second floor for various dumb retail duties. The dumbest of these was rack combing. People have this tendency to browse and pick up things, and carry them around the store. Then when they find something better/cheaper, they abandon the first thing at whatever bin or shelf the second thing is found in. By the end of a week of rabid browsing, the racks would be full of misplaced crapola, hence the task of rack combing. For some reason, the jazz department didn’t get as shuffled as the pop and rock sections, and this annoyed me, and the fact that it annoyed me also annoyed me.

I generally started an afternoon’s combing with the bargain bins. People left a lot of junk there, which always caused aggravation for the cashiers, because people would find stuff there that wasn’t on sale, but then try to get it for a sale price because it was in the bin. (We’d never give it to them.)
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By noon I had worked my way over to Bart’s house and knocked on the door. After a few minutes his roommate whose name I could never remember opened it.

“Bart here?” I realized then that I didn’t see his car.

“Nah, he took off for Boston with Michelle.” Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Yeah, right, of course.” I wondered who Michelle was.

“You wanna leave him a note?”

I didn’t–I’d see him tonight, I hoped. I thanked the roomie and went back down the steps. I climbed back over College Hill to where all the used record stores, used clothing, used books, and fast food stands were. With four dollars in my pocket I could get a pretty decent meal if I doled it out right. But I wasn’t hungry. Lack of sleep was turning my blood to mud. I went through the motions of looking through the record stores and got real depressed looking through the dollar-bin. Band after band I’d never even heard of, the cover photos on their albums seeming utterly ludicrous in the face of their failure. It was time to go home.
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