Inside, Carynne was already talking with Louis, which was to say Louis was talking and she was nodding a lot. He was gesturing toward the rafters but I couldn’t make out what he was actually saying. He hadn’t struck me as the talkative type so it must have been important.
I laid the guitar case on the stage and then went to join them. Chris started adjusting drums. Ziggy prowled the edges of the space and the stage like a cat, checking everything out.
“Basically what I’m telling the boss here,” Louis said, as I stood next to him, “is that what I’m going to set up in here is like a toy piano, but when we get on the road it’ll be more like a Rick Wakeman set-up.”
“Okay.” Continue Reading »
Chris drove, I rode, which was a good thing since I still hadn’t really figured out the best way to get to the rehearsal space yet.
“When are you buying a car?” he asked, while we sat in traffic at some intersection I didn’t recognize. Chris hadn’t figured out the best way to get there yet, either, apparently.
Continue Reading »
The bed felt really empty when I was trying to get to sleep. Which turned into an endless loop of “The Bed’s Too Big Without You” by the Police in my head. Which turned into me turning the light back on and jotting down some notes for a song, which turned into the writing out a staff by hand and making actual musical notes, which I rarely do, but it seemed to make sense at the time, which turned into me grabbing the acoustic guitar nearest the bed (the orphan Yamaha) and working something out.
And by the time I was done with that, I was too tired to notice if anyone was in the bed or not. Continue Reading »
I was sitting crosslegged on the crappy shag carpet in the basement when the phone rang. The cordless phone had a kind of shrill yet anemic sound to it. Incentive to answer as quickly as possible. “Moondog HQ, can I help you?”
“Jeez, where have you been? And did you know it was me or do you always answer the phone like that?” Continue Reading »
Despite all the coffee, J fell back to sleep after we cuddled for a while.
Not sure if I wasn’t much of a cuddler or if it was that I was still antsy about all the things I was thinking about. Or if I just wasn’t used to it. I just hadn’t done much cuddling up to that point. When he was well and truly conked out again, I slipped out of bed, got dressed, and went down to the front desk and paid his hotel bill. I made sure to tell the clerk how awesome the concierge desk had been. Continue Reading »
Late that night insomnia bit me in the ass and wouldn’t let go. I didn’t want to wake J, and I didn’t want him to think if I left–i.e. went for a walk or something–that I was freaking out over something he had said.
Which led me to wonder, wait, am I freaking out over something he said?
Continue Reading »
Hello all, Cecilia here, popping in with some meta. Thanks for reading Daron’s Guitar Chronicles and I hope you’re enjoying that new chapters are flowing again after our hiatus.
A couple of notes about recent chapters that you might find of interest.
FAST AND LOOSE
I played fast and loose with a couple of dates and live shows and I should come clean about that.
First, apologies to Treat Her Right/Morphine for using them as a prop here. See, here’s the thing. My roommate Mac and I went to a show one night at Venus de Milo. We had gone there to dance, I think, and didn’t know there was going to be a surprise show. He and I moved in together in 1990 so technically that was a year after when the scene with Daron and Jonathan takes place at Venus. So I transposed the show a year earlier.
The really fudgy part is that I don’t know what band we saw. Continue Reading »
J and I had a long, slow meal at the Oyster House, and it didn’t even occur to me that oysters are supposedly an aphrodisiac. I was too busy talking about the upcoming tour, which J wanted to know all about, and dissecting the show we’d just seen.
Continue Reading »
Colin had called a cab while I was still drying off, and of course for once they came right away. So I had soaking wet hair and nearly broke my neck trying to pull a boot on and cross the living room at the same time. Turned out the insole had gotten twisted inside. I tossed the boot across the room and pulled on my high tops instead and didn’t tie them until I was in the back seat of the cab and we were on the way.
We got into traffic a few blocks from Lansdowne Street. “Ballgame traffic,” the cabby said. He was a bulk of a man with almost no hair and a neck like a whale’s belly, tattooed with something I couldn’t read. That was kind of surprising to me, given that I expected to see neck tattoos on guys like Colin and not ones twice his age.
“Let us out here. We’ll walk the rest of the way,” I said.
Continue Reading »
I worked on “Infernal Medicine” when I got home. I still just had fragments of lyrics–I’d crossed out far more than I’d left on the page. That was normal for me. But I started playing around with the sound of it, trying to get the aural equivalent of something deceptively sweet with a razor blade hidden in it. I ended up in the basement with my beat-up old four-track, dubbing one track with the Strat and one with the Ovation, then scrapping the Ovation in favor of the orphan Yamaha we’d unearthed.
Continue Reading »
