John took me straight back to the hotel and put me in bed. He took my temperature again (normal), gave me some aspirin, and ordered room service. He looked at my throat, said it was a good thing I didn’t have to sing, and ordered me to stay in bed.
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
“Don’t push it, Daron. I’ve seen this before. You’ve got to last a couple more days. I hate to make cancellations.”
Seen what before? I wondered. Scarlet fever? Rock Star Syndrome? He stayed until the food came, made sure I ate something, and then left. As soon as he was out the door, I lay back and fell asleep.
The next few days went on like that, with the road crew and everyone holding me together with home remedies and naps and it began to seem to me like I was always going to be sick and the tour was never going to end. Someone was always having to prop me up or figure out where I had gone to sleep. I developed a cough. Ziggy didn’t break the quarantine but did check up on me a couple of times a day. The shows were more noise and delirium and were the only time I felt awake. Video evidence would later prove that all the cough medicine was not a detriment to my playing. If anything, they were some of our best shows yet, which made me sorry I didn’t remember them better.
The next thing I knew, Bart was propping me up in an airport waiting room. In a few hours we’d be home.
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The next day we hit the road for Philly and I spent the two-plus hour bus ride sitting by myself, staring out the window or resting my head on my arms. Whenever Bart or Chris would ask me how I was doing I’d shrug and tell them I was resting my throat or I felt a little dizzy or something. And my throat was killing me. The words Strep Throat were mentioned several times and ignored.
But while I sat there with my silence pulled around me like a blanket, really I was thinking over last night and wondering if anything had really changed. For all his talk, Ziggy and I hadn’t made any “decisions,” and it seemed for now that our secret was intact. Ziggy ignored me. I gnawed on my calluses and played over in my mind things he’d said last night, and other nights. I could not decide for myself what my admission might have meant or how it changed anything. Maybe, I hoped, it would change the way he treated me, maybe he would take my feelings a little more seriously. But I feared that all it meant was I’d given him another opening to hurt me, another length of chain to jerk.
They checked us into our hotel first before taking us to sound check. John handed me a room key and explained that they were rooming me alone to try to keep anyone else from getting sick. “Your singer gets that sore throat and we’re fucked,” he said.
I refrained from telling him why this precaution was probably too late.
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I spent most of our day off in bed. Tread came to see me and I asked him to play through Windfall with me while I worked out some lyrics that meshed with the fragment Ziggy had left me.
The song was coming out sweet, that much I knew.
Room service, and this time I was awake for it.
Of Ziggy all I saw was that at some point during the night/morning he’d come in, showered and changed his clothes. I didn’t ask anyone else if they’d seen him.
A brief interruption of a nap for maid service. Bart and Christian checked up on me in the middle of the afternoon. My throat was swollen and I felt tired. They went off to a museum. More room service. I stood in a hot shower for a long time, not thinking about anything. When I got out, I wrote in the steam on the mirror: Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami. The four cities we had left to go. I’d gotten the itinerary from Tread. Tomorrow we’d drive to Philly and play a show. The following morning, drive to DC and play a show, then into the buses and drive all night to Atlanta, get there the next day and play a show that night. We got to sleep there that night, spend the next day traveling, and then sleep in Miami one night before the closing date.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. “Daron?” Ziggy’s voice.
“What?”
“Just seeing if it was you.”
No, it’s Speed Racer, I almost said. But my throat hurt and I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. Continue Reading »
Belle woke me up shaking me by the shoulders. “Come on, rock star,” she was saying, “time to go.”
I sat up slowly, waiting for my head to spin, but it didn’t. I knew the fever had broken before I touched my forehead. “I think I feel better.” The sky was dark outside, I realized, looking out her window at the illuminated offices of late workers across Sixth Avenue.
I stared at the glowing windows until she said “Driver’s waiting for you downstairs.”
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Cecilia here. So, the offices described for “BNC Records” are the offices of what was RCA Records back in the day. I didn’t change anything.
RCA started out as Radio Corporation of America in the 1920s and when I first set foot in their offices in 1984 they hadn’t yet been through the mega-mergers and acquisitions that would eventually make them part of BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) and recently there was even such a big merger that they are now part of the same company as their ancient rivals, Columbia Records. (This is like if the NBC and CBS tv networks merged, basically. Crazy.)
Their offices then were on Avenue of the Americas, not terribly far from Radio City Music Hall, as well as the building that housed 95.5 WPLJ FM, where I worked when I was in high school. WPLJ had just gone Top 40 and changed its handle to “Power 95″ at that time.
The two-story rehearsal studio/recording studio/performance space I describe at the BNC offices, where the video footage is filmed and where Daron and Ziggy get interviewed in the control room, was a real place deep inside the bowels of RCA’s corporate HQ. And if I’m remembering right, it was on floor 8. Continue Reading »
I was right about one thing, Belle sure could medicate me. She made me take four aspirin, drink a can of ginger ale, and gave me a slug of cough medicine for good measure. “Jacket fits?” she asked.
“Yes.” I didn’t want to take it off even though I knew that might bring the fever down. I just felt cold, cold, cold, and the coat was lined and warm.
“You function okay when you’re stoned?”
“Excuse me?”
“When you’re stoned. Do you function? Can you deal?” Her maroon lips slowed down for me.
“Yeah, I guess.”
She gave me the bottle of cough medicine. “Then hang on to this. In a couple of hours you can take another swig. If it knocks you out too much, you can take a nap in my office.” She moved a stack of papers off the couch. “Do you remember what floor this is?” Continue Reading »
At eleven a.m. the phone began to ring and I wondered why I was getting a wake up call when I didn’t remember asking for one. I reached for the phone to shut it up and my hand collided with another hand on the receiver. Ziggy stared at me with wide, unseeing eyes.
“I got it,” I told him, and waved him back.
The prerecorded wake up droned in my ear. I hung up on it and lay back in bed. Belle said a driver was coming for us at noon. That made it my job to make sure everyone was up. Maybe I had asked for the wake up call. Or maybe Ms. Super-Competent did.
I wished I could go back to sleep, or at least pretend I was. Anything to avoid Ziggy. Potential conversations echoed through my head. In one version I told him I was sorry I shoved him like that. In another he told me he was sorry, yeah, sorry he forgot I was such an uptight prick. Continue Reading »
The press conference was over but I was thirsty and jittery and my face still felt hot, like I’d gotten sunburned from the bright TV camera lights. I went into the men’s room and splashed my face with water. I slid the elastic out of my hair and let the uncut strands fall over my face. My hands were shaking. “God I hate this,” I said to no one in particular.
“Hate what?” Ziggy was behind me.
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New York was New York.
Mills planned a reception and press conference at Limelight to announce our “new relationship” and told us to invite whomever we wanted. I got the number for the Pool Bar from directory assistance and left a message on Jeremy’s answering machine telling him to show up.
There wasn’t anyone else I could think of to call. You’d think I hadn’t grown up driving distance from here. Bart invited his parents (who had a house in Greenwich, Connecticut) knowing that they wouldn’t come.
The BNC publicity department also set up a bunch of other interviews and things for the following day at their offices, and we had the photo shoot and the video shoot to do. With all the hoopla to come, playing the show seemed like a mere prelude.
Which, in a way, I suppose it was. Backstage was crawling with all kinds of hangers on, just like LA. Press, agents, photographers, managers, executives, radio station personnel…
I wished for one minute that I could sit down somewhere quiet, undisturbed and have a talk with Ziggy. Continue Reading »
We all came off stage half crazed, still high from the signing, still high from the playing and energy, and I felt like I didn’t want it to end. In some weird way, I felt safer lusting after Ziggy up there than I did in a hotel room or tour bus. I wanted the game to go on. While we played it I felt connected to him, like there was a bond between us. And afraid as I was to admit that maybe there was some sort of attachment between us, I knew it wouldn’t work on stage if there wasn’t. From the first day we’d met something had been there, unspoken, hidden, but there. We stumbled to the backstage area, Ziggy skipping ahead and still singing, the rest of us half-jogging behind and laughing. Chris gave me a high five.
I stripped out of my sweat-soaked shirt and felt the air on my skin. Ziggy was undressing a few feet from me. Christian was soaking his head in the basin there and Bart went to the men’s room.
No one was looking. I reached toward Ziggy’s bare shoulder, brushed it with the back of my fingers.
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