As Jake and the band finished up Hit the Highway and the crowd cheered and whistled and overwhelmed everyone’s eardrums once again, Obie took a little look around, trying to gauge just how the engineering of such a festival might be improved upon. It was then that he spotted a familiar figure standing by the small opening that led from the roped off access area into the SVIP section. He thought he was imagining things at first, but then realized that what his eyes were seeing was accurate.
He pulled on Celia’s shirt to get her attention. She looked at him to see what he wanted. It was far too loud at the moment for verbal communication, so he simply pointed. She squinted in the direction he was indicating for a moment, not understanding what he was trying to show her, and then he saw the figure as well.
It was Matt Tisdale. He was standing there and watching Jake’s performance.
While the crowd cheered the ending of Highway, Natalie made her first appearance on the stage, trotting out and taking her position just in front of the drum set. One of the crew came out and plugged her output cable into the box strapped to her waist. The box picked up the output from the microphone on the bridge of her violin. Meanwhile, another crew member came out to Jake’s position, carrying his Fender acoustic-electric in his hands. Jake turned the volume button on the Les Paul all the way down to nothing, unplugged the guitar cord, and unslung the instrument from around his shoulder. He handed the Les Paul to the crew member and took the Fender in its place. He slung the new guitar over his shoulder and plugged into it before twisting its volume button all the way up. As the crew member retreated backstage, Jake stepped forward to his microphone.
“How’s everyone doing out there in the desert tonight?” he asked the crowd. They roared back at him in a manner that suggested they were doing pretty good. “God damn, there’s a lot of you out there! I hope those of you in the back can see the show. Anyway, we’re really happy to be up here in front of you all to play our set. I hope you’re enjoying it so far.” Another roar of approval indicated they were, in fact, enjoying it so far. “We’re going to do a song now from my second solo CD, a little more mellow of a piece, called The Life I Lead.”
The crowd roared again—the song was the biggest hit from the second CD—and Jake began to play out the melody on the acoustic, strumming in the key of G major while Natalie provided backing melody with the violin and G added some gentle fills with the piano. It was a song about traveling through life, dealing with the bad times and enjoying the good times, about navigating around pitfalls when you could and driving straight through them when you couldn’t. Like Down, it was a piece that changed tempo throughout, slower on the verses, faster and with more distorted electric guitar during the choruses and the bridge. There was no solo of any kind in the song, just a brief instrumental portion between the bridge and the final chorus. They played it almost exactly like the studio version, only extending the outro for another twenty seconds or so and then transitioning that into a finale that ended with an drawn out note of the violin being allowed to finally fade.
The applause washed over them once again. Jake thanked the crowd for it, flipped his guitar pick into the seats, and then resettled his guitar and pulled out another pick while everyone except Natalie, Phil, Pauline, and himself left the stage. Jake was feeling very good, very confident now, knowing that he was doing his job and entertaining people. He could feel the energy and love from the audience surging through his soul. It was a very good feeling, right up there, as he had told Pauline earlier, with sex (but not quite better). He strummed a few open chords on the guitar and then grabbed a G chord and began to play the primary melody for Insignificance, his biggest hit as a solo artist. The crowd erupted once again as they heard it. They then settled in to watch, listen, and sing along as Jake waxed musical poetry about the essential meaninglessness of life. The song featured only the guitar and the violin for instruments. Natalie stood next to him as he played, her bow moving up and down and creating the sweet, melancholy accompaniment to the guitar melody. Phil and Pauline added their voices to the choruses, just as they had in the original studio version.
When they got to the violin solo, Natalie stepped forward to the edge of the stage and Jake stepped back, giving her the spotlight. The solo had been originally composed by Mary Kingsley, Jake’s mother (the first solo she had ever composed), and Natalie did it justice, reproducing it perfectly with only minor variations that could be attributed to individual phrasing. The crowd cheered her as the solo wrapped up and the two of them had to go through one full rep of the primary melody before Jake could start singing the final verse or they would not have been able to hear him. He sang out the verse and the final chorus and then he and Natalie played out the outro together, ending the song after Jake gave her his cue by adding a small flourish as he approached the end of the final repetition.
“Thank you!” Jake said. “We got Natalie Popanova on the violin! Let’s hear it for her!”
Another enthusiastic cheer erupted. Natalie smiled at the crowd and gave a nod of acknowledgment before stepping backwards and resuming her normal positioning. Once she was there, G, Ben, Ted, and Lenny all came back out, Lenny now holding his drop-D tuned Brogan. The crew member in charge of Jake’s guitars came out as well, letting Jake switch from the acoustic-electric to the sunburst Les Paul, which was also in drop-D tuning.
“How about we ramp things back up a bit?” Jake asked the crowd. “Does that sound good to you?”
It sounded just fine to them. Ted gave a four count and they launched into the extended intro for Put Me Out There, Jake’s second hit from his last CD, a hard-driving, complex, and somewhat cynical tune about how music was delivered to the masses by the sale of advertising to radio stations. In the original recording, Jake had played the lead guitar and the solo while Celia had backed him up with her drop-D tuned Stratocaster. Here, Lenny played lead and Jake played rhythm while Ted pounded out the complex beat, Natalie added fills and backing melody with the violin, and G kept up a steady secondary rhythm with the synthesizer. The crowd loved it, many of them standing up and waving their arms as he sang it out.
They love us, Jake thought warmly as more positive energy came flowing in. They fucking love us. We really do belong up here.
Forty-five feet away, Matt Tisdale was having much the same thought. He had come out to the special VIP section for one reason: because he thought that Jake was going to fail, was going to be booed off the stage for daring to play his mellow, alternative rock and easy-listening crap at what was primarily a heavy metal music festival. Matt wanted to see that happen, had been eagerly anticipating it, but he now realized that quite the opposite was actually occurring here.
They fucking love his shit, he thought in wonder. Not just like, not just ‘can get into it’, but fucking love! People were standing and dancing and waving their hands around. They were singing along with his tunes. Matt had even seen a couple of bitches crying when Jake had sung Insignificance. Fucking crying!
Matt could not help but acknowledge and respect how Jake had played the crowd and hooked them. He had opened the set with one of his hardest-driving tunes and one of his most powerful backbeats, thus giving the fans out there what they had primarily come to see—hard rock—before gradually transitioning down into the more mellow shit. And then, after hitting the very top of the mellow meter with Insignificance, just when it seemed like things might start getting cumbersome, he had kicked right back in with another hard-rocking number to reengage them. And, though Matt had not seen them, he smelled the Nerdlys in the background. No one else could have tuned in sound in a venue like this to such perfection. All of the instruments and mikes and the drum set itself were almost exactly in balance and adjusted so that every individual instrument could be heard, every word of Jake’s lyrics could be understood. Even the backup singers—who the fuck brings dedicated backup singers to a goddamn heavy metal festival?—could be perfectly heard and understood. And it was quite obvious that Jake and his band had rehearsed extensively for this performance. He could quite plainly feel the teamwork and camaraderie they shared as they meshed like a well-oiled machine.