“I can’t believe we’re actually going to play for you,” Stephanie said, her eyes showing a certain amount of awe at their presence.
“I’ve actually been quite looking forward to this,” Jake told her.
Next came the bass player, Jeremy White. He looked no different than the last time Jake had seen him. His hair was cut short and professional, he had no tattoos, and a pair of glasses rested on his face. After him was Rick Jackson, the drummer. He no longer had any hair. A victim of premature male pattern baldness the first time Jake had met him, he was now apparently shaving up there. It was a good look for him, though he still looked like a teacher instead of a drummer.
“All right,” Jim said. “How do we want to do this?”
“Well, I’m assuming you got your instruments all tuned and your sound dialed in to your satisfaction?” Jake asked.
“Yes, of course,” Jim said.
“And I assume you have some tunes you’ve been rehearsing of late that you could play for us?” he asked next.
“We’ve been mostly working on new songs these past three weeks,” Marcie said, “but we have a considerable catalogue of material after doing this for eight years now. A lot of it we could do in our sleep.”
“Then let’s hear what you got,” Jake said. “Play a little something from each of the singers. Play a little mellow shit and then hit us with the hard stuff. We want to see a good cross section of your work.”
“All right,” Jim said, nodding thoughtfully.
“Oh ... one thing,” Jake said.
“What’s that?”
“The Nerdlys are going to hate your sound set-up, no matter how good it is. Don’t take it personally. They’re anal to the tenth power when it comes to sound. It’s just one of those things that has to be, like a law of physics.”
“We’ve asked them not to criticize or judge too much based on your sound reproduction,” Pauline said.
“That’s right,” Nerdly said. “And we will honor that agreement and concentrate instead on just how much better you will sound when Sharon and I are the ones setting it up for you.”
“Assuming we get that far,” Pauline said.
“Assuming we get that far,” Jake agreed with a nod. He turned back to the band, who was now looking a lot more nervous than they had been just a minute before. “Now then, let’s hear what you got.”
The band took their positions and picked up their respective instruments. Jeremy flipped a few switches on their sound board and powered up. They then held a whispered conversation among themselves, seemed to come to an agreement, and then got ready.
“All right,” Jim said into his microphone. His voice was now coming out of the speaker. “We’ll start with one of mine. This is one we worked up for our tour last summer and it was always a crowd favorite. It’s called Look at Me. I hope you like it.”
With that, Jim stepped on one of the three effects pedals arrayed around his microphone and began to play his Stratocaster guitar, the music coming out clean, as if he were playing a straight acoustic. Marcie began to play as well, setting a secondary melody on the piano sound. Jeremy and Rick set a gentle backbeat at around a hundred a minute. Stephanie contributed little at this point, just some minor fills with her distorted Hamer guitar.
Jim began to sing. His voice was a pleasant tenor and he had good command of it. He sang a song that seemed to be a declaration that he was somebody, that he did not care what people thought about him, what their opinion of him was, but that he still had a need for them to know who he was and what he was about. As the tune went on, the tempo picked up and the intensity increased with each verse. Stephanie’s fills became more numerous, more powerful. Jim himself pushed down on a pedal and changed over to distorted sound. On the choruses—which contained what Jake thought was a good hook line (I need you to look at me, see what’s here to see, understand me... )—they sang in perfect three-part harmony, the tenor, contralto, and mezzo-soprano mixing beautifully.
“Not bad,” Nerdly said to Jake, “although they really do need someone to work on their sound.”
“What do you want from a couple amps and a speaker in a storage room, Nerdly?” Jake returned. “Just listen to the music.”
“I’m listening,” Nerdly assured him. “It is aesthetically pleasing.”
They wrapped up Look at Me with a bit of a rough ending that was the mark of a lack of recent rehearsal of the tune. They then played one of Stephanie’s tunes, a hard driving, almost heavy metal piece called I’m Sorry. It seemed to deal with the way she’d treated a former lover, acknowledging that she’d treated the lover badly during the relationship, that the lover had, in fact, left her because of this treatment. The chorus, which contained the title, served as a flippant apology that seemed to want to be taken as insincere and without regret. It was actually a masterful piece of cynical, realistic songwriting and it included a blistering guitar solo between the third and final verses.
After this, they did one of Marcie’s songs. This one was called It Never Fails, and was a mellow piece featuring the clean guitar from Jim and the piano as the primary melodic instrument. It was a song about self-doubt and making mistakes but always learning from them, always pushing forward, and never giving up. Pauline, in particular, liked the theme of the tune.
From here, they played some of their older stuff, their classics that the New England fans particularly enjoyed. It was plain to see that Brainwash was intimately familiar with these classics as they played them perfectly, without so much as a missed note or a single lapse in timing.
“How are we doing, guys?” Jim asked his guests after song number eight was finished.
“You’re doing great,” Jake assured them. “We’re thoroughly enjoying the show.”
“Although,” Nerdly could not help but saying, “if you ramped up the high end on the keyboard and cut down the low end just a bit on the vocal mics, it would serve to...”
“That’s his way of saying he likes it too,” Jake interrupted. “If he didn’t like your shit, he wouldn’t be trying to think of a way to improve it.”
“I would think that would go without saying,” Nerdly said.
“Uh ... right,” Jim said. “Have you heard enough? Or should we do some more?”
“How about one more?” Jake suggested. “The best you got. The one the audiences love. One of the songs you wrap up the final encore with.”
Marcie, Jim, and Stephanie all looked at each other knowingly. A nod passed among them. They turned to the rhythm section. “Together,” Jim said.
“Fuck yeah,” Jeremy said with a smile.
“Let’s do it,” agreed Rick, twirling one of his drumsticks.
“It sounds like you have just the tune,” Jake said.
“We do,” Jim said. “It’s kind of a duet ... sort of. Marcie and I sing it together. She sings the verses but I come in for the choruses and the bridge. It’s about ... well ... it’s about the ups and downs of a long-term relationship. Sometimes we open with it, but usually it’s our final encore. The audiences get royally pissed, however, if we don’t play it at some point during a set.”
“I’m intrigued,” Jake said. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well ... the thing is,” Jim said, “it’s also kind of technical and we haven’t rehearsed it up recently, not since the last tour anyway. It might be a little rough right here and right now.”