7
The elevator ride down was gross. Killian reeked of weed, Derek smelled like bourbon, and Riley just stank.
I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“God, it’s like ridin’ the underground in Paris in the summertime,” Miles muttered.
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“Buncha Frogs without any deodorant, and they still smelled better’n you lot. Come on, out, out!” he yelled as the elevator door dinged open.
The walk through the lobby was fairly uneventful, but once we got out front, there were twenty paparazzi waiting, flashes going off. Derek smiled winningly for the cameras and hoisted up his bottle of scotch; Riley stuck out her tongue a là Miley Cyrus and flipped them off. Ryan, Killian, and Miles just ignored them.
The photographers probably got plenty of shots of me in the background, goggling at them like I had never seen a camera before.
Inside the black stretch limo, seating order was Killian, Derek, and me. Ryan sat opposite and facing me, and next to him were Riley and then Miles.
As I sat next to Derek, I was distinctly aware of his thigh pressing against mine. I was getting a little turned on being right next to him – and it was pissing me off.
Derek turned to me as the limo drove off. “So – having fun yet?”
“It’s interesting,” I admitted.
“Aaaah, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” He turned to the other members of the band. “Set list – anybody got any requests?”
Ryan – who was sitting across from me – pulled out a piece of paper and a pen from his jacket. “I’m assuming we’re keeping our own stuff in the same order?”
“Fine by me,” Derek said.
“Fine,” Killian agreed.
“I wanna do ‘Moby Dick!’” Riley shouted.
“NO,” Derek said.
I looked bewildered.
Ryan smiled. “We do our own songs in the same order every night, but every third song we throw in a cover. ‘Moby Dick’ is a Zeppelin tune that’s basically one big drum solo.”
“And everybody fuckin’ hates it,” Derek said.
“No they don’t!” Riley complained.
“Everybody except you. NO.”
“My sisters are going to be there tonight – can we do something for them?” Ryan asked. “Maybe some Katy Perry?”
“Your sisters are here in LA?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah, I flew my family in, they all went to Disneyland and then they’re coming to see the show,” Ryan grinned, then turned to Derek. “So keep the antics on the clean side, okay?”
“I’ll try. How ‘bout ‘Roar’?”
“Cool,” Ryan nodded, and wrote it down. “I’ll put it after… ‘If There’s A Next Time.’”
“Fine,” Killian agreed.
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida!” Riley shouted.
I looked at Ryan.
“Another epic drum solo,” he explained.
“NO,” Derek snapped.
They went back and forth, suggesting songs, with Derek clearly in control of the final selection. In the end, they settled on about seven songs, and let Riley have ‘Hot For Teacher’ by Van Halen.
“We have to give her one big drum solo song per show or she’s impossible to live with,” Ryan said.
“Don’t you start in on me, Ry,” she threatened, and leapt up and gave him a good-natured noogie. He laughed and pushed her away.
“I know how you two formed the band,” I said to Ryan and Derek, then looked over at Killian. “And I’ve heard the story about how they met you. Was it true?”
“More or less,” he smiled as his fingers plinked over his guitar strings.
“But… how did you join the band?” I asked Riley.
“They promised me they’d give me a really hot blonde from Rolling Stone,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
Derek kicked her. Riley kicked him back, and within seconds it had turned into them trying to stomp each other as fast as they could, boots flailing at each other across the short interior of the limo.
“CHILDREN, CHILDREN!” Miles screamed. “DON’T MAKE ME STOP THIS CAR!”
Derek and Riley settled down and glared at each other, exactly like feuding siblings.
“I’ll answer this one,” Ryan said. “You got your recorder turned on?”
I pressed the button twice and got the solid red light. “Okay.”
8
“So, the summer after you… met us,” Ryan said, hesitating the tiniest bit, “we found a local drummer and guitarist. They weren’t very good – nobody good wanted to play with us. They all wanted to play with the more established bands in Athens, and we were pretty young. So we settled. But the guitarist and drummer we got were good enough. I started going to UGA in August, and in September we started booking frat party gigs.”
“A thousand a show,” Derek laughed. “Remember when I was over the moon when we used to get 250 each?”
Actually, the way my finances were at the moment, 250 dollars for one night’s work sounded pretty damn good… even if I was staying in a luxury hotel doing an interview for Rolling Stone.
“Except we didn’t make that our first couple of shows,” Ryan told me. “In fact, we had to bribe somebody to let us play our first gig.”
“Two kegs of beer,” Derek remembered.
“They paid you in beer?” I asked.
“No, we had to pay THEM to play. Two kegs of beer in exchange for letting us do three songs. They let us play before the opening act for the main band, if we paid them two kegs of beer,” Ryan clarified.
“What’d we play?” Derek asked, trying to remember. “‘Paradise City’ – ”
“‘Give It Away Now’ by the Chili Peppers,” Ryan continued.
“And ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’” Riley finished up.
I looked at her in surprise. “Were you with them at that point?”
“No, but I’ve heard this fuckin’ story a million times.”
“How’d you get the beer?” I asked Ryan. “I’m assuming your parents wouldn’t buy it for you.”
“Ohhhhhhh no,” he laughed. “No, no, no.”
“I knew somebody,” Derek explained.
“He fucked some sorority chick who was over 21,” Riley crowed, “and she bought it for ‘em.”
Ew.
I actually hadn’t needed to hear that.
“Thanks,” Derek said sarcastically. I could tell he was actually pissed at her now.
“Awwww, does Blondie not know how many bitches you bang after the shows?” Riley clucked in fake sympathy. “Am I ruining your chances of gettin’ in her pants?”
EWWWWW.
Derek immediately kicked her again, which led to another flurry of kung fu kicks across the aisle.
“CHILDREN!” Miles screamed, and they stopped.
“Anyway, we had to pay to play,” Ryan said.
“But we blew the other bands AWAY,” Derek chuckled. “We had, like, two offers for other gigs as soon as we walked off stage.”
“So we started playing regular gigs after that – at least one a weekend, usually two, sometimes even three.”
“We were rollin’ in the money,” Derek laughed.
“Did you move out of that horrible house?” I asked.
“Nooooo… that house had character,” he said, as though offended I would even suggest otherwise.
“But we eventually traded up guitarists and drummers,” Ryan said. “Only problem was, as a cover band we couldn’t get any gigs opening for other bands at the 40 Watt or the Georgia Theater… and we couldn’t play any of our own stuff at the frat parties. They only wanted to hear ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’”
“But your songs are really good,” I said.
“Our early stuff was okay,” Derek said unenthusiastically.
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed, “but our guitarists and drummers weren’t. No real chops, no real contribution to the song writing, basically just wanted to get drunk and get laid. We knew that if we wanted people to take us seriously, we were going to have to get serious.”
“So I fired all of them and we called Killian,” Derek said.
“Just like that?”
“Well, actually we emailed him,” Ryan admitted. “And sent him some digital recordings of our covers, plus some original stuff.”
I looked at Killian at the other end of the limo. “And you just picked up and moved across the Atlantic?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t really have anything going on at the time.”
“What about that band you were in? God – Gob – ”
“Gobsmacked? Uhh,” he groaned slightly. “Biggest bunch of wankers I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing with.”
“Besides us,” Riley teased him.
“Besides you in particular, yes,” Killian smiled.
“So… you were just sitting around in your apartment, doing nothing – ”
“Nooo – he’s too modest to tell you,” Ryan said, “but he was doing tons of session work in London at the time.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Session work is where the individual members of a band aren’t good enough to nail a part on an album, so the producer hires really good outside guys to play their parts just for that recording session,” Ryan explained. “Killian was doing tons of session work after Gobsmacked broke up – but as soon as he heard the recordings I sent him, he came on over.”