Chapter 10

I had to hand it to Brent, our first show was much better organized and much larger than I’d originally expected. It was actually at one of the clubs we’d looked at the other night, but hadn’t gone to because I was too young to get in. Strange that I was now going to be paid to be inside, but that’s one of the little oddities of life.

It held seven hundred people at max capacity and had two levels. The first floor was standing room only and held the bulk of the audience. A thin second-floor balcony wrapped around three sides of the venue and had a series of small tables on two sides and roped-off areas directly facing the stage with couches and tables that people could rent for parties or whatnot.

We showed up an hour before the gig was scheduled to start and people were already inside dancing and drinking. A DJ was playing music and a curtain covered the stage, letting us set up our equipment unseen. I’d wanted to do a sound check, but the way this club operated, they didn’t have live music until later in the evening and didn’t want the party atmosphere interrupted. They said they checked all the sound equipment, and their audio guy was around to make sure we knew the preset levels, but that didn’t necessarily mean we wouldn’t have the guitar blowing out the vocals or the vocals disappearing into the mix.

“We couldn’t request to come in and do a sound check earlier and then come back for the show?” I asked Brent when he showed up, halfway through set up. “This no sound check thing could really screw us.”

“I ... no. Not this time. But I’ll make sure to check with the next venues and make sure you get a sound check,” he said.

The hesitation at the start kind of made me think he hadn’t checked at all. I’d already gotten the impression that he was somewhat new to this, but it was dawning on me just how new he was. I couldn’t blame the label for saddling new talent with the new managers, since they had to get their experience somewhere, and it was doubtful that they’d want to do it with the real money makers; but it did bother me that instead of owning up to it, he just talked a big game and tried to act like he knew what was happening.

Still, there wasn’t much I could do about it now, and calling him out on it would make our working relationship even more tense than it was after the meeting the day before. He’d clearly not been a fan of being pushed back on and had the idea that he was in charge, instead of working for us.

“Okay,” was all I said, instead.

“There’s some good news, though. Turnout is really good. Much better than we were hoping. There’re already almost four hundred people out there, and the door is jumping. I just talked to the owner, and he said that they usually max out at about three hundred on nights they bring in unknown talent.”

“Maybe it’s ‘cause we’ve played in this area before. We had a pretty good-sized audience by the end of our set at the festival a few months back, and that was recent enough that the people who liked us haven’t forgotten about us.”

“Maybe. The radio show you did this morning also went well, so maybe it was that.”

Of course, his first thought would credit something he set up and not the show we’d done a few months ago, but he wasn’t wrong. The radio show had been crazy early and Lyla had been too hung-over to join us, but it had gone really well. It was my first time being on the radio, but once we got started I really wasn’t that nervous. The DJ was a middle-aged guy and seemed way too old for our demographic, but he was also really charismatic, which is probably how he ended up being a DJ in the first place. He was really good about setting us at ease and getting us talking.

When he heard that we had already played regularly in Ashville, he asked a lot of questions about it, which gave us something to talk about. I also played an a cappella version of Country Roads using an acoustic guitar Brent had gotten from somewhere. I’d only really played on my guitar and besides plucking away while writing songs or playing with Mr. French during the school year, I hadn’t tried to actually play unplugged for real. The night before, Rowan emailed me a version of the guitar tabs he’d redone to work better on acoustic, and I’d given it a few run-throughs, and thought it sounded all right. I was still skeptical anyone under the age of thirty listened to morning drive-time radio anymore, but maybe Brent was right and the crowd was because of our appearance that morning.

“Anyway,” Brent continued. “The door is looking very good and the management is happy, so we’re starting things off with a bang.”

He rubbed his hands together almost cartoonishly and then headed off stage, back towards the manager’s office. That was good news. I know he’d said we didn’t have to worry about selling out any shows on this tour, but I knew they were paying attention to how we did and it would also hopefully have an effect on album sales.

We hadn’t officially released any songs yet, but Rowan had put together two singles, one for Country Roads and one for Hush, and Kent had gotten a very small pressing done so we’d have some to sell at the show. Neither was for actual release, since it only had our logo and the song name on the cover, and wouldn’t be listed on any charts, but the label got the bulk of those sales and it would add to what we were pulling in overall. The big hope was that, when the album was released in September, the audiences would remember them and go out and buy it, or at least start streaming it.

The show itself went great.

The room wasn’t full when the curtain was pulled back, but it wasn’t empty. I’d say we filled just over half, including some of the smaller tables on the balcony, but none of the big roped-off sections, which I guessed were probably expensive and mostly used when a bigger name performed.

We opened with Country Roads, which was our most polished song and how we opened most shows when we hadn’t played there before. After that, we went through the rest of the songs on the album, keeping them in the same order. I hadn’t been sure of that decision since we’d been doing a different order when we’d played other shows.

True, that order had included about half covers, since we really only had about seven songs show ready before we’d come to town, but we really worked hard the last four months of shows at the Blue Ridge to have our song order keep the tempo up for the audience. A lot of that had to do with the covers we picked, almost all of which were up-tempo, because the stuff I was writing was all trending slower. That worked for our album, but I wasn’t sure it was what we wanted for live performances.

The audience was into it, but the energy was very different than it was at the Blue Ridge, and I chalked a lot of that up to our song choices. The song that seemed to get the audience going the most was One Night Stand, which had Lyla grinning over at me as the crowd started getting into it.

It was late into our set and the bar was busy all night, so maybe part of it was just the people were a lot more lubed up by that point of the show than they had been during the first half. I know one guy was for sure, as he climbed over the small metal divider that separated the dance floor from the stage. I guess because we were unknowns and they weren’t expecting a crowd, there wasn’t much in the way of security. There was a bouncer at the door and another who was standing by the bar area, but no one by the barrier to the stage. To the guy by the bar’s credit, he saw it right away and started moving, but half of the audience was packed towards the front half of the club, which meant he had to push his way through the crowd to get to the edge of the barrier, where he could hop over and move faster. There was no way he was getting there before this guy made it up on stage.

Surprisingly, just as the drunk made it halfway over the barrier, an arm shot out through the crowd, gripped his shoulder, and pulled him back hard, sending him to the floor on the audience side of the metal fencing. He didn’t seem to care, or really even notice, that he’d been manhandled, however. In classic drunk fashion, he just hopped up and went back to bopping along with the song, barely even noticing he’d just been knocked over.

It wasn’t until then that I noticed the arm that grabbed him belonged to Victor, who moved up closer to the front thanks to the gap created when people moved out of the way as he pulled the drunk back.

“Did you guys have a good night?” I said into the mic as we finished our last song.

The crowd yelled back in unison. I liked to get audience participation with my crowd work, and by the end of the last set, I’d cajoled them into responding enough times that I usually could get a good response at the end of the night. This was one of the largest crowds we’d played for, and the largest inside a closed building for sure, so even getting half the crowd to respond made for an overwhelming rush of noise.

“If you liked what you heard, we have singles at the merch table in the back and our CD drops in September. We have a mailing list back there if you want to get notified when it comes out. You guys have been great and we look forward to seeing you again next time we come through. Before we go, let’s hear how things are with Backstage,” I said, and stepped back so we could close out the show.

I’d shifted Jesse James, which was the last song on our album, with Backstage on the fly because I wanted to at least leave them with something more up-tempo to end the night. Backstage wasn’t as upbeat as One Night Stand or Let’s Go Out Tonight, but it had a really solid guitar solo in the middle that sounded more classic rock than anything else we were doing, and I thought it would leave us on a good note, since the last song is one of the things audiences usually remember. It seemed to pay off. The reaction to the guitar solo was good, with the dance floor, that had started to empty out, filling up again.

“That’s it for us. Good night,” I said as I finished off the last note, and got a bigger applause than before the encore.

The curtain came down and we started packing up, although mostly that meant unplugging and putting the guitars and keyboard in their cases. We’d discussed it the night before, when figuring out how to get out to the merch table fast, and it was decided that, once we had the equipment in cases, Seth and Marco would load the van while Lyla and I went out to the merch table. I felt kind of bad that they didn’t get included, since they were equal members of the band, but it had been Seth’s idea.

He said that we’d all agreed that we needed to be out there to sell merch and talk to anyone who wanted to, so they’d remember us, which meant someone was going to have to stay behind and deal with the equipment. He pointed out that I had to be out front, since I was fronting the band and was the name and face people would remember, so I had to be by the merch table. He also suggested Lyla go with me, since any time we performed she got the second most attention. True, a lot of that attention was from guys who never stood a chance, and Lyla wasn’t too subtle about turning them down, not that they ever seemed to mind. So Lyla and I left the equipment to Seth and Marco and headed out front.

A DJ had taken over and some people were still dancing. It wasn’t a huge crowd to start with, and the number had thinned out when the live music stopped. It was flattering to think that they stuck around to hear us finish out, but it was probably just that when any music was playing they could dance to it. They probably would have stayed on the dance floor if the DJ hadn’t royally sucked and picked stuff that was popular, but impossible to dance to.