Backstage wasn’t actually backstage at Wherever—it was in the back of the room, behind the PA, with the entire bar between green room and microphone. Usually it didn’t matter; the shoulders aren’t packed particularly tight when only 25 people show up to see you play.
But tonight the shoulders were packed tight, and in a couple of minutes Gracie was going to have to squeeze past a good chunk of them. It was the last night of the tour, thankfully, and they were home, finally, playing a sold-out victory lap at the most beloved rock club in Chicago for anyone with decent taste. They’d never sold out Wherever before. This was the show Gracie had been waiting for since before the tour even started, the culmination of a fantasy she’d been holding onto for years.
But that excitement came before the tour. Now they were 32 days in, and culmination had come to seem like it implied end more than it implied peak. In a couple of ways.
Gus was pacing back and forth in front of the couch, an Old Style swinging at his side, gripped by pop tab between thumb and forefinger. He was trying to project calm, but he didn’t seem calm, and Gracie sure as hell wasn’t. He wore his usual outfit: black jeans, red basketball shoes, a white Fugazi tee with the sleeves carefully cut off. His blonde hair hung to his shoulders, damp as if he hadn’t showered in days (though she’d seen him do so that morning in their apartment, and had seen him wet it in the bathroom sink to apply product during the opener). This was how he amped himself up. But there was a tension in his movements, an energy emanating off of him, that she knew only she could recognize. She could smell it. She was sick of that smell.
This was supposed to be the one venue where Gracie didn’t feel like shit before a show. She’d been seeing bands here since she had to use a fake ID to get in. It was as familiar to her as her living room. She’d thrown up in every bathroom in the building at one point or another, but never before a gig.
Wherever had been around for 30+ years; it was older than Gracie herself. Punk, indie, metal, country, hip-hop—name an alt act and odds were good they’d played it on the come up. It was dark, hot, loud, and Old Styles were cheap. The bathrooms were a history exhibit of every band that had ever printed a sticker. She’d put up a few herself.
Eddie, the booker, had been an early fan. The first time they played here was their fifth show ever; it was a miserable Monday night in the middle of December, and no more than 20 people came. They made $100 and drank Old Styles all night for free. That was five years ago, and in the interim they’d played Wherever dozens of times, sometimes headlining for no one, sometimes as the local act Eddie asked to open for a bigger group from out of town.
So they were always going to end the tour here. Even when things started changing halfway through, after the review came out and that Tik Tok used “Nirvana” in the background and the shows in Pittsburgh and Philly and DC were suddenly, strangely, sold out. Even after Eddie called them up and asked how they felt about moving the homecoming show to Avondale Hall, Wherever’s 1,000-cap sister venue.
Avondale Hall had a balcony, and the band had fought before calling him back to decline. Gracie and Felix wanted more time to prepare—the shows they’d been playing were a quarter that size, max—and Matty ultimately agreed. That was the day they played Baltimore; Gus disappeared all afternoon, showing up drunk two hours before they were scheduled to go on. It was a disaster, the worst set they played all tour, so bad that Gracie had wondered the next morning whether their chance of ever playing Avondale Hall had passed as quickly as it arose. So bad that Gracie felt a surge in her brain that she’d been trying for months, maybe longer, to ignore.
But Gus had apologized the next day, both to the band as a group and to Gracie in private. The show in DC that night was electric. Gus was switched on; prancing and prowling across the stage, eliciting laughs from audience and band alike between songs, riding a wave of uplifted arms during the instrumental freak out in the encore. Gracie had felt euphoric at the merch table after the show; while the rest of the band was closing out the bar, she and Gus snuck away and fucked in the van, something they hadn’t done in years.
But Gus wasn’t the type to stay carefree for long. As the energy at their shows increased, the energy on stage inched ever closer to the knife’s edge. It was as if Gus was trying to prove they were ready for the next step, and any mistake or rough edge became an intolerable blow to their future. You need to fucking chill, Gracie had shouted backstage in Louisville, after Gus had shot her a vicious sneer at a barely late cue during the penultimate “Your Turn.” We sounded fucking great! We don’t get on you every time you miss a note, which is just about every song, by the fucking way.
She was right, but it was the wrong thing to say. Gus didn’t speak to her the rest of that night, and even though they were being put up by some friends of the opener, he opted to sleep in the van. He apologized the next morning, but the show in Indy was tense; he fussed with his mic stand, sang with his back turned for half the set, and said almost nothing to the crowd.
St. Louis was better, and Columbia too, but without Gus at his best, the shows were never going to hit the heights they had out east. It had been a long, strange tour, Gracie told herself; it was July and the air conditioning in the van didn’t work as well as it should. Everyone was fried. They just needed to get through it, get back to Chicago, and get some time to decompress.
And now here they were. For as long as they’d been a band, this was about the most Gracie had ever aspired to, the most she’d been willing to believe was possible. A couple weeks ago she’d found an oversized white blazer at a thrift store in Philly. She’d known it would push her over her tour budget, but bought it anyway; she’d pictured herself onstage in it tonight, jacket open, black crop top underneath. Now she didn’t know what to do with the sleeves.
They’d been supposed to go on five minutes ago, but there was some problem with the lights. The nature of that problem wasn’t particularly clear to Gracie; she’d learned to let Felix worry about these things. He was the unofficial official leader of the band for a reason.
And with that thought, he appeared, brandishing two thumbs up. “Only the red, white, and blue spotlights are working for some reason,” he said, unflustered, “but I told them it’s no big deal. They’ll only ever have two colors going at once. Then when we go into Born in the USA it’ll be perfect.”
"Fuck Bruce," Gus said, tossing his now-empty can at the waste basket and missing, then reaching into the cooler and cracking another.
“Come on man, don’t say shit like that about The Boss,” Felix said, mock seriously. “You know it’s bad luck.” Gracie could see that he was trying to lighten the mood, but she didn’t need the specter of a hex hanging over them right now.
“Okay, huddle up,” Felix then said, waving them in. He’d watched a documentary about Michael Jordan last year, and ever since he insisted on a basketball-style pep talk before every show. When they were feeling loose they took turns doing parodies of different coaching styles, but tonight he turned serious. “Nirvana straight into Don’t Say Anything,” he said. “No stopping, no matter what. We get through those two, the crowd’s going to be going fucking crazy, and it’s all smooth sailing from there. Then you don’t have to see my face for a whole fucking week.” On three, they broke. Gracie squeezed Gus’s hand; it hung limp and cold like a dead fish.
“Waiting Room” was playing as they emerged, and the crowd was already in good voice. Sharp whistles rang out as they climbed the steps to the stage and took their places. Gracie looked out into the lights, and though she had seen them shine down on dozens of acts over the years, and been on this side of them more times than she could count, she could tell something was different. She just couldn’t say what.
She didn’t have time to ponder this question for long, because suddenly Gus was stomping his foot and the bass drum followed suit, and that was her cue—it was time for the show to begin.
They’d opened with “Nirvana” every night on tour—24 of the last 32 days—and it had been Gracie’s least favorite part of the set every one of them. She knew the song inside and out—it wasn’t that—and she was proud of the way it had turned out on the record (her keys slinked in and out of the bass groove like they were a single instrument), but playing it live was a different beast. Gus always said he wanted to catch the crowd off guard, to punch them in the face before half even realized he was on stage. So the intro was abbreviated; she had just a couple of notes to find the tempo. The adrenaline wasn’t coursing through her yet, muscle memory hadn’t yet had a chance to kick in. Most of the time it was fine. But if it wasn’t, if she was off even slightly, it could change the mood of the whole show.
Tonight she nailed it.
The snares rolled, the bass thumped, and she caught Matty’s eye with a smile as his guitar and her keys took off in unison. Gus was looking for something, he shouted, lunging to the edge of the stage, and with that the crowd started vibrating as if they didn’t have the ability to do anything else.
Gracie squinted into the red lights, looking out over the quivering mass before her. She recognized a number of faces, but fewer than she’d expected. The Nose-Ring Twins—two girls Gracie knew not to be siblings, but had dubbed as such because of their matching septum piercings—were pressed up against the stage as usual, thrashing their heads to the music. She knew a number of friends were somewhere in the room, but with the way the lights were shining she couldn’t see much further than six or eight bodies deep. And so for the most part the faces before her were foreign.
It had been that way the whole tour, of course. Gracie didn’t know people in Pittsburgh, or Providence, or Burlington. She knew only a handful in New York and Philadelphia. And of course, she’d been anxious the whole tour. But she knew what a show at Wherever was supposed to look like, and this wasn’t it. Her wrists felt stiff.
Surprisingly, Gus looked loose, looser than he had in a week. As they roared into “Don’t Say Anything”, he poured the rest of his beer down his throat in one go, and leapt into the crowd with barely a warning. They caught him, of course. When he was riding a high, this was Gus’s super power—doubtless self confidence, an utter surety that nothing would or could go wrong, and a fate that seemed eager to agree.
Gracie turned to look at Felix on bass, and tried to lose herself in the song at hand. She’d learned that watching him made her less self-conscious. He epitomized cool in a way not even Gus could. His look managed an effortlessness that belied the very real intention that went into it. Tonight his hair was slicked perfectly to the side, a single loose strand dangling over his forehead. A military-style shirt hung open, a white wife-pleaser tucked into black chinos, cuffed just above the boot line. But when he played, the coolness melted away; his bass hung tight against his chest, his eyes rolled up with concentration, as if he were inspecting the ceiling. He swayed with the music, but there was something jerky and plodding about his movements.
It wasn’t that these were particularly difficult keyboard parts—they were a punk band, after all—but Gracie was an instinctual musician, and the more she thought, the harder it was to get right. She’d been like this her whole life. When she was a kid, she’d sit down at the battered piano her mother had managed to cram into their back porch, and play whatever she was practicing flawlessly. But with her piano teacher on the bench next to her—slapping her thigh to keep time, tutting at missed notes, stopping Gracie over and again to correct her hand placement—it would inevitably fall apart. As a result, most of her teachers and band leaders never thought she was very good.
She quit for a long time. She turned 18 and didn’t have a piano, didn’t have a keyboard, didn’t have friends who played, didn’t have a reason to herself. It was Felix who got her started again. They worked at the bakery together, getting up at the crack of dawn to make cakes of cocks and vulvas and sometimes non-sexual objects as well. Special-order only, which meant customers rarely came in, and since the mixers were loud, the music was too. It turned out they listened to a lot of the same shit. So they started getting high together after work, and it was one of these afternoons, both of them stoned beyond belief, that Felix told Gracie he wanted to start a band.
What can you play, he said, grabbing an acoustic guitar off the wall. You sing? I know you do something. It was just a laugh, so Gracie told him. I used to play piano. In another life. They were in his living room, and she saw the guitars, the bass, and assumed she was safe. But then he said I fucking knew it! And hopped up off the couch and disappeared into his bedroom. When he returned he was carrying an old keyboard, a ten-dollar thrift store Casio, with all manner of sounds and tunes pre-recorded.
Oh no, she said, laughing, I can’t play that thing, honestly, I don’t know if I even remember how. But he put it on her lap, and plugged it in, and kicked off a programmed drumbeat. You don’t have to, but hop in if you’re feeling the vibe. And he picked up the guitar and started strumming a Clash song they both liked, and before she knew it she was singing along, and then she was searching for a chord in the keys. She found a few that fit, and sometimes she still thinks about the way Felix said Sick! No one had ever said that like that about her before.
It turned out it was fun. Really fun. They started jamming once or twice a week. When Gracie thinks of those sessions it’s with a nostalgic glow—the two of them perched on the edge of rickety wooden chairs in front of Felix’s bay windows, bathed in afternoon sunlight. Because his roommates and neighbors all worked “regular” nine to fives they could play as noisily and as badly as they wanted. So they did. Gracie spent a lot of time watching the succulent on the windowsill vibrate between songs.
Felix was prone to grandiosity, especially when stoned. It was rare for him not to rave about how they needed to start a band for real. Gracie never took it seriously. Neither of them wrote lyrics, neither of them could sing worth a damn. Who would want to listen to her play? And then one day as they were wiping down the stainless steel counters at the bakery, Felix told her a buddy of his was joining them that afternoon. She felt a rush of embarrassment, but simply shrugged. The worst that could happen wasn’t worth worrying about.
That buddy was Gus. She recognized him from a few parties she’d been at, but they’d never spoken. He was tall—well over six feet—with shoulder-length, stringy blonde hair that invoked someone better looking and more famous. She’d only ever seen him in skinny black jeans and bright red shoes. He played the guitar, but as she quickly realized, wasn’t particularly good at it. After a couple of songs he handed it off to Felix, trying to hide a frustration, it seemed to her, and slumped back into the couch.
The thing was, Felix’s whole deal was an innate relentlessness. I’ve seen you at karaoke, he said to Gus, you know any Misfits? Of course he did, who didn’t? Felix started into “Hybrid Moments”, Gracie followed, and it turned out that Gus could sing, indeed. He didn’t even have to sit up straight. He shouted the verses still leaning back, his long arms stretched along the back of the couch like the wings of an owl, golden hairs poking through a hole in the pit of his shirt. She felt her left calf tense. Felix shot Gracie a pointed grin, and that was the start of things, in more ways than one.
By the fourth song they were cruising. The room swelled with sweat, and Gracie was paying more attention to the way Gus’s soaked sleeveless stuck to his lower back than she was the next note. The crowd bucked and swayed, the amps hissed with feedback, the disco ball danced. There wasn’t a single thought in Gracie’s mind.
When the water started coming down, Gracie was watching Matty shred through a solo, and she only saw it in the periphery. At first she thought Gus was simply pouring his drink on himself. It was just a thin stream, but after a few seconds she realized that it didn’t intend to stop. A pipe, it had to be.
Felix stopped playing first, as the sound guy rushed onto the stage with an orange paint bucket held above his head. It took Christian a couple of measures to realize what was going on; the noise stopped with a reverberating cymbal crash.
The band looked at one another for guidance. Gus’s eyes were wide and wild, his shoulders taut, his beer gripped in his right hand like a grenade. Gus didn’t respond well to adversity; he was panicking like a horse. Turn off the amps! the sound guy shouted, and they acted. Gracie quickly unplugged everything at hand, and turned to see that Felix, Matty, and Christian had done the same. Gus hadn’t moved. Felix motioned for the rest to huddle around him, but as Gracie reached for Gus’s arm he shook her off, tossed his beer into the crowd, and bolted, pushing his way through the crowd towards the green room.
The band stood in a loose semi-circle at the back of the stage, watching water stream steadily into the bucket. The sound guy had disappeared. After an awkward half a minute, Felix finally spoke. “You get Gus,” he said, addressing Gracie, “we’ll figure it out up here.” As she squeezed through the bodies of confused onlookers, she heard Felix addressing the audience behind her. “Give us a few minutes to figure this out,” he shouted. “We’re gonna do our best to keep rocking.”
In the green room, Gus was sprawled on the couch. Water dripped from his chin; his arms were outstretched and his fists balled. Three chairs lay on their sides, clearly kicked or thrown. Gracie didn’t even have a chance to say anything before he started ranting. “I fucking told you,” he said, his voice thick with anger. “We could be at Avondale right now, but instead we’re at this shithole and I’m drenched in piss or what the fuck ever. I fucking told you, I knew it.” He kicked out at a chair strewn at his feet. Gracie tried to dodge it, but something sharp nicked her ankle as it skidded by. She looked down and saw a trickle of blood below the hem of her jeans.
“Give me a fucking break,” she yelled back. She hadn’t meant to raise her voice, but her adrenaline spiked at the sight of blood. “You’ve been to a million shows here and have never seen anything remotely like this before. You know it’s a freak thing, so just fucking relax.”
Gracie almost never swore at Gus, and never with real anger in her voice. She learned early on in their relationship that he didn’t respond well to that emotion.
He pushed himself up. He was nearly a foot taller than her, but they’d been together so long that she rarely noticed it anymore. She noticed it now. “You don’t get it,” he snarled, “this is our chance. We fuck this up and we’ll be stuck playing Wherever every other month until we’re 50.”
“Nothing is fucked up,” she said, “it’s fine. What’s going to happen? They have to rebook us? Oh no!” She could hear the condescension dripping from her voice. Frustration pounded in the back of her skull like Christian’s snares.
Gus took a step towards her. “You still don’t fucking get it. The record’s hot. And once we play Avondale, that’s it. They’ll put us in the bigger font for Riot Fest. We can go back out on a real tour and actually make money. We can be that band. But now’s the chance. In six months the record is old news and someone else is up.”
Gracie had heard all this before. Not once, not twice. It was that insidious type of argument that had a glimmer of truth to it, which allowed Gus to hold onto it like dogma. It didn’t matter what evidence was presented back to him. He wouldn’t see he was wrong until he was wrong, so Gracie had given up trying. “Sure, Gus,” she said, dismissively.
“Just admit you don’t actually give a shit,” he said, suddenly calm. “You don’t actually want any of this, you never did. You joined because you wanted to fuck me and didn’t think this would lead to anything.” He took a deep breath. “The only difference between you and the girls that wait by the van is that you can play the keyboard a little bit.”
Gracie felt her whole body clench—her forearms, her lower back, her calves. Tears welled in her eyes. She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to hit him. She’d never felt like this before. But before she could respond, before she could tell him that he was right, that she’d been happier jamming in Felix’s sun-soaked living room than she had at just about any point in the last year, the door opened.
“Lemme get a hand,” Felix said, poking his head in. “I’ve got an idea.”
The practice space was in a warehouse on the northwest side, just past the river. Some friends of Felix rented it, and had agreed to let them use it for their first official practice. Grey padded blankets covered the walls; a few empty PBR cans were stashed in the corner behind the drum kit. When they weren’t playing they could hear the vague rumblings of other bands down the hall. There was no window, not even in the door. The air smelled stale and vaguely sweet.
Matty was another friend of Felix. They’d worked at some job together and gotten fired together. The circumstances weren’t totally clear. When he showed up, he struck Gracie as the type of the guitarist she’d observed countless times over the years. Quiet and a little grumpy, expressing himself better with his instrument than he could with words. Felix had called him a “ripper,” and this was what she took him to mean.
And rip he could, but she quickly found that the grumpiness was a misread. He was pointed with Felix, but it was never in earnest. It was how they joked. To Gracie he was kind and encouraging, seeking her input about riffs and frequently asking her to take the lead on a melody. She felt comfortable playing with him almost immediately.
Christian was Matty’s ex. This was also a bit unclear, but as Gracie understood it, they’d dated very briefly, just long enough to find out that they had more musical chemistry than romantic. Unlike Matty, he played to type. He was sweet, shy, and drummed like a madman. He was clearly trained in a way none of the rest had been. This excited Gracie; she’d been working on a theory about drums. Decent songs could get by with mediocre percussion, but in the best songs there was always something special about the drums.
Gracie had played with Gus a number of times in Felix’s apartment by this point, and had graduated from animal attraction to genuine crush. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but you don’t control these things. She kept finding him in her thoughts, unbidden. And so she’d think about something else, but then he’d return. He appeared on street corners and in the grocery store, his shoulders pushing a stroller in the park, a flash of his hair behind the mirrored window of a bus. She imagined playing him her favorite records, trying to guess at the ones he already loved and the ones he’d hear for the first time. She imagined telling him about her past—her first apartments and her friends and family and former lovers. She imagined her hands under his shirt, his hands on her hips and the small of her back.
And it wasn’t that bad an idea. He was an open book, for better and worse. Fragile and immature, sure, but Gracie had yet to meet a 27-year-old man who wasn’t. He was also capable of kindness and self reflection, qualities she’d found to be rarer. When he’d play a new song he wouldn’t look at her or Felix until it was over; she could see he was scared to see their reactions. In one of the early sessions, after she layered in some keys while he was still playing, he looked at her and said That wasn’t what I’d imagined, but that sounded so much better than it did in my head.
That night, the first official practice, they ended up waiting together for the bus. It was eleven by the time they finished, and the air was damp with the memory of a rain that had fallen hours earlier. She barely noticed the chill because her whole body was still vibrating. They were headed in the same direction. Gracie lived on the south side then, with a woman she’d met on the internet, in a small, dirty, and dirt-cheap apartment. She would have to transfer to another bus, for which she’d almost certainly have to wait. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
And then, a stop before his own, three before she’d have to transfer, Gus suggested it, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. You could just stay with me tonight, if you wanted. And wanted she had.
Whether it was the music or not, the next few practices had been charged with an undeniable energy. There was no pressure except to have fun. No one was comfortable enough yet to snipe, no one had a backlog of perceived slights to battle about. They’d stumble their way through a cover everyone barely knew, then spitball bad band names before the next one. Snakeweed? Too metal. Angel Dust? Pretty sure that’s already a band, and also, too metal. Okay, softer? How about Jimmy Schlong and the Johnson Controllers? We just talked about the phallic stuff! Fine, then can we reconsider The Dog Dicks? They’d laugh and rock and rock some more and laugh some more. Then Gracie and Gus would get on the bus and one stop before his own Gus would say: You know, you could just stay with me tonight if you wanted, and 15 minutes after that they’d be fucking on his couch with the lights on and blinds open. Gracie told Felix about her and Gus after about a month; he’d said simply Oh, I know, and that had been that. She didn’t know if that meant Gus had already told him or it was obvious to everyone around them, but she didn’t ask.
They settled on The Worrymen. It was a Beatles joke. A joke that worked even better when they changed it a few weeks later, after enough people told them it didn’t sound like a punk band. So they went with shut up!, what they’d taken to yelling at each other when someone was talking too much between songs at practice, and the shouter was ready to move on. As in shut up, listen!, followed by a squeal of guitar or pounding of drums or scream of keys. A year or so later they’d restylize the name, dropping the exclamation point and capitalizing the words, feeling that style had already become dated.
Early on they practiced three to four times a week. Gracie would stay up late playing and drinking and fucking, exchange knowing yawns with Felix at the bakery, nap in the afternoon, and then start it all over again. She felt constantly tired, but in a good way—as if she were plugged in—wired on coffee and lust and inspiration. She’d bought a small keyboard for her apartment, and would play along while she listened to records, noticing how the chords moved, trying to figure out how to fit her keys into songs that didn’t have any.
Their first show was at a notorious dive on Milwaukee. Felix knew the owner and the main act (the more time she spent with him, the more she noticed that he seemed to know everyone). When they went on there were maybe 15 people present, mostly friends. She had no ability then to know how they sounded, and probably stood stock still the entire set, but afterwards people came up to her—even one or two she didn’t know—to praise the performance, and some chemicals fired in her brain she’d never felt before. That night she told Felix to book them for the next show as soon as he could, and he laughed. I told you being in a band would rule.
That first year they played what felt like every crummy bar, venue, and DIY space in the city. The Black Hole, where the only lighting was fake candles—so dark Gracie could barely see her keys. Teddy’s High Dive, where the spotlight was angled straight into her eyes the whole set and the bathroom door didn’t lock. Wooden Ice, an all-ages roller rink that was lit like her prom, disco ball and all. They made maybe 300 bucks all in. And though Gracie would feel like throwing up before every show, by the end, no matter how they played, she’d be buzzing.
They played enough to get a small but loyal local following. Gus’s charisma oozed, and no matter how shitty the venue or small the crowd, he was always up for it. They played loud and they didn’t play slow songs, and enough people started showing up that Gracie stopped having to feel guilty about pimping out a new show to her friends every other week.
After three years both the anxiety and euphoria had mostly faded, and they settled into a slower performance schedule. They put out a couple of records that got some local press, but didn’t break through. They spent a bunch of their own money playing small venues across the Midwest, then came back and picked up the same old slots at the same old bars. Gracie still had fun whenever they played, but like her relationship with Gus, the band had become domestic. They joked less and argued more, and sometimes she went to practice ready for it to be over before it even started.
In the last year Felix had befriended some folks who ran a local label, which led to the record that just came out. They’d set up in a studio downstate for three days, playing from noon to midnight. There was an apartment upstairs, where they slept all together in a large, open room filled with twin beds.
It was their first proper studio experience; the first two albums they’d gone super DIY and recorded in the practice space. Gracie was excited in the lead up—she was looking forward to putting her phone away and just focusing for an extended period. Plus, there was something about all the equipment that made her feel like she was on Supermarket Sweep with the clock turned off.
They’d been recording rough demos in their practice space for a couple of months, and went into the studio with 8, maybe 9 songs they planned for the album. On the first two records, Gracie’s parts were afterthoughts—usually she was just following the bass or guitar chords to give the songs depth. But she was getting better, and had been spending time at home listening to the demos, tinkering with her keyboard to see what else she could do.
They arrived in the early afternoon, and started drinking right away. Mike, the producer, an aging hipster with a long grey beard and horn-rimmed glasses, wanted to hear what they sounded like when they were live, loose, and having fun. So they drank a beer while they set up, drank a second as they played through all the songs as a group, then finished a third and played through them again. When the pizza arrived they listened back and talked about how to tighten them up for the record—double track the guitar on this one, shorten the solo there, start that one with just keys and drums.
Mike showed them how to hit record in case there was anything they wanted to put down, then left around around nine. He wanted them to feel comfortable fucking around and trying stuff without him there. So they drank and jammed, trying out some of the ideas they’d kicked around over dinner.
By eleven thirty, Gus was tapped out. His performances were about energy, and with the lyrics written, he was mostly just sitting around. Matty and Christian followed him not long after. Gracie didn’t mind—she’d paced her drinking right, and was looking forward to fooling around without quite so many ears in the room.
While Felix tuned a guitar, Gracie sat down at the baby grand in the corner she’d been eyeing all evening. She didn’t get many chances to sit down at a proper piano, but loved the weight of the keys, the way she could actually feel the instrument reverberating.
"Careful," Felix said, “You’re going to want it, and I don’t think you’ve got the money or space for one of those in your apartment.”
Gracie pressed down on the keys, and sound filled the room. It was amplified only by its own body, but Felix would have to turn up his amp to be heard over it. It rang out clear and deep, with a timbre so much richer than she was used to.
“Fuck me,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.” She tried out a few of the chords from a song they’d been working on earlier. It sounded incredible, but knew immediately it wouldn’t work with the rest of the band. “How do we punk this thing up?”
Felix smiled. “If you want to pitch a ballad, be my guest, but I’m not sure Gus has the patience or range for that.”
Gracie started playing, feeling her way into the melody from “Androgynous.” “The Replacements made it work! There must be others!”
"Don’t get me wrong, I love ‘Androgynous,’ but that’s a ballad. ‘Rock the Casbah’ is all about the piano, I guess, but that’s a whole different vibe." He looked up at the ceiling, racking his brain.
"I could do the thing Cale does on I Wanna Be Your Dog and find a note that sounds good and just play that like I’m a hi-hat. But…"
Felix cut Gracie off. ”…that’s what you do on like every song, I know.”
Gracie grabbed a drum stick lying on the floor and threw it at him. “Oh fuck off, you prick.”
Felix laughed, blocking the bouncing stick with his foot. “If you’d let me finish, I was going to say: ‘And it sounds sick!’”
Grace made a heart with her hands and held it to her chest. “You think it’s funny, but you won’t know what to do when I show up to the sessions for the next album with the dozen ballads I’ve been writing all these years.”
Felix strummed his guitar, tuning complete. “If you’ve got a dozen ballads lined up, you better start playing them now, because there might not be a next time.”
Whenever she thinks about that night, Gracie can still feel the jolt that shot through her. Even in the bad moments—when Gus was moody or petulant, when they spent whole practice sessions arguing—she never thought about the end of the band. The band was like her pinkie toe; sure, it could disappear, of course, but why would it? And what would she do without it?
“You been running around behind our backs with a younger model?” She asked, trying to laugh it off.
“Oh yeah, you wouldn’t believe the keyboard player I met. She just graduated from SAIC, and doesn’t even have crow’s feet to Botox yet.”
Grace picked up the remaining drum stick, and held it above her head in faux menace. “I swear to fucking god, if this record was already in the can, you would not be walking out of this studio.”
Felix laughed harder this time. “No, I’m just saying, these things don’t last forever. If you make it past the third record and you’re still just a bar band, chances are you’re never blowing up. Life takes over, and before long you’re practicing once a month just for the kicks.”
Gracie chewed on it for a moment. “I guess I thought it was always just for the kicks. I mean, weirder things have happened, but you don’t see many bands blow up with bassists whose whole vibe screams sex pest.”
Felix shook his head in mock disappointment, “You actually do, but I see what you were going for.” He pushed himself up, making the signal for another beer with his hand. Gracie nodded back.
As the door to the studio clicked shut behind him, Gracie started back into “Androgynous.” She’d learned to play it as a teenager, and realized now that she didn’t so much know it—it simply came to her, like the words do to a song you’ve heard a thousand times on the radio. But it was deceptively simple: a few octaves with her left hand, a few with her right, basically the same pattern, slightly staggered. Woo-omp, womp-womp, woo-omp, womp-womp. The high notes of the right hand shimmered off the bassy notes of the left. If you wandered into a saloon in the old west, it wouldn’t sound out of place. And then the chorus of course—a few quick notes with the right hand, echoing the vocal melody. The simplicity was the whole thing.
She let the notes ring out, then felt with her left for a pair of octaves she’d never been able to find a use for. Dissonant and slightly eerie—she’d been drawn to them as a teenager, but they never sounded right on her keyboard at home. Here in the studio, they sounded perfect.
She was working on a basic rhythm—a propulsive one-two, one-two—when Felix returned with the beers. “All right now, play it!” He called out, and with an ironic grin Gracie improvised a high melody on top, drawing out the notes theatrically.
Felix handed her a beer, and grabbed his guitar. “Do that again,” he said, and strummed silently, concentrating, as she repeated the phrase.
When she finished, he plugged himself in. “You know ‘Melody Lee?’” He asked.
“If I do, I can’t picture her face. She that young bartender at the Broken Spoke?”
Felix laughed. He was referring to a song by the Damned, a band Gracie knew a touch of, but not well. She laughed too. ‘Melody Lee’ started with a piano intro he said, clean and pretty, before it was enveloped by the snarl of late-70s punk guitars. He wanted her to run through the part she’d written a couple of times, and then pause for a beat.
When he came in, she heard it immediately. He was playing her melody, adapted slightly, loud and fuzzy and distorted. He paused after a couple measures.
"Yes," Gracie said.
"Yep," Felix said back.
They stayed up until two working on it. Finding a balance between the piano and guitar was a challenge. Too much piano made it vaguely operatic, so they settled on the propulsive one-two for the verses, bringing the full piano melody in only for the chorus. Gracie wrote the bridge, and though they tried it on both piano and guitar, they couldn’t decide which worked better. By the time they hit record, Gracie’s intro had extended out to nearly a minute. They played it back once before turning in. Maybe it was because she was well and truly drunk by that point, or maybe it was because she was bordering on delirium after playing music for almost twelve straight hours, but as raw and rough as the demo was, it was the first time Gracie could remember listening to something she’d made where she didn’t immediately notice every flaw.
They played the demo for the full group first thing in the morning, with Felix leading the charge. Gus pushed back at first—he’d have to figure out a vocal melody and write lyrics, and his parts always took the longest to record—but with Matty and Christian supportive, they agreed to jam on it that night and see if there was room to fit it in. When Gus asked for a title to work off of for the lyrics, it came to Gracie almost immediately. ‘No More Next Time.’
The vibes that second day were impeccable. Takes were coming out clean, they were laughing, everyone was dialed in. After Mike left they split a joint and tried to figure out No More Next Time. After some playing around, they decided to move away from the ‘Melody Lee’ model. Instead of bringing the full band in with a crash at the end of Gracie’s intro, they’d string it out, coming in one at a time. First the drums, then the bass, then the guitar, then finally, once the song was at a full rollick, the vocals. They were loose and having fun; every take devolved into a slurry of solos and noisy feedback.
At the end of one of those chaotic takes, it was Felix who said it—this is the album ender—and as soon as he did, Gracie knew he was right. They were playing like they were live and their time had ended five minutes ago. It was when they were at their best.
The album version came together on the third evening. They decided to wait until the end of the day and record the instruments as a group, to better capture the frenzy that emerged when they were tired and playing off one another. It might have just been Gracie’s imagination, but she could’ve sworn that when they called it on the final take, Mike’s smile was bigger than they’d seen since they arrived.
They hadn’t yet heard the mastered version, but by the time they loaded their gear into the van for the long drive north, Gracie was prouder of the record than anything they’d made before. It didn’t mean it would lead to anything more than the first two had—in fact, she doubted it would—but she’d given more than she ever had before, and that felt like enough.
Felix presented the idea for the month-long tour on the drive. Gus jumped on the idea immediately, and Gracie agreed mostly because she could see how excited he and Felix were. Secretly, she thought about what Felix had said: it might be the last chance they’d ever have to do something so extravagant. If it were, what a fun way it would be to go out.
The crowd parted for Felix and Gracie, and she could see that though it had thinned out somewhat, the bulk of the audience was waiting to see what would happen. We’ll leave Christian on the stage, Felix said, it’s not leaking back there. But we gotta move the amps and our gear onto the floor.
Gracie didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure what her voice would sound like, and she was too wound up to do anything but follow instructions. The leak had slowed to a drip somehow, and the tech had left his bucket on the stage underneath it. It didn’t take long to move everything into place. They didn’t try to get the monitors perfect, they didn’t lose sleep about the angles of the amps, they put their gear where it would fit and plugged it in. They’d probably sound like shit, but at least they’d sound at all. Felix ended up directly next to Gracie’s keyboard, an unusual arrangement. Gus hadn’t come out of the green room; the microphone lay on its side on the edge of the stage.
Felix pulled the four of them into a quick huddle. The show’s fucked, who gives a shit. Let’s just fucking rock.
You really want to do this? Gracie said. We don’t even have a singer.
That’s why we have to really fucking rock, Felix said, pulling the strap for his bass over his head. He thumbed a few of the strings, and the amp he was plugged into called out. Christian clambered onto the stage, and Matty picked up his guitar. Gracie looked out into the crowd. She couldn’t see far; from the floor much of the front row was taller than she was, but she realized for the first time that they were clapping. As the boys took their places, a roar swept through the room—whistles and yelps and shouts. The Nose-Ring Twins were still there, standing side by side less than five feet from her. They were beaming at her, teeth showing in wide smiles.
Gracie took up a position behind her keyboard, and pressed down. The sound came out clear and loud to her left. Felix was a foot away facing her and Christian behind her. No More Next Time, he called out. It was their longest song, and normally what they ended on. This time, they drew it out even longer than usual. Felix kept his back to the crowd, signaled when he wanted Christian to come in, two refrains later than he normally would, and again for Matty, who came in with a distorted howl. Gracie could hardly hear herself—the amps were too close, the drums echoed without the rest of the band on stage, the crowd stomped and roared, pressed up almost touching her keyboard. And then a louder roar emerged from the back, and Gracie looked up to see a single head bobbing higher than the rest through the crowd.
Gus had lost his shirt, and some mixture of sweat, beer, and whatever had come from the pipe glistened in the strobing red light from above him. He grabbed the microphone and immediately pushed his way back into the crowd. His first hollered Next Time was met with an eruption. The mass swayed like a forest in a thunderstorm. He hadn’t made eye contact with her for even a moment, and she was glad for that. She knew, and feared, what her eyes would have said.
The song built and built and built, one layer at a time, speeding up and up until by the end it felt like everything was on the verge of spiraling out of control. It was then that Gracie felt a body lean into her. It was Felix, his eyes half-closed, head bobbing from side to side with the beat, fingers racing up and down the neck of his bass. The song was reaching its conclusion—Matty’s guitar growing ever more fuzzed out and disconnected, Christian’s bass drum pounding louder and faster, cymbals crashing. Gus was nowhere to be seen, his own repeated No Mores indistinguishable from the shouts around him. Gracie looked out—she saw the chalkboard above the bar offering the same six dollar handshakes it had been for the last ten years, noticed a poster for an act she wanted to see next month, watched the shifting spotlights reflect off the slowly spinning disco ball above the crowd. Her pulse quickened and her calves flexed. She threw back her head, closed her eyes, and swayed her shoulders in time with Felix’s. She felt the slightly tacky plastic of her keys as her fingers moved of their own accord. She could barely hear herself, but it didn’t matter. The notes tattooed on her fingertips were a map she didn’t need anymore. She would lose herself, and wherever she ended up, she would lose herself again.
John McDonough (he/him) received his MFA from Colorado State University. His work has previously appeared in Rabbit Catastrophe Review and Cream City Review. He lives in Chicago.