April started snoring gently, and a nap struck me as appealing. I set an alarm on my phone and closed my eyes. Woke what seemed like two seconds later to my phone’s chime. April was drying her hair. I never figured out how she managed to wake herself without alarms, no matter how little sleep we’d gotten. I followed her lead with a blissful, uninterrupted shower.
I debated taking everything with me, decided against it, then for it, then against it again. What were the odds that someone might pull the same hideous stunt two nights in a row? I packed my gig stuff into my backpack and left the larger bag, just to make a point.
The guys met us in the parking lot. I handed Hewitt my tour bible, and he read the address to the van’s GPS to route us. The guys had laughed at my insistence on a hard copy of our itinerary for the first few days of the tour, until the afternoon the phones had crashed but I still knew where we were going. We stopped to buy an actual atlas that day. “Haven’t sold one of those in a while now,” the convenience store clerk said. Nobody had mocked my book since then, and I loved making notes in the margins of the atlas. A childhood spent in the confines of a single neighborhood had left me a fan of maps and all they could tell.
We drove through a cute little business district full of boutiques and restaurants, before turning off the wide street and onto a narrow one.
“Stop the van.” I was already opening the door. “Stop, stop, stop.”
Hewitt slammed on the brakes, and I jumped out. The Peach, our destination, had an old-fashioned marquee out front. An old-fashioned marquee with my name on it. TONIGHT: LUCE CANNON. I had seen my name on chalkboards and posters, but never on a marquee before.
A year before, when things had started moving for me, I’d made a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish in my music career. Two lists, actually: one of things within my control, and one of things outside my control. On the first list, I had line items like “learn how to play better lead guitar.” On the second, the more pie-in-the-sky stuff: clubs and theaters I wanted to headline, people I wanted to share a stage with. I had never even thought to put “my name on a marquee.” The first chance I had to open my journal, I’d write it down for the thrill of crossing it off.
“How cool is that?” I asked nobody in particular, pulling out my phone to snap a quick picture.
A car honked behind our van, and I waved the band on. “I’ll meet you inside.”
Hewitt had my tour bible, which meant he’d seen the note about the loading dock behind the club. This gave me another few minutes to admire my name in lights.
A woman walked by on the opposite side of the road with a German shepherd, heading into a park.
I pointed at the sign. “That’s my name!”
She smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.
The theater looked like it had been a cinema once upon a time. The label’s PR team had sent posters, and one was displayed in a fancy bulb-framed display beside the old-fashioned ticket booth. I tried three locked doors before I found one that opened into a rotunda-style lobby with a bar. A guy in a black T-shirt with a giant peach on the back was stocking a beer cooler. He looked up when I entered.
“I’m in the band,” I said before he asked. “Is the loading dock open, do you know?”
He nodded, and I stepped into the theater.
No wonder they had been pushing me to do promotionals in this town. We’d mostly been playing midsized rock clubs, but this was an honest-to-goodness theater, with chairs and a balcony and everything. A theater we were headlining. I was headlining. On a Tuesday, granted, but still a step up.
I walked down the aisle. The house lights were on, displaying all the details: the art deco wall sconces, the carved proscenium. April staggered onto the stage from the wings with her giant bag of drum hardware, always the last thing loaded and the first thing unloaded, as tall as she was, and twice as heavy. Behind her came the other guys, with her throne, her cymbal bags, her bass drum. Everyone helped with everything, but April always grabbed the big bag herself as a point of pride.
I made my way out to the van. Gemma had said early on that I didn’t have to help unload. “Play diva if you want. We’re on your payroll.”
Maybe I’d have been able to get used to it, but it felt like a weird separation between me and the people I played with, even if they were hired guns. I wanted to be part of the group, but situations kept conspiring to set me apart: the solo promotion spots, their painting expedition. My own unwillingness to share much of myself. The least I could do was carry my own gear and help with theirs.
After Gemma left, I was glad I’d already gotten them used to me stepping in alongside, so it wasn’t some weird change in procedure. I might claim some point of “That’s my name up there” privilege every once in a while, but I didn’t actually know how to play diva, when it came down to it.
We got everything unloaded, and started on setup. Another Peach-shirted employee joined us onstage after April had assembled her kit. He started pulling drum mics and stands from an alcove and fussing with their placement.
“Hi—I’m Luce,” I said when he paused for a moment. Step one: always be nice to the people responsible for making you sound good.
“Eric Silva. Call me Silva. I’m looking forward to this. We’ve been playing your stuff in the house mix for the last few weeks, and I really like your sound.”
Points in his favor. I could often tell how the show was going to go by the sound person’s attitude. The ones who didn’t want us to be there, maybe preferred another genre or didn’t go for chick singers, didn’t introduce themselves by name. When I introduced myself, they’d grunt or nod or go about their business. Those guys directed all their questions to JD or Hewitt, and talked down to April and me, or didn’t talk to us at all. I’d learned the introduction served as an easy test.
Somebody in the booth was cycling through various gels and positions for the lights, throwing rainbows and occasionally blinding us. Silva orbited the band as we set up, placing mics and shifting monitor angles. He didn’t ask us any questions about the makeup of our band, or where we wanted the monitors, and I realized he’d actually studied our tech rider, something that put this place in the top one percent of venues as far as I was concerned. When somebody met us on the stage with all our needs and preferences attended to, I got the feeling the show would be a good one.
The soundcheck went well. The theater had the nicest sound system we’d run into on this tour, and Silva gave us the exact monitor mixes we wanted. The room sounded like a cathedral, full and warm; it would sound even better filled with people. After Silva had all the levels set, we asked him if we had a few minutes to work on a new song I had written over the weekend.
“Be my guest,” he said. “You’ve got two hours before the doors open and dinner’s on its way to the green room. Come find me if you need me.”
I had gone through a fallow period at the tour’s start where I couldn’t figure out the rhythm of things. We were driving to the next town after each show, checking into hotels in the middle of the night, sleeping a few hours before I had to start the promotional cycle; everyone else got to sleep a few extra hours while Gemma dragged me to morning shows. I was haggard, getting myself wired for shows on caffeine alone, eating crap.
After three weeks, I begged Gemma for a change, and we settled into a new schedule. When possible, we started sleeping in the town we had played, so I could get a solid night’s sleep. Wake up, try to get to the hotel gym, drive, soundcheck, play, sleep. It didn’t work if we had to be at a radio show six hours away by eight a.m., but the PR people got some promos rescheduled for lunch shows instead of morning, and worked it out that I called in for others.