The song began to play. He was a little doubtful at first as he heard the opening melody, as he realized there was no electric guitar, no drums, not even much of a bass line. But that guitar playing was kind of cool, a solid, well-played piece that was catchy. And the violin played over the top of it ... that actually was kind of interesting as well. And then Kingsley’s singing—his voice laid down the lyrics perfectly, a dark tale that seemed to suggest that everything a person did in life was ultimately meaningless.
“Pretty fuckin’ deep,” Steve said approvingly, his lube gun in his greasy hand, his head bobbing in time to the rhythm.
The song ended and Steve went back to focusing most of his attention on his work. He finished the oil change on the police car and lowered it back to the ground, after which he drove it out to the ready line and marked it as being in-service. He then pulled in his next project: A city snowplow that needed a diagnostic on its cooling system. He just had time to determine that the thermostat was frozen open before it was time for lunch.
He worked out the rest of his shift and then drove over to Bradford Municipal Park just north of the downtown area. There, in the very back reaches of the recreational facility, he met with a few of his coworkers so they could unwind after a hard day. Steve had a case of beer in his trunk, the cans at the perfect drinking temperature thanks to the thirty-one degrees it was outside. His friend Tommy Vale had an eighth of some decent bud. A joint was passed around and the beers were popped open and the five men talked of things that early thirties men talked of while the radio, tuned to WZAP, played a stream of rock music from Tommy’s car.
The new Jake Kingsley song came on the radio again. As before, the DJ announced that it was about to play.
“You heard this one, guys?” Steve asked them.
“I think I heard them playing it earlier in the day,” said Tommy. “Kind of mellow shit, isn’t it?”
“Nothing like Intemp,” said John Stone with a shake of the head.
“Yeah,” said Rick Farls, who had just killed the last of the joint. “It’s got violins and shit in it. Kingsley’s a fuckin’ sellout!”
“Naw, man,” Steve said. “It’s kind of cool shit, really. Give it a listen. That’s actually his mother playing that violin.”
“His fucking mother?” Tommy asked in disbelief.
“She’s a symphony musician and shit,” Steve said. “She fuckin’ nails it. Check it out!”
They checked it out. Rick still didn’t care much for it—he was a hard-core Matt Tisdale fan and had never really cared for any of Kingsley’s shit, Intemp or otherwise. Tommy and John, however, seemed to get into it.
“That’s Kingsley’s mom, huh?” John asked. “She really is pretty good with that thing.”
“I did like the violin solo,” Tommy had to admit.
“I told you it was good shit,” said Steve, who was already planning to stop by Tower of Power Records on his way home so he could pick up the CD.
All over the United States and Canada for the next two weeks, similar stories were going on. People heard Playing Those Games and Insignificance on their radios, usually several times in the course of a day. Not everyone liked the songs immediately. Some never liked them at all. But a great majority had the tunes grow on them the more they were exposed to them. And since those who liked the songs also tended to be the same ones who had liked The Struggle and The Easy Way, many of them decided that they would cut loose a little of their funds and go get the CD.
By the end of the first week in January, 1993, Games was getting frequent airplay on both the pops and the hards and the album had cleared two hundred thousand in sales. Games the song, however, was not doing so well on the charts—it had only gone to sixteen in the Top 40. Insig, on the other hand, was moving up the charts with a bullet, powered mostly by requests from the pop stations. It cracked the Top 10, still moving upward. And sales of Can’t Keep Me Down, the CD, passed a hundred and twenty thousand and kept on moving.
The ride was truly underway.
Matt Tisdale heard Insignificance for the first time as he rode in the back of the limousine on his way to a jam session in a Culver City warehouse where he and his band were working up his new material. It was ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning, just after the turn of the year, only the third such session to be held. The radio in the back of the limo was tuned to KRON and a commercial break had just wrapped up. The ten o’clock DJ, who had just started his shift, then announced that the latest from Jake Kingsley was about to be played.
“Fucking Kingsley,” Matt said in disgust, his fingers reaching for the dial. The last thing in the world he wanted to hear right now was another fucking tune from that sellout motherfucker. It was bad enough he had been subjected to that last crappy tune the man had put out, which, undoubtedly due to some underhanded marketing by National and good old legal tender, was actually getting airplay on KRON instead of staying on the pop stations where it belonged. Imagine Jake Kingsley, who had always held himself out to be some kind of purist when it came to music, now involved in the sleazy marketing of his own shit when it benefited him to do so. That was the very definition of a sellout.
Matt’s finger stopped short of the dial, however, when he heard the DJ say that Kingsley’s mother was playing violin on the cut they were about to hear. Violin? His fucking mother? What kind of sad-ass easy listening abortion is he peddling now? Morbid curiosity, the same kind that made a person want to look at a roadside automobile accident, kept him from tuning out just yet. He had to hear this shit.
He heard it. And, as much as he wanted to, as much as he tried to, he could not hate it. The fingerpicked melody that Jake had laid down was a masterpiece of acoustic guitar skill and phrasing. Jake had always been incredible on the acoustic, perhaps one of the best there was. And those violin fills atop the melody ... well ... it was easy listening shit, true, but goddamn if it didn’t sound pretty good, didn’t fit right in with the tone of the song. He had met Mary Kingsley several times before and he knew that she was a symphony musician, of course, but he had never given her a whole lot of thought other than that she was a nice lady, kind of square, but someone he had respected as a person, nonetheless. She really could play her instrument. Very shrewd of Kingsley recruiting her for the piece. Matt even analyzed the lyrics to the tune as best he could on a first run-through. They were classic Jake Kingsley lyrics, deeper than some he had laid down over the years, dark, intriguing, words that rang true with a universal theme of life that many did not like to acknowledge.
“This fucking song is going to chart,” Matt whispered, partially in wonder, partially in anger.
The song faded out and was replaced by a group of hackers called Primal Fire. Matt had heard their shit before and was not impressed on any level with it. He snapped the radio off and rode the rest of the trip in silence, his mind troubled.