“What’s that?” Gahn asked, his signature grin on his face.
“A portable cassette player with some headphones.”
The grin faded a little, becoming a look of confusion. “A cassette player. What for?”
“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” Matt told him. “Just get one for me as quick as you can. Maybe they have one at this store we’re going to.”
“Dude,” Corban spoke up. “There’s like a cassette player right here, in the limo.” He pointed to the sound system installed against the partition between the passenger compartment and the driver’s compartment. There was indeed a cassette player there, as well as a CD player and a VHS player. But Matt had no intention of listening to the cassette in front of other people.
“Mind your own fuckin’ business,” Matt barked at him. “And stop calling me dude.”
Corban gave him a look of appeasement and a shrug. “Your world, boss,” he said.
“All right,” Greg said, exasperated. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Cool,” Matt said. “And make sure it’s a stereo player, not a mono. And high-quality headphones.”
“Of course,” Greg said with a sigh.
Greg was indeed able to dig up the required items at the record store. He presented them to Matt after they climbed back into the limo following the autograph session. Matt took them from the manager without even a word of thanks. Greg seemed unoffended—or he was at least used to it.
They arrived at the Tacoma Dome just after 5:00, the limo parking among the tractor-trailers and the buses in the rear of the facility. They were shown first to their dressing area and then reported immediately to the stage to begin their soundcheck. This took about fifteen minutes to accomplish. The roadies and techies then marked all the switches and dials and began getting ready to soundcheck the opening band—a group of hackers from Reno called Malignant that National had recently signed to their label—before the doors opened at 6:00.
Matt and the band, with Jim the paramedic and his ‘football’ trailing along behind, were then led back to the dressing rooms. Matt, unlike the rest of the band, had an entire room to himself. He went inside and shut the door behind him, cutting off Greg who was trying to give him some instructions about his stage clothes. He locked the door and then went over to the dressing table, where the torn jeans and black button-up shirt he would wear tonight were neatly folded.
Instead of picking up the clothes and getting ready—they would be meeting the locals and signing autographs backstage in just thirty minutes—he pulled the cassette case out of his pocket and set it down. He then opened up the packaging that contained his new cassette player and headphones. It took him a few minutes to figure out how the batteries went into the device—his close vision was not what it used to be and there was no way in hell he was going to wear reading glasses—because he couldn’t tell which way the plus and minus signs were supposed to be aligned.
Finally, he got it right, mostly through trial and error. He pulled the tape out of the case and inserted it into the player. He plugged in the headphones and put them on his ears. He took a deep breath and then pushed the play button on the device.
He really wanted to hate the song, and at first, he did. It opened with a slow piano melody and picked up into a rap beat complete with turntables and thumping bass guitars—sounds he generally detested—followed by G’s baritone rapping about some fucking thing or things he didn’t like. The rap built up a bit in intensity and then suddenly, the chorus came up and the tune switched from rap to a grinding hard rock guitar belting out a three-chord riff of impressive complexity. And then Kingsley’s voice cut in, singing out how he signed that line and sold his soul.
Son of a bitch! Matt thought in amazement. Is he singing about what I think he’s singing about?
The chorus ended and the tune switched back to the rap rhythm. Matt paid a little more attention to the lyrics this time around, hearing about how G was treated like a slave, paid like one too, about how his talent was exploited and he didn’t get shit for his effort.
They are talking about that! Matt realized. They’re talking about fucking National Records! About how those assholes fucked us over on our contract!
The next chorus started and Matt further realized they were actually modulating keys from E major to G major as they shifted from the rap to the rock portions. And they were doing it almost seamlessly, so that no one but a professional musician or sound engineer would notice. He could not help but be impressed by this—even though he really did not want to be. Kingsley belted out his words again, his voice a little more intense, a little angrier on this go-around, leaving no doubt remaining that he was singing about the music industry in general and National Records in particular.
The key remained in G major as the bridge portion began. Jake sang an agonized diatribe about how he’d just wanted to have his voice heard and wanted to make a simple living, about how they’d taken that dream and smashed it to pieces and flushed them away, about how he was put in a trap from which there was no escape. The words were mournful, angry, hard hitting. He trailed off the last syllable of the bridge and then launched into the guitar solo. And Jim was right. It was not as good as what Matt himself could have done, but it shredded pretty impressively.
The solo gave way back to the rap beat in E major and Bigg G singing out a final verse. From there, Kingsley belted out one more repetition of the chorus, his tone even angrier this time, and then they faded to a slow outro that was a mixture of the piano, some light turntables, and G and Kingsley singing out alternating vocalizations. The song ended on a fade out of the last piano note.
Matt pushed the stop button on the machine and then the rewind. When the tape stopped moving, he pushed play and listened to the entire tune one more time. Once this was complete, he pushed stop once more and removed the headphones from his head. He then threw the tape machine, the tape, and the headphones into the garbage can next to the dressing table. This did not stop the song from continuing to play in his mind, however.
“Motherfucker,” he muttered, shaking his head back and forth a few times.
I Signed That Line was going to chart like mad, maybe even faster and higher and longer than that song by those Brainwash nerds had—what was it called? Together? Jake Kingsley had been involved in that shit too. But at least Together only covered one basic genre. This I Signed That Line shit was going to explode both through the hard rock demographic and the hip hop demographic. Talk about fucking crossover!
He’s a musical genius, Matt’s brain whispered to him. Fucking admit it!
“So, what if he is?” he said aloud. “He’s still a fucking sellout. He still led the push to vote Darren out of Intemperance, which is what led to Darren killing himself with heroin.”
But even as he spoke the words, he had to admit that they did not have quite the same power behind them that they once had. When you came right down to it, Darren had been a fuckup—a fuckup who managed to fuck up majorly time and time again despite multiple chances to redeem himself. Was Kingsley really all that wrong for taking the stand he had taken? Was it all just a power struggle against me, or was he really only trying to act in the best interest of Intemperance, as he claimed at the time?
Matt did not like these thoughts in his head. Did not like to doubt himself, especially not on a subject as painful and far-reaching as Darren and the breakup of Intemperance.