Not
so with Weed Wacker Joey. Wade thought of Joey as his hands finally
moved from strumming the stark 4/4 of the song's verse to walloping the
6/8 discord of the chorus, based loosely on an open B-minor chord. He
could hear the sharp tang of new strings straining to fall out of tune
and the rattle of phlegm in his breath. The conductor calmed the orchestra's
roar so that Wade could take the floor in his slick white suit. He swallowed
the pasty fear on his teeth and wetted the roof of his mouth with his
tongue. Usually he liked be inside his songs every time he performed them.
He sang from inside of their words and melodies, living the memories the
songs evoked, and unless he was drunk the guitar would play itself. But
right now, Wade wasn't anywhere near Skinner's Mountain, much less inside
of it. He was inside a stiff white suit, which seemed to move him out
further onto the floor, where he curled his head and shoulders around
the microphone so that his guitar fell just short of brushing the chrome
stand. He took a deep breath, and began to sing.
Even while he wistfully injected his curious, sad lyrics into the faux-1940s Hollywood mic, Wade thought about Sonogramotronic. The formerly-independent label that had put out Wade's clear seven-inch record, which sold fewer than 150 copies, had also put out Weed Wacker Joey's wild folk tales years before, and his Lawn Implement Subversion Tape series (the LIST tapes are now available only via a collective of Internet fan sites known as the TapeLoop webring). Post-buyout, Sonogramotronic put Joey in a big, corporate studio, with all his genius, with a good producer, without the static, without the concept album hangups and the small-fry budget. And boom, he was an overnight sensation, a rocket from the underground to the top of the charts! But that's different from me playing the Whammies, Wade thought from behind closed eyelids, feeling the TV cameras zoom in on his sweating face and the swollen zit on his forehead. Because it's different when you're watching it happen to somebody else. And besides, Weed Wacker Joey's mother was a performance artist.
Wade opened his eyes just enough to see the floor, a peculiar black surface that didn't reflect much of the jolting stage light, but offered a clear view of his guitar, his mottled face, the hair flopping over it. Cinching his eyelids down, he launched into the inspiring 6/8 chug of the song's chorus once more. In his old band, Wade was just a guy with a guitar, somewhere near the drums at the back of the stage. He could create the swirling, swaying aural terrain beneath the feet of the lead singer, who *was* a rock star, with a sculpted face and no acne and a cocky attitude.
Now it was just Wade, Wade Lee, all by himself. He liked his songs and it was pleasing that other people liked them, too, but Wade knew he was not a rock star. A year, hell, six months ago, he was playing his songs solo, playing his acoustic guitar; you didn't find conductors and orchestras within spitting distance of the dark little clubs and coffeehouses he played. Resisting the urge to wipe his face on the cuff of the borrowed white jacket, he was glad to hear that his voice had already moved on to the third line of the second verse. He heard it ring out plaintively, filling the domed hall with words about the haunted paths and mossy trees of Skinner's Mountain. Distant cellos swelled dramatically, waiting to escort him into the next chorus.
Wade used to compose his private musings and jarring folk songs on the side, but the songs were immediately pried from him...even if he just played them once, wasted, on a porch at two in the morning when people gathered in the August heat. Word got around about these songs. Suddenly the booker at La Luna started remembering Wade's name. The sexy owner of the Empire Room told him to come by her club anytime for Framboise or champagne on the house. At parties, pretty young girls with barettes in their bleached silver hair let their fingers rest on his guitar, as though it were a soft kitten they intended to bring home. People he respected—musicians and girls and the new booker at Satyricon and his old friend Weed Wacker Joey—told him that he must make these lovely and honest songs available to the public. To do otherwise would be selfish, they told him, or simply a shame.
So he did it. He went into the apartments of friends with four-track recorders, and the basements of friends with ADAT decks, and the studios of friends with computers, and he recorded the songs. They were songs about love, and the girl leaving, or the girl having a drug problem, or just plain being screwy. Maybe she was genuinely cruel like in the song about throwing a guy off the St.Johns Bridge and laughing while he struggled in the cold water, unable to swim against the river's current with his arms broken.
Onstage in Hollywood, the accumulated sweat finally began to dribble down his face. It brought Wade back to his present surroundings, to the spotlights, the selectively reflective black floor, and the increasingly frenzied spasms of the string section. The famous Motown producer had written this bridge especially for tonight's Whammies show. Based loosely on Wade's own two-measure bridge, it jumped sideways from the deep and intimate shadows on Skinner's Mountain, the cool damp spots beneath the rhododendron shrubs where—as the song explained—Wade and the girl would roll beneath a full moon, down the hill from their empty beer bottles. The new bridge sounded puffy and lustrous, building up in the orchestra risers behind him so that Wade's figure was silhouetted in otherworldly light like the Virgin of Guadalupe. It sounded to him like the part of a science fiction movie where the young hero fights the electric sand eels. It did not sound like the cool mountain forest at night. Wade listened as the new bridge gave way to a would-be Stevie Wonder keyboard solo and turned his face upstage, shielded from the lights as his cheeks heated up.
After making his first tape, the one about girls, Wade wrote songs about his habits, even though they were shameful: while Weed Wacker Joey went on world tour with the Beastie Boys and David Bowie, Wade Lee was still in Portland, Oregon, going on speed binges. His band kicked him out; then they broke up. The girl he'd shared the picnic with on Skinner's Mountain changed her phone number and pretended not to know him if they showed up at the same party or club. Wade went to rehab for the first time since the 11th grade, and wrote a new album's worth of songs, "each more finely wrought and hopelessly empathic than the last," according to the local hotshot indie rock critic, the same one who used to say that Weed Wacker Joey was a joke and would never go anywhere. That's when the local film director asked him to write a song for a new movie. Wade said, "Only if you'll put 'On Skinner's Mountain' on the soundtrack, too."
In Hollywood, in front of the movie stars, the orchestral swells rolled on much longer than Wade remembered from the rehearsal. He tried to concentrate, looking over his shoulder at the conductor, listening to the vibrant strings and a particularly trashy tuba sample blurting from a synthesizer. A knot clenched in Wade's gut as he realised the song was unrecognizable at this point. Skinner's Mountain had disappeared, girl and all. The knot moved up to his ribcage as he searched the orchestra's moans for his song, the song that was nominated for a Golden Whammy Award, the song that somehow caught the attention of the same critics who liked loud Adult Contemporary chicks and cheesy R&B singers. Panic swept over him; the part of his mind where his songs lived was empty. Blank.
The strings and tubas and keyboards quieted behind him, one violin holding the last note. Wade realized his fingers were rapping gently against the guitar's body. Bad. He tried to picture the park on Skinner's Mountain; instead, he pictured Weed Wacker Joey, wearing a 'Luv Yr Idols' t-shirt and spinning a clear seven-inch vinyl frisbee into the distance. Breathing, Wade forced his hands to his sides and grasped for an image, a word, an anything. The mood of the place, the moss, the girl, okay, that helps, the girl, the last verse starts with something, it starts with a word, what's the word? No word, not even a wrong word, one from a different verse. He breathed again, trying to invoke that night, how the trees rustled, how the rhododendrons smelled, the feel of the girl's skin. Where is the word? Where is my song? What the fuck am I doing up here? What is the word?