by magdalen

The silence of 4,300 well-dressed movie stars greeted Wade at the foot of the stage. His white suit shucked up around his acoustic guitar, the buttons pressing into his abdomen. A rack of unblinking white lights, like they have in operating theaters and alien abductions on TV, bored into his eyes. Evading the glare, he looked down, breathed deeply, and thought of yard maintenance equipment.

Wade could clearly remember the day he first heard the song "Pancake" by his friend Weed Wacker Joey. It was a sunny day, the first one Portland had experienced in over nine months. Wade Lee—bagel baker, house painter, and struggling musician—wasn't driving with the top down, because like most sensible people in Oregon he didn't own a convertible. Mentally, though, the top was down on his 1970 Plymouth Valiant. His eyes glowed painfully as the sun glinted off the puddles and pavement of NoPo's dowdy streets. He was on his way to meet up with a wonderful girl, and they were going to have a picnic on Skinner's Mountain. A freshly-rolled Drum cigarette dangled from his lips and a slightly-stale cup of Beaterville coffee balanced on the seat beside him. The inane chatter of Modern Rock Radio DJs kept him company.

Just as Wade turned left onto North Killingsworth, headed for I-5 and a glorious Sunday afternoon, an eerie sound pulsated from the car speakers. It wasn't static. It wasn't a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. It was the familiar buzz of his friend Joey's Weed Wacker. Wade shook his head as though he'd gotten water stuck in his ear, because nothing else sounded quite like Joey's crazy setup. The tiny contact microphone on the Weed Wacker's blades would pass a signal through an ugly purple DOD delay pedal, a Crybaby wah-wah, and another effect pedal which proclaimed itself to be a "Heavy Metal Riot," creating a distinctive cacophany. Wade could even hear the zooming sound that Joey's fucked-up little Gorilla amp always made, a blown-out, swirling hum that almost seemed like a Leslie if you cranked it loud enough—and here it was on the popular Modern Rock Radio station. Then Wade heard the deep, deadpan voice that was unmistakably Joey's, singing, "Girl, you flipped me like a pancake; Girl, you poached me like an egg."

Wade and Joey weren't close friends, but in the '80s they'd meet up in towns like Olympia, Portland, Chico, Eureka, and they would say "Hi" to each other. Later they'd be on the same bill at a club in Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver, Boise—even Las Vegas one time, which was Weed Wacker Joey's hometown. Joey would play some weirded-out folk songs he'd written, and then do electronic numbers backed only by his Weed Wacker and the tinny, uncontrollable sounds he'd programmed into his Casio CZ-101 synthesizer, which his grandmother had given him for his fourteenth birthday. Sometimes Wade would play after Joey, and sometimes Joey would play after Wade. Usually they were both opening for somebody else, someone further up on the food chain, like an alternative-country band with a formerly-famous punk rock singer, or a concept group involving accordions. Since Wade was naturally shy, and Joey was very outgoing, they didn't talk much. But they smiled at each other, and sank into comfortable silences on uncomfortable sofas in the Green Rooms of the clubs and dilapidated theaters where they played.

Now, as the 70-piece orchestra trilled the first bars of a famous Motown producer's arrangement of his hit song "On Skinner's Mountain," Wade looked away from the Golden Whammy Awards audience and thought about driving along on that sunny Sunday. He'd felt amazed. Joey was just another independent music guy like himself. Sure, things had gotten wild and stirred-up as the 1990s hit their stride, and formerly-ignored punk rockers could now command huge sums of money for elaborate contracts, but Wade hadn't thought about it spilling over. Not to obscure singer-songwriters like himself and guys with garden tool fixations like Joey. But the sound of the Weed Wacker sprayed out of Modern Rock Radio stations nationwide, heralding a new era.

Later that week, Weed Wacker Joey had left a garbled message on Wade's answering machine. "Yoooooooowooh!" he howled. "How's my man Wade Lee? Listen to this!" A shirring shriek, more like the sound of dry gears cranking into each other than the growl of a lawn trimmer, blasted through the huge avocado-colored answering machine that his dad had bought Mom as an anniversary present, just before Dad left them all for good. "I just got signed!" Joey's deep voice warbled on the old tape.

So Weed Wacker Joey signed onto a major label, or actually to a Portland indie that'd been swallowed up by a major. It was the same indie that had released Wade's only solo record a couple years before, a seven-inch single of "Daphne" on clear vinyl with a Wipers cover on the B-side, sung as a madrigal by a girls' church choir because the producer thought that would be ironic. Now the tiny Sonogramotronic label was a part of Warner-Atlantic-Mercury-Disney or Polygram-A&M-Universal-EMI-Sony. Wade didn't really know, but it was a big corporation, not the sort of people who used to take interest in Weed Wacker Joey or musicians like him.

Sometimes your friend gets signed to a major label and nothing happens to him, Wade Lee mused as his fingers went into automatic, the callouses of his left hand slipping on the smooth fretboard under the limelight's heat. Your friend's band plays out a lot more, on eight- or twelve-week tours, but they're still playing the same rat-holes you play on your three-week wannabe-tour in the summer. You don't notice your friend's band on MTV (which you'd never admit to watching) and you don't hear them on the horrible Modern Rock Radio station you would never listen to except that you can pick it up on your car radio. The evil corporate record company people don't promote your friend and his record; they just plain don't care. The band eventually puts its collective tail between its collective pair of legs, churns out those two albums they promised they would make, and no one ever hears of them again. That is supposed to be the big time.

Next Page