Time Out of Mind (Suncoast Society #43)(26)

“Yeah.” Mevi took a bite of his taco, savoring it. It wasn’t a fancy dinner, but it wasn’t fast-food, and it was fresh and hot and something he’d cooked himself. “You feel like a ‘sober history’ lesson?”

“Sure.”

“I worked my ass off when I got to LA. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to break into the music industry, but I was determined not to give up, no matter what. But not many jobs for an eighteen-year-old guy without a college diploma, right? I mean, no farm work, which I could do. I held down two or three jobs at a time, usually waiting tables or washing dishes. I’d do anything that paid. That meant not much time free.

“So one of the places where I worked, they had a karaoke night. I usually didn’t work there that night, but they’d had a guy call in so I worked a longer shift under the table for the owner because I didn’t have anywhere else to be. When I finished when the next guy came on shift, I was hanging out and decided to put my name in for the hell of it.

“I performed two by Nickelback—don’t laugh, I love their stuff. I did ‘Feelin’ Way Too Damn Good’ and ‘Figured You Out.’ Standing O both times. After the second song, I get off the stage and these two guys come up to talk to me.

“Turns out Bonnie’s brother, Tom, was in the audience. He’d called her, and she called Garth to go talk to me since he wasn’t far away. Their lead vocalist had just gotten popped for drugs, so even though he was out on bail, they dumped him. When they found out I also played guitar, they begged me to come to their rehearsal.” He took a sip of water

“Wow,” Doyle said. “That was lucky.”

“Very. I told them I had to work the next night, so they all arranged their schedules to meet with me in the morning. I mean, they were unknowns then, still working regular jobs to make ends meet. The band got paid but it covered their expenses to get to the gigs, if they were lucky. They had a gig coming up Friday night and asked me to join them, for pay. About what I’d make working Friday night. Since I was scheduled to work at that restaurant, I talked to the guy who’d come in on shift and swapped nights with him.

“They were mostly a cover band, but I told them I wrote music, too. We didn’t have time for them to learn anything new, and it was easier for me to learn their songs on short notice. We worked well together, and…” He sighed. “It snowballed.”

He took another bite of his taco.

“When did you realize it was going to get big?”

“Tom was in computers. He did their website and stuff. They weren’t even Portnoy’s Oyster then, they were Carouselacious, which I personally thought was a stupid name. Plus, it was nearly impossible for people to spell right. Turned out the band’s domain name was registered to the creep who’d been popped, and he refused to turn it over to them since he’d been the one to come up with the name.

“So the next week, we’re all at Tom’s place, trying to come up with a new name and stuff. I’d been reading Portnoy’s Complaint. Don’t laugh, I love to read. We’re sitting there, trying different names of bands, Bonnie’s brother looking them up on the Internet and iTunes to see if anyone’s already got it. After an hour, Pasch groans as we come up empty again and said it’s like trying to find a damn pearl in a pile of oysters.”

Doyle smiled. “Ha.”

“Yeah. Well, and I figured hey, the world’s our oyster. And Bonnie’s brother said searching stuff on Google—we were thinking ahead, all of us—‘Portnoy’s’ comes up pretty easy because of the book. And it’s not hard to spell. So we became Portnoy’s Oyster.”

Mevi thought back to those days as he took another bite of his taco. Hardscrabble times for them, but still fun. Like having a family.

“We recorded six of my original songs and released them. Took a couple of months, but they suddenly went batshit on sales overnight. Turns out a DJ in LA had been sent our website link by his sister, and he loved them and pimped them on his Facebook page.”

“And history was made.”

“After a shit-ton of hard work, yeah. Bonnie’s brother was our sound engineer at first, and did all our early recordings himself because no way we could afford real studio time. He had a Mac and could borrow or rent equipment for us to make demos and production material. Layers of old Goodwill blankets stapled to the walls and door in his garage. That kind of bare-bones stuff. He busted his ass in his free time to learn sound software and researching how to process the files to make us sound really good. He posted them for sale for us, ran the website, all of that, in addition to his day job, and having a wife and kid. He deserves the credit for our discovery. He engineered the shit out of our website’s SEO terms so that we came up a lot. People would e-mail us that they found us while looking for someone else. He ran our Facebook page, too. Twitter account. Everything.”

“He still with you guys?”

Mevi shoved away the wave of pain that tried to wash through him. “Cancer. Five years ago.”

“Oh. I’m really sorry.”

“So am I. But, ironically, his older daughter followed in his footsteps. She did go to college, because all of us ganged up on her, along with Tom and his wife, and insisted. But she grew up sitting in Tom’s lap and working on stuff on the computer with him. She’d be in practices with us with her earmuffs on to protect her hearing while watching her daddy work the software. Her younger brother is head of our publicity department now. So it’s still family.”