The High Notes: A Novel(6)
Most of the time, there was an atmosphere of camaraderie among them, in their misery, but occasionally tempers ran short and the men got into fights. Injuries were of no consequence, and they had to go on anyway, or not get paid, or were even penalized for it if they couldn’t perform. Tours were twelve weeks long, with two weeks at home in between, if they even had one.
Her father floated around while she was on tour, and most of the time, she didn’t even know where he was. He checked in from time to time, and she discovered later that he was spending her money, not saving it for her as he was supposed to. At the end of her five-year contract with Billy Weston, she didn’t have a penny. She’d had a few brief romances of no consequence with members of other bands. She learned early on that the men in that world were unreliable and the romances brief and disappointing. The women stuck together and became adept at protecting one another from the drunks who hit on them after the shows.
She felt that she had wasted her time and her talent for five years. They kept her as an opening act for four of the five years, and finally put her on as a feature for the last year of the tour, in the frigid Northwest in the dead of winter. They were the worst five years of her life. She had no money to pay a lawyer to try and break the contract. Her father didn’t care.
When the contract ended, she flew back to Las Vegas with a little money she’d saved on the road to pay for a room in Vegas until she found work. She was determined to audition at the casinos this time. She had some experience under her belt now, with five years of tours, and as she made the rounds, she heard from other talent that Billy Weston was well known for exploiting young performers, abusing them in the worst ways possible. He wasn’t respected in Las Vegas. She needed an agent, but didn’t know how to find one. Her father was a bad joke. Weston sent him her paychecks, and he’d cashed them all at bars where they knew him, and spent the money. She had nothing to show for five years on the road.
There were waiting lists of highly experienced singers and musicians for the casinos, and Iris put her name on the list. It took her three weeks to locate her father when she got back. He finally turned up, and got her a gig in a halfway-decent bar where he knew the owner and spent a lot of his time when he was in town. It was a stopgap measure until she got a better job, and she had some new songs she’d written that she wanted to try out.
The audiences loved her songs. Her material just kept getting better. The only time she was happy was when she was singing. When she sang, she didn’t care where she was. She had learned to become oblivious to her surroundings. It was just her and the music, and her voice soaring high above the crowd.
The second night she presented her new material, a manager’s scout came to see her backstage after the show. The owner of the bar had called him. She was twenty-three years old and had a small dressing room, even though she was a seasoned performer by then after five years on tour, one of them as a featured act. She wasn’t interested in what he had to say, after years under contract to Billy Weston. He’d called her several times to get her to sign on again, and she didn’t return his calls. She knew better now, and what a liar he was. Her father had sold her to Weston like a slave. She wasn’t going to fall into the same trap again. She had learned a lot about the business, the hard way.
She had made a few friends, but Weston shuffled the groups around, matching up opening acts with featured performers, and they rarely went on tour with the same people. It was hard to stay in touch with anyone. They all moved around too much. She’d dated one singer and a few musicians, and eventually learned her lesson about that too. Most of them just wanted someone to sleep with during the tour. Many of them were into drugs, which she wasn’t. In the end, she just stayed in her hotel room, which she shared with one or two other women, wrote songs in her spare time, and concentrated on her music. She’d never had a serious long-term boyfriend. Her brief relationships had gone nowhere except in and out of bed, with no promise or substance for a future. It was impossible to maintain a serious relationship the way they lived.
They were all drifters, and many of them were younger than she was. Billy Weston was a master at exploiting young people, some of whom had real talent. He treated them like so much cattle. Some of them just walked away from their contracts and disappeared, and went back to wherever they came from, and gave up music. Only the hardiest and most dedicated stuck with it. Iris refused to let him beat her down. There were road managers who went with them, who were usually sleazy guys trying to hit on the girls. She managed to stay away from them too. It was a seedy world, with some of the worst elements in it. She rose above it with her music. She had no friends, no money, and no idea where her father was when she first got back. After checking with Weston’s office, Chip knew when she finished her contract, and he found her in Vegas and got her the job at the bar, where the scout heard her sing, and waited for her after her second set. She was twenty-three years old, and still looked like she was in her teens. She had a freshness and innocent look about her that didn’t exist in the world she was in. But she was willing to endure anything to stick with her music.
The scout’s name was Earl Drake. He said he worked for Glen Hendrix, which was a name she’d heard. He was supposedly a step up from Billy Weston. Drake said he managed talented artists for quality tours, and it was a short step to stardom and the big leagues in Vegas after that. Iris already knew how hard it was to get on the inside track in Vegas, unless one had a powerful agent. The bottom-feeders were plentiful and easy to find, and the reputable agents and managers impossible to get to, unless you had connections, which she didn’t. She knew no one in the upper ranks of her business, and was at the mercy of everyone she worked for, with no one to protect her. Earl Drake reminded her that she needed another “layer of experience” before she could get to the top. Sometimes she thought about just giving up, and getting a normal job somewhere, like others she had known who’d done that to escape the tours, but she couldn’t live without her music, and didn’t want to give up. She’d spent eleven years singing in bars, and terrible places all over the country. She didn’t want to waste that. She had been paying her dues for years, and still hoped that one day it would pay off. She knew she had the talent, what she needed now was luck. The scout left her with his card, and told her that if she wanted to be a big star one day, she should call them. Glen Hendrix could help her get there. She didn’t trust them.