Rock All Night(11)

“A thousand a show,” Derek laughed. “Remember when I was over the moon when we used to get 250 each?”

Actually, the way my finances were at the moment, 250 dollars for one night’s work sounded pretty damn good… even if I was staying in a luxury hotel doing an interview for Rolling Stone.

“Except we didn’t make that our first couple of shows,” Ryan told me. “In fact, we had to bribe somebody to let us play our first gig.”

“Two kegs of beer,” Derek remembered.

“They paid you in beer?” I asked.

“No, we had to pay THEM to play. Two kegs of beer in exchange for letting us do three songs. They let us play before the opening act for the main band, if we paid them two kegs of beer,” Ryan clarified.


“What’d we play?” Derek asked, trying to remember. “‘Paradise City’ – ”

“‘Give It Away Now’ by the Chili Peppers,” Ryan continued.

“And ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’” Riley finished up.

I looked at her in surprise. “Were you with them at that point?”

“No, but I’ve heard this f*ckin’ story a million times.”

“How’d you get the beer?” I asked Ryan. “I’m assuming your parents wouldn’t buy it for you.”

“Ohhhhhhh no,” he laughed. “No, no, no.”

“I knew somebody,” Derek explained.

“He f*cked some sorority chick who was over 21,” Riley crowed, “and she bought it for ‘em.”

Ew.

I actually hadn’t needed to hear that.

“Thanks,” Derek said sarcastically. I could tell he was actually pissed at her now.

“Awwww, does Blondie not know how many bitches you bang after the shows?” Riley clucked in fake sympathy. “Am I ruining your chances of gettin’ in her pants?”

EWWWWW.

Derek immediately kicked her again, which led to another flurry of kung fu kicks across the aisle.

“CHILDREN!” Miles screamed, and they stopped.

“Anyway, we had to pay to play,” Ryan said.

“But we blew the other bands AWAY,” Derek chuckled. “We had, like, two offers for other gigs as soon as we walked off stage.”

“So we started playing regular gigs after that – at least one a weekend, usually two, sometimes even three.”

“We were rollin’ in the money,” Derek laughed.

“Did you move out of that horrible house?” I asked.

“Nooooo… that house had character,” he said, as though offended I would even suggest otherwise.

“But we eventually traded up guitarists and drummers,” Ryan said. “Only problem was, as a cover band we couldn’t get any gigs opening for other bands at the 40 Watt or the Georgia Theater… and we couldn’t play any of our own stuff at the frat parties. They only wanted to hear ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’”

“But your songs are really good,” I said.

“Our early stuff was okay,” Derek said unenthusiastically.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed, “but our guitarists and drummers weren’t. No real chops, no real contribution to the song writing, basically just wanted to get drunk and get laid. We knew that if we wanted people to take us seriously, we were going to have to get serious.”

“So I fired all of them and we called Killian,” Derek said.

“Just like that?”

“Well, actually we emailed him,” Ryan admitted. “And sent him some digital recordings of our covers, plus some original stuff.”

I looked at Killian at the other end of the limo. “And you just picked up and moved across the Atlantic?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t really have anything going on at the time.”

“What about that band you were in? God – Gob – ”

“Gobsmacked? Uhh,” he groaned slightly. “Biggest bunch of wankers I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing with.”

“Besides us,” Riley teased him.

“Besides you in particular, yes,” Killian smiled.

“So… you were just sitting around in your apartment, doing nothing – ”

“Nooo – he’s too modest to tell you,” Ryan said, “but he was doing tons of session work in London at the time.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Session work is where the individual members of a band aren’t good enough to nail a part on an album, so the producer hires really good outside guys to play their parts just for that recording session,” Ryan explained. “Killian was doing tons of session work after Gobsmacked broke up – but as soon as he heard the recordings I sent him, he came on over.”

“You remembered them?” I asked Killian.

The guitarist smiled and took a drag on his joint. “Oh yes. Derek made quite the impression.”

He tends to do that.

“I guess nobody else ever came up to you and said, ‘I’m going to start a band and I want you to join it.’”

“Yes. He was quite ballsy, even then.”

“That’s what I want on my tombstone,” Derek said. He motioned in the air like he was laying out the words as he spoke in a British accent: “He was quite ballsy.”