Rock All Night(24)

Oh my God… I’d never thought about it like that before.

I felt like I wanted to cry a little, I was so touched.

Derek didn’t notice, just kept talking. “But that was just the final straw. You wanna know where it really started?”

“Of course.”

“Back in Athens, when me and Ryan still had Inward Spiral – you remember Inward Spiral, don’t you?”

“Did you ever write that song, ‘Recipe for Disaster’?”

He laughed. “You do remember. No, that’s still on the docket – same as ‘According to Kaitlyn.’ Actually, ‘According to Kaitlyn’ was my working title for ‘Girl, Please Stay.’ Did you know that?”

A flush of heat went through my chest. I got a little choked up again.

“…no, I didn’t.”

“Well, it was. Anyway, there was some nerdy music guy from the Red & Black, the UGA newspaper, at one of the shows, and he wanted an interview. So we gave him one. And the entire f*cking time, he obviously had this huge chip on his shoulder. He was haughty and stuck-up and just loooved him some Velvet Underground, and anybody who wasn’t the Velvet Underground or Lou Reed basically sucked ass. Have you ever noticed that critics – at least indie critics and college critics – all f*cking hate the stuff they review? They’re so above it all. If it’s a movie critic, they hate 95% of all movies except foreign stuff. If it’s a music critic, they hate everything except one or two ‘cool’ bands from the past and a bunch of obscure shit nobody’s ever heard of. And they sneer at everything else because they’re just too f*cking cool. Me? I love everything. I love Chuck Berry, I love Elvis, I love the Beatles, the Stones, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Prince, Michael Jackson, NWA, Metallica, Tupac, No Doubt – I love f*ckin’ Earth Wind and Fire, for God’s sake – ”

“You don’t love Savage Garden,” I said.

He almost bust a gut laughing. “No, that’s true. I don’t love Savage Garden.”

“Or Maroon 5.”

“I gave Maroon 5 a bad rap. They’re okay.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I met ‘em at a show a year ago.”

Of course you did.

“They’re really good guys. I realized I was just jealous of all the attention that Adam Levine got, so I gave them another listen… and yeah, they’re alright. So there you go – that can be your headline: Derek Kane Loves Maroon 5.”

“But then I’d be a sensationalizing media whore, right?” I asked in a smartass tone of voice.

He grinned. “You said it, not me. Anyway, back to the college music critic. The little prick hated everything. And he obviously hated us. Ryan was being so f*cking polite to him, so earnest, so… Ryan. And I just sat there the whole time staring at that punk with his little hipster glasses, thinking, ‘This * is just going to write whatever he was going to write anyway, and he’ll cherry-pick everything we say to support whatever shit he’s already decided.’ And did he? Of course he did. He wrote this scathing review, making us sound like dumbshits and calling us a mediocre, derivative rip-off of some band I’d never heard of. And when I went and tracked them down on Youtube, they sounded nothing like us. So I confronted him the next time I saw him at another band’s show.”

“You didn’t,” I said, and laughed in spite of myself.

“I did. He was there with this little jaded alternative chick. I asked him why he’d written all those lies.

“‘They weren’t lies.’

“‘Yes they were. For one, we don’t sound even remotely like My Bloody Valentine.’

“‘It’s obvious you do.’

“‘It’s pretty f*ckin’ obvious we don’t.’

“‘Well, if you think that, it’s obvious you don’t know the first thing about music.’

“And then I got up in his face and started telling him that what was obvious is that he was a pathetic loser who wanted to be a musician and didn’t have the balls to get up on stage. He got all scared and said he was going to press charges if I touched him, which I wasn’t going to do at all, and then he takes his girl and splits. And THEN – THEN, like the little chickenshit that he is, he runs ANOTHER review of one of our shows, and starts insinuating I’m gay and that Ryan and I are lovers, and then he says how I would be better at giving blowjobs for ten bucks a pop behind the 40 Watt rather than singing inside of it.”

I put my hand to my mouth and had to suppress a laugh. That was just too funny.

Derek laughed, too. “Nothing against gay dudes, but don’t f*cking call me gay; I’m not gay. Do you know how many chicks I lost out on ‘cause they read that article?”

I doubted it was that many, but I didn’t like thinking about ‘all the chicks he missed out on,’ so I kept my mouth shut.

“So I see him and his girlfriend again at another band’s show, and as soon as he sees me coming, he runs. Doesn’t even grab his girlfriend, just bugs out for the hills. And I walk over to her, and I say, ‘Do you know who I am?’

“‘Yeah,’ she says. She’s kind of interested in me, I can tell.

“‘I f*ckin’ HATE your boyfriend,’ I say.