No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [59]
Alone and lost in a distant memory, he held her for five minutes before he strummed. She needed tuning. He didn’t have a tuner so he set about doing it by ear. This took a little while but when he’d finished she was perfect. He placed his fingers on the first chord and then she sang “Hotel California”, one of his granny’s favourite tracks. He followed up with “Life In The Fast Lane” forgetting the mid-eight but returning to it after the second verse. He played it again three or four times until it flowed and his hand was less stiff. The Kinks were next – working out “Louie Louie” took him until tea-time. He stopped to fry up some French toast, then resumed, playing Steely Dan, the Grateful Dead, a little Floyd and, of course, he couldn’t resist Led Zeppelin. It was after ten when he put her down and, exhausted, took to his bed, his mind buzzing with something he had long ago forgotten about. Sam’s gospel phase was over.
Music had mattered to him once, before he’d been disappointed too many times. His first band Diesel, featuring Hilarie, the dick-licking bass player, had lasted a mere six months. They’d broken up when the drummer fractured his leg in a car crash and Hilarie decided she wanted to be a nurse.
Sam had also been hospitalized but for different reasons. He hadn’t broken any bones, but his injury would take the rest of his life to heal. He had also moved schools that year and spent his last year of high school as a recluse. He didn’t bother with college but, desperate to leave home, he found himself a job in a music shop and rented a boxroom in a tiny apartment he shared with a lesbian couple, Ronnie and Sue. It was Ronnie who had introduced him to the bass player in the band Limbs, an all-guy unit made up of three art-school dropouts, Fred, Paulie and Dave. They used to joke about it, saying they were missing a limb, as if it was funny, but he guessed that when you were twenty-two and high, it pretty much was.
The music was serious, though. Fred was the bass player and lead vocalist – he had a set of pipes on him. Paulie was the drummer, and what he lacked in talent he made up for in raw energy and enthusiasm. Dave, on guitar, was the quiet one and the main songwriter. They wanted a second guitar player and Sam fitted the bill. He would have been designated “the pretty one” but the epithet was used only once: Dave and Fred had to pull Sam off their terrified drummer, who sustained a black eye and a fat lip. Although Sam apologized for the seemingly unprovoked attack, he didn’t explain to his new band mates why he had torn into Paulie.
Sam was desperate to be in a successful band and he knew that, with the right songs, these guys could go all the way. Dave’s were shit so he hoped that after an apprenticeship he could introduce a few of his own, and maybe then they’d rocket and he’d no longer be window-dressing. It didn’t work out like that. Dave was precious and, although Sam’s songs were infinitely better, Dave was boss. It was his band and Sam could fuck off if he thought he was coming in to take over. So he did fuck off. Instead of trying to hook up with another band he auditioned for his own. That was how he met Sophia Sheffer, the rocker chick with the big hair, hips and voice. He knew instantly that she was the one. He also knew that she was into him, and he slept with her that first night, sealing their newly formed partnership. He wrote the melodies and she wrote the lyrics – she insisted they had to mean something to her. He didn’t mind because she wasn