Page 8 of Backstage

“From two of the three bands, yes,” I confirm, rolling my eyes and sitting on the couch next to Simon and Thomas, making them tighten up a bit.

“Those of them who sat down are already my favorites, too,” chuckles Thomas as he sips from his cup.

We burst out laughing as we wait for Evan to join us and start this long and terrifying day. The risk of a dead-end is enormous.

“Didn’t one of the bands have a girl, too? Have you seen her in the waiting room?” Simon asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, I think so, the one who never turns to the camera,” confirms Thomas. “I don’t know, the four of them who were sitting on the sidelines were all curled up in their hoodies, it could have been Miss Universe in there, and I wouldn’t have recognized her.”

I burst out laughing. If it’s a pretty girl, none of us are backing down.

“Simon, have you set your eyes on her yet? Remember, we’re potentially going on tour with her, don’t fuck up your life for a lay.” I tease him even though he’s the only one of us who’d rather have a nice girl to walk down the aisle with than one of those one-night stands. I admire his purity of spirit.

“No, asshole, she stuck in my mind because she’s great on the bass. You guys haven’t heard it? She plays some licks that even I can’t in that song,” he laughs. “Am I the only one who’s noticed it?” he asks, almost astounded.

“No, I did too. She’s one of the best bass players I’ve ever heard,” confirms Thomas, and I feel like an idiot because all that bothered me was that she stood there, showing us just her back as if we weren’t worth a penny of her time. I’m ashamed of myself for not going beyond appearances.

Evan takes us away from our thoughts and slams the door behind us. “Those kids do get up your business, don’t they?” The exasperated question makes us all burst into a thunderous laugh.

“Let’s get started, come on. The sooner we begin the sooner we’ll be done with them,” I propose, and the others nod vigorously as they move around the chairs in front of the mixer.

The room is arranged like a classic recording room: on one side of a glass partition are the instruments, microphones connected by cables to the mixer, headphones for every single position, and soundproof walls. There’s also a drum kit against the far wall and three racks for the electric and acoustic guitars and basses. The kids brought their own instruments, except drums, but it never hurts to have some backup instruments for any possibility.

There’s a mixing board on this side of the glass with thousands of keys, levers, and indicators which, when you look at it, gives you a headache from how complicated it is. A row of monitors allows you to work on the different recording channels of the audio tracks. I have always held the technicians who manage to maneuver this spaceship in high esteem. If we were producing an album, the audio tracks would be played separately to get clean recordings of each instrument. For today we just want to hear how they sound, so they’ll perform as if they were in the rehearsal room together.

Evan calls his secretary on the phone and not two minutes later, on the other side of the glass, five young kids appear. They are little more than teenagers, connecting bass and guitars to the cables and smiling as if they’d won the lottery. They’re quite comfortable in a studio; it’s probably not the first time they’ve seen one, and if that’s to their advantage, their matching clothes and mass-produced hairstyles make my nose twitch. They’re the exact opposite of us, who look homeless most of the time. It’s like we’re dealing with a boy band from some talent show.

We start them off, and in no time we’re looking at each other, wondering how they got in the top three. They’re definitely the ones in the video but they’re overplaying so much they’re slaughtering the song. Extra guitar solos, bass solos, and even drum solos just to prove they can play. The singer is attempting high notes that don’t fit his vocal range or the song. “Jude” was written from the gut and sung in a voice made hoarse from generous amounts of whisky. This sounds like the soundtrack to a musical played by people on LSD. Overdoing it isn’t exactly the way to get our attention, and when they’re done we all agree not to let them play their original tune. The first performance is enough for us.

“Thank you very much, you can go back to the waiting room. We’ll let you know when we’ve heard the other two bands,” Evan announces with a smile phonier than a thirteen dollars bill. I admire his ability to lie so casually.

“But we haven’t done our song yet!” points out the singer with such stiff hair it didn’t move while jumping around like a madman for three minutes.

“You’ve done a unique job, we don’t need to hear any more,” says our manager with a hint of annoyance that only we recognize.

Unique is the definition I would have used for sure. I’ve rarely heard a song that ugly played live. The guys leave the room smug with their success, while we immediately delete the name from the list of winners.

“Luckily, we decided to hear them play before making a decision. Can you imagine if we took them on tour?” Simon shudders at his own words, which are followed by a chorus of “Don’t even joke about it.”

“It was hard to convince the label, but luckily they listened to me in the end,” Evan admits, who seems to breathe a sigh of relief. “If it were up to them, we would’ve taken the band with more Facebook likes.”

We’re all shocked and speechless at that admission.

The second group goes almost unnoticed. They’re good, even better than what you see in the video, but they don’t stand out. A typical band that could be quite successful locally, but they wouldn’t make it on the national or international charts. They lack the breakthrough factor. Musically they didn’t miss a note, but they’re not a band you’d remember after they got off stage. I don’t think I would even remember their faces.

Confirmation that they’re not ready yet for the big time is their original song. It’s immature, as though they wrote it when they were teenagers and had just started playing, with only a few chords used repeatedly throughout the song. If we were to get our hands on that piece, we’d have to throw away three-quarters of it. And while we can teach them how to get on stage and perform we don’t have time to mature them artistically. The creativity must already be there; we can’t teach them.

“Hopefully, the next ones will be better because otherwise, we’re in deep shit,” says Michael, sipping his coffee with a grimace. I’ve rarely seen him so worried.

I nod. This stunt risks making us look like rookies. The problem is that we’ve exposed ourselves publicly, and we can’t go back and say, “Sorry, guys, we fucked up.” We’d be eaten alive. We need a winner out of this charade who doesn’t make us look like assholes. The guilt grips my stomach, because if I hadn’t been an idiot in L.A., we wouldn’t be here risking our image with this farce.

The final band, the Red Velvet Curtains, comes in, looking like they’ve never seen a recording studio before. As they position themselves at the instruments, taking forever with their awkward gestures, the one I assume is the bass player stumbles over one of the cables and almost goes down. The hood of the sweatshirt slips to the side and I am amazed to see a cascade of brown hair, two green eyes that seem to light up the room—even if covered by square, thick, black-framed glasses—and a mouth that seems drawn.

She’s one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, and only God knows what goes through my head when I stare at that mouth; he’s probably covering his eyes to avoid the obscene images passing through my brain. In a fraction of a second she ducks back under the hood of her sweatshirt that is at least three sizes bigger than her body. But it’s enough time to awaken parts inside my pants that I’d prefer to keep asleep while working. It’s not lovely to flaunt my erection right now; I look like a maniac who can’t contain himself in front of a woman, for God’s sake.

They start playing, and we immediately understand who our winners are going to be. They give such an intense performance of “Jude” that I get goosebumps, and their awkward nerdiness gives them more character than I expected. They take a completely different approach to this song; we throw in all the heavy rock rhythm, almost with a wave of screaming anger in the microphone, whereas they interpret it as a melancholic ballad, making the painful lyrics almost unbearable.

When the singer closes his eyes and sings in a voice that seems broken from crying: “Jude, I watched you slip out of the sheets, and I was afraid you would never come back,” I feel the hairs on my arms rise with emotion. I like the rough voice he uses, the almost calm and respectful sound others give to the musical accompaniment. The drummer manages to play with delicate touches while never failing to support the song with his rhythmic part. The guitarist accompanies the voice without ever becoming the protagonist, dragging the notes when the singer’s voice becomes heartbreaking. But what strikes me the most is the bassist, because she caresses the strings with a delicacy that makes the sound of her bass sweet, discreet, like someone’s heartbeat when you put your ear on their chest: a constant and vital rhythm but never overpowering.

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