Captive Audience Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE REGULAR

  THINGLESS

  CAPTIVE AUDIENCE

  IN MEMORIAM

  LOOK AND FEEL

  POSTGAME

  DANCING MAN

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  For my family

  THE REGULAR

  Around eight each weeknight, I left work and took the El north to a small club called Whirly Gigs. While roadies and band members wrangled cords and tuned guitars on the club’s tiny elevated stage, I sat at the narrow end of the bar, my messenger bag, two-toned cotton sweater, jeans and brown plastic-framed glasses identifying me as a member of the creative proletariat. My stool was the furthest one from the stage. Blasé, aging indie kids ordering drinks often blocked my view, but I didn’t care. I could hear everything I needed to see.

  Julian held court each night in the booth closest to the stage. Guys who barely knew him would approach and extend their hands for a hipster’s handshake, a curled-finger lock, tug, and release. Julian obliged each one coolly. The girls sitting with him communicated interest, excitement, or jaded lust with their eyes. Julian absorbed their attention without courting it. If my look identified me as someone with a job, Julian’s sloppy hair, denim jacket, and tub-soaked tight jeans placed him outside the workaday world.

  When the first act took the stage, Julian would leave the adoring courtiers and his stage-side seat for the stool next to mine. One night I asked him why no one ever tried to drag him back to his booth, or pull him into the crowd to dance. He shrugged, and sipped his bourbon. “I put the word out,” he said, his eyes on the stage. “During the shows, I listen to the music, and I talk only to you.”

  I’d been a regular at Whirly Gigs since moving back home from college in 1996. Julian arrived a few years later. I noticed him right away, but didn’t speak to him at first—I spoke only to the bartender, Casey, and once he knew enough to give me a bourbon when I sat down, we didn’t speak very often.

  One night, on his way back from the bathroom, Julian stood next to my stool during the opening act of a three-act bill. The band was aping The Stooges without the punk pioneers’ energy or talent, though energy and talent wouldn’t have made them sound any better. Distaste was surely visible on my face, but Julian never looked at me. “The snare is peaking too high,” he said. His analysis was that of an audiophile, of one who lived for sound and executed unconsciously and crudely what a sophisticated computer program could do electronically and exactly. Julian heard instrument and microphone inputs as visible tracks—jagged peaks above deep, repeating fissures—stacked like a dense, multicolored polygraph display. I could hear the same images in my own head.

  From then on, Julian and I analyzed every live set at Whirly Gigs as if it were being recorded. We spoke of sound in terms of two-dimensional images: distorted guitars crying out for compression, backing vocals that needed gating. We weren’t friends. We were something less. I’d never seen Julian outside of Whirly Gigs, never spoken to him on the phone, and it seemed, beyond our nightly meeting place, that seeing sound was all we had in common. But that was enough to make sitting alongside Julian the high point of my day.

  When the headliners, whoever they were, had played their final encore, Julian would clap me on the back and head back to his booth. I would pay my tab and head for the El. On my walk to the Belmont station, I would pass a karaoke club called Starmakers. Because of its stock in trade, Starmakers—the name alone—was an insult commonly overheard at Whirly Gigs. If a singer’s performance was overly earnest or overwrought, one regular might shout “Starmakers” into the ear of another before heading for the bar. To associate an act with karaoke was worse than calling its sound dated, or derivative, or even boring. At Whirly Gigs, “Starmakers” was the atom bomb of on-the-spot reviewing.

  Despite the hipsters’ disdain, Starmakers was usually packed when I walked past its plate-glass façade. Inside, sleeves were rolled up and collars unbuttoned, and skirts were twisted from repeated shimmies across vinyl benches to visit the bathroom and the bar. In my head, I kept a running tally of the songs I heard on my nightly pass-bys. “I Will Survive” and “Like A Prayer” were favorites, and bachelorette parties often tackled “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” en masse. But the real treats were the choices that confounded me, like the warbling older woman who performed Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” as if it were a Presbyterian hymn, and the guy who gave a pitch-perfect rendering of Michael McDonald’s supporting vocals on “This Is It”—a 1979 duet with Kenny Loggins—but declined to sing Loggins’ parts, reducing the song’s verses to underfed synthesized instrumental breaks. Once I heard—but didn’t see—a man singing Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” What sort of guy, I wondered, would select that song from a binder full of other choices? I promised myself that if ever again I heard a man singing that song, I would get a good look at him and buy him a round. He would deserve it, somehow.

  Getting off the El just north of Downtown, near the building where I spent my days working as a senior art director for Fahrenheit Graphic Design, I would walk to the open-air lot where I had parked my car seventeen hours earlier, then drive home to the edge of the city, one of only a handful of Chicago neighborhoods with a zip code that did not begin with 606. Mine was 60707, and when I saw the soccer fields, car dealerships and day-care centers on my stretch of Fullerton Avenue, the 607 seemed about right.

  My apartment was in the basement of my parents’ house, a duplex with a door in the gangway that allowed me to come and go as I pleased. I had a bedroom just big enough for a twin bed and a dresser, a bathroom with a shower, and a living room with a kitchenette along one wall. The living room doubled as my home studio, which consisted of a Mac G5, a digital mixing board, four top-shelf microphones, and sound-absorbing cotton panels on the walls and ceiling.

  Each night, after arriving home from Whirly Gigs, I would stay up until three or four in the morning scouring file-sharing networks for individual tracks of multi-track pop recordings. I imported each song piece by piece—the drums isolated from the bass, the backing vocals separated from the lead—and investigated every hiss or fumble or bleed that caught my eye. Once, I spent two weeks of late nights with The Clash’s “Clampdown,” searching for the reasons that Joe Strummer’s guitar had been buried in the final mix and trying to decide for myself whether or not Topper Headon deserved his “Human Drum Machine” moniker. (He did.) When I had seen all there was to see in a given song, I would return to the networks, poach another masterpiece, and start the process all over again.

  This was my life. It was static and less than I wanted, but with my studio, Whirly Gigs, and Julian, it was just enough to live on.

  One Monday, I had to work late and didn’t arrive at Whirly Gigs until twenty minutes past nine. I found Julian standing next to my regular stool, staring at the stage. By this point in the evening, the stage was usually cluttered with a drum kit, a half-dozen amps and a slithering mass of black cords. Tonight, however, a portable projection screen flanked by two elevated portable speakers occupied the drum kit’s usual position. To the left of one of the speakers, a laptop and two microphones rested on a folding table. The front of the stage was barren but for a monitor mounted on a spindly metal tripod and an empty microphone stand.

  I dropped my bag between the stool and the bar and glanced at Julian. “Are they doing an open mike night?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t so. He didn’t say anything. He just kept staring at the stage.

  A woman at the bar ordered a dirty martini. The platinum band of her engagement ring was milky in the stage light, and her silk blouse laid neatly on the curve of her left hip.
Over her shoulder, two men wearing khakis and golf shirts emblazoned with corporate logos sat in a booth, chatting up two women sitting across from them. The woman closer to the bar wore nylons, black high-heeled pumps, and a gray jacket-and-skirt set. After the guy across from her dribbled beer foam on his shirt, both women erupted in nearly identical cackles.

  That was when it hit me. They were sitting in Julian’s booth.

  Suddenly, Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” blasted from the portable speakers and the projection screen ignited with quick-cut images of Asian men and women riding bicycles, slurping noodle soup, and pruning topiary menageries. A slightly overweight young man wearing a white short-sleeve button-down, blue jeans, and ear-covering headphones was now standing behind the folding table. A wireless mike, protected by black foam shaped like a wrecking ball, was held in front of his mouth by a plastic arm connected to the headphones. He looked like the pilot of a traffic helicopter.

  “Welcome,” he announced, “to Karaoke Monday at Whirly Gigs.”

  As Casey put my drink on the bar, I asked him what was going on. He told me that management had been running an ad for “Karaoke Monday” in the Tribune for the past two weeks and had stopped booking bands on Mondays. “Management” was a rotating cast of shadowy Serbians, a pair of whom showed up at least once a week in loose, open-collared black shirts and tailored black slacks to let the bartenders and the bouncers know they were watching everything. Since taking over Whirly Gigs a few years ago, the Serbians had twice threatened to convert the club into a hookah lounge. In each instance, a week-long, sold-out residency of local bands made good—Smashing Pumpkins the first time, Wilco the second—had put enough money in the Serbians’ pockets to stay the club’s execution. Were the Serbians now using karaoke to take Whirly Gigs back from its regulars? Were they trying to turn the place into Starmakers?

  “What about the other nights?” I asked.

  “Bands,” Casey said, “just like before. But with this ....” He turned to the stage and his voice trailed off.

  “The regulars won’t ever come back,” I said.

  Casey nodded.

  When I turned to commiserate with Julian, he was gone.

  I grabbed my bag and hurried out to the street. Julian was already a half-block away. I jogged after him, coins and keys jangling noisily in my pockets, and slowed to a walk as I fell in alongside him.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Julian’s clenched jaw and flattened eyebrows were probably supposed to make him look angry, but his wet eyes gave him away.

  As we walked along in silence, something soured in my stomach. Whirly Gigs was dying; in a sense, it was already dead. I could find another place to see sound—this was Chicago, after all—but would Julian follow me there? Would sound look the same if he wasn’t there to share it?

  But Julian’s loss was even greater than my own. He was now a king without a country, his throne occupied by consultants who saw Whirly Gigs as a place to sit while they waited their turn at the karaoke mike. Even if Julian decided to find another club and make it his own, he would be nothing more than another good-looking hipster.

  We were crossing Racine Avenue against a red light when my mind flashed to a place that could return to us some of what we had lost. When we reached the sidewalk, I grabbed Julian’s elbow, stopping his retreat. “Last night I found the individual tracks of Cheap Trick’s At Budokan.”

  Julian looked at me as if he hadn’t understood. “What?”

  “I found the individual recording tracks of Cheap Trick’s At Budokan.”

  “You mean each song.”

  “No. Each track of each song.”

  He stared at me. “Where did you find them?”

  “File sharing,” I said. “I’ve got them all loaded into my computer. Come over to my place. We’ll give them a look.”

  Julian lowered his eyes to my hand, which still held his elbow. I let go, and replayed the previous ten seconds in my head. My mouth went dry as I realized that my proposal had sounded something like a proposition, the audiophile’s equivalent of the bachelor’s ruse in which he tells a potential conquest that she must see the breathtaking view from his apartment.

  Julian began to nod, almost imperceptibly at first. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  As we walked toward the Belmont El station, I assured myself that Julian had understood that I had meant nothing untoward, and if any doubt lingered, I would prove it at my apartment by delivering what I had promised and nothing more. And just when I had managed to put my mind at ease, I realized that my invitation had left me vulnerable in a way I’d failed to anticipate: what if Julian found out that I lived with my parents?

  I led Julian around the side of the house, down the three concrete steps, and inside. I turned on the lamp near the door, but the dim yellow light failed to brighten things up. In that moment, I experienced the space as I thought Julian might have: the trapped aromas of mildew and micro-waved meals, the oak footboard of my twin bed detailed with carvings of dogs and cats, bundled cords emerging from the back of my recording console, untreated wooden stairs leading to the floor above.

  I took off my coat, laid it over the footboard, and looked for the bottle of bourbon I’d started the night before.

  “Nice place,” Julian said.

  “Thanks.”

  I poured bourbon into two coffee mugs and set them down on coasters in front of two rolling chairs. I sat in the better chair, not wanting to make things more awkward by overtly deferring to Julian, and immediately called up the At Budokan tracks. I double clicked on the lead-guitar track of “Hello There” and watched the thin, vertical black line move from left to right over the visual representation of the music we heard in the speakers.

  “Wow,” Julian whispered.

  We spent the next three hours analyzing each track of At Budokan’s first two songs, finishing more than half the bottle of bourbon between us. As the backing vocals of “Come On, Come On” melted into the noise of 14,000 cheering Japanese, Julian said, “Let’s stop there. I could look at tracks all night, but I don’t want to use them all up, you know?”

  My first thought was that Julian was making an excuse to leave, but he poured himself another drink and sat back in his chair. It occurred to me then that in stopping our analysis after only two songs, Julian was creating a reason to come back.

  “We don’t have to stop if you don’t want to,” I said. “I’ve got other albums.”

  “Track by track?” Julian asked.

  I nodded.

  “Can I see?” Julian said, leaning forward toward the monitor.

  “Sure.” I let go of the mouse and Julian took it with his right hand. As I poured more bourbon into my mug, I took stock of the situation. Julian was in my house, on my studio computer, relishing the audio I had collected, showing no sign of leaving and every indication he intended to return. I had lost Whirly Gigs, but had gained something more of Julian. For the first time I could remember, I felt like my life could do more than keep me going: it could fill me up.

  Julian scrolled through all my downloaded tracks, his heavy-lidded eyes glowing green in the monitor light. “The Clash,” he said with an approving nod. “Blur. Pavement. Nirvana’s In Utero sessions?”

  I nodded.

  “The original Albini sessions?”

  I nodded again.

  “Not sure how you found those,” Julian said. “Don’t want to know.”

  I sipped my bourbon. Even if Julian had wanted to know how I got the In Utero sessions, I wouldn’t have told him.

  “Journey?” Julian asked. It looked like he was trying not to sneer.

  I felt blood flooding the vessels in my face. I could have played off having Journey in my collection as a hipster’s slumming lark, or cited the difficulty of finding any track-by-track recordings on the web—a sort of beggars-can’t-bechoosers defense. But the truth was that finding Journey’s “Faithfully” had been
the culmination of a yearlong search. By coincidences of vocal quality and range, I could sing just like the band’s lead singer, Steve Perry.

  The previous week, in the privacy of my studio, with my eyes closed and the mike in both hands, I had belted out “Faithfully” with the full band (minus Perry) playing in my headphones. When I was done, I moved my own vocal track, a horizontal, hot pink image of intermittent sound, just below Steve Perry’s neon green original and magnified both one-hundred times. At that size, a vocalist’s performance looks like impossibly steep summits and unfathomable glacial crevasses between flatlands of silence. I spent an hour comparing the visual representations of the two vocal tracks, noting tiny discrepancies and savoring the fine details of each similarity.

  In another situation, the whole thing might have made for a funny story. But given the abomination we had witnessed at Whirly Gigs a few hours before, I had no intention of appearing to be in league with karaoke nation.

  “Journey are people, too,” I replied, trying to laugh off Julian’s question. I took a sip of my drink. When I saw he was still waiting for an explanation, I said, “I was desperate for some new tracks, so I took them. I checked out the drum track and the lead guitar track and called it quits.”

  Julian opened his mouth in surprise. “You downloaded ‘Faithfully’ and didn’t even give Steve Perry a look?”

  As Julian turned back to the monitor with the mouse in his hand, I said, “No! Don’t!”

  He must have thought I was putting him on, because he smiled and kept going. When he started playback, the neon green vocal track was still silenced. The hot pink vocal track was not.

  My voice sounded like Perry’s but, unmixed and unmastered, the vocal was obviously not the original. Julian looked confused at first, but when the furrows on his brow began to flatten out, I couldn’t look at him anymore. I covered my eyes with my left hand and swiveled my seated body toward the stairs. The idea of singing in front of people made my hands shake, but I would have rather performed at a packed Carnegie Hall than witness my recorded voice being absorbed by this audience of one.