Captive Audience Read online

  After Julian stopped playback in the middle of the second verse, I heard him picking up the mouse and putting it down over and over again like a bull pawing the dirt. I turned back toward him when he stopped scrolling and started clicking. At the time, I believed that Julian did what he did next in solidarity, so that I would have company in being embarrassed. Now I think that he probably did it to one-up me, to show that if there was a performer in the room, someone with talent and charisma, it was him. He opened the individual tracks of “Do You Feel Like We Do?” from Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! and put on the headphones. Then he picked up the microphone and held it at his side.

  I wheeled over and checked the computer monitor as the song began. “Julian, you’ve got Frampton’s vocals set to play back in your headset.”

  “I know,” he said.

  I figured Julian was using the original vocals as a crutch, either to help him remember the words or hit the right notes. But when the thin black line swept over the image of Frampton’s lead vocal, Julian didn’t sing. I looked at him, then scrolled through the two-dozen tracks. When I got to the lead-guitar track, I saw what he had in mind. I just didn’t believe he could do it.

  Julian kept the mike at his side throughout the intro, three verses, four times through the chorus, a short guitar solo and a keyboard solo. Only he could hear the music. I watched it all on the monitor. Then, after six minutes, he began to imitate the sounds of Frampton’s most famous guitar solo. A skilled amateur with the right equipment could have played the solo note for note on the guitar. But Julian was playing it with his voice. With each passing second, Julian’s blue vocal track mirrored the size, shape and pattern of Frampton’s silenced red guitar track, like a string of genetic material being gradually cloned.

  For the second movement of his solo, Frampton had employed a talkbox, which compresses the notes from an electric guitar and sends them as vibrations through a piece of plastic tubing taped alongside the lead-vocal microphone. By taking the tubing in his mouth and shaping the sound, Frampton had created the aural illusion that his guitar was singing to the live audience. Julian created the same effect without a talkbox, and without a guitar.

  Then Julian dove into the fiery concluding movement, bending the notes through mouth shapes that ranged from the oval to the trapezoidal. His Adam’s apple pulled almost out of sight on the high notes and descended into view only when he approached the depths of his range. Another person giving voice to Frampton’s notes with a series of “no,” “nare,” and “wah” sounds might have aped the sort of histrionics that traditionally accompany guitar heroics. But Julian kept his eyes open, his hands on the mike, and his performance free of air guitar.

  At the end of the song, Julian tore off the headphones and leaned in toward the monitor. “Let’s give it a look,” he said.

  The discrepancies between Julian’s vocals and Frampton’s guitar were greater than those between my vocals and Steve Perry’s, but smaller than they might have been had Julian played Frampton’s solo on an instrument. His precision astounded me.

  When we were done analyzing the visuals, Julian got up to leave. I didn’t want him to go.

  “Wait,” I said. “You should do that next week.”

  Julian looked at me and sat back down. “What?” he asked.

  “Sing the guitar part of some song at Whirly Gigs. On Karaoke Monday.”

  He laughed through his nose, shook his head and stood up again. “I don’t think so.”

  I stood up with him, wobbling a bit. “Think about what a great last stand it would be! A karaoke crowd wouldn’t know what to do with a performance like that.”

  Julian looked at me as if I were losing my mind or, at the very least, too drunk to drive him to the El. I bent over the console, took the mouse in my hand, clicked once, twice, then double clicked. Cued to its final minute, “Do You Feel Like We Do?” erupted through the speakers with Julian’s vocal track in place of Frampton’s guitar. As accurate as they were, Julian’s unmixed notes sounded ridiculous backed by the instruments recorded live at San Francisco’s Winterland in 1975. Julian smiled and we both laughed out loud, though our laughter was nearly drowned out by the playback. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I wrapped my left arm around his waist and pulled him toward me.

  Then the basement door opened.

  “Brian?”

  Julian and I pulled apart immediately.

  “Brian, it’s three in the morning,” my mother said. “Can you keep it down?”

  “All right,” I said.

  As I turned the volume down, my face flushed. I hadn’t called her mom, and she hadn’t called me son, but there could have been little doubt in Julian’s mind to whom that voice belonged. Her tone and our dynamic said it all. Now I did want Julian to leave, not because of anything he’d said or done, but because he had seen me as I really was.

  With my head down, I grabbed my car keys. Julian, getting the message, picked up his keys and wallet from the console and pushed them into the front pockets of his jeans. Then he followed me out the door and to my car.

  For the first few miles of the drive to the El station, we were silent.

  “It’s not a big deal, you know,” he said, eventually. “Living with your parents, I mean. A lot of people I know do it. And you’ve got such a great setup down there! I wouldn’t ever want to move—”

  “Thanks, but can you just—?” I tried to smile through my shame, but came up short. I did manage to exhale and start over. “Thanks.”

  The incident with my mother wasn’t even my largest source of embarrassment. I could still feel my hand on Julian’s belt, grabbing it and pulling him toward me. At the thought of Julian replaying the corresponding sensation in his own head, I wanted to make a deep, exhausted, guttural sound that would have forced my tongue out of my mouth. But I had to swallow that urge for another mile or so.

  I rolled to a stop in front of the station stairs, put the car in park, and kept my eyes straight ahead. I was aware that this would probably be the last time I saw Julian, but I didn’t want to look at him.

  “I’ll be over tomorrow,” he said. “Around eight. We’ve only got a week to put this thing together.”

  It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about performing at Whirly Gigs.

  “They’re going to hate us,” Julian said, smiling. Then he clapped me on the shoulder blade with his left hand, got out of the car, and closed the door behind him.

  The next night, we found a song worthy of Julian’s talent. Over the next five evenings, we put Julian’s rehearsals up against the original lead guitar track of Cream’s “White Room,” noted each difference, and honed his rendition into a precise sonic imitation.

  In spare moments at work, I laid out a graphic treatment to accompany Julian’s performance. When I had leaded and kerned the type to my satisfaction and synchronized text to sound, I burned the finished product to a DVD. If Julian’s voice-guitar would be the blow to the gut of karaoke nation, I imagined my graphics would dig the knuckles deeper.

  On the final night, after rehearsing until almost four in the morning, I asked Julian if he wanted to crash at my place instead of heading home. He declined. I offered to drive him home or to the El. He said he had money for a cab, slapped me on the back, and left.

  The following Monday, we walked north from the Belmont station toward Whirly Gigs. When we approached Starmakers, I looked away, as did Julian. But there was no way to avert our ears. A woman half in the bag and half a measure behind the accompaniment was singing Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young.” She didn’t sound young, but she was certainly dying up there.

  A few paces after the woman fell out of earshot, I voiced the question that had been on my mind the whole trip up here.

  “What are we doing?” I asked.

  Julian stopped and squinted at me. “What do you mean?”

  “If you go up there and do this tonight, are we any different than that woma
n in there? Sure, you’re doing the guitar, not the vocals, and you’re better than she is, but what we’re doing is still karaoke—at a karaoke night, on a karaoke stage.” I lifted my palms and smiled hysterically. “I might as well get up there and sing ‘Faithfully.’ Would it be any different?”

  Julian nodded, turned, and resumed his march toward Whirly Gigs without saying a word.

  “Julian,” I said, walking after him. When I put my hand on his shoulder, he whirled around, knocking it off with a windmill-swing of his right arm. I flinched and gave a shallow, startled gasp. I recognized the look in his eyes, having seen him give it to bands with no talent, women who couldn’t dress, and men who wouldn’t leave him alone. It was disgust. He took a breath and ran his fingers through his hair, seeming suddenly aware that he was in public.

  “Look,” he said. “You helped me find my mistakes and fix them, and you did the graphics. But I do the performing. So I guess I don’t need you anymore.”

  He said the words matter-of-factly, with only the barest hint of malice, but they struck a heavy blow, and pulverized the notion that Julian and I were somehow in league together.

  When I made no reply, Julian started walking. I let him get a half-block ahead, then followed him. The moment wasn’t mine anymore, but I still couldn’t bring myself to miss it. Besides, I had nowhere else to go.

  I took my usual seat at the bar. Casey arched one eyebrow, poured me a bourbon, and handed it to me without a word. Julian was talking to the karaoke DJ, punctuating the rhythms of his speech with small movements of the DVD case he held in his hand. The DJ nodded his assent to whatever Julian was saying, took the DVD, and went backstage. Julian sat on the stool closest to the stage and turned his back on it.

  Julian’s regular booth was occupied by two Korean couples, laughing loudly and speaking in their native language. They were surrounded by casualties of what appeared to be a sizable after-work happy hour that had moved north from Downtown. A man from the happy-hour crowd guided an unsteady woman by the elbow to a spot a few feet away from my stool and proposed, in a whisper he probably thought was discreet, that she leave her husband for him. She demurred, citing the man’s “sexual problem.” I cleared my throat a few times to get them to move away, but they didn’t.

  To kick off Karaoke Monday at Whirly Gigs, one of the Korean women performed a stunning rendition of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” without so much as glancing at the words. The happy-hour crowd ate it up. Then one of their own, a man I had seen standing alongside a booth listening to conversations in which he was never directly addressed, took the stage and sang Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” His rendition was competent but boring, and the Koreans joined his coworkers in ignoring him.

  As the man placed the microphone in its stand, the DJ said, “All right. Please welcome Julian to the Karaoke Monday stage. Julian, are you here?”

  Julian drained his bourbon, swiveled on his stool, and walked calmly and coolly to the stage. By the time he got up there, the perfunctory applause had extinguished. He pulled the microphone from the stand and stood with his arms at his side.

  The screen behind him changed from green to a rich black. In silence, 84-point white Futura type reading “White Room” appeared against the black background for a moment and faded slowly to black. When the first haunting bars of the song rang out, no images appeared on the screen, and as the song’s original first-verse vocals played loud and clear over the portable sound system, Julian kept his mouth shut. We had been sure that this close-mouthed protest would raise the ire of the karaoke fans. But now, as I looked around the room, the Koreans were laughing at a private joke while, over my right shoulder, the unsteady woman was in the midst of another refusal to leave her husband for her lover. This time I actually heard her say “erectile dysfunction.”

  Eventually, a man with a red necktie loosened beneath his collar cupped his hand around the right side of his mouth and yelled, “Hey buddy! If you’re going to lip synch, move your lips!”

  I exhaled. Finally, Julian was getting some fraction of the hatred he had hoped for. He seemed to be resisting the urge to smile.

  Casey put another bourbon down for me. “What’s he doing?” he asked, his eyes on Julian.

  “He’s about to start,” I said.

  “Start what?”

  “Singing the guitar parts.”

  Casey turned to me. “Singing the guitar parts?”

  The song entered verse two and I realized that, in a few seconds, no explanation would be necessary. After Jack Bruce sang the verse’s opening line, Julian flawlessly rendered Eric Clapton’s howling, bending notes with his voice. The moment the first sound left his mouth, white text exploded on the black screen: “Bow, wha goo wow ooh wow wow wow owe owe owe own.” The combination of text and sound won the Koreans’ attention.

  After the second line, Julian hit Clapton’s notes again: “Whoa ooo-wow-ooo-wow-ooo-wow, ooo wow ah-ooowhan wow.” As I witnessed my bold graphic mockery of karaoke convention, I flushed with pride and excitement. But both pride and excitement cooled when I remembered that Julian had claimed my work—and this moment—for himself alone.

  By the end of verse two, the Koreans had returned to their conversation, the happy-hour crowd seemed more bored than annoyed, and Casey had turned his back on the stage to mix a martini. Even the DJ had his head down, cueing up the next song. I was the only one watching Julian now. We might as well have been in my parents’ basement.

  As verse three began, Julian seemed to notice the crowd’s indifference. He began pounding his heel in rhythm with the drums. His diaphragm clenched visibly beneath his tight black t-shirt, and his mouth and throat performed the complicated contortions required to imitate the open-door-closed-door effect of the wah-wah pedal. Hitting even the high notes cleanly, he screeched and squealed and roared with confidence.

  And still they ignored him.

  When the final solo began, Julian slammed the mike into its stand. He braced his right wrist against his pelvic bone, pinned his left elbow against his ribs, and held his left hand in the air with its back to the audience. Julian recreated the sound of Clapton’s solo with staggering fidelity, capturing the energy and emotion of the playing in his voice. All the while, he picked and fingered an imaginary guitar.

  Feeling sick to my stomach, I put my elbow on the bar and shielded my eyes with my hand.

  “Is this part of the act?” Casey asked.

  I didn’t answer. Finally, mercifully, the song faded out and Julian returned his arms to his side.

  “Let’s hear it for Julian,” the DJ said.

  The audience offered a few whoops and a short round of applause. Julian walked off the stage with his hands in his pockets and his head down. I slid off my stool and walked out to the main floor to meet him. He passed me without so much as a glance. I stood there facing the stage, feeling exposed on all sides. I touched my jeans to assure myself I wasn’t naked and headed back to the receding comforts of my stool.

  Having sung a guitar solo, played the air guitar and pandered to an audience he knew to be beneath him, Julian would never allow himself to return to Whirly Gigs. The performance had been a clean break with the club, and a clean break with me. Whatever we had been must have mattered to Julian at least as much as Whirly Gigs had; he’d put the torch to both. And I had helped him gather the tinder.

  “All right,” the DJ said. “Let’s get our next performer up here. Give it up for Tommy, everybody.”

  Tommy, the alleged sufferer of erectile dysfunction, staggered to the front of the stage. The top three buttons of his oxford shirt had come undone, revealing a v-neck undershirt and a thin patch of long, scraggly black hairs. “This is for you, Lisa,” he yelled, causing the speakers to screech ear-splitting feedback. Then, his brow furrowed in earnest emotion, Tommy began to sing over the backing track of “Love Will Keep Us Together.” He was sharp on every note. Lisa, clearly mortified, put her drink on a table
and hurried to the ladies’ room. Some of her and Tommy’s colleagues laughed at the spectacle, while others put their heads down or covered their eyes. But I kept my eyes on Tommy, and applauded politely when he finished. Then I got Casey’s attention, pointed at my credit card by the register, and pointed at the stage. Tommy’s next drink was on me, and his song choice was only part of my reason for buying it.

  While one of the Koreans performed Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” I sat on my stool, sipped my bourbon, and listened. Karaoke, it turned out, presented some interesting audio conundrums, like the variable volume levels of the backing tracks, and a performer’s struggle to determine the appropriate distance between his mouth and the microphone. They were sonic images simple enough for me to envision on my own, without Julian, and whether the hipsters would have admitted it or not, these performers were no worse than some of the bands we had seen over the years.

  And as I sat on foam padding compressed into a mold of my buttocks, I decided I wanted a clean break, too—from the old Whirly Gigs, and from the absence pulsing from the empty stool beside me. I looked around at the Koreans, and at Tommy leaning over the drink I had bought him, and realized that I could make my clean break right where Julian had made his, and that I could do it my way, without torching anything or hurting anyone. My path was laid out straight: four minutes of hot pink peaks, valleys and flatlands magnified one-hundred times.

  At the thought of taking the stage, I started to sweat, and saliva thickened in my throat. Keep your eyes closed, I told myself, and all you’ll see is sound.

  I wiped my forehead with my hand and scanned the tables for a thick black binder. I spotted it in a booth occupied by Lisa, whose chin was bobbing with half-sleep, and two of her female coworkers. With the club’s north wall, the two ladies formed a perimeter around Lisa, probably to protect her from Tommy’s drunken advances. As I approached, the guards stiffened.