Fanfare (Country Roads #2) - Chapter 35

We spent the rest of Thursday hanging out with Seth, Marco, and Lyla, just relaxing and talking about the show. It had been the biggest thing any of us had played, and we were all hyped up. Eventually, they had to get back on the road, but I made a mental note to spend more time with them. So far, we only really hung out when we practiced or played gigs, but a band is all about chemistry and while we all got along, it wouldn’t hurt to become friends as well. Admittedly I was a little young for the rest of them, but they seemed to have a good time with us, so it didn’t seem like it mattered.

We invited them to go to the beach with us, but they all had stuff going on back home and had to decline. It had been worth a shot. I still needed to bring up the thought with Hanna later to see if she had any ideas of how we could spend more time socializing with them, but that could wait.

The next morning we were up early and packing. It was only about two and a half or three hours to the beach, but Hanna wanted to get to the beach early enough to get some time lying out in the afternoon. It was still cool outside, but apparently, there was never a bad time to lie out on the beach. We were only really staying a day and a half, since we’d have to drive a fair amount on Sunday to get back in time for school.

The drive down was nice, since a lot of the land between the triangle and the beach was mostly farms, with tobacco, cotton, and corn planted all along the sides of the highway. It was oddly relaxing after living in the mountains all year. The land seemed to stretch into forever. Once we got close to the beach, everything changed.

There started to be all kinds of stores and shops advertising beach clothing, as the highway dropped from four lanes down to two. The fast-food places, seafood restaurants, and a very out-of-place Chinese buffet were all open, but the stores selling swimwear and surfing equipment were all still shut for the winter. I wondered how close to summer they waited to open up, since after spring break season, families and college students wouldn’t start taking vacations again until late May or early June. It seemed strange to waste this high traffic season, although maybe it wasn’t worth it to open up for one week only to shut again after that.

While it’s easy to think of North Carolina as being framed completely by the outer banks, if you look at a full map of the US that really only covers the top half of the coastline. Although Ocean Isle was, as the name suggests, an island, it was just off the mainland, only separated by a thin strip of water and this close to the South Carolina border, you didn’t need a long bridge to get to it. What I hadn’t expected was how high up the bridge went, forming a big arc that went up and then just as quickly went down. It was amazingly tall, although I didn’t know if that was so it could accommodate boats or for hurricane season.

As soon as we were on the island, it became really quaint. There were hardly any cars driving but there were lots of people walking. A couple of seafood stands and an ice cream and candy shop operated not far from the bridge, followed by a put-put golf course and, if we kept driving straight another dozen feet, the ocean with a long pier stretching out into it. Signs advertised an arcade in the little building that you had to go through to get to the pier.

Aside from the road that followed on from the base of the bridge and directly to the pier, there were two roads running parallel stretching mostly to the north, which is where we turned. The road closer to the ocean had the really big beach houses on it, some of them three stories and actually looking more like houses you’d find in the suburbs instead of what I thought of as a beach house. The ones on the road nearer the mainland were closer to what I’d thought I’d see. Small little one-story houses sitting on top of tall stilts with a little parking spot underneath the house on one side. Every block or so an inlet came into the island on the mainland side where people could park boats right up near their house, if they were on that side of the road.

Hanna drove us down quite a ways till I wondered if we were going to end up driving off the island before pulling underneath a little blue house on stilts. We piled out, the salty ocean smell hitting me as soon as the car door opened. Hanna looked for the keys her aunt had given her and led us up the stairs that twisted back on themselves and ended at a tiny little porch to the front door.

The inside smelled stuffy and had clearly been closed up for a while.

“My mom and aunt rent this place over the summers, but it sits empty most of the winter, since there isn’t that much demand and the people that do come down here stay at one of those bigger places closer to the beach.”

“I guess this isn’t a big spring break spot.”

“No. I think it’s kind of a combination of family’s summer houses and older retired. I used to come out here a lot when I was younger. Those big houses weren’t built yet and you could actually see the ocean from the back porch.”

“So it’s not that late yet. Want to head down to the beach?” Kat asked.

“You realize it’s like sixty-eight degrees out. It’s not freezing, but it’s a little cold to be out in a bikini,” I pointed out.

“We’ll be fine. Come on, the sun is shining and there aren’t that many people around. Besides, we have now and tomorrow and that’s it. We have to leave early Sunday morning as soon as we get up.”

I looked over at Hanna who said, “Sure, I’ll go.”

“Fine. Let’s get changed. Who gets which room?”

There was a tiny kitchen right by the front door, then a small living room, with another door directly opposite it leading out to the back deck. On either side of the living room were two doors opposite each other.

“There are four rooms. How about Kat and I take a room on this side, and you pick one of the ones over there. There’s a bathroom between the pair of rooms, and this way you get your own and we don’t have to share a bathroom with a boy.”

“I’ve been well trained. I don’t leave the seat up or anything.”

“Still, no one wants a stinky boy’s bathroom. You go get changed and we’ll do the same.”

I carried my bag into the room closest to the kitchen, which had a small twin bed shoved against a wall and a dresser on the other. I threw my duffle bag on the bed and set my guitar on top of the dresser, since I wasn’t about to leave it in the car.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone swimming. I’d outgrown all of my swim trunks, so I’d just packed some basketball shorts as a substitute. I switched into those, leaving on the t-shirt I already had. The only major change in wardrobe was that I lost my socks and shoes and switched to flip-flop sandals, since I didn’t want to end up tracking a bunch of sand back into the beach house.

It hadn’t taken me long to change and I was back out well before the girls. Hanna was the first one out in a modest, emerald green one-piece. Even when we went dancing the other night she hadn’t worn particularly revealing clothes, at least not the way Kat had. At school, she always went with larger clothes. They weren’t baggy or anything, but they did cover up most of her skin. I assumed it was some kind of response to her sexual assault and the trauma she still had from that. She was already wearing loose jean shorts over the bathing suit and was already pulling on a t-shirt as she walked back out into the living room.

I didn’t make any kind of comment on her clothing choice, since I knew she didn’t particularly like to dwell on it. Besides, I was more distracted when Kat came out. Sometimes, it was hard to remember how much of an athlete she was. Even when she was dressed for clubbing, you could only really see it in her arms. When she walked out wearing a low-cut red bikini though, it was very obvious. She had a well-defined six-pack and you could see her muscles move as she walked. She wasn’t bulky in the arms like a weight lifter or in the legs like a runner. She had that classic, sleek swimmer’s body that was made for gliding through the water.

“Are …” I started, and then had to clear my throat, to dislodge the frog that apparently got stuck in it. “Are you going to wear anything over that? It might be a little cold walking down to the beach.”

Hanna was fighting hard to suppress a grin at my reaction, but Kat didn’t notice.

“I thought I had a big t-shirt to throw on, but I couldn’t find it in my bag. I was hoping I could borrow one of yours.”

“Ohh, uhh, sure,” I said, going back and grabbing one of my clean shirts.

I tossed it to Kat who pulled it on and led us all out the door. I would have just tromped over the sand dunes that made a thin line between the next row of beach houses across the ocean side road, directly onto the beach, but apparently, that wasn’t the way to go. Hanna directed us a block down to a small cross street that led up to public access to the beach.

As predicted, it was more or less deserted. It might have been a pretty comfortable temperature when we were standing just outside the beach house, but the breeze blowing off the ocean really dropped the temperature a bit, causing me to shiver slightly. The girls, however, seemed to take it in stride. I followed them to whatever they determined was a good spot, where they each laid out their blankets and proceeded to strip out of the clothes covering up their bathing suits.

I, probably too obviously, made it a point not to stare as I lay out my own blanket. While I was attracted to Kat, she needed the room to deal with her own issues before she was ready to date anyone, but especially me, considering the unique power imbalance between the two of us. Even though I liked her, or maybe because of it, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her mental health further. Maybe one day, if she got things sorted out, but that was some point in the future so it was best not to think about it.

Hanna was a different story. While there was no practical reason - aside from the two-year age difference - that I couldn’t have dated Hanna, it wasn’t something that I’d ever even thought of and I was pretty sure she hadn’t either. Our friendship just never went in that direction and thinking of her as anything other than my best friend felt weird and wrong. Hell, she was closer to my sister than someone I would date.

However, the teenage lizard part of my brain kept trying to remind me how smoking hot they both were, and it was taking every ounce of willpower I had to ignore it and try to keep thinking of my friends as asexually as possible.

I was positive they noticed my discomfort when Kat asked, “Charlie, can you put sunscreen on my back?”

Hanna laughed and said, “Yeah, me too.”

“Why don’t you put it on each other,” I pointed out.

“Nope, this is the whole point of bringing a boy to the beach. We lie out and you put on the sunscreen and feed us grapes. Now … chop-chop,” Hanna said.

I grumbled nonsense under my breath for show and took the bottle from Kat, directing her to lie on her stomach. I started applying the sunscreen across her back, shoulders, and legs, being careful to avoid getting too close to any problematic areas. Her muscles were like coiled ropes and if there was an ounce of fat on her, I couldn’t find it.

After I finished Kat, I moved over to do Hanna who, while still toned from her cheerleading days, was a lot softer than Kat. My job finished, I went back to my blanket, ignoring them once more. I tried to jot down ideas in the little notebook I’d started carrying around to work on music when I had free time, but everything was more or less nonsense. I couldn’t keep my focus long enough to actually get anything done. Eventually, I gave up and lay back on my blanket, staring at the sky while the girls chatted about stuff.

We’d gotten in after lunchtime and it had taken us a little while to get to the beach, so before long the sun started making its way down in the sky and the temperatures started to cool off to the point where none of us could take it anymore. I did foolishly try one quick trip into the ocean, just to say I had, but I’d barely gotten into ankle-deep water when the shock of how cold it was hit me. I wasn’t much of a beach guy, but in my head, I’d always had a picture of white sandy beaches and warm waters, but maybe that was just Caribbean islands. Wherever I’d been thinking about, it definitely wasn’t the Atlantic in mid-April.

We got back to the beach house and got cleaned up, changing into more reasonable clothing and started talking about dinner. There’d been a little hamburger stand down by the pier, and we all agreed a hamburger and a walk on the pier sounded nice.

As we headed down the steps I said to Kat, “Just throw that t-shirt in my room when you get a chance, okay?”

“Nope. That’s mine now.”

“What?” I asked, looking at Hanna, who just shrugged as she finished walking down to the street.

“Them’s the rules. Sorry,” Kat said before catching up to Hanna.

I just followed behind, wondering what rules she was talking about.

The hamburgers were fine. They didn’t hold a candle to Chef’s burgers, but the view, looking out the small window at the pier and the ocean as the sun went down, couldn’t be beat. After dinner, we paid to walk on the pier and watched the last of the sunlight fade away before heading back to the beach house, where we sat on the back porch and just relaxed. It was cold enough that Hanna pulled on a sweater and Kat brought out a blanket, but it was so relaxing, none of us minded.

***

It was almost noon when I rolled out of bed the next morning. Apparently, I’d been impossible to wake up, because a note on the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room area told me Hanna and Kat were back down at the beach.

As much as I loved my friends, that didn’t interest me at all. The beach was nice and I did enjoy just hanging out and watching the ocean the day before, but I don’t think I could spend hours doing it again. Instead, I pulled out my guitar and sat on the back porch, working on music. Even with Seth’s song and a possible one Lyla said she was working on but hadn’t shown us yet, I still had to come up with six more to have a full set to play for the audition, and that was coming up pretty soon.

So far on this trip, I’d had two ideas for songs. The first idea was when we visited the campus at UNC. I don’t know if they’d had some kind of family activity or mid-term thing, but they’d had some banners from whatever the event had been hung up around the park where we’d watched kids studying, relaxing, and playing Frisbee. They had been cheesy; mostly stuff about college being the next step to adulthood and believing in yourself, but it got me thinking.

When you’re young, you think of getting out of high school and moving away from your parents as the end of childhood; and it is, but it’s also more than that. There are points in your life, like when you go to college, or when you graduate college and go into your ‘real life’ where you have a chance to completely remake yourself. It’s like how Hanna was originally thinking of going all the way to California, to put the bad parts of her life behind her.

It’s more than that though. You then have a bunch of years, whether it’s four or ten depending on what kind of degrees you’re going for, to learn who you are. You can experiment, try out different interests and change majors, join groups, meet new people, whatever. At the end of college, you have the option to reinvent yourself again, this time armed with all those experimentations and new experiences.

I wrote down Chrysalis on the top of a new section of my notebook and started making notes on ideas for it. Trying to turn the idea of inventing yourself again and the unique experience that college seemed to be into a song. Admittedly, I’d never been to college, so I’d need to run some of the ideas past people that had and maybe some people in college now, to make sure it was authentic, but it was a starting place. I could see the beginning of a song in it.

The other idea was a departure from anything I’d done before, but it had popped into my head the night before and I hadn’t been able to shake it. It was about an outlaw that robbed trains in the old west called Jesse James and the chorus started each time with Jesse James died for me and was then followed by something that tied into the previous verse. I didn’t have them all, but it was basically about the exciting life of an outlaw who’d been living each moment as his last until Jesse James took a bullet for him. In the first chorus, he was happy to be chasing down trains and shooting it out with marshals. For the second, things were going bad, his friends were dying. And in the third, he’d retired from the life and settled down by the sea.

I honestly have no idea where the idea came from, but the song kind of just poured out of me, and with a really hard rhythm, especially on the chorus, I was pretty sure it would be the kind of song to get the crowd on their feet. The only sticking point was that it was a lot harder than anything else I’d written and when put next to the pop sound, or even the near country sound of Country Roads, it would really stand out. While I liked different kinds of music and was interested in exploring a range of styles, I was worried that being so unfocused might make it harder for us to sell ourselves to a label. I needed to talk to the rest of the band - and maybe Mr. French - about how this should work, or if we needed to rework everything into a single genre.

I was out on the back porch still plucking away when the girls made it back from the beach. I could hear them laughing and talking as they came inside and disappeared into their rooms to get cleaned up.

When they finally came out Kat said, “Get cleaned up and dressed. We’re going to go down to Myrtle Beach for dinner and dancing.”

“You want to go dancing?” I asked, looking at Hanna for confirmation.

Considering what had happened just a few nights ago when we’d gone out dancing, I wasn’t sure she’d be ready for a repeat.

“Yeah, it’ll be fine.”

“Okay, if that’s what y’all want to do. Myrtle Beach is kind of far though, isn’t it?”

“A little. It’s about an hour, but it’s where we’re going to find actual nightlife. I love this beach house, but it’s kind of ‘old person central’ in the off-season, you know? This is our last night before we have to go back to the real world and I could use some fun.”

“If that’s what y’all want to do, I guess I’m in.”

I took a quick shower and got dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a clean t-shirt. It had been fine for the last club and they already knew this was all I had to wear anyway so I assumed, or at least hoped, that they’d take that into account when we got down there.

Dinner was a little seafood place we found about halfway to Myrtle Beach. It was a little pricy for me and was going to eat up all of the money I had left that I’d budgeted for this trip, but they wanted to try it and I wasn’t going to say no.

The club itself was very different from the one in Raleigh. That had been a dance club where they’d only had a DJ in one corner playing music and most of the room left was all dance floor. This place had a dance floor, but it also had a stage and a live band up front. It actually reminded me of several of the places I’d played with Willie when he’d done his tour in the fall.

The band was already going strong when we got there so the girls dragged me straight out onto the dance floor, where I preceded to once again look like an idiot. Neither Hanna nor Kat seemed to mind still, so I just went with it, but I could see I was getting more than a few looks from people wondering what the hell I was doing.

At least the band was pretty good. They were playing covers, a lot of which overlapped with the covers I’d been playing, especially before I’d started working on my own music, so I knew them really well. Their drummer was really good and held an amazingly steady beat, although I did think I was a lot better than the guy playing lead and singing. He had a good voice, but he had simplified a lot of the harder parts into simple chord progressions. It sounded close to the real thing, and with the rest of the band playing I’m sure the audience didn’t really hear the difference, but it stood out like a sore thumb for me.

They must have been going for a while, because we got three songs in and they said they were taking a break and would be back in ten minutes. That was fine by me, since I didn’t love to dance and felt so self-conscious.

We zeroed in on a standing cocktail table that was off to one side of the bar, kind of close to the entrances to the kitchen and I hustled over to grab it as the people who’d been using it left. It wasn’t great, since I couldn’t see much of the band or the dance floor, which is why I’d probably been able to get it, but we could use it through the night, with one of us always staying here so the girls had a place to put their purses and we could leave our drinks with someone watching over them.

The band kind of moved off to one side of the stage and looked to be shooting the shit when one of the band members hopped off the front and walked past us towards the bar, returning a minute later with a couple of bottles of whatever, which I completely understood. Singing could be murder on the throat after a few hours, even when you weren’t singing rock. Put that together with how exhausting it could be and how hot the lights could get, bands really did need a little break every now and then and some water or they’d drop before they ever finished the set.

The guy did this weird double take at me as he passed and then hopped on the stage. I started getting a little worried when he huddled up with the rest and started looking back in my direction every few sentences while talking and handing out the water.

I looked around and behind me, trying to see if maybe he’d seen someone he knew and it was just one of those things where someone waves and you wave back only to find they’d been waving at a guy standing behind you. There were a few people around us, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to them.

I had no idea who these guys were, but they were clearly directing their attention at me when the water guy hopped off the stage and came directly over to me.

“Did you play at The Spring Break Bash the other day?”

Of all the things I could have guessed he was going to say, that wasn’t even near the top of the list.

“Uhh, yeah,” I responded, completely confused.

The guy turned around and waved at his friend, one of whom broke off from the other two and came over to us.

“I told you, it ishim,” He said to his friend before turning his attention back to me. “We pulled the short straw and were put in the fifth spot, since no one else wanted to follow House of Grace, and we got there early enough to hear you play. Man, you absolutely murdered that cover of Downtown Lover. I mean; that guitar riff you added in during the second run of the chorus, holy crap. That was in our staple when it was getting a lot of air time before Christmas, but we’ve been talking about dusting it off and picking up your changes, cause your cover was better than the original.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, sort of embarrassed.

“No way. It really was. The crowd ate it up. Do you mind if we steal your cover?”

“I mean, it’s a cover. It’s not exactly covered by copyright. Go for it.”

I actually didn’t know if it was or not, but it’s not like I could make money off my changes to the song. Mr. French had actually mentioned one of the reasons I needed to get away from doing covers was I’d need to start paying the original artists if I was going to perform them. He’d gone into a whole thing about performance licensing and mechanical licensing, but we hadn’t had time to really go into it and it was kind of confusing. He’d assured me that I wouldn’t get in trouble for playing covers at the festival since they’d paid for some kind of blanket performance license with the recording artist association, but I needed to be careful with clubs, which were probably not doing it.

“We actually practiced your changes a little bit earlier, just messing around. How would you feel about coming up and playing Downtown Lover with us once?”

“Nah, you guys are doing great. You don’t need me to come up and play.”

“It’ll be a blast. Frank even said you could take the vocals. I think he’s just afraid to be compared with how you sang it. Come on. We’d love it.”

The friend who hadn’t been speaking, and who I guessed was Frank, punched the guy who’d first come up in the arm.

“Go on, Charlie,” Hanna said. “You know you’d rather be up there playing than dancing anyway. Have fun.”

I shrugged and said, “Sure. I’d love to play.”

“Yes,” he said, pumping his fist. “Ahh, man, I’m psyched. Let me introduce you to the guys.”

“You still have to come back and dance with us afterward though,” Hanna said.

I waved her off and followed the other two back up to the stage, where they introduced themselves. They went by the name Tomorrowland and were a straight cover band, which was pretty common in local clubs. I’d met several over the years when I’d been traveling with Dad. They usually didn’t travel very far, except for the occasional festival, because they didn’t make a lot. Dad and the rest of the musicians who played their own stuff tended to look down on cover bands, maybe because they didn’t make their own music or something. I’d always thought that was unfair, since the good ones changed up the songs they covered, often completely elevating the original work.

Of course, even though I’d started out playing covers, it hadn’t taken long for me to start working on my own stuff, so maybe some of that attitude rubbed off on me.

The guy who’d been talking to me was named Marc and was the drummer. The other three were Frank, Lewis, and Lester. They were pretty nice and we talked for a few minutes before it was time for them to go back on. I didn’t have my guitar on me, of course, so Frank loaned me his guitar, which left him nothing much to do but stand off to one side of the stage and watch.

I felt a little bad but he didn’t seem to mind and looked to be having fun, so I just rolled with it.

“All right, we’re back!” Marc said into the mic by the drum kid. “You might have noticed we changed up guitarists while we were gone. This is Charlie Nelson and he tore up the stage at the Spring Break Bash in Raleigh a few days ago and was nice enough to come up and help us with his cover of Downtown Lover which I guarantee you, you’re going to like.”

And with that, Marc gave a brief count and we were off. I hadn’t actually changed a lot of the song, so it wouldn’t be that different from what they’d played before. To make their cover stand out, a lot of people tended to mess with either the tempo or dynamics to change the feel of the song, like taking a rock song and slowing it all the way down and changing some of the cords into minors instead, turning it into a sad country song instead.

I hadn’t done that on Downtown Lover because I really liked the song. I added the long riff between the chorus and the second verse because the original artist had them too mushed together, and every time I thought the chorus would keep going, boom, we were into the second verse. It was a weird transition I didn’t like and I thought it would be better if we separated them out. Since it was alt-rock, I’d liked the idea of doing a guitar riff. Not exactly an entire solo, since it wasn’t 1987 anymore, but something that hinted that way, kind of a call back to rock of the past.

I knew what I wanted, but I still couldn’t pull it off by myself, so I’d worked with Mr. French on it. We made two versions of it, one going from the first chorus into the second riff and one closing out the song, going from the second chorus into the little end part that was almost like half a third verse. We changed the simple chords into a fast progression and then tacked on a similar change for the melody from the chorus at the front of the riff. I also gradually increased the complexity across three measures of the beginning of the riff so it flowed seamlessly out of the chorus and then decreased complexity coming out of riff until it matched the melody of the riff itself.

Although I was impressed with it, Mr. French said it was a little hacky, but it was okay for a cover. He said a real producer would do more than just change the progressions of the chorus, but I didn’t care. I thought it sounded good and apparently, others liked it, so I was counting it as a win.

The crowd was into it and everyone was dancing, except Hanna and Kat, who had to stand watch over their drinks since I was on stage. I begged off doing any more, thanked the guys, and told them if they were ever near Asheville to look me up at the Blue Ridge.

Hanna and Kat danced some more and forced me to join them when they finished their drinks, before we called it a night and made it back to Hanna’s beach house.