Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vol 4

229 DELIRIOUS

“What?” He pulled one headphone back. His hair was glossy black except for that tuft he’d left white, so inky it didn’t look real. Well, it wasn’t, and I knew that, but for some reason I couldn’t stop staring at it.

“I said it still needs a chorus. I don’t know why, I just can’t ever seem to come up with one these days.”

He nodded, rewound the tape, and lay back on the bed, listening, his eyes closed.

Then he did something I’d never heard him do. He began singing the chorus from David Bowie’s “Changes.” I couldn’t really hear the music at that point, but I felt a surge of adrenaline, thinking, Holy shit, does that work?

“Does that work?” I demanded.

He sat up. “Yup.”

“Are you sure?”

“It fits counterpoint with the last line of the verse, and then can be it’s own thing. Here, plug it in.”

I plugged the four-track into the jack to my stereo and played it, and he sang. My hair stood on end. “Holy fuck.”

He was grinning ear to ear. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

“It’s really fucking good.” I stood up. “Chris has to hear this.”

“Bart’s down there, too, right now,” he said.

“He is?”

“If you weren’t being such a hermit, you’d know that,” he chided, half-joking.

“If I wasn’t such a hermit, we wouldn’t have this killer song,” I answered, as I went to the door and hollered down the stairs to the living room.

Bart came up the stairs two at a time. “What are you screaming about?”

“Wanted you to hear a track,” I said, while Ziggy rewound it.

“I’m going to play it without the chorus first,” he said, as Chris came into the room, looking curious.

The room wasn’t very large, so the four of us standing there was kind of crowded. I climbed back onto the mattress, and Ziggy sat down on a pile of laundry, the four-track in his hand,and hit play.

They listened. Bart nodded along. “Pretty good,” he said. “Nice hook.”

“You haven’t heard the real hook yet, though,” Ziggy said. He rewound the tape, but he said to me, “Can you just play it and sing the verse?”

“If you want.”

“Someone’ll have to sing it when we do it live. I can’t do it all with overdubbing, you know.”

“This is true…”

Bart made an impatient noise. “Could we just hear it, please?”

“Play the tape and I’ll play along,” I said, not wanting to get distracted or thrown off by the counter-melody. Zig hit play, and I went along and sang unison with myself.

I saw Bart’s eyes light up with Ziggy’s part came in. “That’s fucking brilliant,” he said when we got to the end.

“Yeah, but will Bowie’s record company sue the bejeezus out of us?” Christian asked.

“That’s a question for the suits,” Ziggy said. “No? Besides, they can’t stop me from ‘quoting’ other songs when we play live, can they? What if we just wanted to do a cover of the song? There’s nothing stopping us, is there?”

I hewed my lip trying to remember the rules. Chris was more on top of it, though. “Yeah, well, then it gets worked out with ASCAP and BMI, I think. You can do the cover and the original artist gets paid out of the song royalties pool… It’s just recording it that would be a problem, probably. Yeah, a question for the suits.”

“But you like it?” Ziggy pressed.

“I fucking love it,” Bart said. Christian nodded in agreement. “It’s genius.”

Colin was yelling from downstairs.

“Probably telling me it’s my turn,” Christian said. He went out of the room, but then came back a minute later. “Daron, it’s for you.”

“What’s for me?”

“The phone.”

“Oh.” I’d turned the ringer off the one in my room while working on the song. “One sec.” I disentangled myself from the guitar and got up. As we all went out into the hall, Ziggy raised his hand, and I gave him a high five. Maybe in the morning I’d think it sounded stupid after all, but at that moment I was pretty sure we had a winner on our hands.