Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vols 1-3

78 VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR

We had to do the take again and again and if I hadn’t been doped up I probably would have been really annoyed. But I just kept going. I did it standing, sitting on the edge of the stage, looking at the camera, not looking at the camera… singing along with the chorus and not singing. And then it was Bart’s turn. I gave him a weak high five as I made my way down the steps to the floor.

Patty motioned me into the control booth. “How do you feel?”

“A little dizzy, but alright.” I was actually thinking about the couch in Belle’s office and wanting to lie down.

“Do you think you could talk to another reporter?”

I shrugged. “Sure, as long as I get to sit down.”

She settled me into one of the plush ergonomic rolling chairs at the sound board. Then Ziggy and another guy came in. Ziggy sat down next to me. The guy shook my hand and introduced himself as someone or another from Music Time. He had the same press kit in his hand that they had been handing out last night and I wondered if he’d been there. He clicked on a tape recorder in his lap.

He was older, maybe forty, nondescript haircut and clothes, as if as a reporter he was supposed to blend into the background easily. “So, what would you two like to talk about?”

Ziggy picked up the ball first. “Well, that’s one question we haven’t heard before.”

“I know. I don’t want to ask you all the same questions everyone else has. I want to know what you want to tell me.” His voice, slightly deadpan and nasal, gave me the suddenly creepy feeling that this guy wasn’t a reporter at all, but some kind of undercover psychoanalyst. Maybe secretly hired by Mills. I didn’t dare look at Ziggy.

“Well,” Ziggy was saying, “I’ve got opinions about plenty of things, but I don’t know where to start.”

“We’re pretty new to this whole corporate publicity machine thing,” I added.

The reporter smiled at me in a gentle, condescending way which only intensified the feeling that he was a shrink. “What do you think of this whole video thing?”

Ziggy motioned to me and now I did look at him. He was giving me the nod to say… something. “It’s weird,” I began. “I mean, here we are, having to mimic ourselves, note for note… the feeling of doing it is bizarre. And you know no one watching thinks that it’s real, do they? It’s a weird kind of acting, you’re playing a part, but the part you’re playing is yourself… Obviously we have to do it though, MTV has so much pull now, it’s changed everything…” I trailed off, feeling like I was babbling. “You know?”

Ziggy shrugged. “They haven’t done me, yet.”

Mr. Nondescript turned his disarming smile on Ziggy then. “Did you always want to make it big like this?”

Ziggy sat back, chewing on that one a moment before answering. “No, not really. Because I never wanted to be a rock singer until all of a sudden, I was one. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. Then I met Daron and Bart and they had a vision for what they wanted to do, for success. They needed me to do it, and I needed something to do. So we teamed up.”

“But you’d never sung before that?”

He laughed, and shot a sly smile my way. “Well, Daron and I sing in the same choir.”

“No we don’t,” I said, wondering why he’d said that, if he was just goofing around or if he wanted to give this reporter a hard time. “He’s making that up,” I told the reporter. Meanwhile, my imagination was working on the image of Ziggy in the church choir. I couldn’t quite picture it, and it occurred to me that I really didn’t know anything about what his childhood was like. I’d never asked him about it because I didn’t want to talk about my own. Maybe he did sing in the church choir.