Putting on his show face as easily as someone might put on a pair of shoes, Peter sent a blindingly charming smile at the camera. I, on the other hand, was leaned back in the chair, my foot tapping incessantly and my fingers gripping the ends of the armchair so tightly that my knuckles were white.
It was probably a pretty comical picture, for anyone but me. I still wasn’t much of an actor, though through all this time I can handle my own.
The problem was I knew what was coming. And I desperately didn’t want to talk about it. I had known this was coming the moment I’d given into Mark about this exclusive. Yet I’d never been able to prepare myself. I’d thought I could fake my way through it, go into that interview bubble where I act witty and intelligent without any real personal touches. It had been so easy to go into the past couple years.
There was no faking my way through this one.
A niggling voice whispered in the back of my head, reminding me of something a person had once told me, and it hadn’t been Kurt Cobain. The worst crime is faking it.
But the moment that thought occurred, all I wanted to do was vomit.
I could practically feel myself getting green.
Holy mother fuck, I am not ready for this, I thought, panicking seizing me.
“Here we are,” Peter started, that perfectly smooth announcer’s voice magnifying from the microphone clipped to his three piece suit. “I’m back with Keely Staub, doing her first exclusive ever on television. How are we going so far, Keely?” he enquired, looking at me for a response.
I wouldn’t have been surprised had I been trembling in the chair, it felt like I was shaking like a leaf. But even through my tense jaw, I achieved in sending him some semblance of a grin. “I don’t think that one’s up to me.”
Giving a chortle, Peter reached over, patting my knee. I knew what the motion was supposed to mean, he wanted to send me some kind of comfort, he could see what was going on. He wanted to help. But nothing was helping me at the moment, because we both knew where this was going. “I say we’re doing great,” he assured me warmly. “So let’s talk about The Spares.”
My heart was pounding against my chest so fast I could have sworn it was going to beat straight out of my chest. “What’s to tell?” I managed.
Suddenly he was frowning at me in confusion before asking, “What do you mean?”
Finally gaining some of myself back from that panic, I sent him a bland look. “Didn’t you – just moments ago, call them a failure?”
That made him chuckle again, though this time he didn’t feel the need to send me any comfort. He thought I was over it… maybe I was getting to be a better actor than I gave myself credit for. “Sharp as a knife,” he congratulated me, “Well, what can I say about the Spares?
“In four years together, they put out brilliant, ingenious, heart-wrenching, hopeful, disturbing, beautiful music. They were the most commercially and critically acclaimed rock band in the past decade. With the four albums they made together, every single one has gone platinum. They did world tours of stadiums and clubs, won awards after awards to the point where it just seemed ridiculous, sometimes hilarious and sometimes deeply insightful award winning music videos; I can’t even name everything The Spares have done. They were my favourite band of this decade, and I have no regrets saying that to the world.”
Yeah, panicking again, I thought as I stared at Peter, searching for words, any words. C’mon, I’m a song writer; I shouldn’t be at a loss for words. “Well, that might have been the nicest thing ever said about them,” I admitted, playing it down pointedly.
With a bawdy laugh and a shake of the head, Peter just told me, “We’ll start at the beginning. Keely, how did The Spares come into being?”
Blowing out a loud breath, I nodded slowly. If I was ready for it or not, there was no choice in the matter, I was doing this. I fucking hate Mark.
“It was right after NSR broke up,” I began. “I was already demoing songs for my sophomore album that Maureen Jones, the owner of UAE Records and our manager, was pushing for, and she expected Seth Ryan to be doing the same as she wanted a real solo album from him. Well, Seth had never really wanted to be solo. I mean, he put out that EP that everyone knows about, Vaughn.”
As if to confirm the words I was saying, the crowd broke out into a raucous cheer, making me wince slightly. I always wondered if they were really getting told what to do or not, I was so rarely paying attention if I was stuck in a studio audience.
“But,” I continued, “He didn’t want to be a solo artist then. So he had this idea, he wanted to make a band, and he wanted me to be part of it.”
Making an interested sound in the back of his throat, Peter leaned into his palm, staring at me in a captivated fashion, as if engrossed in what I was saying. “Do you think that he’d been thinking about this, before NSR broke up?”
Forcefully I distanced myself from the words; it was easier to speak if I was considering the person saying them a different person. I could get through this; I always got through this stuff. “I think that… he hadn’t really wanted to be in NSR for a long time.” The words were getting difficult, though. “And as is common knowledge, their Sons of Silence album was mostly his work, though I came on as a co-writer then. He felt like he was almost solo in NSR by the end, he was playing half the drums and bass in the studio, as well as the vocals and everything other instrument.
“But had he been thinking of making us into a band? I don’t know, he never told me. I think he had ideas of making another band, because he didn’t expect to NSR to last much longer, which he was obviously right about.
“Anyways, we still weren’t telling Maureen about it. We were spending a lot of time writing music and just thinking about making a band, kind of day dreaming about it. I had always wanted to be in a real band, I’d wanted to be a part of something like that. And he just wanted another band. So we finally decided to make it reality. But there we were; both vocalists and guitarists. We needed other people.
“We had this friend that was hanging around New York at the time; he was thinking of becoming a session bassist since his band The Dynamic had broken up. Jake was almost a hero of mine, I’d worshipped The Dynamic mostly because he was the bassist. That band was so fucking punk rock it was awesome. And the moment we asked him, he said yes.”
“You still didn’t have a drummer though,” Peter pointed out.
Nodding, I found myself grinning even though I was feeling nauseous talking about this. Bitter sweet. “Yeah, we had a lot of trouble finding a drummer that we liked as a person and a musician, it was important for all three of us to have someone we could get along with. This was supposed to be a fun thing we were doing, we didn’t want some dick as our drummer. At one point Seth offered to play the drums for the band, but that would have been stupid. I mean, it’d be like John Bonham quitting Led Zeppelin and going to Jimmy Page, “Hey man, want to play drums? We’ll just put Robert on guitar.” Putting him on the drums would have been a bad idea for the band.”
“Weren’t you living with a drummer at the time, though?” he put in.
Nodding, I sent him a half smile. “Yeah, when I’d moved to New York I was rooming in this apartment with a drummer named William from this band The Cavern Jets. They’d opened for me and NSR on the last tour, and we were really good friends.”
Frowning, Peter propped his chin upon his fist as he thought about it, questioning, “You never thought about asking him to be in the band?”
“Well, he was in another band, and they were getting pretty big at the time. But one day I mentioned the issues going on, and he volunteered. The band was never exactly good to their drummers, and we were all really great friends plus he knew we respected him and his talents. He was the best drummer I’d ever played with.”
Peter grinned broadly, clapping his hands together. “And there are The Spares; Seth Ryan, Keely Staub, Jake Beck and William Johnston.”
“Exactly, and the first night we were a real band, we went to this bar. We got drunk and we just talked, we wanted to be comfortable with each other, we didn’t want secrets or anything. We just wanted it to be fun, and I think we all had this idea of the band becoming a bit of a family.”
But even as I said those words, looking at the television host in front of me, I couldn’t help the memories flickering in front of my vision.
Running a hand through his already messy dark hair, Seth grinned crookedly, holding up his long neck beer bottle. “You guys ready for this?”
Without even a moment of hesitation, I smirked across the table at him and raised my beer as well, all too aware that his foot was securely against mine under the table. “No doubt,” I answered, biting on my bottom lip.
As I looked at him, I watched his gaze drop downwards towards my lips, but both our attention was taken away when Jake tapped his beer to ours. “Might as well.”
“Fuck it,” William laughed, knocking his as well.
With a laugh of my own, I lowered the bottle to my lips, but my gaze flickered across the table to where Seth’s eyes had latched onto mine. When he raised one eyebrow ever so slightly, I gave another laugh into the bottle of beer, rolling my eyes. I very sincerely doubted that I was going home to my apartment tonight.
“So how did Maureen Jones take to the news of losing two solo artists, a session bassist and the drummer of a new up and coming band?”
Groaning I rubbed a hand over my forehead, remembering the scene quite clearly in my head. “She was pissed,” I told him bluntly. “She thought we were being idiots, which we might have been, and called us a super band. We’d never thought of ourselves like that, we didn’t want to be a fucking super band; we went into thinking of ourselves just being a band. Plus we never gave a lead vocalist, me and Seth took the most of the vocals, but Jake and Will sang too so they were getting songs, which she thought was just a key for disaster. And she flat out told us that this whole thing was going to crash and burn.”
Nodding slowly, Peter continued on with the line of questioning. “Then how did you guys ever even get to make the first album?”
“We offered to finance it ourselves, we believed in it so much we would have done anything to record it. What we ended up doing was recording this album in this crappy old warehouse we had, Seth and I were producing and we did it on tape no less. All on our own, but as a band. It was the best thing we’d ever done.”
“How did the song writing go for the band, though? You and Seth had already had quite the prolific song writing partnership way before this.”
I shrugged, half mind on the present and half shoved into the falling apart warehouse with all the instruments and recording equipment we could get shoved in. “We all wrote together, it was a pretty even song writing between all of us. Will and Jake were great songwriters as well. I mean, Seth and I still had the habit of going to each other for help, but we were a working partnership of four then.”
“Well, music couples seem to rub off on each other,” Peter reasoned, “It’s quite common, almost feeding off of one another.”
For a moment, I stared at him blankly, a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Yeah,” I answered.
He sent me a quick look, but once again offered no comfort to the questions. “How did the name The Spares happen?”
“We actually didn’t name the band until we had finished recording the album,” I informed him. “I remember it was like “Fuck, we need a band name still”. The inspiration actually came from this show.”
This was the first time Peter looked truly surprised, responding, “What?”
“The first time The Spares ever performed, we did it here. We weren’t a band yet, though. I was doing promotion for my first album, and you wanted me to play with Seth to put “chemistry” in the act, but I wouldn’t tear apart my back up band for that. So we recruited some friends for it. It was actually me who had thought all the way back then that it felt like we were all just spare parts, worn off edges from different and broken up bands. I told them that once, and it stuck, therefore, The Spares.”
Suddenly Peter got a proud look on his face. “So I could be partially credited with the creation of this band?”
“I guess,” I answered offhandedly.
Looking towards the cameras, he pointed a finger at the screen. “Eat your heart out Maureen Jones; while you were saying they’d be a failure, I was helping create the best band of this decade.”
Shaking my head slightly, I just fell into silence.
Where he’d taken out my first solo album, Peter dragged out a CD copy of the first Spares album from the side of the couch. “So, this first album was recorded in a warehouse on tape by a band that had no backing?”
“Pretty much,” I answered.
“What happened next?”
“Well, we did what would become a habit for us, we started to tour,” I explained. It was the first time in a very long time that I’d allowed myself to even think of this time, I could practically feel every memory running along my skin. “This was a club tour.
“You see, I’d never done a club tour before,” I expressed directly to Peter even if the rest of the world was watching, “So this was like ground breaking territory for me. The Dynamic had been this really punk rock underground band, so all Jake had done was clubs. Seth had played a lot of clubs on his own and with NSR. And Will had been playing in clubs for a long time as well. But me? I’d started out my career doing stadiums, a bit opposite of most musicians.”
Nodding, he kept his eyes focused on me. “What did you think of club tours?”
“They were the best fucking thing I’d ever done,” said I blatantly, a smile even coming to my face at the thought. “That was where I first got to jump into the crowd without security dragging me back up, that’s where we got to demolish our sets. There’s something so intimate and personable about playing clubs that you don’t get in stadiums. Anything can sound good in a stadium with all the production you get, playing clubs is a test to how good of a band you are, not how good your crew is.
“We got this van too, no tour bus. We could barely even fit in it altogether with all our instruments. It was the craziest, hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it was the best. Our live shows were really all about having fun. We’d all switch instruments, Will had taught me to play the drums and sometimes it was like playing musical instruments on stage. We dived into the crowd. We destroyed our guitars and drums. We almost induced riots wherever we went. We were just kids having so much fun.”
Peter smiled back at me, but despite the smile, my stomach was still moving uneasily. “Why did you guys call your album Laika?”
“Seth had been reading this book, and it was about a dog called Laika. The Russians had launched it into orbit as a precursor to human spaceflight. Laika died in Sputnik Two probably within hours from overheating, though the Russian government told another story. It really stuck with him at the time; he was kind of fascinated and horrified by the story, so he wanted to name the album after it. There’s actually an etching done of Laika by one of our friends in the liner notes in the album.”
“How do you feel about this album, now?”
“That album’s good,” I admitted. “I loved the making of it, I learnt so much about producing, and it was the first time I’d ever done anything on analog. It’s such a raw, rough, up tempo, punk rock album.”
"Well, you guys one four Grammy's and countless other awards for this album. So "good" could cover it."
I shook my head, thinking back there. I shouldn't press my own memories for this, lately it had all felt so fragile. And letting myself drift back to this time, I could only wonder how I was going to recover. I'd barely survived The Spares the first time.
"We were a good band, that's it," I implored him, and everyone for that matter. "We didn't know how huge the album got back home, because at the time we were touring Europe. But all these people were swearing to us that they thought we were brilliant, and none of us ever believed it. We had this amazing tour; people were lining up to see us in these clubs for freaking days. It was insane. And we flew back here, all the sudden we had the number one album in the world."
"But The Spares changed music," Peter challenged.
I felt my jaw clench at the words. "We didn't change music; we were part of a revolution in music. There were so many rock bands just waiting in wings for a moment like that, when people wanted something more in music than what they were getting. For the first time in a long time, rock was the number one genre again, but it was the same as what happened in the early nineties with grunge, music was on a ledge and it fell towards grunge then. Now it fell and gave into all sorts of rock and roll. But they’re still countless sell out musicians out there, and they’re still really popular."
"Humble as always," Peter grinned at me.
Narrowing my eyes, I snapped back, "I'm not humble."
"So you made a worldwide acclaimed album, won over millions of fans, sold eight million records which is unheard of in this day and age, won countless awards all while touring an album in crappy little clubs; what did Maureen think of you then?"
"All the sudden she was all too willing to float the bill for our next album. So we went into the studio, but this time the album had a more simply rock and roll feel to it. I mean, yeah, there was punk rock. We all grew up on punk rock and that’s where the root of the band laid, but we also loved bands like The Beatles, Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin. We wanted to incorporate every single type of music we could find into this album. That point I think we were labeled as being an alternative rock band instead of punk, but we never wanted to be labeled as anything. That wasn’t who were.”
Using my hands to make my points, I continued by saying, “And that’s pretty much where our second album came from. We called it The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, which was the name of a movie made about the Sex Pistols, mostly done to the piss of the “purists” of punk rock who were saying we were selling out.”
“I guess you don’t believe in the musical purists then, do you?” Peter questioned. Apparently the quotation marks made with my fingers didn’t make the point enough.
“I think that makes people very close minded,” I returned, running my hand through my hair. “I don’t think the way we branched out made us sell outs, not at all. It was still all for the music, so what’s so bad about it? At heart as a musician, you want to play and do all the things you possibly can do. And when there’s the ability to do that, explore your song writing depths, push the limits of your talent and determination, I think it would have been cowardly for us to back off and become secure and stale staying within what certain – and very few to be honest – people thought we should.”
He nodded appreciatively at my words, but I didn’t stop talking. “And this I think would be a very good time for a Kurt Cobain quote. Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing, playing what you want. We were saying, doing and playing what wanted. His definition of punk rock is what mine was practically built on.”
That time I managed to make Peter grin, probably because I was acting just the way he wanted me to; the perfect intelligent non-conformist with a touch of darkness, just the rock star he wanted. But that wouldn’t last for long. “So after you finished recording, what did you lot do?”
“We all packed up our bags and headed out on tour again, but this time it was a stadium tour.”
“This is the time where things started to change a bit for the band, wasn’t it?”
This time it was me that nodded, feeling that nauseous pit in my stomach grow. Yeah, I knew where this had been going from the very beginning.
“Um,” I started, feeling my voice choke out for a moment. Hurriedly, I gulped, wetting my lips. My voice wasn’t supposed to fail me, not now. “Yeah, it did,” I admitted with a stronger voice. “I mean, we liked doing stadium tours and all, but it all starts to look the same after a while. And remember, we’d only been off tour for like six months making that album. We made music and toured harder than we ever should have, and this was another ten month tour, like what the fuck where we thinking?
“And being “rock stars” was getting into our heads. We started drinking pretty heavily, sometimes even on stage to the point where we were crap by the end of the show. Then at some party we started doing drugs, and it just escalated from there.”
I knew this was common knowledge to everyone that heard this, but it still hit me in the gut if I had to talk about it. When you’re a kid you think you’ll never be a drug addict, well, sometimes kids are wrong.
“With the lifestyle of rock musicians before us, I think we just fell into a pit of thinking that’s what we had to do,” I attempted at explaining, but it sounded pathetic to my ears. “I mean, we just started doing weed and that’s not a bad thing, it really should be legal, probably eighty percent of the people I’ve ever known have smoked weed at one point in their lives. But we took it to another level and started moving upwards, at first we were trying acid, thinking about the sixties and music and shit then. Then it moved to like cocaine, and onwards.”
Giving a half laugh, that sounded desolated, I ran a hand over my face. “It’s a weird time to talk about, you know? We, as a band, were getting really political too. We were writing these really political, beautiful, thought provoking songs. But were so fucking high half the time, we just heads up our asses.”
“And that’s where it took another sharp turn for you guys,” Peter prodded.
With a nod, I leaned my head into my hand as I stared down at the cup of frozen tea on the table. “Yeah,” I answered slowly, “Will and Jake had gotten into heroin in the last couple months of the tour, Seth and I hadn’t gotten there yet. We were in Paris, Seth and I had gone to this underground show while Will and Jake went to I think it was this party being held by these people we knew. I don’t know exactly what happened,” I confessed.
“But the next morning I woke up in bed in this shitty hotel room where we hadn’t let the maid in and it was getting disgusting, to a call from the hospital. It was Jake telling me Will had OD’d, and he was there with him and Will hadn’t woke up yet.”
This time I was fixed with a sympathetic look, the one that had been set to me far too many times in the last years. “You and Will were really close, right?”
Folding my lips into my mouth I nodded, trying to force myself not to sink into memories. Not from then. Not with Seth’s gaunt cheekbones, wires attached to Will and Jake wish his sunken eyes. “He’s the one I moved in with when I got to New York, I told him everything, and he was my best friend. He was the one who cleaned in the apartment and he cooked. I mean, we were all best friends the four of us, but Will and I were different from me and Seth or me and Jake. It’s not a fun experience to watch your best friend in a coma, wondering if he’s even going to live or not, and if he does, will he have brain damage or something?
“The three of us stayed there the whole time until he woke up. The only way they were getting us out of there would be for them to arrest us. We were family, we really were. We’d chosen each other and were closer to one another than we’d ever been to any other human beings. And we weren’t leaving Will. He was the kid of us; he was like our younger brother.”
I let out a long breath, still not meeting Peter’s eyes. “When he did wake up, he was fine. I think that’d shocked us more than anything, and suddenly despite all the horror stories, we knew it could kill us, it would kill us. But what stopped us in our tracks hadn’t even happened yet.
“They were holding Will at the hospital just as he got better and we’d cancelled the rest of our tour, staying with him until he got better. And that’s when we got another call, though it was somewhat similar. We were told our friend Marissa James had overdosed in her house in LA, but she died.”
Obviously knowing it was better not to speak, Peter just nodded when I finally met his eyes.
“We flew back home and did for this benefit they held for her. We played a cover of Oasis’ Champagne Supernova with me on lead vocals and piano while Seth took up lead guitar, Jake on bass and Will on drums.”
“So did that was what got you all off drugs?” Peter questioned quietly.
Pursing my lips, I nodded, almost feeling the rusty sensation in my throat as my fingers slid across the keys, tears dropping down my cheeks. “Yeah, all the sudden our friends were dying. And when we went back into the studio to record our third album, something occurred to us. We weren’t cut out to be rock stars, we were just musicians. And we just realized how completely fucked we’d gotten, and we’d only really been doing drugs for about eight – nine months. I can’t even imagine how people handle it that had been hooked for most of their lives.”
“And that’s when you started recording No One Gets Out Alive,” he said, prodding me in the direction he wanted the questioning to go.
I nodded, pulling my thoughts away from overdosing and dying friends. “Despite the title, it was actually a surprisingly hopeful album from us.”
“And very political, as you said the band had been getting into politics over that last tour, and I see that while the drugs didn’t stick, the politics did,” Peter pointed out.
“They did,” I agreed, “But it was actually a very soft delicate album, it was full of this kind of fragile beauty that we were bridging on. I mean, it wouldn’t be The Spares if there wasn’t anger and darkness in it and there were a lot of references to death and hatred in it, but we were singing not all about how bad things were getting, it was about what they could be as well. Without Hope was the first single off of that album, the title was contradictory to the message.”
Peter grinned, apparently having moved his mind away from death and drugs without a hitch. I just wished it was as easy for me, I thought I’d been getting good at compartmentalizing. “The second single Victim Of Authority was point blank, though.”
“That it was,” I murmured.
“But once again, even during the making of that album, things started going haywire.”
I nodded, gulping for no reason and simply making my dry throat worse. “It really did. I mean, the paparazzi were stalking us like never before and the rumors were just getting nuts. They’d said Will had really died in Paris. That Jake was still getting fucked up and doing heroin, he and Will had even done a brief stint in rehab but that didn’t matter to anyone. Then there was a rumor about I’d been pregnant, but I’d continued doing heroin – which I hadn’t even touched, ever – and ended up killing my child. And because of that Seth and I had ended our relationship.
“Everywhere I went people were saying they were sorry for the fact that The Spares had broken up. I kept telling people it wasn’t over, but it didn’t do anything. And the bullshit coming from the press never stopped, it just kept getting more and more outrageous with each story. But we could have handled that.”
Pressing a hand to my stomach, I gathered my wits about me. I had to just get through this, after this show I could just curl up and cry for however long I needed.
“It was when we went back on tour that it got really bad. I guess, we’d stopped doing things worthy of gossiping about and they’d extended their imagination for making up stories about us. So they went into our past.”
My breathing was getting faster, but I continued to plod on. “None of us had awesome childhoods. Actually, I had the most normal one, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exploit it. They went into my past, to people who had known me and started posting stories about my strained relationship with my father and my absentee mother before she’d died. But no one cared that me and my father actually had a pretty great relationship at that time.
“Then they did it to Will, whose parents had both died when he was a child and he was raised in a strict family by his aunt and uncle. Jake came next, they went after the fact that he’d been born into a really poor family in Liverpool with six children and a single mother. Seth was the hardest out of all of us, because no one had known his last name was Vaughn before that. They found his father’s death records, police records for his step-father and things that had happened in all the states he’d lived in, they found out about juvie and his mother.
“I don’t even want to talk about it!” I exclaimed suddenly. “Those are our lives. And they weren’t good times, and people felt it was fun to manipulate our pasts so everyone knew all of our deepest, dirtiest secrets. Hell, they did a report about my first boyfriend! We made a choice to keep our lives away from the public, we gave ourselves over to being picked apart, followed and letting everything we did get criticized in our present lives, but we were supposed to have some resemblance of having lives before this. We chose to tell each other, not the world. And I refuse to talk about their pasts any more than what I’ve said, it’s not fair to any of us.”
At my rant, I successfully silenced Peter for a moment, and he was once again staring at me with those concerned eyes. “But that’s what started causing cracks in all of your relationships, wasn’t it?”
“It would have happened to anyone had they been going through the same thing,” I returned. “All the sudden we didn’t trust each other the same way we always had before. We were stressed and suspicious of everything going around us, we started fighting more than we ever had before. It put strains on us like never before, and I could practically feel everything crumbling over that tour.
“When that tour finished, we just weren’t the band we used to be. That was always my favorite part about The Spares, we worked as a cohesive unit, we would switch instruments, we could all write music, we all sang. But all the sudden it was like we were working against each other.
“Even this show was an example,” I gave a bitter laugh. “We were supposed to do one show with you as a band as we’d done a few times before. But we couldn’t even do it together, so we all did it separately. And at that time we were doing a tribute album to The Beatles we’d been asked to do, we were recording all the songs for Rubber Soul at live locations for the anniversary of that album. So we all came on different weeks and played a show with your studio band. Will did You Won’t See Me, Jake did Think For Yourself, Seth did Run For Your Life and I did I’m Looking Through You. That was the one album we never finished as a band, the only track we never did was In My Life.”
“Was it all bad at that time?” Peter asked.
I gave a little shrug. “Not all the time,” I disclosed, “Sometimes we felt like the band we used to be. I had moved in with Seth the year before, and sometimes we were perfect. Fuck, if we were happy we were Paul and Linda, but if we were mad? We gave Sid and Nancy a good run for their money. Someone once told me they liked watching me and Seth, because it was like two trains crashing head first. We were toxic to each other.
“And then with the band, we’d have really good days, but I can still remember being in the studio once and we just got into one of the biggest fights we’d ever had. We were just being vicious to each other, and we screamed and fought for hours in there until we all left. What didn’t help that when we were going into making our fourth studio album, Maureen had decided she wanted to make a documentary of us. So we had cameras following us around, catching all the crap that was going on.
“The thing about that album was that we still were writing together, even if we were being so cruel to one another, we were still working together.”
When I paused, Peter informed me, “That album is my favorite.”
“Really?” I responded, though I couldn’t feel interested. I felt like I was suffocating. It was just getting worse and worse.
“It is. Question Everything was a brilliant album, The Spares really came back with a garage rock sound. It was abrasive and angry, daring people to challenge what they were saying. And through it all there was a storyline. Four kids trying desperately to stay together in a world falling into hatred and cruelty. It was homage to humans trying to stay pure and good, but being dragged apart and down into a corrupt society.”
I pulled in a shaky breath, forcing a grin. “You might want to start writing album reviews.”
“Did it feel like the band was falling apart?”
“I… it did,” I finally decided on, the words were once again becoming hard to find. “It felt like we were all falling apart by the time the last tour had ended, but a part of – a huge part never thought we’d actually break up.”
Peter nodded sadly at the words. “And after the album and the documentary was done…?”
“We did what we always did,” I laughed again, the sound just as horridly cynical as before, “We started off on another endless tour. I’d thought it would be a good idea for us all to do a club tour again, just get a van, but we were told we had to do another stadium one.”
“We actually have a video from that first show,” Peter announced.
Almost immediately with his words, the screen behind him materialized into a stage. A very plain stage, nothing but black and a band standing in the middle, the four bodies reflected in a single flood light behind them. Had I had the forethought, I would have averted my eyes; it would have been less painful. But as it was, I found them glued to the screen, along with everyone else’s.
I remembered it was the encore as I watched, but very soon I felt myself sinking into the time instead of watching it.
There was this pall over us. The stadium was filled with seventy thousand people screaming, but it didn’t touch me, and I didn’t think it touched anyone else.
My stomach felt like it might just drop out from me, and it wasn’t from nerves. There were no nerves, not anymore, not for the band or the audience. It was sinking with the desolation with hopelessness and depression.
Glancing around me, I found the same expressions on all their faces. Will’s shoulders were hunched over the drums, Jake was staring down at the ground and Seth was staring out at the crowd like he was watching paint dry, the Stratocaster hooked over his shoulder. I didn’t even want to know what I looked like. And from the emotions radiating off of them, I knew they were feeling the same as I was, why couldn’t the audience feel it?
Why couldn’t they see it?
The separation was obvious between us, how did they not know? Sure we always had at least four microphone stands on stage when we started a show, we all needed to sing. By the encore, though, we used to all sing at the same mic, well, except Will who was at the drums. But now we were all carefully distanced, singled out on our own stands on the stage.
Finally Will counted us off, and I started to play the guitar I had for this song as he started the bass drum and I pressed down on the pedal, drawing out a sound close to a banjo that I had particularly for this song.
Seth gripped his microphone is hand while Jake and I stepped forward into our, and we all started on the vocals as one. “Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise. Run in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies.”
But it was Seth and I who took up the lead vocals on the chorus while Jake and Will took the background, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they were bitter because of it. I never used to wonder before. Things were different. “And if you don’t love me now. You will never love me again. I can still hear you saying. You would never break the chain (Never break the chain).”
Still after a repeat of the chorus, we were all back together again. “Listen to the wind blow down comes the night. Running in the shadows, damn you love, damn your lies. Break the silence, damn the dark, damn the light.”
When the chorus came back and Seth and I took over, I couldn’t help but look straight at him as we sang, and he stared straight back at me. The lyrics taking hold. I felt like pleading the words to him, but my voice didn’t listen and my actions didn’t follow my emotions. I just stared back as we challenged each other.
After we got through to Seth’s guitar solo, we all fell back into our microphones. “Chain keep us together (Running in the shadows). Chain keep us together (Running in the shadows)…”
As we repeated the lyrics, switching our gazes between the four of us and the crowd, all of the sudden it sounded like a plea. Begging for that chain to keep us together, but it was a hollow one.
And when the song finished, we left our instruments and without touching, departed stage left.
When the video ended, there were tears pricking my eyes and my throat felt tight, not only from tears but from the urge to vomit, all those emotions that had plagued me at that time coming back to haunt me now.
It wasn’t hard to remember what it felt like to barely survive that band.
“That was the last song we ever played together,” I announced, being the first one to talk. “Right after I went to the hotel we were staying in, packed up and went to Prague where a really close friend of mine was doing a tour and joined them for two weeks. I don’t know what the rest of them did.
“I was ordered to come back after those two weeks, Maureen Jones had cancelled our tour and we were supposed to meet at UAE.”
Even as I talked about the meeting at UAE, I was thinking of something completely different.
Feeling dread in my stomach, I unlocked the door, pulling my suitcase behind me.
I wasn’t sure what was going to meet me, with everything that had happened I had no idea what would be in there when I got into our apartment. Would he have that look in his eyes? Would he just look through me? Would he be so angry he punched a wall? Would we fight to the point of no return yet again? Would even be here or was he staying in a motel again?
But what I hadn’t expected was what met me. The apartment had been a mess when we’d left, we’d been so caught up in fighting and writing, that it had become nothing but papers, dirty plates, empty bottles, take out containers and music piling up on the ground to the point we’d almost looked like hoarders.
Now? It was almost clean, there were a few papers on the ground, but it was mostly clear. However it hadn’t been just organized, half of the records on the walls were missing and the same with the books.
My breathing was coming out in short gasps as I left my suitcase on the ground in the doorway, stepping into it numbly. When something caught my eye, I moved forward to the kitchen counter. All the papers we’d been writing on had been crumpled and tossed about, but this one sitting on the granite was smooth and perfect.
Picking it up in trembling hands, I read the words scrawled boldly across it. “I love you. I love you.”
Covering my mouth as my breathing became more ragged and louder, I slid to the ground slowly with wide eyes, collapsing with my back against the counters. It was only then that a tear slipped out.
Clenching my jaw at the emotions that were coming out, I looked flatly at Peter. “It was that day we all met and terminated the contracts for the band. Well, not all of us. Seth sent a lawyer, but Maureen, Jake and Will were there.”
“What are they all doing now?”
“You probably know better than me,” I snapped, anger seemed better to show than the sadness. “I think Seth is supposed to be in Russia composing classical music, Will is doing a solo thing at a studio down in California and Jake I think is playing the drums for some band in Philadelphia.”
“Have you seen any of the other members?” Peter pestered.
I shook my head. “Only in magazines, but I don’t read those. Last time I saw Seth was at the last concert we played, and the last time I saw the other boys was at UAE.”
In what was probably another attempt at making me feel better, Peter smiled, but I was way too far gone for that to help at all. I was feeling numb again, feeling as if I could break at any moment. “Have you spoken to any of them?”
“About two years ago William called me asking for advice on the album, I gave it to him. It was a very short conversation.”
He continued to stare at me, making me feel obligated to add something. “People were devastated when the band broke up, but they don’t even grasp the worse part. We had chosen each other as a family, as friends and it was all taken away from us. We’d already left everyone else we’d ever had for this, and then we had no one.”
“What would you say to the people who blame you and Seth for the band breaking up?”
I pressed my lips together for a moment before answering him. “They attribute The Spares breaking up because Seth and I broke up, what they don’t understand was that we broke up because The Spares did.”
Apparently he couldn’t resist the next question, “Any chance of a reunion?”
With a resentful smile I shook my head. “No chance in fucking hell. We were always the band on the run, and now no one’s ever going to catch us.”
“Alright,” Peter murmured before looking back at the cameras, the blinding smile back. “Well, there you have it, an exclusive on the biggest band of the decade right from the horse’s mouth. After this break, we’ll be back with Keely to talk about the past four years and what’s happened with her after The Spares.”
When the cameras turned off for a moment, he looked back at me with a stern face, but I could see amusement there. However it didn’t affect me, I was far away from him. “You know you’re not supposed to swear on live television.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I mumbled, hurriedly ripping off the microphone attached to my shirt and throwing it down onto the armchair.
With every step I took my knees were starting to feel weaker as I sunk lower and lower into what I’d been fighting for so long. I hadn’t wanted to do this. I hadn’t wanted to think about that time, because I’d known that was going to happen.
Tears were falling down my face before I even got to the bathroom, and I rubbed the hastily away in hopes that no one would see them, but they just kept coming. Finally getting to the washroom, I slammed it behind me and finally let out the full body sob I’d been holding in, my body raking with the pressure as I dropped my head against the door.
- I hope I did justice to this and I really hope it wasn't boring for you guys to read.