Let’s keep on going with the music talk straight through to the weekend. Here’s the first of two stories alluded to near the beginning of the Definitive Top Ten. Both feature the former band Stage, of my hometown, Dix Hills. But really, naturally, each is about a girl.
It was right before my junior year of high school. My band geekiness was reaching its apex. Our band director had called us in for a week of rehearsals before the start of school. Budget cuts, possibly, and/or and a particularly bad experience (for the bus driver) my freshman year at band camp, where things do happen, had left us for the second straight year a marching band in only the strictest sense of the word. We would not go to band camp to learn formations for halftime at football games, we would only and literally march, and stop, and occasionally turn, in a couple of parades all year. But we needed to learn the music, especially the freshmen, and we let them have their baptism by fire before the rigors of school set in.
I’ll never, ever, forget when one of the freshman clarinet players strolled in. Temple-achingly beautiful, even for my scattered teenage taste. Long, straight brown hair, hazel eyes, probably. Slightly pale. Didn’t know her name, didn’t know anyone who knew her name. I was in no position to go talk to her, so it had ended before it began.
Eventually our band director passed out a phone list, for our parents, and not for the last time in this story, my head caved in on itself before then exploding. A name I saw rang a bell from all the way back in elementary school. We were in the fifth grade: A friend of ours who played clarinet, and was very good at it, was conspicuously absent from lunch. I soon heard that it was because he was being “challenged” to the nerdiest kind of duel. His chair, his seeding in the band, was put into question by a little third grader who happened to be very good at the clarinet. The results of the challenge are now lost to history, except to those two and maybe the conductor, but the girl who competed with my friend was the very girl whose swagger would catch all the upperclassmen off guard so many years later.
Our band followed the same football game protocol for my junior and senior years. Instead of marching on the field during halftime, our band played fight songs from a corner of the stands during the game. But we also got to have a little break, toward the end of halftime and into the third quarter. And it was during one of these breaks that this girl who played the clarinet rushed over to meet a friend of hers, a guy. I didn’t know her at all, really, and sure as hell didn’t know him. But he looked a little bit older, and that they were probably going out (doing nothing unseemly) threw me off the scent pretty much for good. But I did overhear some of the guys in the band talking, who’d heard of this guy, that he was in a band too, a rock band, and that they had already been signed to Madonna’s label. I couldn’t have felt any smaller than I did right then. But it was fair enough, I wasn’t alone in how I felt, and the crush eventually faded as most do. I graduated, got a girlfriend, and that brings us right to the summer of 2002.
I can’t recall how I got tickets to this show: It was probably announced on the radio, when I listened to it, when I drove a car to work, when I commuted like a sensible human being for a reasonable amount of time. On one of these twenty-minute drives between home and the company where I was making a good little summer living as a twenty-year old, I heard advertised a show at this venue by the railroad tracks in Farmingdale called the Downtown. Playing the show: Tonic, who provided three or four integral songs for me and the girlfriend (Godiva still, then), and that local band Stage, who I’d met at Musicfest when I was a freshman myself. I went away to school and fell out of touch with whatever they’d been up to, so I was excited to get a chance to see them, and with Tonic!
Well, not even joking, Tonic put on a hell of a show. That night is still one of the top five or six shows I’ve been to, both bills included, considering how enjoyable it was, for every reason. It was a small venue for a good, fun band who recently had been very popular. I was ten feet from the stage, five from the speaker overhead, drinking underage, girl on my arm, money in my pocket. Life was all right. Incidentally, that night was the first time I heard that #9 song on my countdown, “Live Happy, Live With Anorexia.” Stage came out to it: The lead guitarist started it and the other three joined in one by one, building it up to its pinnacle. But by that point, my jaw was already on the floor – for when Stage were announced, they were described as having an album upcoming on Maverick Records. Madonna’s label. And it was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of that band, Ryan Star, who was dating the girl who had once challenged my friend to a duel of clarinets.