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Chapter Two
To say that playing music at live shows was different from playing music in the studio was like saying a wild tiger was different from a stuffed one or that a man with a real gun was different from a child with a water pistol. The pieces were the same—band, drums, music, listeners—but the result was impossibly different.
In the studio, everything was controlled.
The music could be stopped, taken back, perfected. You could tweak bits and pieces on the computer, you could finesse and change, and you never worried too much about the amount of sweat accumulating on your brow because it wasn’t like anyone was taking pictures of you. Music there felt like an art or math project, something that could be broken down into notes and melodies and strings.
Live music, however, wasalive.There was no fixing a mistake, no going back, no stopping to tell the bassist he was rushing into the bridge. Live music moved like an animal, twisting through the crowd, driven by the musicians but rarely owned by them. The crowd added to the noise, their shouts and cell phone sounds and glasses clinking together or shattering on the ground. It was different every time because living things are never the same twice.
Plenty of musicians preferred it this way. They liked riding atop the creature that was a live show, being bucked and thrown and sweating and trying to survive it all. Val was one of those musicians. When he played live, he didn’t look like a musician playing a song; he looked like a wild thing in its habitat. He commanded the eye not with his sound or his look or his voice but with his entire being.
Remy did not.
There was a time when the high of live shows pulled him along, but now, that high came with the frustration of being unable to correct mistakes, the memories of Val at his worst, the reminder of how the label had snuffed them out like they were stompable insects. He and Val would kiss the pads of their middle three fingers then wave to the crowd—a Quiet Coyote tradition—and then the venue would close, the people would leave, the stuff would need to be loaded up, and they’d return to the hotel or motel or friend-of-a-friend’s couch, struck by how silent the world was compared to how loud it’d been just hours before. And they’d make five hundred dollars or so for it all.
The irony that Remy was bemoaning his way to this particular live show, which he would attend bearing the news that he’d just signed on to do two months’ worth of live shows with a pop star, was not lost on him. He finished in the studio early, killed time at a coffee shop on Abbot Kinney for an hour, then made his way over to the venue—a place called SALT (in all caps—alwaysin all caps, or the owner got pissed). He cut around to the back, where the van was parked. Val had a cigarette propped in his mouth and was diligently unloading equipment with the bassist.
Val tilted his head up in greeting as Remy approached. Unloading was one of the few times of day when his brother was all business, and Remy knew better than to meddle in it with conversations or hellos or news that he’d be leaving town for six weeks. He ducked into the front seat of the van, where he found Celeste on her laptop.
“Is merch already out?” he asked.
“It’s in the dressing room. We got here early. Val wanted to make sure the lights were right.”
“He what?”
Celeste looked up at him. “Something about the house lights flashing? Or…I don’t know. The lights were wrong.” She smiled, and there was a hint of humor in it—of quiet acknowledgment that sometimes what was Very Wrong to Val wasn’t necessarily what someone else might consider Very Wrong.
Remy shrugged. “It’s hard to play with lights distracting you,” he said.
Celeste’s face fell a little, and Remy felt a twinge of remorse—she wasn’t wrong for her exasperation, after all. Val was the sort that would suddenly decide the fifteen-minute sound check wasn’t good enough and spend another thirty saying, “Yeah, yeah, YEAH,” into the mic at varying pitches, pushing dials and running back and forth across the stage, all of which made no discernible difference. Rather than being the problem child, though, Val was usually viewed as some sort of genius, a delicate and exotic plant that needed just the right conditions to grow, and what the hell is wrong with you that you can’t encourage and understand that?
But that didn’t mean that, sometimes, you couldn’t roll your eyes at him or at leastwantto roll your eyes at him. Remy did—often, actually. Celeste did too. But doing so together? That still felt like a betrayal, even after all this time—a betrayal Remy might have overlooked had he not just agreed to leave his brother for six weeks without warning.
Remy made his way through the loading dock and into the backstage maze. SALT smelled like old wood and ocean water and spilled beer, and it was excellent. The place made you want to create something, or do something, or run away from home. It wasn’t the nicest club in LA, obviously. It wasn’t even a nice club, period. But Remy and Val had been playing here since before Celeste, before they bought the carriage house, before even Remy had accepted the fact they weren’t likely to grace the Billboard charts again anytime soon. SALT was home base in the same way that Val was home base, which made it all the more worrisome that they were playing here less and less these days. He couldn’t blame the club—after all, Quiet Coyote hadn’t created any new music in two years. How long could you play the same set, tossing in a cover now and again, before people got bored of it?
Remy walked down to the dressing room—the small one, since SALT never wanted to open the large, fancy one for them, opting to save it for special occasions like Remy’s mother saved her wedding china. The small one had a few fat chairs with worn leather, each more comfortable than the last. Fluorescent lights, a table, an abstract mural that had been signed by various musicians over the years, and a cabinet which was, as Remy always requested, stocked only with water. Alcohol had never really been Val’s vice, but the news that Remy was going to leave for six weeks with someone like Vivi Swan…well. It was the sort of thing that might set him off.
Remy cracked open a bottle of water and sat back, playing with his phone until Val appeared, then the keyboardist and bassist, and finally Celeste, who was still pecking at her laptop even as she walked.
“Lights fixed?” Remy asked Val.
“Yeah. They switched to those ones that flicker. I can’t stand those. I changed them all back,” Val said, sounding annoyed. He slumped back in another chair and kicked his feet up on the table.
“I could make a million dollars teaching girls how to get out of cars in short dresses. You know they’re going to take crotch pictures, honey. It’s not fair, but you know they’ll do it, soput your purse over your vag,” Celeste said under her breath, though the room was quiet enough that she might have shouted it.
“Andthengo into the market selling specialty crotch-blocking purses,” Val suggested.
“Brilliant,” Celeste said and shut her laptop. “Though, honestly, I should go back to running the sorts of sites that cover cellulite and sex tapes. Maybe the ‘celebs without makeup’ stuff. That’s where the money is.”
“People are idiots,” Val responded, shaking his head.
“Yeah, well, money from idiots spends the same, especially multiplied by five. We could get a new TV if I did an article on Tuesday Rivers’s butt pads,” Celeste said, sighing. Celeste had worked out early on that the key to success wasn’t pumping up a single website’s reputation but rather running multiple websites at once, linking them to one another, sharing information across the void. She had one that was more vulgar than the others, one that focused on teen audiences, one that focused on musicians, another on actors, another on female starlets. They were all run under different names, so when Celeste shared information across the lot, it looked like a story was blowing up—even if it was truly something small and inconsequential.
It was pretty damn genius.
“Well, good news for Tuesday Rivers’s butt pads, then—I can cover the TV,” Remy broke in casually. “I took a gig today.”
“New studio? Pass me a water,” Val said as Celeste leaned back in her chair absentmindedly.
