Rock On (8 page)

“Hey, quit working so hard and come down to the conference room and say hello.”

To which, in fairness to myself, I have the corporate savvy
not
to reply, “Oh, I'm just checking out my friend Ben's Web site that he built for his band and trying to figure out if there's a guest-book thing you can sign on here.” Instead, I remember that success in a corporate environment means always appearing busy, confident, and outgoing. I remember how my friend Josh recently busted me — told me that I could really no longer fall back on the shy loser shtick that got me through my twenties when it seems I'm doing fine for myself in my thirties. And you know that sort of gay little voice in your head that goes, “Yeah . . . he's right! I'm going to go down to the conference room and introduce myself to Duran Duran in front of my bosses, because this ‘quiet guy isolated in his office and not taking any risks' thing is going to stop!” If you don't have that voice in your head, just try to remember the voice that convinced you that you should try dancing drunk at a wedding or office party. I hear that voice and I get up out of my chair with my goony, doggone-it-I'm-going-to-choose-life confidence.

I walk down to the conference room in my sensible gray sweater, black slacks, and black leather Prada shoes. Everybody is in the conference room already; Ms. Chocolate Chip is looking right at me clearly wondering if I've got the balls to walk through the door, so I ignore her as I step in. Suburban Classic Rock Guy is there. Aging Robert Wagner Character From Sales is there. A smattering of vice presidents is in attendance. A gaggle of lesser-paid-and-ironically-more-qualified-than-everyone-in-the-room assistants and product managers stand around looking genuinely happy and effortlessly cooler than everyone in middle and upper management. I've got that burning sensation on the back of my neck that comes from making a late entrance to a work thing like this. And apparently
it's the late entrance that comes with the misunderstanding that maybe I'm the guy the band is waiting to meet? I ask because I'm deeply confused when, for no reason that I can discern, Simon LeBon takes the initiative to get up from his seat at the conference table and extend his hand to me, which makes some small gland somewhere inside of me shoot into a spasm resulting in a burning, red-hot shot of adrenaline speeding straight into my bloodstream, which triggers a warning in my head to keep it together and not say something stupid. And so when we shake hands, I just stick to the first very basic thing that pops into my head and say, “I'm Dan Kennedy,” evidently a little too loudly in a way that sounds surprisingly way too confident. I start to panic in my head when I hear the voice boom from my upper chest area, and see three other guys from the band turning toward me when they hear it. I do the only thing you can do, which apparently is to keep repeating a slight variation of what you just said with each new handshake until you think of a way out of this. And so the guitarist puts his hand out and I grab it and repeat, “Dan. Dan Kennedy,” in a tone that my little internal adrenal meth lab has now turned in to a weird mix of loud and happy. But it's a loud and happy that's mixed with a slightly boisterous, mildly inappropriate confidence; like that of an armed forces recruiter enjoying tempting small-town youth with discipline problems into a reservist program that yields a modest payout to barely cover textbooks and a couple semesters of tuition at the local college after enduring fifty or sixty weekends of vaguely homoerotic torture in a boot camp. I have to quickly think of a way to make sure there is no misunderstanding, especially with my boss in the room. That I'm not delusional enough to think I'm upper management or something and
that Duran Duran shouldn't think so either. So for the bassist, when I reach out and grab his hand, I switch it up and say, “Big fan. Bigfan.”
Jesus, somebody mace me. Have the compassion to put me down and get me out of this
.

The “big fan” line doesn't help reverse any of the situation at hand, since now they're kind of looking at me like, “Well, good thing this guy's a big fan. Wow, we're already off to a great start here.” And I'm thinking, “No, I mean, I'm just a fan to you. That's all I am, just another, everyday, ordinary, one of millions of ordinary fans. Not the booming voice and whatever that implies in a conference room at a record label where you're talking about a possible deal.” And then there's a fourth guy, and he's not reaching his hand out, so I make the effort since my adrenal glands have now apparently tightened into a
series
of twitches that tell my brain to shove my arm out in front of me. And in a slight variation of my last greeting, I tell him I'm a big fan of
his
. “Heybigfan. Of you.”

Somebody. Anyone. Slam 60 ccs of Klonopin and Valium into my shoulder with the hard punch of a thick needle like they do to inpatient escapees or discount inbred quarter horses
.

So, I'm locked into staring at this guy's face trying to recognize him.
Wait, which one is he? Okay, think about the “Rio” video from '82 where they're all on the yacht that's racing across the ocean. Okay, visualize it . . . the guy on the bow was Simon. I recognize the other two guys. They were sort of standing in the middle section of the yacht. Who is this guy, though? Was he maybe in the boat's galley fixing lunch or something and you couldn't see him? I mean, it's not like I was into them enough to recognize them twenty years later. Although, I did just holler over and over again that I am a big fan. Okay, this is not the time to figure it out, let go of the guy's hand, it's been twenty
seconds or something
. Soon chairs are shuffled, everyone who isn't upper level brass is asked to leave. The meeting is getting under way, and I recede and fade, walking backward out of the room with a pleasant and vacant look frozen on my face, convinced that the line between today's anxiety attack and tomorrow's stroke or unemployed cross-country spree of petty theft committed in a blackout is thinner than ever now that I'm working in an office full time. On my way down the hall, a product manager walks by having just exited the same meeting.

“I can't believe I got to meet Simon LeBon. I got a picture with him. Did you see that,” he asks.

“Yeah. Hey, who was the guy with short black hair sitting to the left?”

“I don't know, I think he's their manager. Or maybe their road manager, I'm not sure.”

All I can think is:
Well, whoever he is, he knows he's got a big fan
.

How can anyone not like this band, the Donnas? Or maybe more accurately: how can one thirty-five-year-old straight white man receding into the melancholy of middle age not like a band of cute girls, ten years younger than he is, playing a solid stadium-rock song about having sex in a car with a faceless male protagonist? Deadly combination, if you ask me. The only combo that might be slightly more powerful would be the same band of girls playing power ballads about sexual loopholes that don't technically constitute cheating on one's wife or high-energy anthems that detail ways to avoid getting gouged on taxes this year. Anyway, decent band; paid major dues in the first portion of their career on a small independent label; and they've now taken the jump to a major label, having signed with Atlantic.

They've got the requisite indy guitars-up-front sound with a mild hint of indie label post-punk vibe, which will be briskly and freshly scrubbed off of them quicker than you can say “Budweiser wants to pay you to be in a commercial.” They're good looking, they play guitar songs in 4/4 time that are loud
and have this kind of tongue-in-cheek take on lyrics and maybe a certain nod to seventies stadium rock with the requisite twenty-something hipster wink of irony. I wonder, though, is there anything sincere about hipster irony? Can you even imagine Joey Ramone ever standing on a stage and thinking, “Man, this is hilarious — I'm being totally ironic; my hair is hanging over my face, I'm super tall, and I'm singing about some place called Rock and Roll High School? Get it? Me? In High School?” Say what you will about what became of punk or seventies stadium rock, but my hat is off to the lack of irony. I applaud the fact that Kiss never came off stage saying, “How classic was that? I was all, ‘Alright, New York, do you people want to rock and roll all night?' and then I was all, ‘I can't hear you!' and they yelled even louder! I think they thought I was serious!”

Anyway, here in the studio up on the twenty-eighth floor with the Donnas, we're waiting for a couple of other people I work with to show up. The band's product manager arrives with some big wig from radio promotions or New Media or something. We're going to be recording thirty-second public service announcements about how kids shouldn't bring guns to school — which kind of seems like a given, but whatever. These little announcements will feature the band saying something to the extent of, “Hi, we're the Donnas, if you hear about something or see something out of the ordinary” — namely, your peers toting assault rifles —
and we're guessing that would strike you as out of the ordinary
— “let a teacher or your principal know. Check out our new album,
Spend the Night
! at a record store near you!” or something along those lines, and the world will be a better place. They're really cool about it; their attitude is pretty much, “If it stops one kid from
doing something horrible, then it's worth it” type of thing. And I guess the label's stance is more like, “If one person, plus five and a half million other people, hear this public service announcement, possibly prevent a tragedy, but more important, head to retail to buy your album, then it's worth it. . . .”

The in-house studio is basically two little rooms hidden behind a sort of James Bond blue vault door, and the door just looks like a part of the long, high-tech, space-age hallway here on floor twenty-eight until you realize there's a little handle tucked away that turns part of the wall into a door. It's crammed with racks of preamps, boards, monitors, and about seventy-five other high-tech flashing, blinking, slim, and impressive things that I have no idea how the engineer operates.
How much did this place cost
? is my first thought. The studio is used mostly for recording things that it seems you could just record on your laptop — like these public service announcements we're doing today, or what they call “drops.” Drops are when you get an artist to say, “Hi, this is
ARTIST NAME
and when I'm in
CITY
, the only radio station I listen to is
NAME OF STATION THAT LABEL HAS PERSUADED TO PLAY RECORD REGULARLY
.”

I'm standing in the first room of the studio, next to a leather designer couch that exceeds my station in life and a mixing console manned by today's engineer. I hand each Donna the little scripts I wrote; there are a few different versions of each one. I'm a little nervous about the fact that they're so attractive, although — and I'm sure unveiling the following ruse isn't breaking news, but: no star looks quite as gorgeous or handsome in real life as the five or six-figure photographer's version of what they look like. The first time I saw Jewel at the office it took me ten minutes to recognize her even with
four huge posters of her new album cover on the wall of the hallway we were both walking down. I was shuffling down the hall that day thinking, “Who's this attractive blonde woman walking toward me? Think. She . . . looks . . . very . . . familiar, but I can't quite . . . Connie, maybe? From accounts payable? Yes! That's her. That's who does the expense checks! Wait . . . is it?” And I kind of nodded hello as we passed in the hall and as soon as I was ten yards past my brain made a positive ID and I was thinking, “Wait just a minute. That was Jewel. But with pores. And a normal, human-sized waist.” Enough time, money, lighting, film, and Photoshop airbrushing, and you can make America fall in love with the oddly tiny, slightly hooked little toe on my left foot. Yep, give me the standard budget of one to three hundred grand for a shoot with the right photographer, stylist, and art director, and I'll show you an unsightly little toe that gets e-mailed marriage proposals and has legions of gushing fans bringing that photo to plastic surgeons and hair stylists, saying, “I want to look like this.” Still, the Donnas are very attractive. I've walked into the studio from the control room to hand them their scripts, and am hoping I've written them in a fashion that gets across the sober tone of discouraging teens from bringing fully automatic firearms to school, while at the same time still managing to capture the playful, rockin' tone of the band and their song, “Take Me to the Back Seat.” That's the song that will be playing in the background while members of the bands are telling the teens not to bring guns to school.

“So, do you like your job?” one of them asks me.

“Yeah . . . you know. Whatever. I guess it's pretty cool as far as jobs go. Man. Pretty, you know, chill.”

When I hear it come out of my mouth, it sounds like a tape
of an undercover cop trying to convince downtown perps that he's not a square. Or one of those cheesy modern dads trying to get his daughters to think he's cool so they'll admit to drinking beer on the weekends and then he can lecture them and insist that if they're going to drink, they do it at home.