Darrin could figure her out. He changed the settings, and they listened again. Marcella threw a glance Dash’s way. They both nodded.
“That works,” Dash said.
“Yep,” Marcella agreed. “That sounds great.”
Marcella had been in this business just about long enough to still have a shadow of a dream of signing a huge recording contract and making it big, moving to LA and buying a funky house in Laurel Canyon, living the good life. But in reality, that dream had been all but an impossibility for almost as long as she’d been chasing it.
Now the major recording companies were all sucked up into massive media conglomerates, and nobody took risks anymore on new sounds. The people who got those massive recording contracts were either already stars or had been created as if in a lab to fit the mold of what was already popular. And even those people weren’t earning like they would have in the old days. iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify had seen to that.
Everybody else did what they could to cobble together a living from live performances, social media, and indie record sales. iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, whatever, it was always a scramble, and the chance some Sony exec would be sitting in the shadows with a contract and a pen was nil. When they offered contracts these days, it was to the artists with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and followers.
Marcella Lewis and The Lowdowners had almost sixty thousand subscribers to their YouTube channel, and that had taken years to build up. A few of their videos had gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of views, but that didn’t happen often enough to translate into real money.
Still, with regular live gigs, steady sales of music and merch on their website, the tiny trickle of royalties they got from streaming services, and ad revenue from YouTube, they did okay.
Everything they made was split evenly six ways, after paying for things like sound engineering and CD production, their manager/booking agent’s cut, gas for the bus, food and lodging on the road, and every other expense a touring band incurred.
They made enough to keep roofs over their heads, food in their mouths, and their gear in good repair, but every day was a scramble, a constant uphill fight, in an industry that had taken a massive hit and was still changing constantly as it tried to figure out how it worked now. ‘Okay’ was relative.
If not for the support of her family, Marcella wouldn’t be able to keep doing this gig. If she had to pay for child care, that right there would knock her out of the game.
But she had a decent apartment, a great kid, family close who loved her and went out of their way to hold her and Ajax up.
And she fuckinglovedthis job. Mansions and infinity pools, palm trees and beaches, lunches on Rodeo with David Geffen and dinners with Keanu Reeves or Jesse Williams—that dream was dead. But she was still living her dream at its core. She made music. It was the only thing she’d ever wanted to do with her life, and she was doing it.
Darrin flipped some other switches and the music came through the speakers rather than the headphones they were all wearing. Dash and Marcella pushed theirs down to hook around their necks and listened.
The song was called ‘One Last Lonely Night,’ and like almost all their original pieces, Dash and Marcella had written it together. Marcella was the lyricist of the group; Dash had a preternatural sense for the music in her words.
The Lowdowners was really Dash’s band. He’d been the front man since they were a trio of high school band geeks playing in his folks’ garage in the Nineties. Back then they’d played grunge, because everybody played grunge. But in college, Dash had picked up an appreciation for jazz and blues, and he and Joe Strano, their keyboardist and the other remaining member of that high school trio who was still in the band, had retooled The Lowdowners’ concept. For a few years, they were a band-for-hire with five members, covering standards for the bar mitzvah-and-wedding set.
Marcella had come in twenty years ago, answering a Craigslist ad for a female vocalist. They’d hired her on the spot, after she’d sung two songs, one a cover of ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me,’ and the other an original of her own.
Her sound jelled perfectly with Dash’s, and they’d discovered early on that their writing sensibilities jelled just as well. They had great chemistry on stage, too, turning all those broken-heart letters that were the heart and soul of blues into dramas of real love lost, played out right there on stage.
Their chemistry was fucking great almost all the way around, actually. They’d tried once to make that something more, and had been together as a couple for about six months, but that was one way they didn’t jell. Dash respected her as an artist and an equal, until he also thought of her as a lover. Then he got what he thought of as protective and what Marcella considered pushy. They started squabbling and getting hurt feelings, and it warped their chemistry in the band, too.
They were better as friends and collaborators. Though yeah, every now and then, when they both felt the need, usually when they were both a little drunk, they still hooked up. Sometimes the dick in the hand was better than the dicks in the bush. Or whatever.
“I think that’s your single,” Darrin said as ‘Lonely Night’ faded out. “Have you been playing it live?”
“A few times,” Dash answered. “When the crowd is vibing right.”
With the exceptions of any actual fans of the band who might be in attendance, most people at bars wanted to hear music they knew. They wanted to sing along. They wanted to drunkenly squealI love this song!and bounce out to the dance floor.
In a carefully curated set list full of blues, nightclub-style jazz, and a few old-school rock & roll classics, The Lowdowners splashed in their original stuff like hot sauce, just enough to catch the interest of listeners without overwhelming them with the unfamiliar.
On a night with a difficult crowd, the original stuff was the first to get cut. Playing music a scrappy audience didn’t want to hear was a sure way to get a beer bottle hurled at your head.
“What’s the reception been like?” Darrin asked.
“Good,” Marcella answered. A glance at Dash showed him nodding.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Real good, I’d say. They shut up and listen.”
Darrin turned the seat of his chair and leaned back, lacing his hands on the back of his head. “Then I’m gonna suggest something new. How about we do a real video for this one.”
Dash frowned. “What do you mean?”