“Two weeks,” Jimmy said. “We’d only need two songs. We’d only need to work up two songs.”
“And a name,” Frank said. He was a little dizzy in the white room. “A band needs a name.”
• • •
They had three names, in the first three weeks. They played the Fall Festival in the gym as the Rangemen, doing two Rolling Stones songs, “Lady Jane” and “Mother’s Little Helper.” Frank did in fact play bass, sitting against a high stool in his leg cast, Jimmy played lead guiitar, Mason sang (along with Jimmy) and played rhythm guitar, and Craig played drums. At rehearsal the night before the festival, Craig spray-painted the head of his bass drum cherry red and glued half a cup of sparkles to it. Their first performance came between the three Griffin sisters, who lip-synched “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” and the Four Sticks, a coed baton team. The Rangemen were a little raw, and they knew it. In fact, they were terrible, and they knew it. No two elements of their playing coincided correctly. Both their numbers sounded purposely discordant, as if in some thematic link with the lyrics, drug songs, and happy to be here. People in the gym milled about nervously during the eight minutes of punishing music, some stopped short by the sparkles drummed loose from Craig Ralston’s drum kit, flecks that floated up in the little thermals present in the old wooden room.
But what stayed for the four boys—every one of them sweating to catch up to melodies, chords that raced ahead, every one of them certain of at least partial humiliation in this, the first real independent venture of their lives—was that from the first chords of Jimmy Brand’s Fender and then the raucous drumbeat and visceral bass guitar under Frank Gunderson’s fingers, twenty, maybe thirty of their schoolmates, not just girls, came up to the plywood stage and stood in a crescent around the one AudioVox speaker, and these kids leaned there and took it. And when the Rangemen finished their set with the last three descending notes of “Mother’s Little Helper,” these twenty kids clapped and stayed after the applause and looked at the band, and a couple of them came up and helped Craig move his flaking drums. Three or four kids lingered at the side of the stage when Jimmy and Mason and Frank came down, and there was something there that had not existed nine minutes before, and now it was different. They’d gone up there four odd ducks in the early days of their senior year in high school, and they came down as a band. They didn’t need to say it or clap hands or even go oh wow; it had happened, and though they had been so ruthlessly terrible, they were a band. They would get better. They were a band.
It was a great night, a night that Jimmy Brand put in a book, assigning the euphoria and confidence the four of them felt to other young people, kids at a party. He’d disguised it. But his feeling always had been that it was a great night, one of the top ten for him. The other great nights were mostly in New York, with Daniel, small victories that they shared. He’d been a writer, he realized early in his career, because he lived for loveliness and intensity but only if he could know about them, be aware, have the distance and the words that would make them ring and ring in him. He’d been self-conscious as a kid, and he knew that night that something had happened for them all that was beyond the ordinary, and at seventeen he loved the knowing.
Without really plotting it or planning, they started rehearsing every afternoon in Jimmy Brand’s garage. Craig’s drums were already there, and Mason lived three houses down. After football practice, Craig would pick up Frank, who would be in a full leg cast until December, and they’d pull into the Brands’ driveway. The garage door was open, and Jimmy and Mason were in there tuning up. They learned their instruments a song at a time. Craig had taken drum lessons and had the basics, and Mason had had some guitar, but it was uphill for everyone. They’d pick a song and learn it line by line, so that the neighbors that year got used to hearing random electric noises suddenly galvanize into ten or fifteen seconds of “Help Me, Rhonda,” or “I Get Around.” Leaves from the giant poplars and cottonwoods fell across the mouth of the open garage and scattered red and yellow as if urged by the music.