Three Chords and a Fog Machine

My mother’s dreams of me becoming a star were very different from my own.

Which brings me to the one thing that finally got me out of the costumes: the electric guitar.

I begged my mom for months, because my mom was the one you begged.

My dad was the one who bought it.

He drove me to the store on a Saturday, paid in cash, and said almost nothing on the way home, which in that house was a full paragraph. A man who could not play a single note handed his son the thing that son would spend the rest of his life pointed at.

File that away. It comes back in his handwriting.

The second I plugged it in, I knew. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t play anything but the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water.” I had found something that was entirely mine.

Suddenly I wasn’t the kid who moonwalked through Sears. I was the kid with the guitar.

And there is nothing, nothing, like blasting a power chord at full volume and feeling, just for a moment, like the noise belongs to you.

At sixteen, I was in a band.

I need you to hear that sentence the way I said it at sixteen, which was constantly, to everyone, including several people who had not asked and at least one substitute teacher who was mid-sentence about the Louisiana Purchase.

I was in a band.

We had everything a band needs. A drummer with a temper. A bassist who could not play bass but owned a bass, which at sixteen is the same thing. A garage with electrical outlets of ambiguous safety. And me, on guitar and vocals, armed with three chords and the unearned confidence of a boy who had learned all three in the same weekend.

What we did not have was a name we could agree on.

We cycled through dozens. Toxic Lullaby. The Van Goghs. Sudden Melvin. For one dark week we were Lethal Injection, until the drummer’s mother found the flyer and we all had to sit through a talk about what colleges look for.

We settled on VAGRANT. All caps.

Because nothing says rock and roll like a wandering homeless nomad loosely associated with garbage. We considered it poetic. It was also, in hindsight, an accurate forecast of the band’s finances.

Our first real gig was a battle of the bands at the VFW hall. Eight bands. A trophy. An actual stage with actual lights, run by a man named Dale who took the phrase “you break it, you bought it” as a spiritual position.

We prepared the only way we knew how, which was not musically.

We pooled our money. All of it. Every lawn-mowing and paper-route dollar the four of us had.

And we bought a fog machine.

Let me repeat that. We could play, generously, four songs. Two of them were the same song at different speeds. The first cover we ever learned all the way through was “Cum On Feel the Noize,” which we played that night, somewhere inside all that fog.

And with our one collective financial resource, we purchased atmosphere.

This is the most sixteen-year-old decision ever made and I stand by it to this day.

The plan was simple. Kick on the fog at the top of the set. Emerge from the mist like gods. Melt faces. Collect trophy.

What actually happened:

The fog machine, it turns out, has settings.

We did not read about the settings. We set it to a mode I can only describe as “naval battle” and hit go roughly ninety seconds before our set.

By the time Dale said our name, you could not see the stage. You could not see the audience. You could not, and I want to be precise here, see your own hands, which is a meaningful problem in an activity performed entirely with your hands.

I played our opening song to a wall of white, facing what I believed was the crowd.

It was not the crowd.

Midway through the second verse the fog thinned just enough to reveal that I had rotated during setup and was performing, with full rock-and-roll intensity, hair in my face, one foot up on the monitor, directly into the American flag at the back of the stage.

Somewhere out in the mist, my mother was cheering. I couldn’t see her. I could only hear her, whooping through the fog, guiding no one to safety.

Then the smoke alarm went off, Dale cut the power, and eight volunteer firefighters, who to be fair were already in the building because it was a VFW hall, evacuated our audience of thirty-five people into the parking lot.

To this day I cannot tell you how a fog machine sets off a fire alarm. It’s basically flavored humidity. But it did, and I’ve heard we were one sensor away from the sprinklers, which would at least have completed the baptism.

We did not win the battle of the bands.

We were, technically, the reason there was no battle of the bands.

Our drummer quit two weeks later over creative differences, meaning we had ideas and he differed with having to show up.

VAGRANT: one show, zero songs completed, one building evacuated, a lifetime of consequences.

Undefeated.

But I need to tell you about the ninety seconds.

Before the alarm. Before the flag. When the fog was still just fog and the amp was buzzing against my leg and three chords were ringing out into a cloud of artificial weather.

The narrator stopped.

You met him in the introduction. The broadcaster. The little man in my skull who has been calling play-by-play on every dumb thing I have ever done since roughly 1985, who runs the highlight reel at 2 a.m., who has never once said anything useful.

For ninety seconds, I couldn’t hear him.

Total static. Blessed, beautiful static.

I was sixteen years old and I had just discovered that there was a volume at which he could not be heard.

I need to be straight with you about what that did to me, because everything after it proceeds directly from it.

I did not think I love music.

I thought I have found the off switch.

And a kid who finds the off switch at sixteen will spend the rest of his life going back to that room, in different cities, with different bands, with worse and worse ideas about how to get in the door.

Bars. Clubs. Basements. Theaters. Festivals. Rooms where the sound guy was somebody’s cousin who had recently discovered electricity.

Almost thirty years of it.

Standing in a fog bank in a VFW hall in Cincinnati, Ohio, playing to a flag, with a fire alarm about to go off, I was the happiest I have ever been in my life.

Hold onto that. There’s a machine in my basement that does the same thing now, and it only takes one chord, and I don’t need anybody to watch.