I met a rockstar once.
A real, honest to god, effortlessly “rock” rockstar.
I feel that word has been so diluted, so misappropriated, so over-printed on souvenir t-shirts and energy drinks, and attributed to drunken drug-fueled next-morning Facebook posts, it makes me sad. I understand and appreciate the aspirations, but dude.
I was in a band. Well, I’m still in that band, but at one time we were a “band.” Records deals and tour buses and gold records and all that shit.
I met this rockstar right after our first album on Universal came out. Our manager told us we were going to open for Fuel on a string of dates on the East Coast. It was our first real tour, supporting a real act. A big step up from slogging all over the West Coast playing frat parties and dive bars.
Somehow we got our drums and guitars and amps and stuff out to Florida, rented a van and a trailer, and rolled into our first show with them.
We are SF based, Fuel is Pennsylvania, so while we’d heard of them, we didn’t really know their music that well. The song “Shimmer” was getting radio play, but we had never seen them before. I think we had the same booking agent, so that’s how we got the gig.
We rolled into the club right after they finished soundcheck. We had seven minutes to set our shit up and do our soundcheck before the doors opened. Sweet.
We played our set. Probably sucked. Most likely.
Then we saw Fuel play. And yes, we sucked. They didn’t. It was life changing.
They were so loud, so tight, so intense. It did more than merely hit you in the gut. It hit you in the taint.
And then there was the singer. Brett. He was everything you could ever want in a front man. He could wear leather pants without being try-hard. It looked like wherever he woke up that morning, there happened to be a pair of leather pants near him that he would pull on, and they fit perfectly and looked perfectly cool. He could steadily stagger around the stage, singing and screaming his nuts off, simultaneously exuding perfect confidence and a casual sense of who-gives-a-fuck. We ate it up.
We followed them around for a month. We listened to their album to get pumped up for our set. We watched and learned. I don’t think they ever once watched our set, and were barely even aware that we were opening for them. Although we did accidentally drive into front-of-house at a street show in Pittsburgh, and someone said “Typical van-band maneuver” over the P.A.
Once, as we triumphantly stormed from the stage to our green room after what we thought was a particularly kick-ass set, we passed by Brett who asked, “What time are you guys going on?”
After a show one night somewhere, maybe Virginia or Florida or Ohio, we had to leave after Fuel’s set to catch a red-eye to Los Angeles to be on TV for the day, before rejoining the tour in some other city.
We had just stuffed our backpacks full of beers for the shuttle ride to the airport, and were walking out the backstage hallway, past Fuel’s dressing room.
Brett was slumped up against the hallway wall in a post-show come-down, flanked by two attentive female fans. His hair was wet with sweat, the longneck in his hand resting atop his thigh.
When we were about 15 feet past him, we heard him call out.
“Where are you assholes going?”
We turned around, then literally and comically spun our heads to look behind us, to see who he was talking to.
When we realized it was us, we nervously stammered out, “Uh, we gotta fuckin’…catch a plane right now to L.A. for some TV show.”
As he brought the beer up to his lips and turned his head back to looking straight ahead, he drawled out of the side of his mouth.
“I hope your plane doesn’t crash.”
It was, and remains to this day, the greatest compliment I have ever received.
