Rocking the Pink (15 page)

Back when I was eight, Mom's Magnum, P.I., look-alike boyfriend (a mustachioed heartthrob who also happened to be a first-class mooch) asked me to sing him a song.

“Okay,” I agreed, enjoying the attention.

As Magnum, P.I., leaned against our kitchen counter, spooning an entire apple pie into his mouth, I sang Fleetwood Mac's “Dreams” to him: “Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom . . . ” I drawled, expertly mimicking Stevie Nicks's lilting inflection and slurred phrasing.

Magnum, P.I., spit out a mouthful of pie, he was so impressed.

“Hey now, girl. You can sing!”

The next day, much to my delight, Mr. Handsome came back with a stack of record albums and song requests.

“‘Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,' by Crystal Gayle!” He shoved a record album into my hands. “Oh, and how about ‘Jolene,' by Dolly Parton? That'd be a good one!” He pushed another album at me.

It was a defining moment: I could sing!

And now, all these years later, my inner child had been jogged loose, and she was furiously stomping her Buster Browns inside my head:
I can sing! I gotta sing!

But where? How?

After much consideration—
should I audition for local community theater, go to karaoke bars, or maybe deliver singing telegrams?—
I decided what I wanted to do was sing in a rock band. (Not original, I know, but each time I said it out loud, it sounded less and less preposterous.) But how to achieve it? Rather than trying to build my own band from scratch, I figured my best bet was to find and join an existing, functioning band. Easier said than done. I was a thirty-five-year-old, married, minivan-driving mother of two. And if all that weren't enough, I was an attorney to boot. Not the prototypical front woman of a rock band.

What existing, functioning rock band would have me? I tried to visualize what that band would look like. First, and most obvious to me: They'd have to be all men. If this existing band already had a woman in it, then why would they need me? And anyway, I didn't want to poach on another woman's territory. Yes, definitely all men. Second, the womanless men in this band would need to be in their late thirties or forties, or, hell, even beyond, or else I didn't stand a chance. As a thirty-five-year-old woman, I'd be a Golden Girl to a group of twentysomethings. On the contrary, in a group of older men, I might still have a little game. Finally, these womanless, fortysomething-year-old men would need to play music I actually liked and wanted to sing: fun, recognizable cover
tunes. But, truth be told, if numbers one and two were satisfied, I probably would have joined a polka band.

Now that I knew my criteria for the band of my dreams, it was time to find it. But how? Maybe there was a more professional, targeted approach than mine, but I simply followed my instincts: I went shopping online, the same way I'd have bought shoes on
Zappos.com
. But since
Rock_Bands_Who_Let_You_Sing.com
didn't exist, as far as I knew, I googled “San Diego cover band.”

A handful of websites popped up. I clicked on the first link and was met with a band photo—four dudes and a feisty-looking woman.
Nope.
I clicked on the next link. Another woman. I clicked on the next link. A woman.
Dammit!
I clicked on the next link. Hey, no woman . . .
but these guys are toddlers.
I clicked on the next link. A polka band. Okay, my standards were a bit higher than I had thought.

The very last link on the screen was to a band called Cool Band Luke, a play on the classic movie
Cool Hand Luke,
starring Paul Newman
.
This was a good sign. Brad and I often quoted the movie's most iconic lines, such as “I can eat fifty eggs,” “Just shakin' the stick, boss,” and of course, “What we got here is . . . a failure to communicate.”

I clicked on the link. Four handsome men stared back at me. Not a woman in sight!
Bingo.
I scrutinized their faces. It was hard to tell their ages from the grainy snapshot, but they were most definitely
not
in their twenties.
Bingo again.
I held my breath and clicked on a tab labeled “Song List.” Up came a list of songs like “Mustang Sally” and “Brick House”—party standards.
Triple bingo!
I felt a tingling begin to course through my body.

After finding the band's email address, I composed a lengthy sales-pitch email, which I've abridged here to save myself too much humiliation (and you from boredom):

I read and reread the email, adjusted the phrasing to make it just right, and pressed the “send” button. I took a deep breath to control my excitement.
Calm down,
I told myself.
Really, you shouldn't get your hopes up
.
It could take days to hear back from them, if ever, and
. . .

Just then, I received an immediate email reply from a guy named Rob, the guitarist from Cool Band Luke: “Can you call me, please?” he wrote, along with a phone number
.
I immediately picked up the phone.

Rob and I hit it off. He had a dry, understated sense of humor and didn't take himself or the band too seriously. He was a straight shooter—not a cheeseball at all. I knew right away it was a fit.

“Your timing is incredible,” Rob said. “The band was just talking
today about maybe finding a female singer, trying to mix things up. There are so many classic female songs we'd love to play.”

I was spazzing out. “Oh, great! Can I come to your next rehearsal and, you know, see if you guys like my voice?” Damn, my voice was sounding like a chipmunk's.
Get a hold of yourself, Laura!

“Why don't you just send us your demo?” he suggested. “If we like what we hear, we'll arrange a time to meet in person and jam for a bit.”

“Sounds great!” A little squeak escaped from my throat.
Laura, try to sound casual
. “Yeah, I'll just send you my demo.”
Damn, now I was going into drill sergeant mode.

We said our goodbyes and hung up. It was a great plan. Yes. I'd send them my demo, and if they liked it, we'd get together and “jam for a bit.”
Awesome!
Only one little problem:
I didn't have a demo.
And telling them the truth was out of the question; I didn't want them to think I was an amateur (which, of course, I was). I would adopt the same attitude I always did: Fake it till you make it.

The next afternoon, Brad and the girls (by then ages six and three) came home from a daddy-daughter day to find me standing in the middle of our family room with a teenager whom I'd found online (after having googled “how do I make a demo?”). I was wearing big black earphones and singing my heart out into a fancy overhead microphone supplied by my new best friend.

“Hi, honey,” Brad said tentatively. “Whatcha doin'?”

“Makin' a demo.” I smiled. There was a pause as we stared at each other.
I'll tell you all about it later.

And then, God bless him, Brad escorted the girls quietly out of the room.

I sent the guys from Cool Band Luke—Rob, Jann, and Buzz—my “demo” (pretending, of course, that I'd had it all along), and, after hearing it, they invited me to their next rehearsal! I was elated, but also nervous.

I showed up to Cool Band Luke's rehearsal at Buzz's house (with pizza and beer for the guys and flowers for Buzz's wife). I must have changed my shirt eight times in anticipation of our first meeting, trying to decide if I should show a little cleavage, or maybe go for “not trying too hard” in a T-shirt, or maybe just try to stay classy (as mandated by Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy in
Anchorman).

When I walked up the steps of Buzz's house in a semiclassy, flowery blouse that showed a tiny (but undeniable) peep of cleavage, I had butterflies in my stomach and my throat felt tight. But then I met the guys. These guys were funny. Patient. Talented. Family guys.
They were my people.

In person, Rob was every bit as cool and easygoing as he'd been on the phone. And Jann, the bass player, who also managed the band's website, was warm and genuine. He echoed Rob's earlier amazement about my timing in contacting them.

“The band has been taking a break for almost a year,” Jann said. “The day you emailed us was the very first day I had put the website back up.”

And then there was Buzz, the lead singer, a big-hearted, frenetic bundle of creativity. Buzz picked up his guitar and began to play “Brick House.” I took a deep breath and began to sing along to the music. The guys laughed at hearing a woman sing, “She's mighty
mighty, just lettin' it all hang out.” When someone suggested we try Ike and Tina Turner's version of “Proud Mary,” I squealed and told them how much I loved the song.

“If we do that one, I'll have to do the Tina Turner dance, like this,” I proclaimed, jumping up and shaking my body around wildly like Tina Turner (though I probably looked more like Richard Simmons).

The guys clearly enjoyed that spectacle, but no one had made a definitive statement about whether I was in or out. And I couldn't get a read on how Buzz felt about my horning in on his lead-singer territory.

I decided to force the issue. “You know, I'd be thrilled to sing ‘oohs' and ‘ahhs' in the background, if that's what you guys want,” I said, putting out a trial balloon.

“Nah,” Buzz assured me. “I'll sing half the songs, and you sing the other half. My voice gets tired from singing all the time, anyway.”

The other guys agreed unanimously. I was in!

We selected a crop of songs for me to sing, and then embarked on several weeks of rehearsals for our first gig together, at the upcoming county fair in Ramona, California: population 36,405. Every time I ran out the door, telling Brad I was going to “rehearse with the band” (usually followed by “Don't forget to give the girls a bath!”), I felt as if I'd been inhaling nitrous oxide. I was in a rock band!

On the day of our first “big” (but actually small) show, at the Ramona County Fair, I stepped onto that stage with
my band
and belted out songs like “Chain of Fools” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” much to the thrill of my entire extended family (including Brad and
the girls—who'd covered their hair with glitter for the occasion—Dad, and Sharon) and the Bunco Girls.

At first I couldn't hold the microphone steady because my hands were shaking so hard, so I just kept it in its stand. But once I'd made it through the first three or four songs, sheer terror gave way to unadulterated, childlike joy. I could barely enunciate the lyrics, my smile was so ridiculously wide.

The next morning, I still had that smile on my face, and I'd also acquired a grapefruit-size bruise on my right hip—the by-product of having banged my tambourine all night with an overabundance of enthusiasm and a deficit of technique.

I had reclaimed a part of me that had lain dormant for far too long.
I was me again.

Shortly after my striking debut, Buzz bowed out of the band to pursue his original music. And just like that, I became the one and only lead singer of Cool Band Luke—proving once and for all that you can, indeed, shop for just about anything on the Internet.

With each performance after that, I learned more and more. For one thing, I figured out that singing in a rock band differed from singing in a stage musical, and that singing into a microphone was different from projecting my voice toward the back of a theater. For another thing, I began to understand the nuances of my voice—when it sounded good and when it sounded bloody awful.

Brad came to as many Cool Band Luke shows as he could. He was effusive in his praise when it was merited, and honest in his criticism, too.

“You're oversinging,” he'd tell me, or, “You're making weird expressions with your face.”

He was always right on the money. I soon realized, with Brad's help, that I didn't have to
sell
anything. If I trusted my voice, if I stayed in the moment of the song, then everything fell into place. I could stretch for notes or inflections that were outside my comfort zone; I just had to sing from my heart, instead of my head.
I just had to be real.
But, oh, wasn't that the lesson I'd been struggling with my entire life? Easier said than done.

Victor Borge, a comedian and entertainer, has famously said that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. But as I sang “I Want You to Want Me” for a room full of joyful people celebrating a wedding or a simple night out, I learned beyond a shadow of a doubt that
music
surely gives laughter a run for its money as a person-to-person
expressway. At the end of a long night of performing, I'd often receive loving hugs and words of warm affection from partygoers—strangers—who'd come to feel an inexplicable, visceral connection to me, despite the fact that we had not exchanged a single spoken word all night. And it wasn't
what
I was singing that caused this reaction—God knows I wasn't charting any new musical territory. No, it was that, through music, our souls had danced together, even if our intellects had not yet been introduced.