Five, and the place is jam-packed with sweaty, half-drunk bodies and we’re having a great night. We’re on our last song and the crowd is pressed all the way up to the lip of the low stage, right on us so I can’t even move. Joey is killing it behind me with the cymbals. Cole is to my left, his fingers bleeding on the bass he’s rocking so hard. God I love that guy. Travis is to my right, his hair full of sweat and in his eyes, and Millie is right in front of him, so close she can cloud up his pick guard with her horny, gin-soaked breath, but his eyes are closed, like he’s not even here. He doesn’t even realize there are a hundred people here glued to every note he plays.
Despite the weirdness between me and Travis, we’ve hit some new level of playing together where it all just works and when I’m singing I disappear into the words and I don’t care about anything but letting it all go and being part of that feeling. I finish the last chorus of our last song tonight and look over at Travis, and he’s giving me the look. The look that says Let’s fucking do this, and I’m so here for that. I nod and he gives me the nod back. The room sways and Bean rips into some insane feedback that sounds like the world is ending, and so I turn around and crank up the gain on my Big Muff (another guitar pedal, a big Soviet-style green metal box that could probably make a pretty good weapon used as a projectile), face my Fender Twin, and my rig lets out this gorgeous, angelic howl and together with the low rumble from Travis’s half stack it’s all so beautiful in a postapocalyptic destroy-diamonds-in-the-rubble kind of way. At the end of the set, we are all high on the feeling of it. We leave the crowd begging us for an encore we won’t do because we’re already over time and we’re not dicks.
“Hey, Mickey is here,” Joey says as I’m gathering up my pedals. He points to the bar, and sure enough, Mickey Melchiondo, or Dean Ween as he’s known, is having a beer there with a few other locals. Holy shit.
Ween are heroes of the New Brunswick music scene. Dean and Gene Ween started out in the Court Tavern basement with just a boom box and each other and made it all the way to Elektra Records. They understand what it’s like to be a Jersey band (even if they’re from New Hope), to be treated like shit in New York City and Philadelphia, to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. They’re a major-label, nationally touring act now—the ones who got out of here and made it. They’re who I want to be.
“Go talk to him,” Joey says. “Maybe we’ll get that opener spot at Ag Field Day.”
I look up and feel a burning in the pit of my stomach. I’ve been introduced to Mickey before—he and Aaron come back to New Brunswick often enough to hang out and Carl from the Court is their regular sound guy when they go on tour. They’re plenty approachable, not dicks at all. This is actually a good night for Mickey to catch our set but there’s nothing I can think of to say to him without sounding like an asshole.
“Em, go see what he thought of our set,” Joey prods me.
“How can I do that without being douchey?”
“Just go sit at the bar,” he says. “We’ll get the gear.”
But I’m not going alone, that’ll look so obvious. I ask Travis if he’ll come get a drink at the bar with me.
“Why do you need me to get a drink with you?” he asks. “I’ve got gear to load.”
“Please?” I say.
Travis schleps our amps over to the gear lounge and then comes back into the room and points at the bar. I meet him there and he orders himself a Guinness and me a vodka tonic. He hands Greg the bartender our drink tickets, but Greg gives them right back.
“You guys were on fucking fire tonight,” he says. “All drinks on the house forever.”
That’s why we love this town.
Mickey is deep in conversation with Billy Broadband. We don’t really know Mickey, we’ve just met him once and he’s an actual rock star and I for one am sweating, stinking, my hair is a mess, and I’m