Me Again: Starting over

Chapter 5

When the hand you’re dealt rocks your boat, this is all you can do:

Go down a new path or start over again.

Here I tell of my new start, its ups and downs and one constant.

Sound check

Nashville Bridgestone Arena

22 August 2014

A sharp sound, strong and explosive enough to perforate my eardrums ruin my last solo, Hold you tonight. I bend forward in shock and put my fingers in my ears not to hear this t*****e. s**t!

Hold you tonightI’m here on the stage in a few hours’ time for the final date of the tour, tired and sweating, still grappling with these damn acoustics.

It’s not okay, dammit! I can’t wait to get home, even for a little bit, to rest and put my hand to the very many projects left locked in that drawer too long.

“Dammit, Sam!” I yell, drawing his attention. “That amp needs to be moved down!” I point to the row of Tourmaxes suspended just over our heads. “Where’s Davon? He’s never there when you need him”.

Davon, my manager, is an excellent sniffer dog, but when it comes to being there, he leaves a lot to be desired.

“C’mon, Chris, let’s try again. Perhaps we’ll manage to find the right signal range to avoid issues”.

“No, stop! I’m beat; this is the second time today this has happened! Call Davon and tell him to get those damn amps moved forward. Actually no; you deal with it. I can’t risk there being a Larsen effect every time I move around on stage. I nearly blew my eardrums out, that normal to you?”

“No, of course not, but it takes time to move them and we won’t have any more time tomorrow to do a full sound check”.

“I don’t give a f**k about that! Call Damon and get “em moved. I want them to reach out over the stage and not to get in my way while I’m moving. If we have to, we’ll work all night on it. They have to give us the free stage tomorrow morning. For the day, that’ll be all; it’s impossible to rehearse in these conditions”.

I can’t afford to take risks. Tests are fundamental to the smooth running of a concert like mine. I’m tense, tired and exasperated. I’m nervous beyond belief because it makes me anxious, not being able to rehearse as one should. I wasn’t expecting this problem, never mind Davon not being here to lend a hand to resolve it.

He’s surely busy promoting the concert and if I don’t turn off my phone quickly, he’ll set up an interview for me, or worse, a photo shoot.

Outside the arena, it’s chaos amongst the fans left without a ticket, touts and the girls already behind the barricades who’ll spend the night here, I’m sure of it. They’ll be ready for everything tomorrow, even having a photo with me, an autograph or ─ why not? ─ sticking their tongue down my throat.

“C’mon, Mr. Center of Attention, as you like it!” Sam teases me, having come out right behind me and smiling at the girls as if he were the real star.

It’s true, but you’re not joking either. This climate, the first few times around, would excite me and made me feel on top of the world, but the myth of invincibility soon began to come to terms with reason.

I’ve never had problems taking what I wanted for myself, be it fame, women or money. Those especially. I didn’t miss s*x during those years, although it was never anything imposing and without sentimental implications as I always avoided these. It was something to take as it came, not least because I couldn’t carry off both a serious relationship and a career like mine made up of work, study, hour upon hour of rehearsals and concerts on world tours several months a year.

The problem is that, if I earlier had fun and looked the other way, those who I now consider are women are, in fact, young girls ─ sometimes minors ─ hidden under the make-up and clothing of older women. It’s an easy mistake to make and I’ve run risks at least once. To them, I am off limits and I take care not to give them enough rope, otherwise I’ll set a vicious circle off that’s hard to break.

I’d better leave and let Sam deal with the problems. I’d be lost without him; he’s always been by my side from the first agreement carved into a piece of riverbank wood. Even when the first rejections by record labels risked me giving up on moving forward. It was there between joints and huge hangovers and also during important moments and times of success.

I want to come back home, relax a bit and mentally prepare for tomorrow night. There’ll be nineteen thousand watching, a sold-out show I never expected, which filled me with pride. The press is already breathing down my neck because of the new album being released and I’d like to get them hearing something, but it’ll be impossible to do so without these rehearsals.

My mom won’t be there for the grand finale; she’s had to come back home because her partner isn’t well and, having always run to-and-fro for everybody, has had to stop this time. I don’t know much about the situation because she’s hiding everything from me, which has me presume it’s something serious.

After Dad died, she hasn’t had an easy life. She tried to start a new life, but kept running into unreliable, opportunistic guys who thought they’d make a profit out of going out with Chris Levi’s mom. Totally useless people.

Tom isn’t like the others; he loves my mom and I’ve seen the way he smiles at her as he asks her some unusual questions. His eyes brighten as if, in that moment, there was nothing more important than making her happy. In her life, at least, she’s found love a couple of time, I’m sure of that.

As for me, I’m in love with music and, as in the best fairytales, it’s happily requited.

Instead being in a glittering castle saloon, I leap onto the stage and instead of a princess, I’m holding a microphone in my hands. Dancing to the beat of my own songs, I promise eternal love in a redundant case of “And they all lived happily ever after”.