The Drum Tech's Prize

I'm Agatha, I'm fifty-five, and I've been playing guitar longer than most of the bartenders in this town have been alive. By day I'm a nurse at the clinic over on Corbett Street, and by night, meaning Friday and Saturday nights and any practice night Robert can talk me into, I'm the lead guitarist in a cover band called the Rusty Hinges. We're not good enough to quit our jobs. We're too good to quit playing. Anybody who's played in a weekend band knows the territory.

Robert and I met three years ago at the clinic, which is not where anybody expects to meet a drummer. He came in with a sprained wrist from hauling his kit up a stairwell that had no business existing, and I wrapped it and told him to stop lifting with his fingers like an idiot. He asked me out before the tape came off. I was fifty-two, he was fifty-three, and we've been together ever since. He's a music teacher during the week, which means he's patient in a way that took me some getting used to. I'm used to people who yell. He just waits you out.

The Battle of the Axes is our band's annual competition, and I will explain how a cover band ends up with an annual competition. It started as a joke ten years ago, back when Kirk Newell, who manages us and runs the open mic at the Thistle & Reed, decided the band needed a reason to write original songs instead of grinding through "Mustang Sally" for the nine hundredth time. So he invented a contest. Two nights, local acts, original sets only, and a prize that changes every year. Kirk's sixty-two now and he's known Robert and me for a decade, all business and beer, never anything else, thank God, because the man judges the thing and we'd all be worried about favoritism otherwise.

The first few years the prize was joke stuff. A gift card. A ceramic rooster somebody made in a pottery class. Then last year Robert got it into his head that the prize should be real, so he built one. A vintage Sennheiser mic stand, the kind they stopped making before either of us was old enough to drink. Robert spent a whole winter rewiring it, custom soldering the cable runs, rebuilding the joint so it holds any angle you put it at. It is, and I say this like someone who has dropped a guitar down a flight of stairs and only checked the guitar, a beautiful object.

Here's where the friendly rivalry stops being entirely friendly. Robert wants that stand back. He built it, he wired it, and he's spent the whole year telling anybody who'll listen that his custom mic stand is no joke, which is the kind of thing a man says when he needs strangers to agree with him. And I want it. Badly. I admitted this to Kirk at the brewery two weeks before the contest, while he was counting the till and I was nursing a cider.

"I'll be honest with you, Kirk," I said. "I don't care about the trophy. The trophy's ugly. I want the stand."

Kirk didn't even look up from the register. "You know Robert built that thing so he'd have an excuse to win it back."

"Of course I know that. I want to take it out from under him anyway."

"That," he said, putting the cash drawer shut, "is the spirit this competition was founded on."

And that's pretty much where we stood going into the first night. Married-ish couples on opposite sides of a stage, a sixty-two-year-old judge pretending to be neutral, and a crowd of college kids and townies who just wanted loud music and cheap pints.

The Thistle & Reed is a long narrow room with the stage crammed into the corner like it was squeezed in as an afterthought. The brewery does its own beers, which taste like bread to me, and the acoustics are somewhere between a garage and a church basement. Lexie was there that night running sound, twenty-nine years old, been interning and then engineering at Lydian Sound since she was twenty-two, and she knows every musician in this town professionally and personally, which is its own kind of power.

I drew the first slot, which Kirk claims is random and which I claim is punishment for my trash talk. I played an original blues rock tune called "Night Shift," which is about nursing, if you're wondering, and it's about nursing in the way you'd expect. It's in E, it's tight, and I wrote the solo to be played entirely in one position because I'm fifty-five and my hands have feelings about travel time. I've been playing that song for two years and Friday night it came out clean. Clean in the way that only happens when your boyfriend is sitting three feet away at the bar, arms crossed, trying not to look like he's grading you.

The crowd was decent for a Friday. Maybe sixty people. They clapped where you want them to clap and I got a genuine whoop when I bent the last note into the chorus one more time than the recording calls for. Kirk wrote something on a clipboard with a face that gave away nothing, which is a skill I assume he practiced at parent-teacher conferences in some previous life.

Then Robert went up.

Now, I want to be fair here, and fairness costs me something every time I pay it. Robert's set was good. He's got this banjo-driven odd-time stomp he's been building for a year, something in seven that sounds like four until it isn't, and he brought out a washboard player named Barbara who I only know as "Barbara from the hardware store" and who, I have to say, commits. The crowd didn't know what meter they were in. They didn't need to. They cheered the drop and cheered the banjo and cheered loudest when Robert kicked his kick drum over on purpose at the end, which is showmanship and also a repair bill.

I stood at the bar and applauded as a grown woman would, and inside I was doing arithmetic. His set had flash. Mine had tightness. Flash wins bars. I don't know what wins clipboards.

Between sets Kirk came over and stood next to me and we watched Robert pack up his kit with the smugness of a man who knows he brought a washboard to a gunfight.

"You played cleaner," Kirk said.

"You're the judge, not me."

"I'm saying it like someone who was standing here. As a judge I say nothing until Sunday."

"That's a coward's position."

"It's an employed man's position," he said, and went back to his clipboard.

The second night was set for Sunday evening at Lydian Sound Studio, which Lexie had offered up since the brewery had a private party booked. The finals there, on an actual recording floor, and Lexie wanted to cut a live demo of the winning act as part of the deal. Cross the street, plug in, play for a clipboard and a mixing console instead of a bar crowd. A different game entirely, and one I figured favored me.

Kirk made us wait until the last band cleared out, which was cruel. He stood on the little corner stage with his clipboard and his reading glasses and made a whole production of straightening the pages, and I stood there with my beer getting warm because I refuse to drink bread.

"Alright," he said. "Judge's decisions are final, whining is allowed but pointless. Finalists for this year's Battle of the Axes are, in no particular order, which is a lie because there is an order, Agatha Walsh and Robert Feeny."

The room did the polite confused clap you get when two people with the same last address both make finals. Robert whooped for me. I raised my glass at him like a duchess.

"Here's the wrinkle," Kirk went on. "The clipboard has them dead even. Same score, different penmanship. So Sunday night, tie-breaker, Lydian Sound Studio, across the street. Each finalist records one track, clean, no crowd, just the room and the console. Lexie engineers, I judge off the playbacks, winner takes the stand."

"You're judging us on takes in a dead room," I said.

"I'm judging you on who sounds best with nowhere to hide," he said. "Which is the whole point of a tie-breaker."

Robert leaned over to me on the walk home and said, "This favors you and you know it."

"It does," I said. "I'm not going to argue you out of saying it, though."

"I hate that you're right twice in one sentence."

We got home and he practiced his seven-beat thing on the kitchen table with his hands until I threatened to hide the banjo in the attic. He went to bed humming. I lay awake running my solo in my head, every bend, every transition, the way you do when sleep has lost its argument.

Saturday we kept apart like rival nations sharing a border. He took the living room with a metronome. I took the bedroom with a practice amp and a headphone jack, which is the marital equivalent of a demilitarized zone. Around four he made sandwiches and we ate them at opposite ends of the couch and didn't discuss music, which was its own kind of discussion.

Seven o'clock Sunday we crossed the street to Lydian Sound. The studio is a converted tire shop, which sounds grim until you see it. Lexie hung quilts on the walls years ago and the room sounds warm and close, like singing into a pillow in a good way. She had the console lit up and two chairs pulled back like a referee's corner.

"House rules," she said. "One full take each, plus one safety if you blow something early. I record everything else anyway because I always do, but Kirk judges the first take. Agatha, you're up first because Robert lost the coin flip."

"I won the coin flip," Robert said.

"You lost it. Second means the room's already warmed up. That's a prize."

I plugged into my amp on the rug, no mic on the guitar because Lexie mics everything her own way, and I played "Night Shift" start to finish with nobody breathing on me. It's a strange feeling, a studio audience of one judge and one engineer and one boyfriend pretending to tune a banjo he had already tuned. The room pulled the sound in close. I could hear my own hands, every scrape, and for once that didn't scare me. I landed the one-position solo and even added the extra bend, the Friday night move, because tight and safe was only going to tie a man with a washboard.

Robert went second and I'll say this plainly: the room changed his song. In a bar, that seven-beat stomp is a spectacle. In a dead room with quilts on the walls it turned into something almost pretty, the banjo rolling around the meter, the washboard gone, Barbara not invited to the tie-breaker, just him and his kit and the click. He played it tight too. I stood there listening to my own boyfriend and thinking, well, hell, he practiced.

Kirk sat with his eyes shut through both playbacks, which he does to be theatrical, and Lexie watched the meters like they might misbehave.

Then the worst part, which is waiting. Kirk made us wait while he "let the tracks settle," which means he wanted a beer, and Lexie busied herself with faders that didn't need touching. Robert and