Chapter 4: The Earth is my Witness

I've read numerous accounts written by others stating that we were almost immediately an overnight success. Not quite. It took the first few nights of the tour get to get into any sort of routine, and just when we thought we had found a groove Dave played his last night with us in New Orleans before returning home to his extremely pregnant wife. He never played with us onstage again 'officially, but he always kept in touch with us and remains part of our family to this day.

He jokes now that he became another Pete Best and missed the soft life of riches and fame, but actually he loved his family far too much to enjoy the life of a road musician (they ended up with six children) and he had a good corporate career job that brought home more money than they ever wanted to spend anyway. His regrets, if any, were very few and minor.

It is true that we started to accumulate an entourage nearly immediately, and at our second gig we met an experienced road equipment manager named Gus (figures), who was a gruff curmudgeon on the outside but an absolute creampuff in his gooey center. He had been working for that nightclub part time at minimum wage, and we hired him on the spot (for scarcely more) to be our 'Ramrod', and he has performed the job flawlessly for us ever since, albeit with a large increase in pay over the years.

We started developing fans that would follow us for a city or two to hear our concerts, which began to slowly evolve on the road. We first began by adding the old 'MR' songs that nearly all of us already knew in our sleep, and twisting them into fitting our new playing style. We didn't have a name for our style yet, but it was definitely sort of progressive sounding Goth/Metal/Opera. I still don't know what to call it, but for right now the sound was unique and ours alone.

Slowly and much more carefully, we started to craft melodies that would fit Erin's poetry, and one by one new and better songs began to emerge. Our available set list now included about twenty original songs we were comfortable with, another five or so cover songs we really enjoyed playing and thought we put a different sort of spin on. This let us create alternate set listings, so that we didn't have to play the same damn songs every night. That gets old fast, especially on the road!

By our Atlanta show, playing to a five hundred seat capacity club near one of the colleges, there was absolutely zero doubt that Darryl was our permanent lead guitarist. Apparently he had never been really comfortable being the front man for the old band and now he was quite happy to let Erin handle all of the lead vocal work. Once removed from the pressures of the spotlight, he now devoted his full concentration to his guitar work, and soon he was improvising right in tune with his rhythm section and Simon's keyboards, which still sometimes got a bit too wanky for my taste.

Also by Atlanta, we had sold all of the original 500 copies of our self produced demo CD, and used one of our precious days off in getting another 1000 duplicated.

One night after Simon had creamed all over himself in an especially lurid and messy 'Wakeman-gasm', I forced him into my truck passenger seat for the drive to Charleston, SC and made him listen to some of my early Genesis CD's and bid him to "shut up and just listen to Tony Bank's keyboards". I played the CD's through and he asked me to replay a few songs, such as "Watcher of the Skies" over again, which I did. Simon sat lost in thought for a moment and exclaimed to me in delight, "That evil genius is playing everything the wrong way", and he explained (although I already knew the answer).

"Every other keyboard plays lower melody with their left hand and 'lead' with their right hand. He often does it the other way around, making the lower 'sadder' notes the leading part of the melodies. I should do that with Erin's slower and moodier pieces!"

Hurray! The light had finally dawned on our likeable but hyperactive keyboardist. The change did not occur overnight, and he had the occasional backslide, but slowly he began to create his own deliberate and moodier style of playing our material, and that new sound was a much improved fit.

By Baltimore, we had also acquired two young roadies that wanted to do something fun for the summer and were willing to learn the trade from Gus. One of them even mastered the art of driving our temperamental band truck so sometimes I could now get some much needed rest, instead of worrying about falling asleep at the wheel. We were also being followed now by a caravan of usually five to ten cars of kids who loved our sound and followed us to our next shows sometimes even for a week or so, before heading back home. Our sound improved every night, and I would have been in heaven except that my relationship with Erin seemed to be frozen in place.

She slept every night in my arms, but always at least partially clothed. I often saw her nude while changing and she didn't mind much either if she caught me nude changing clothes or in shower one bit. She had such little personal modesty that she would even come in to use the toilet while I was next to her in the shower or even once while I was shaving.

Still, I was determined that I would remain a gentleman and that I was going to let her make the first serious move. We had managed now to kiss lightly a few times, but never open mouthed ... until that night in Baltimore. We had had a hard trip getting there due to heavy rain storms, and got to the club later than scheduled and we set a record for getting the stage setup and it was a miracle that we only started the show about thirty minutes late. The show itself went fine, but everyone was ragged out and mentally and physically exhausted. Usually we drive through the night to the next town so that we can sleep in late until it's time for the setup and sound check, but everyone was too tired to budge tonight.

I was thoroughly knackered and was the first one to hop into bed wearing just my usual comfortable old pair of shorts, while she took her usual epic length shower. I have no recollection of her coming to bed at all and when I awoke in the morning I found my shorts pulled down to about my knees while Erin, wearing only a pair of thong panties, was playing gently with my arising cock and balls, seemingly fascinated by what she had discovered.

This was definitely a first. I sat up a bit to face her and she warmly kissed me good morning and then kissed me again a bit harder, this time opening her mouth so that our tongues caressed for the first delightful time. Her hand kept a grip on my now hard cock and I gently move a hand to one of her soft breasts and began caressing it. I had just started to lick and suck on one of her magnificent pierced nipples, and things were about to get very interesting as she was starting to remove her thong when a loud knocking at the door interrupted us. I heard Byron's voice yelling something about a band meeting.

A band meeting? This was much earlier than usual for that sort of thing; none of us were morning people. We got very reluctantly dressed and went downstairs to see what the fuss was about. How I managed to fit my cock back into my shorts without breaking it into two, I'll never know.

We all gathered in the hotel lobby but no one seemed to know what was up, or was really awake enough to care. After our last straggler had arrived, Bryon came out from wherever he had been lurking, but he was not alone. With him was a tall slender woman of about our age (about thirty), even at first glance she grabbed our attention, and in an instant I knew what all this was about.

Her name was Faith; she was a singer, a high soprano, also of operatic inspiration and training, who had seen last night's Baltimore show, loved us and wanted to get her foot in and see if we were in the market for a backup singer. No one seemed opposed to this, and as we had just a short drive to tonight's show in DC, we could easily get set up early in time to give her a proper audition to see how well her voice mixed with Erin's. Much to my disappointment, we decided to pack up and get going on the road now, as early as possible to have an extra long sound check and audition for Faith. Erin and I were both disappointed, but we assumed we'd have some quality private time later.

It was obvious from Faith's looks, that if her pipes were at least half as good, she'd get the job - and she did; unanimously. Onstage she was the exact photographic opposite of Erin in appearance, where Erin was our dark angel with black hair and dressed in a black leather corset, mini-skirt, fishnet hose and tall high-heeled boots, Faith was a long haired honey blonde, dressed in flowing white lace and silk. Her voice soaring to the heavens; in every way the angelic counterpart to Erin's darker onstage persona.

Together, their performance became a sort of religious Passion Play and our audience that night was enthralled. Everyone was quick to consider all of the possibilities and ramifications of Faith's addition. Simply put, we were a much better band with her and our potential was now limitless. Well nearly so, we were still very weak in the guitar 'metal sound' and we sometimes missed Dave's growling rhythm guitar sound on some of our louder songs, but that was now a very minor consideration.

There was one major fly in the ointment, at least for me, and I could see the trouble coming all the way down the highway with its headlights on. Faith was a delightful, pleasant, well spoken and personable woman who never caused anyone the slightest amount of trouble, and had the knack of easily making friends. She was also however, another 'confirmed lesbian' who had never had a male lover in her entire life. I knew in that moment, when Erin agreed to share a hotel room with her, that all of my hard-won progress with Erin was now lost. Indeed, by our big New York Indie gig, they could scarcely be separated from each other. Now it seemed to be impossible to get in a word with Erin alone, not that we really had very much that was private to say. She now had a new confidante and bed partner - I was back to rooming with Irv. It didn't seem like a fair exchange.

Soon it became quite clear that our aborted romantic encounter in Baltimore was now doomed to never again be repeated.

The New York show was a triumph, by any definition of the word. We played a one hour long set of our six best songs for a vocal crowd of ten thousand alternative music enthusiasts, who loved every moment of it. The promoter of the festival even had us do an encore (which was supposedly against the rules for any band to do). The festival merchandisers had sold every last copy of our 2nd run demo CD pressing even before we had left the stage and with our quick ok they rushed out to get more duplicated ASAP on their own dime and quickly sold most of those as well!

In the days that followed we had three offers for corporate worldwide distribution of our next CD and more merchandising deals than we could even count. We politely accepted all of the proposed contracts for our review, but refused to sign anything until our lawyers had been over them. No one actually knew any lawyers except for Erin, whose father was a hot shot corporate attorney. They were a bit estranged, but still on speaking terms with each other, and when she called he agreed to review all of the documents. Eventually with his invaluable help we did sign a few marketing deals that did make good financial sense for us.

The big problem was that our band name still kept mutating from show to show. We gave up and put to a vote of all of the band, roadies, cast and crew (and a room full of new friends). The winning vote ending up being "The Dark Ravens of Light" or DROoL as we began to laughingly call ourselves to each other. It was no ones favorite choice for a name, but it was nearly everyone's 2nd favorite one, and won purely on points. The actual name with the most #1 votes was "The Ravens Fly at Midnight"; not bad, but it reminded me too much of the terrible old Jack Benny movie about a bunch of hapless musician angels in heaven called "The Horn Blows at Midnight". Anyway, DROoL might have won the voting for external use, but we remained 'The Ravens' amongst ourselves.

I mentioned earlier that the tour had been originally scheduled to end in NY, but of course our manager Byron had other ideas. He want to keep us out on the road while we were red hot. By the time he finished tweaking our schedule with last minute changes we still had another sixty shows to go in the next three months. Next up for us was a night in Boston, and then three quick dates in upstate NY at Albany, Syracuse and then Buffalo. All stops along the college music circuit.

No one was burned out yet by the road and everyone seemed in pretty high spirits ... except for me. I was feeling 'a bit low' and the deep pains of emotional loss seemed only to get worse for me as each day on the road passed without any sort of meaningful exchange between Erin and myself. I began to fear and suspect the worst, but just couldn't bring myself yet to confront the situation.

By Buffalo my fears were confirmed, the two women had indeed become established lovers. It was obvious in the hundred different little things that lovers do. It was apparent in the way they looked at each other, the way they secretly held hands under the table at meals, and especially in the way that they deeply kissed after getting onto the motel elevator, apparently not seeing me behind them. I went back to the bar downstairs and had a beer, but didn't enjoy it much and left it still mostly full after about twenty minutes when I decided to go upstairs to their room to see if I could get Erin to speak with me at least. Instead, outside of their door, I could clearly hear the unmistakable sounds of female lovemaking. Few of the words were distinguishable, but I could once hear Erin's voice clearly say, "Oh yes, keep licking my clit just like that!"

My worst fears confirmed, I no longer had anything left to lose. I knocked on their door. A minute later, Faith answered the door, still adjusting her robe, her face and chin still wet with Erin's cunt juices. I asked if I could talk to Erin for just a few moments, and that I felt 'it was important'. Faith invited me into the room where Erin was still in bed, obviously still naked under the sheets.

Our talk didn't last long, and Erin was frankly quite annoyed at my interruption of their lovemaking. She pleaded that she was tired and they wanted to get back to sleep.

"It can wait", she sharply growled, with a tired and aggravated look on her face.

I turned and left without saying another word, but I think that Faith could see that my heart was broken utterly in two at this final rejection, and I left the shattered pieces in a trail during the long walk out of their room.

I don't remember much of the next month or so ... really I don't.

The memory of doing the Midwest span of that tour rings absolutely no bells for me, and I couldn't even name five of the cities that we played in. I wasn't eating or sleeping well, and I started to become like Eric, becoming the last one to get on the stage and first to try and leave it. When on the road, I stayed 100% of the time on the band truck now, usually driving in a state of zombie exhaustion until I had one close-call too many and Gus took my set of truck keys away from me. I then took to hiding in a small unoccupied dark corner at the back of the truck where I could be by myself, to think and try and get a little rest, but I mostly just sat in the dark and brooded instead. Endlessly, for hours.