Chapter 12

Saturday, January 9, 1999

Dayna and Sandy had a house only a couple blocks up the street from Kevin and Emily. They'd only owned it a couple years; prior to their both nearly dying from food poisoning in the summer of '94, they'd lived on the road in Home virtually all the time, only visiting Dayna's parents for a few days each year. Even before their sickness and having to split up for nearly a year, they'd had periods when they got tired of living on the road. They'd been coming to the conclusion that they needed a home base of their own, at least partly to serve as a warehouse since Dayna's folks were thinking about getting a smaller place with all the kids gone.

"Warehouse" was a legitimate need for them. They'd recorded their first albums, Genie in a Bottle and Faire Maiden back in the late part of '90 -- one was pop/blues, the other was renaissance faire music. Ordering a thousand copies of each seemed like a huge risk with their limited funds, since they were basically selling the albums themselves at show dates. But it had turned out to be a good deal; the albums cost them about $3.00 a copy to make and they usually sold them for $15.00. The albums moved slowly at first, mostly because it was winter and they weren't playing much, but to their amazement they were running low by the middle of the summer with their best renfaire dates still ahead of them, so, when they reordered, they upped the quantity. The existence of a nearly full summer order of over five thousand CDs had been the main driving force for Dayna to keep the act alive when Sandy had been forced into her disastrous marriage.

With the exception of 1994, when they'd been split up, they'd done an album a year since 1990, publishing it themselves. While they were signed up with a small distributor, most of the sales were right at shows, or, increasingly sales to their fans as a result of the mailings they sent out once or twice a year. These days, the direct costs of the first run of a new album could be covered within a month by the returns from these mailings, and sales from their website were starting to pick up, too.

For something that had started almost as a casual afterthought, the CDs were now a core of their actual income, and they kept pressings of everything in stock. Dayna's mother Angie handled most of the orders and shipping; she'd started out just to help out her daughter, and it had taken maybe an hour a week, but for the last several years it took much more than that, and they'd been paying her.

While much of their music was renaissance faire stuff, deep down inside their main love was pop, of the bluesier persuasion. Their best known song out of this genre was Pick Me Please, which was on their early 1996 album, Together Forever, the first after their reunion. It was a cute if plaintive little song that sounded like a girl at a high school dance, hoping a boy would come and dance with her. Both Dayna and Sandy thought the song was nothing particularly special, but a highly promoted teenybopper singer by the name of Ashley Montague had obviously thought differently. She recorded it the following year, and didn't bother to clear copyright on it.

Dayna and Sandy first heard Ashley Montague's version of Pick Me Please while driving down the road between renfaires one day. They thought that her bubblegummer voice did a better job with it than Dayna's husky, more-adult-sounding blues voice. It both pleased them that someone had picked it up and upset them that no one had asked them about it. "Upset" turned to pure pissed off when they got back to Bradford a couple months later to find a letter from Montague's attorneys demanding royalties on their recording of Pick Me Please. Within minutes they were on the phone to an old friend in Nashville who had gotten them started doing their own recordings in the first place, and within minutes more they were talking to one of the best copyright attorneys in town.

It took over a year for the smoke to clear, but even after the lawyer's cut, the check for punitive damages was more than enough to pay off the house they'd bought the year before. They were still getting royalties on it to the point where it was a significant part of their total income.

Then, at the Halloween Party up at the Heisler's the previous October, Dayna revealed the story behind Pick Me Please. It wasn't about a girl at a high school dance at all! Dayna told the amazed group the reason she'd been able to give Jennlynn's address to Emily before the reunion was she and Sandy had played at the Nevada bordello where Jennlynn occasionally worked. They'd been inspired to write it after watching the girls in the lineup, hoping to be taken out back to do some horizontal dancing. "There are a couple phrases in there that are a little odd for a school dance but are likely to be used in a Nevada cathouse," Dayna had explained with a huge grin. "I mean, who would use, 'Come on and break my luck' at a school dance? Whenever we've done this song at the Redlite, the people there pick them up immediately, but I don't think anyone outside has ever caught it. What I'm saying is Sandy's and my most famous song is about a prostitute on the job."

In spite of Sandy taking off in Dean Sallows' eighteen wheeler on occasion, when they were in Bradford, they really didn't do much lying around contemplating their navels -- or whatever else it was they supposedly did while they were lying around. Whatever else they may have been, they were musicians to the core, and their winter break was as much to hone and prepare new material for recording as it was for anything else. Though they normally did their recordings in a historic studio in Memphis -- the same one where Elvis did his first few cuts -- they liked to go into a studio pretty well ready to record, and getting that way was done in their front room in Bradford. So, as Emily, Kevin, Vicky, and Jason sat in the front room, it was not surprising the room was in its usual clutter of musical instruments, which included several guitars and keyboards, drums, some recording equipment, microphones, and amps. It was no surprise that music was an early topic of discussion. "So," Emily asked, "When is it you're going to be recording?"

"We've got a week scheduled toward the end of March," Dayna explained. "It's taking a lot more to get ready than it usually does. We've got one day when we're going to have the place just packed with session musicians, and we'll have a pretty full crew most of the week. This is going to be our most expensive album to produce ever."

"It's going to be a long way from the two of us and Mr. Tom," Sandy shook her head. "Those were the days."

Jason didn't know the two musicians as well as the rest of the people present, and didn't know some of the stories. "Mr. Tom?" he asked quizzically.

"He was an old black session drummer who worked with us on Genie and Faire Maiden, " Sandy explained. "He was old as the hills, and had worked with Memphis blues singers clear back into the twenties, and God, was he good! We've never worked with a drummer since who had half his soul."

"He died only a few days after we finished the cuts," Dayna added. "We were the last of God knows how many recordings he had to have worked on over the years. We've always had the feeling since then that his spirit is helping carry us on. Out of all the experiences we've had, working with Mr. Tom was one of the best."

"Why do you need all those musicians?" Vicky asked.

"We've got a new direction we're taking with this album," Dayna explained. "Right after we got back together we started working on a song, Experience of Survival. It's sort of about how much more richly we see life after we'd almost lost ours. We've performed early versions of it in clubs and even recorded a version of it, but it keeps crying for more intricacy and power than we can give it with just a guitar and keyboard, and we've kept working on it. It's gotten to the point where we're going to do a revised, spiffed-up version and release it with a group from the Memphis Symphony in to lay down some tracks."

"I am looking forward to hearing it already," Kevin smiled. "This sounds pretty wild."

"It should be good," Sandy said. "Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like much for the two of us to just sit here and do it. We're going to have to have a backup tape when we do this one on stage."

"It's just as well we decided to do a renaissance album last year," Dayna said. "We needed to do a period piece anyway. Even though Faire Maiden has been out there a while it's still our best seller, but Thorns of the Rose moved real well last summer."

"I get the impression you're backing off from renaissance faires a little," Jason commented.

"We've cut way back," Sandy explained. "We still stay through the run of some faires, but now we just go to some faires to headline for a weekend. Sometimes we make as much in a weekend as we would have in a month of weekends in the old days, but that gives us more time to do some conventional concerts. Renfaires can be fun and have been our bread and butter since the beginning, but we're limited in what we can do at them, too."

"Gosh, you've been doing those forever," Emily smiled. "I remember seeing you at one up in Kalamazoo before Kevin and I were married. That was before you met up with Sandy. You were with some older guy."

"Yeah, Tim Willoughby, from over in Hawthorne," Dayna smiled. "He got me started in this crazy business. We still get together and jam now and then."

"Jeez," Vicky shook her head. "I remember the two of you coming back to the dorm on our orientation weekend at Central. You'd just been at some renfaire somewhere, and were dressed in long skirts and corsets, playing your guitars, and singing some dirty song."