Authors: K.T. Hastings
Jake didn't know it until much later, but he wasn't an absolute stranger to Brandee when they met at The Bay Saloon. He had gone in to the Bank and Trust a couple of times to cash checks drawn on it, and once to break a $50 bill. Though he had never spotted Brandee in her small office, she had seen him. She noticed his easy smile and had even heard the laugh that was so famous with his friends. So when he approached her for the first time, she was more than a little bit pleased. The truth of the matter was, she had seen him there before he had seen her. If he hadn’t come over, she would probably have gone over to him and said, “What are you drinking, Cowboy?” just to see what he would have done in return. He told her later that he would have probably turned different shades of red.
Chaz was the first person to realize that Jake might be one to have a little more staying power in Brandee's life. Chaz had never been able to get much information out of her friend about the men that she saw. Usually a perfunctory, “He's okay," or, “It was fun," was the most that she would offer. Conversely, Chaz quickly found out a lot about Jake. She knew his musical likes and dislikes.(classic and southern rock for the former, rap for the latter). She knew that he didn't like peanut butter, raisins, or tomatoes. She knew that he liked sunsets more than sunrises, and football more than basketball. Most of all, though, she knew that he made her friend smile at all hours of the day and night. That was enough for her.
A little over two years after they had their first official meeting at The Bay Saloon, Brandee Reneé Alexander became Brandee Evans in an outdoor ceremony at Centerville Beach.
She melted the heart and glistened the eyes of her groom by singing her vows to him in a piece that she titled, “When Love Comes to Call”. Chaz was her maid of honor. Debra came to California for the ceremony and cried through most of it.
While Brandee considered retaining her maiden name for performance purposes, she decided that she wasn't so well-known as to make that necessary. A letter to the record labels and to the various agencies, telling them about her name change, was all that was needed. It also gave her another excuse to contact the labels and the agencies in kind of a “Yoo hoo! I'm still here!” sort of gesture.
For two weeks after the ceremony, Jake and Brandee honeymooned along the Central California coast. They fed one another deep fried Twinkies on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. They made plans to someday own a home in Camel-By-the-Sea. They explored John Steinbeck's Monterrey, and traveled further south to San Simeon and Big Sur. Jake couldn't imagine there being a day in his life when he would be happier than in those early days of being married to Brandee.
Brandee was very happy too. She loved to walk hand in hand with him as they wandered around the old cannery site on the Monterrey Peninsula. She was beginning to feel a stirring inside though. She needed to get on stage. She knew that she could never be content just as Jake's wife and a middle management drone at the Bank and Trust. She needed to sing and she needed to be applauded by an adoring crowd. She believed herself to be a one-man woman, but she wanted an arena full of people to make love to her with their cheers and whistles of appreciation. She wanted it to wash over her like the tender fingers of an attentive lover. She just wasn't sure how to make that happen.
Jake could sense the reason for the occasional thousand yard stare that his wife exhibited. He knew that she wanted to sing professionally and he supported her dream completely. While he didn't know jack about the music industry, he knew that Brandee had a rare gift. Where to go from there?
After more months of nothing from the most watched mailbox in northern California, Jake walked into the couple's living room and witnessed a sight that he never had wanted to see. Brandee was sitting cross-legged on the couch, silently crying.
Jake had moved into Brandee's ancestral home in Fortuna after they had gotten married. Neither his place in Fortuna nor the apartment that she had shared with Chaz in Arcata was sufficient for the newlywed couple. Jake was thrilled to be able to move into the big old home in Lawndale. It was so huge and impressive that it reminded him of a cathedral. All thoughts of the beauty of his surroundings left Jake, though, when he saw his bride in tears.
***
“Oh my love, what's wrong?” he said one evening, taking her in his arms. He began to gently rock her, something that he knew she found comforting.
“I'm just so damn sad," she said into his shirt. Muffled though she was, he could make out what she was saying.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she wailed. I'm never going to get my chance
“You are going to be the next big thing, baby. I know you are. We just need to figure out the first step, and then the second step, and so on.”
Jake wracked his brain. He wished that she knew more about this kind of thing than he did. How could he get his wife in front of enough people that she could build a following? What could she do without the backing of the big boys or representation from a well-known agency? He knew that she already had a few things up on YouTube but thousands of aspiring artists do that, not just every month or week but every day. How could Brandee stand out in a crowded field?
Suddenly, Jake hit on an idea. It would be a risk that they would both be taking if it even got off the ground at all. He peeled Brandee's face off of his shirt and held her at arm’s length, looking into her eyes.
“Let me say all that I have to say, okay baby girl? I'm kind of working this out as I go along so I may ramble a little but let me get it out?”
She gulped a little and nodded silently, tears staining her porcelain cheeks. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears.
Jake began, “I've been watching you for a while now. I know you're not happy and it's tearing me apart.”
“But Jake”, she said but he held up his hand.
“I know you're happy with me. I'm not talking about that. You want something more for yourself. You want a career on stage. You want to entertain. You always have. I love that about you. So what about this.
How about if you contact some of the places where you could perform. Contact them directly. Little places. Bars even. Any place with a stage that might be available for you. I'm not talking about places just around here. There really aren't many places right around here. I'm talking about places that we could drive to so people could hear my baby sing.
We'll get a couple of musicians to back you up. We wouldn't need much in the way of light or sound in the beginning, would we? Just us. I'll do the driving and the carrying of the big stuff. You do the singing and the negotiating. God knows I don't know what I'm doing here. I just want to see you smile.”
She smiled then. He thought that she was ready to agree, but that wasn't yet so.
“I want you to know that you are probably the sweetest man alive, right now. It's a great dream. We can't chase it though. Even if I can get venue managers to listen to me, what then? All of this takes money, Jake. Musicians aren't going to work for us just because we offer them Whoppers with cheese at the end of the day.”
Jake shook his head impatiently, “I know it's a risk. Don't you see though, baby? It's a risk that we will be taking together. I believe in you so much! I can't see us crashing and burning but if we do, we'll crash and burn together! You're never going to be happy until you know that you've tried as hard as you can every way that you can to make this happen for yourself. There is a big world out there that needs to hear you. Let's work together to make that happen.
Still unconvinced, Brandee countered, “What will we do for money?”
“We'll do it on savings and credit to start," he said. It's the slow season in construction right now. I'll tell Tyler that I'm going to need some blocks of time off. There are a ton of things to do, but let's just promise each other that we will try. Please baby girl.”
Brandee shook her head to clear it. She was overwhelmed at the thought. To set out on such an adventure would be epic, of course. Finally she looked at her husband, took a deep cleansing breath and said,
“I will try, honey. I'll make some calls. The worst they can do to me is say 'Hell no, bitch.”
***
That's how it got started. Brandee called everywhere that she could think of that had a stage. She started with the local venues, and then worked her way out in an ever expanding circle. At the same time, she put out word that she was looking for some backup accompaniment.
Humboldt State netted her a keyboardist named Bruce Jackson, a 45 year old veteran of the local music scene. He looked all of his four and a half decades. Time and substance abuse had not been kind to “Action” Jackson, as his friends called him, but he could make a keyboard hum. He had done a little composing in his time and had worked with some wannabes in the music field. He knew Chaz through the college and she put him in touch with the Evanses.
College of the Redwoods, a local junior college, netted her Suzi Limbaugh, a bass player who had experience in the jazz genre as well as working in some country/bluegrass groups. A young looking 42, she was teaching a jazz guitar class when she heard about Brandee's need for musicians. One evening, Brandee and Jake had Suzi and Bruce over for an audition that turned into an all-evening jam. Suzi and Bruce became an unlikely, but instant, couple that night. Jake shook his head when he saw what was taking place between Suzi, who he considered sweet, and Bruce, the grizzled long time musician.
The hardest support musician to find, interestingly enough, was a drummer that Brandee would be comfortable fronting. They tried out a number of young drummers but the mesh wasn't quite right. Brandee needed to be able to chase the rhythm on the faster numbers and be able to lay back in the arms of the rhythm on the slower ones. She had a hard time explaining to Jake what she meant as one after another of the drummers didn't suit her. Jake was satisfied, though, that she would know who had the right feel at the right time.
Finally, they found the person who could stroke the skins just the way that Brandee liked. Diane E. Hoover could make the sticks fly when necessary. She liked to play Buddy Rich's West Side Story Medley, which involved a good deal of intricate stick work. She was also very adept at supporting the deeply soulful pieces that were so much a part of Brandee's act. Diane, at 51, was the oldest member of the group, and acted as kind of a mother figure to the younger members of the traveling show, that is when she wasn't belting out the words to Great White's “Once Bitten Twice Shy” during breaks in rehearsal.
Jake was busy doing his own thing in support of Brandee's career. He told his friend (and boss) Tyler Henderson about what he and Brandee had in mind. Tyler was laying off employees as the winter months approached so he was more than willing to grant Jake the flexibility he requested. They left the question of what was to happen in the spring open-ended.
Next Jake set out to find a couple of vehicles that would suit the fledgling performance group on its journeys. The Sprinter that he and Brandee were in on the way to Chico was the one that he found first. Nothing like that was available locally, so Jake took an overnight trip to Vallejo when he found an ad that interested him on an on-line auction site. The Sprinter was 4 years old, but it only had 32,000 miles on it when Jake purchased it. A black exterior with deep red leather seating, it was a comfortable ride.
The Sprinter was powered by a 3.0 liter turbo diesel that yielded almost 25 mpg even when it was loaded with equipment. Configured that way, it was woefully underpowered climbing through the mountains. Jake opted for fuel economy over horsepower. He and Brandee were on a budget after all. That consideration wasn't the only thing on Jake's mind, though. He knew that they were going to need a vehicle for the other members of the group as well. He had put pen to paper and calculated that they were better off with two vehicles that were reasonably economical than with a large bus, at least at first. If the time ever came that they were traveling with a large contingent of sound and light personnel in addition to the current group, a larger vehicle would be essential. That was down the road though.
For the second vehicle, he settled on an eight passenger Nissan Quest. It offered gas mileage equal to the Sprinter, and it had a little more giddy up to it, since it was powered by a 3.3 liter V6 gas engine. It could handle the other members of the group along with their traveling gear. The plan was that the support musicians would go to the performance venue several hours early and get the lay of the land. Jake and Brandee would arrive a little later, in a more leisurely fashion. They would be bringing the equipment that hadn't fit in the Nissan.
Jake realized, though he never said it aloud to his wife, that there was a chance that one of these vehicles might end up sitting in front of the couple's Maxwell Street home, unused. They had a group. They had 2 vehicles to carry the group. So far, though, they didn't have anywhere to go.