Kiosk - Taking the Stage (page 3)

Taking the Stage
(continued)

As “Don’t Fear” comes to an end, Bentley takes a bow, swings the microphone up by the cord, and catches it.

“What’s up everybody?” he shouts, before asking the sound technicians to turn up the volume on his microphone.

“Take off your shirts!” screams a deep-voiced girl from the center of the crowd. Bentley gives her an awkward smile, keeps his shirt on, and continues.

“…This next song’s called ‘A Lesson Learned.’”

He begins bobbing to the new beat, doubling over and clutching the microphone. Bentley sings over a slower rock tune, laced with blues.

Took her out to dinner and we had a couple drinks. Told her that I loved her, and she said it too, I think.

As the song - already speeding along quicker than it should - further increases in tempo, the tightly packed crowd of college students swing their heads in time with the faster beat of Wes’ drums. Sean and Bentley rage around the stage, head banging with abandon. At one point Bentley’s six-inch spikes nearly decapitate Sean, who narrowly misses smacking him in the face with his guitar. Sean scoots forward, hopping on one foot towards the audience, looking as if he wants to leap off of the stage and surf atop the people in front of him. He manipulates the very air that people breathe, deciding which sound waves to send; the thudding rhythm of the bass and drums bursts from the amplifiers and vibrates inside everyone's chests.

Kearsey, in its earliest form, was actually just Wes and Sean. Within five minutes of meeting one another, they had established the musical bond and decided to jam. The Bairds was born. Wes had been Japanese Taiko drumming since he was nine years old, and picked up the snare drum when he reached high school. He added the rest of the drum kit piece by piece, isolating each of them mentally, building up speed and emulating his major drum influence, Buddy Rich. When Sean went to L.A. on weekends to meet his martial arts instructor, he spent the night at Wes’s house, which was just a block away. There, they would jam, playing mad mixes of guitar riffs and drum solos.

The group grew quickly. They added Ismet, who picked up the bass out of sheer boredom the summer before his sophomore year of college, and then realized that he’d been following the bass line of his favorite songs all along without ever knowing it. Davey, who had randomly picked up guitar during high school and only taken a couple months of lessons, also joined, along with his high school friend, Kevin.

Kevin, who the other members claim resembles Peter Pan, still uses scratching techniques that he first learned in third grade when, one Wednesday after school, he was locked out of his house. He wandered over to see his next-door neighbor Ron - a friend of the family, a senior in high school, and a member of a DJ crew. Kevin followed him upstairs, where a DJ setup balanced on small nightstands and bookshelves. Ron sat Kevin on an ottoman and taught him the basics of beat and rhythm matching. From then on, when he wasn’t skating or playing with friends, he went to Ron’s to watch him and his friends practice their mixes and scratches. His sophomore year of high school he got his first DJ set and a DJ video, and taught himself to scratch through imitation. When Sean said there was a place for him in Kearsey, he upgraded his equipment, spent more time scratching and mixing, and nestled quickly into the band.

Bentley was the last part of the ensemble. Sean introduced him to the other members over a game of football. Notably, it culminated with Ismet accidentally kneeing Bentley in the kidney. Nevertheless, the group bonded – Kearsey was complete.

Oh, but you taught me hard that love is just a game, and we’re just figurines on the board, waiting to get played. It’s just a goddamned shame, such a goddamned shame. Bentley screams, and the crowd screams back. Sean draws out a series of quick notes, shaking his butt towards the crowd as Davey and Ismet laugh, egging him on.

The two, still grinning, start off the third song, “Gotham, CA,” a funky tune Ismet wrote after watching Batman shows on television. It changes from 3/4 time to 16/4 time to 4/4 time – making it challenging to synchronize with the other instruments, and something bassists rarely do, since most musicians work with only one or two time signatures within a song. Sean raises his hands over his head and begins to clap in time with Wes’s beat. The crowd mirrors him, dozens of hands reaching towards the sky in unison. As Bentley starts to rap, Kevin begins scratching a section of the record. Woh, woh, woh w w w woh, word up, woh woh woh, word, word, word uh uh up.

Bentley looks like a break-dancer as he moves back and forth across the stage. He jams one long, skinny leg on top of a black speaker and, with a raw voice, screams the lyrics so loud that his throat would ache were it not dulled with a gulp or two of whiskey – and the audience can still barely hear him over the sound of the lead guitar.

Sean plays with fervor, using skills initially cultivated to win the heart of an eighth-grade girl who loved musicians. He got his first guitar the summer before his freshman year, and before the end of high school he was playing for three hours a day. He even won the young lady’s affection – a groupie from the very beginning, perhaps. Sean’s father taught him scales, jazz chords, and blues progressions, and he soon started writing songs alone, in rooms filled with acrid smoke. With his grandfather, a traveling blues guitarist at the age of 14, his father, also a blues guitarist by the time he was 15, and his brother, a regular guitar hero in his eyes, it seems evident that the guitar runs in Sean’s blood. And now that very blood splatters across the white pickboard of his Fender Strat, as he launches into a high-pitched riff and slices his right index finger on one of the strings.

(conclusion on page 4)