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Track 88
by Laura Blue

Our first song was a pop masterpiece with a jangley, infectious lead guitar line. We called it "Sunday" because that was the day we practiced.

The video, if we'd ever got around to recording and releasing it, would have revolutionized musicvideo art. We had our every move scripted, right down to Rob getting locked out of the pedal car just as "Sunday" hit its driving, marcato-basslined climax, and Chris and I saving him from the jump-suited bad-guys just before the song resolved into its stunning, abrupt ritardando and strong, slow, open chords.

It was stellar.

So stellar, in fact, that Meredith had our Grammy-acceptance speech worked out by the third Sunday. That was the beginning of the end.

"I don't want a Grammy," I said. "The Grammies are lame."

"But we have to go!" she said. It was key. It was at the Grammies that Meredith would meet Billy Corgan, her future husband. If there was no Grammy, there could be no meeting. And that was unthinkable.

Meredith was depicted on the band T-shirts as a giant Smashing Pumpkins logo. The shirts, made for us one Christmas by some friends, said "Track 88" on them and had caricatures of each of the four band members. I was a train
because, when we'd had band photographs taken, I'd been playing with pieces of the dismantled train set in Meredith's basement. I quite liked the train motif. I felt it captured nicely the appeal of the downtempo, minimalist intro to "Rob's Nightmare".

Rob's girlfriend hated the band.

"She's jealous," we said, "because she can't play anything," and I told her so.

"Nor can any of you," she said.

She had a point. Chris never really learned to tune his bass, let alone play the complex bassline to our most enigmatic track, my personal favourite, "Houston, We Have A Problem". Rob sped up fatally every time he got louder, and our amps were so shitty he could barely hear us over his energetic
drumming anyway. Meredith was too shy to sing loudly enough for people to hear her. The only lyrics I ever knew to "Jelly" (a pop-rock ballad which I later found out shared a chord progression, unfortunately, with GnR's "Don't You Cry Tonight") were "I'll wait for you", "superstar", and "like an angel fallen". Come to think of it, I have no idea what any of our lyrics were about. Probably Billy Corgan.

One Sunday afternoon, we tried to record a demo tape. We tried playing "Jelly" half a dozen times and couldn't finish it once. Then we attempted "Sunday" and failed on that one too. We gave up, went down to the convenience store, pretended to be Swedish exchange students, and tried to wrangle free M&Ms out of the store clerks. It didn't work.

Practices slowly became less frequent. We kept telling people we had a band for ages until, one day, three months after our last practice, Chris finally took his bass back to the rental shop and it was all over. It took the better part of a year, though, for Meredith to return the pitiful contributions we'd made to our studio-time fund.

Laura Blue is a vampire. Sent to drain.