And things had changed. John Engler, who Dayna had been in a back seat with once, and she remembered Vicky saying she had too, had now reportedly settled down with their old friend Mandy Paxton, another class of ’88 girl, but one who hadn’t had much to do with him in school. It wasn’t a done deal yet, but looked serious. They’d apparently gotten together more because of being two kids from the same town at Eastern Michigan University, so they had that in common. Scott Tyler and Shelly Waltz both went to Michigan State, but they hadn’t gotten together; in fact, they reported that the school was so big they’d only seen each other to talk three times all year, and that just in passing. Scott had a girl friend up there, named Sonja, from Detroit, and to hear him talk about it, it sounded pretty serious. It wasn’t mentioned at the table, but Emily had told Dayna the night before that Shelly had said that Sonja was pretty dark, so that was a real surprise for the class dreamboat. Shelly was making noises about dental school, so was trying to keep from getting hooked up with anyone.

"A lot of people we know aren’t here," Dayna said as she watched John give Vicky a straight shot of bourbon with a beer chaser. "Some of them people I’d love to know about. I mean, when I was in school I had lunch with Jennlynn lots of times, but I haven’t heard a peep out of her in almost two years."

"That’s, uh, a touchy subject," Emily admitted. "She spent the last two years out at Caltech like she planned. Well, one day, right back at the first of May, she came knocking on my door, carrying a couple suitcases and crying her eyes out. She said she needed a ride up to the airport in Hawthorne, so I loaded Kayla in her car seat and took Jennlynn up there. On the way I more or less got the message that her folks had thrown her out. I’m still not clear about why, and no one is talking."

"Why’d she want to go to the airport up there?" Shelly asked. "There aren’t any flights out of there."

"She had her own plane," Emily reported, "a little green and white one. She said she bought it to get her pilot’s licenses; it wasn’t real expensive. I didn’t get much more than that out of her, she was crying so much. I got her up to the airport and tried to calm her down, but she was still crying when she got in the plane, started it up, and flew away. No one’s heard from her since, and her folks freeze up and get nasty when anyone mentions her name."

"Jeez," Scott shook his head. "Whatever it was, it must have been something bad."

"Probably," Emily nodded. "We might find out, and we might not."

"What about Pat McDonald?" Scott asked.

"Joined the Marines," Emily reported. "I guess he’s out in the Gulf, but I don’t know for sure. I try to keep up on everybody, since I’m about the only one that’s living here more or less permanently. I figure I can be someone to touch base with."

"It sure will be interesting to see what’s happened to everybody at our tenth class reunion," Scott nodded. "I guess if anyone’s going to organize it, you’ll have to be the one."

"I guess," Dayna nodded, and spoke up a little. "Hey folks, let’s ease up on Vicky just a little bit and drink some ourselves. She’s getting ahead of us."

"Why don’t you play something?" Vicky suggested. "I don’t know if anyone here but me knows how much your music has changed from what you used to do back at the mall."

"All right, sounds reasonable," Dayna said, suddenly finding herself not in the mood to catch up on people she’d most likely never see again. "If somebody’ll pour me another beer, I’ll get my guitar."

*   *   *

"Good God, my head hurts," Dayna moaned from the right front seat of Home the next morning.

"What did you expect?" Sandy chided as she drove north up I-67. "After all, you were the one who said you might as well get as drunk as Vicky. I was the good girl. I was the designated driver and was the one drinking nonalcoholic beer all evening. Which tastes like shit, I might add. I mean, if you can’t get a buzz on, what’s the point?"

"It was in a good cause," Dayna said. "Tell me, I’m not remembering clearly. Did I do any Lucille Bogan?"

"No, and not even Eskimo Nell, either, but a couple times I thought you were getting worked up to do it."

"Pretty good party, though," Dayna grinned, in spite of herself. "I guess last night underlined that I’m the black sheep of the class, unless whatever Jennlynn did was really bad."

"Who’s this Jennlynn?"

"Oh, she was our class valedictorian, real smart, but real straight. Her folks are even straighter; her dad’s a minister and real stuck up. She went to Caltech on a scholarship; she wants to design computer parts or something. Doesn’t matter, I guess. We’ll probably never know. Anyway, fucked up head or no, it’s good to be back out on the road, even if we’re pointed toward Unpleasant Flats."

"Yeah, but we get to drive right by it without slowing down," Sandy pointed out. "God, I hope we have a good summer up there. That’s the key to a lot of things."

The weather the last few days wouldn’t have made it worth going to Mackinaw City, but the weather was passing, so they figured that they might as well get on up there. They had one problem, probably not unsolvable – the little place they’d stayed at out in the forest all the previous summer was about five miles out of town. If they couldn’t find some place to park Home closer in, it was going to be a pain in the butt to have to tear down every morning and set up again every evening, sometimes way late. It was still a little early for the peak tourist season, but they figured they might as well get in what they could, since they had two weekends they could work the heavier weekend crowds before they’d have to be spending their weekends at Maple Leaf. Even this time of the year, weekend traffic could mean thousand-dollar days, and a few extra of those in the bank account would make things a lot more flexible once summer was over with.

It was good to drop off of I-75 at the last exit before the Mackinac Bridge and drive up Central Avenue again. It wasn’t a particularly nice day, but there was a fair amount of traffic on the sidewalks, so things looked promising. As luck had it, there was a parking space open right across from the totem pole, so they parked and went in to say hi to Cheryl, who solved their problem in one phone call. She knew of an elderly widow less than two blocks away who was trying to make ends meet on Social Security. It proved that the woman, Roberta Deborin, was more than willing to let them park Home in her driveway for forty bucks a week; they could even run a hose to an outside spigot, and an electric line to an outlet on her porch. She would even let them use her shower! Best of all, it was only two blocks to Shepler’s Ferry dock, and a block to the Keyhole. They’d have to move a couple times in the next couple weeks to go dump the holding tank, but that was it.

Dayna was over her hangover enough by now that they went out to work the sidewalk by the totem pole for a couple hours, just to get their feet wet, and after a while, wandered down to the Keyhole, had a little hair of the dog, and played for several hours; in the end, it wasn’t a bad hat for only part of a day. The next morning, they were down at the ferry docks for the first time since the previous summer, and Bill came out to say a few friendly words to them as the crowds were starting to show up, so the core of their season was off and running.

Early the next afternoon, they’d just set up by the totem pole and were trying to gather their first real crowd of the day in that location. This, they’d learned, was not something for light and delicate; something with a little power was called for. Cold Cold Heart was one of their favorites, but this time, for no particular reason, they started out with a fairly heavy version of House of the Rising Sun – the old version, not the Animals’ version. Dayna was in a good mood and was especially in to it, but traffic was light and they weren’t drawing much of a crowd. But they did get applause, from Cheryl and a man with her at the door of the business.

"Missy, you beat the hell out of that thing," he grinned. The girls looked at him; he was tall, slender, in his forties at a guess, with thin, graying hair and a salt-and-pepper beard – and possibly the most disreputable-looking cowboy hat east of the Mississippi.

"Thanks," she grinned. "We try."

"Sandy, Dayna," Cheryl grinned. "I’d like you to meet a special friend of mine, Steam Train John. He’s in town to do a show for us this weekend."

"A show for you?" Dayna asked.

"Yes," Cheryl said. "We have dogsled races here in the winter, and John comes up to play for the Musher’s Banquet. That’s built a group of fans, so we decided to do a show in the spring."

"Miss," he said to Dayna, "Can I borrow your guitar for a minute?"

"Yeah, sure," Dayna grinned, expecting something special.

It was – John picked at it a couple times, then launched off into a folk song that had a lot of energy, about a guy who jumped ship to find a gold mine back in the Alaskan gold rush days.

Dayna and Sandy looked at each other. This guy could play a guitar! He ran through the song, which was fun with a lot of energy, then handed the guitar back to Dayna, who asked, "Did you write that?"

"Among others," John grinned. "I’ve written a few. Can’t even tell you how many. Not even sure I remember ’em all, anyway. Cheryl tells me you kids are working as street musicians."

"Well, yeah, but we do some renaissance faires and play some other gigs every now and then."

"Know how that works," he smiled. "I worked the streets for years. One time, I was still living with my girlfriend before we got married, we were up in my cabin in the woods on the Kenai, and we were out of money and just about out of food, and she was getting a little uptight. I told her, ‘Don’t worry honey; I’ll just go play my guitar.’ She was about ready to leave me, but we went into town, I sat down in a bar, put my hat out and started playing. Hell, I knew I could do it; I did it for years, and kind of miss it in a way."

"You’re not a street musician anymore?" Dayna asked. "What do you do?"

"When the kids got to a point where they had to be in a regular school, I decided I better get a real job, so I’m now a songwriter down in Nashville. I still play a few bars and other dates to keep my hand in, and have some CDs out."

"Way cool," Dayna said. "Boy, would we ever love to pick your brain."

"Might’s well, if I can play some with you," John grinned. "I wasn’t doing anything else this afternoon but trying to get in Cheryl’s pretty hair. Let me run and get my guitar out of my car."

*   *   *

It was a most interesting afternoon. The girls would play something, then John would. He was as good at hat lines as Tim, and had some interesting twists to them, although the money went into their hats. Their tastes weren’t close – the girls, as always, were more into blues and pop and renaissance faire ballads, while John went toward country-western and modern folk ballads, but he knew some blues and lots of other music – a huge range of stuff. At the end of the afternoon they were sure they had barely scratched the surface. They played a lot of their original pieces for him, and some of their favorite workovers of old songs, and he was glad to critique them, giving good constructive help. The hats were mostly moderate, since they spent a lot of time between songs talking about them.

What was most important was that he had a different, and more modern, view of the business than Tim, their primary mentor up to this point. As daylight dwindled, they headed up to the Keyhole, not to play, but to talk and learn. And learn they did.

"I can’t believe you don’t have some CDs for sale," he said at one point. "Hell, that’s a gold mine."

"It would be nice," Dayna replied, "but I don’t know the first thing about how we’d go about getting in with a record company, unless maybe you could put in a good word with us."

"I could do that," he said. "But my contacts are all in country-western, and you don’t do that. But, that’s not the point. CDs sell for twelve or fifteen bucks each, right? Do you know what it actually costs to make a CD? I mean press one out?"

"No idea," Sandy shrugged. "Several bucks each, anyway."

"Wrong," John smiled. "I can think of several places that you can get a thousand CDs made, in jewel cases with color-printed cards, at about seventy-five cents apiece. Now, if you’re in with a record company and you have a CD being sold on the regular market, the merchant gets about forty percent of that fifteen bucks, less if he’s discounting it, which is why there’s a lot of discounting. The record company gets about half of what’s left, and the artist about half. But, while the record company pays that six bits a copy, actually less considering a volume discount or doing it in-house, a lot of the promotion and expenses come out of the artist’s share, which is how record companies make so much money."

"Looked at that way, that bites," Dayna said. "But you’re going to sell a lot more through stores and like that than through a record company."

"In theory," John said. "How much competition are you up against in the record stores? The only way to get a name made in the business is to promote yourself. You girls know who Jenny Easton is, don’t you?"

"Sure, she had a big hit a few years ago, a remake of Fever."

"I know Jenny a little," John said. "She’s a good example. Her first album, Smoke Filled Room, grossed somewhere around thirty million the first year, so in theory, she pocketed around nine million. In practice, about eight million in promotion came out of her pocket, and she was so new in the business she didn’t realize she was getting raped. By the time everything was said and done, she was left with about half a million, and after the IRS got done with her, she was in the hole. She had to do a second album with a hell of a lot less promotion, but with sales riding on the first, to get her butt out of tax trouble."

"Shit, no," Dayna shook her head. "I never knew that."

"Point is, hitting it big doesn’t mean hitting it big," John said. "But look at it from the other end. Recording and mastering and clearing music all cost money, but suppose you could do it on the cheap, no studio musicians, a little studio that will work with you, and maybe you can record a master for a grand or two. Then, you have a pressing company knock out a thousand copies for you, that’s seven hundred fifty bucks. For the sake of round figures, three bucks a copy for everything. Now you’re selling that dog for fifteen bucks."

"Whoo, boy!" Dayna said, impressed. "That’d be like twelve grand profit. Can you sell that many?"

"Sure can, I’ll sell two or three hundred here, Friday and Saturday nights," John smiled. "Cheryl will even have a woman taking the money from the customers, out of the goodness of her heart. On top of that, I’m getting a fee for performing in the first place. And, to make it even nicer, I’ll have four albums there and I’ll have paid the master costs on three of them; this isn’t the first pressing of those. Those I’m getting closer to fourteen bucks apiece profit. Now, I’ll admit, the new album is a little more advanced, I got some good studio musicians in to back me up on a few tracks, but I figured I could spend the money this time."

"Holy shit, I never even thought about that," Dayna said, shaking her head. "Hell, that’s the same producer-direct-to-consumer shtick that we throw into hat lines all the time. Look, John, the guy who taught me the most I know about the business more or less retired from it before they came out with CDs, much less got popular, so it’s understandable we don’t know this. How about cassette tapes?"

"The price break ain’t quite as good on them but still pretty good," he said. "On the other hand, tapes are on their way out. I have ’em, but don’t move them as fast, as a lot of my customers still don’t have CD players."

"How do we get into the CD business?" Sandy asked.

"Oh, there’s a few tricks," John told them. "Studio time comes a little high but it’s worth it. If you can pretty much go in, sit down and play what you’ve got to play in a day or two, and you got somebody with a little studio and a good hand at mixing, you can get out of it without burning your ass too bad. You hear these stories of people spending hundreds of thousands of bucks on studio time; that’s because they rent the studio to do their rehearsing, record the shit over and over again, then spend a coon’s age dinking around with the mixing. The big trick is you’ve got to have your shit together before you step into the studio. That includes clearances, and that’s the other pain in the ass, especially for you two."

"Clearances? I’m not with you."

"A big chunk of the music you two do is material that’s already copyrighted. Technically, when someone gives you money to play something like I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, you owe a percentage to a record company. When you’re playin’ on the street like you do, nobody’s gonna hold you to it. But you put that on a CD without clearing the copyright with somebody like Columbia or whoever holds the rights, they’ll have your ass in court so quick it ain’t funny. That’s why my CDs are all my own material; I don’t have to piss around with clearances. They cost money, sometimes a lot of money, and sometimes they’re a pain in the ass to arrange. It can take years."

"Shit," Dayna frowned. "I knew there had to be a fly in the ointment somewhere."

"There it is," John nodded. "Now, there are a couple things that might make things a little easier. First, you don’t want to do a lot of covers on an album, anyway. One or two is fine, but mostly or even all covers is another story. So that means you want to do original works. Now, take Cold Cold Heart. That’s Hank Williams, which means that it’s owned by Acuff-Rose, and I know a guy over there who would probably clear it pretty cheap, especially since you’ve turned it into blues. I liked that version you did of House of the Rising Sun, it doesn’t sound much like the Animals. Did you rework that?"

"Actually, not much," Dayna told him. "The Animals reworked a traditional version that may be a hundred years old. I did the old version."

"Didn’t know that," John said. "OK, if it’s that old and you can prove it, and you do the original version, you could stand off a copyright claim, and you don’t need clearance. Your renaissance faire stuff, that’s all old stuff like that?"

"Some of it," Dayna said. "Some is newer, and some we wrote ourselves. We did a lot of covers when we started; we’re trying to pull away from them to our own pieces, or at least major reworks, like Cold Cold Heart. That’s the first song I did a major rework on, and I’ve honed on it a lot over several years."

"Sounds damn good, too, I’d want to put that on an album," he nodded. "There’s no reason your first album can’t be a medley of this and that. Far as that goes, I’ve got a few songs that are your kind of music that I’ll never record, and a place like I work will never be interested in them, so I’d clear them to you real cheap to help you get started. But I think you may have enough to get started, anyway, there was some stuff you did this afternoon that I never heard before. There was one that really struck me; for example, I think it was something about Genie in a Bottle, that’s pretty good. Is that yours?"

"Yeah," Dayna grinned. "We wrote it in the front seat of my old Chevette on the way up here last year. There’s a dirty story behind it."

"That’d go pretty well on an album, I think," he grinned. "Tell you what. Let’s get together tomorrow, and you do your original pieces for me. I’ll tell you what I think, what might work, what might not, what needs work. It’ll all be my opinion, of course, and it’s for what it’s worth. And I’ll think about it tonight to see if I can remember a few of mine that you might be able to work up."

"Fair enough," Dayna smiled. "How about recording and mastering and like that?"

"You going to be down in Tennessee anytime soon?"

"We’ll be doing a renfaire near Knoxville in October."

"Oh hell, by October I ought to be able to find someone in Nashville that can take you into a studio for a couple days for a reasonable fee."

"John," Dayna said. "I have to say you’ve opened our eyes to possibilities we’ve never even thought of, and we appreciate your offer of help. We must owe you something for it. What can we do?"

John grinned at them with a gleam in his eye. "Lookin’ at the two of you," he said. "Fifteen years ago I’d have had a different answer, but I’m married to the woman that was set on earth for me, and I ain’t going to mess with that. So, here’s the deal. In a few years, you’ll be around someplace and you’ll find a talented kid needing some help. You’ll have been around the block a bit by then, so you can pass some of this stuff along to them, so they can pay it forward to the next person."

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