Days Like This by Laurie Breton

sadness. 
Danny had, after all, been his best buddy.  But beyond the sadness, there was
exhilaration, for every time he heard one of those hit songs, he was blown away
by the magic the three of them had created.  That magic had given him a life he
never could have imagined when he was a scrawny nineteen-year-old guitar player
with vague, unformed dreams about making a living with his music. 
    Everything that was good in his
life today he owed to Danny Fiore:  the woman who was sitting beside him; the
career that was exponentially bigger than his wildest dreams; the money sitting
in the bank that allowed him to work when he felt like it and loaf when he didn’t;
even the house he was living in.  Without Danny Fiore, he would have none of
those things.  Without Danny Fiore, he would probably still be playing the
Boston bar scene.  Or worse, he would have given up his music years ago for
some dreary nine-to-five job that would have sucked the soul right out of him.
    Instead, thanks to Danny, he’d
led a charmed life.  Oh, there had been a few bumps in the road.  He’d had his
heart broken a time or two, had gone hungry for a few years while they
struggled to achieve success.  That had been hard, but it was a cakewalk
compared to Danny’s death.  That was the toughest thing he’d ever had to face,
losing his friend, his front man, the guy whose voice gave brilliant life to
the music he and Casey wrote.  He’d loved Danny like a brother, and losing him had
felt like the sky falling on his head. 
    But it hadn’t always been that
way.  He hadn’t much liked Danny Fiore at first. 
    As cities went, Boston wasn’t a
big one, and in the summer of 1973, the local music scene was small and
incestuous:  if you were out there playing, sooner or later, you knew everybody
else who was out there playing.  And if you didn’t know everybody, you knew
everybody’s bass player, or everybody’s cousin who used to play with your
drummer’s college roommate.  That was the kind of place it was.  For a couple
of months, he’d been hearing about this singer named Danny Fiore, who had a
voice, they said, that could peel the wallpaper off the walls.  Rumor said he’d
been bringing down the house everywhere he played, and at the age of
twenty-two, he was already achieving local legend status.
    One Saturday night when they had
nothing better to do, Rob and a couple of his friends went out to Somerville to
check out Fiore and his band.  The bar was crowded, the audience about
three-quarters female, and the instant Fiore stepped up on stage, Rob
understood why.  The guy was a total chick magnet.  He had a face like a Greek
god, and he oozed sex appeal like ketchup from a bottle.  Disappointed, Rob was
ready to dismiss him as just another pretty face.  All flash and no substance. 
He figured he’d stay for a couple of songs, finish his beer, and find some
better way to spend what was left of the evening.
    Then Fiore opened his mouth to
sing, and any thought of leaving went cha-cha-cha right out the door. 
It was strictly garage band stuff, but holy mother of God, could the guy sing. 
Rob instantly forgave him for the pretty face because it didn’t take more than fifteen
seconds to realize that Danny Fiore was going places.  But not with this band. 
The bass player wasn’t bad, but the drummer was weak, and the lead guitarist
sucked.  Rob nursed his beer and watched and listened and ruminated.  When the
set ended, acting on an impulse that came from someplace he didn’t even
recognize, he thrust his beer bottle into his buddy Eric’s hand. 
    “Hold this,” he said, and stalked
resolutely through the crowd to the stage.  “Hey, Fiore!” he shouted.
    The Greek god glanced up, eyed
him from stem to stern, took in the tangled mess of curly blond hair, the long,
scrawny legs encased in ragged denim, the scruffy army jacket and the wrinkled
Led Zeppelin tee shirt underneath it.  And said, “What?”
    “Your