Emerald City by Chris Nickson

British Invasion, then added their own secret herbs and spices...
    It took over an hour to shape it properly, changing words, chopping them, starting over then deciding I was wrong, but finally I had something I could live with, not perfect but as close as I was likely to come today. I’d carefully avoided the Seattle tag; it was starting to take on too many connotations, and that was a shame. The truth was that the city was a broad musical church and there was plenty of room for the Young Fresh Fellows, the Fastbacks, the Walkabouts and the metal bands next to the Soundgardens, Mudhoneys and the Mother Love Bones who looked set to break big. Who wanted to keep eating the same thing when there was a full menu?
    The Seattle music scene was really a little secret village that existed within the city. That was part of its beauty. Even inside this town, locked in by water to one side and the mountains on the other, you could feel like an outsider. The music tradition went back to the days of jazz on Jackson Street in the 1940s, when Quincy Jones and Ray Charles were playing together in the Cotton Club, through the Wailers at Spanish Castle in the 1950s with a teenage Jimi Hendrix following them around hoping to sit in, all the way down to now when you could go to the Central in Pioneer Square on a Saturday night, pay five bucks and hear some music that refused to conform. They were all sounds forged in the rain and the moss up here, the place I knew so well, where I’d grown up. I was proud of it, proud of my hometown and the Northwest. Maybe that was why I felt it in my soul and it moved me the way nothing else ever had.
    I turned to the other review, one I’d been dreading, for a singer-songwriter who’d opened for Steve’s band at a gig. Someone had told her I was a music journalist and she’d given me her tape then kept pestering to ask when I was going to write about it, saying that as a woman I should be supportive. I hated that kind of thing. Good was good and bad didn’t need the column inches. I cobbled something together, a patchwork of neutral phrases that looked good but meant nothing.
    Then, finally, I typed up my notes for the Craig Adler story, transcribing the interview with his neighbor, the encounters with Mike and Warren, and I understood just how little I had.
    Everyone said Craig hadn’t used heroin in months. Yet he’d died from an overdose. He’d bought it somewhere and put a needle in his arm when his band was all set to sign a good record deal. Had he suddenly decided to use some smack that night? Or had someone used the heroin to murder him? Until the threat, I’d believed it was just a sad accident. Now I had to keep digging until I found the truth. I sat back and thought, chewing on a strand of hair; it was a habit I’d kept since childhood, and one of the reasons I didn’t cut my hair.
    The only one who might have any sort of answer was Sandy. All I could do was hope she’d call me. Without her I didn’t have much of a story at all. And it was a story. The phone message underlined that.
    I’d just finished by the time Steve came home, the warm smell of dish detergent on his skin. He gave me one of the goofy smiles that he could do so well, all teeth and eyes, then one of the long kisses that always melted my heart, a reminder that he really did feel a deep passion for me. When he wanted, Steve could be deliciously sensual. And he was kind in a natural waythat none of my other boyfriends had ever managed, thoughtful and sweet. He cared. He stroked my hair before flopping on to the couch with a beer, boots resting on the table, then took a drink and sighed.
    â€œBusy day?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “One of the machines went down so we were really hassled the whole shift.” He looked at me with concern. “What about you? What did Rob say about the message?”
    â€œI’m staying on the story,” I told him.