Cemented Minds

By John Fleming

Mike Coverelli is a lowly-paid fast food worker by day, but he lives for his side job—frontman for the alternative rock band Cemented Minds. But when his band’s profile suddenly increases, Mike is forced to evaluate not only the future of his band, but the future of his life as a whole, in this dramedy. Includes some profanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Fleming
• Release date: Mar 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311926951

John Fleming

John Fleming is a native of St. Louis, MO. He is not an author by trade and the amount he charges for his writing reflects that fact. Check out his much shorter writings on a variety of mostly unrelated topics (sports, entertainment, politics, etc.) at johnapedia.blogspot.com.

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Cemented Minds

By John Fleming

Copyright 2014 John Fleming

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1

The date was August 10, 2012. I woke up at 8 a.m., took a quick shower, ate a peanut butter granola bar, evened out my sideburns, and drove to work. I flipped around the radio quite a bit on the way over—heard some Aerosmith, some Nine Inch Nails, that Missing You song. I don’t even remember who did that song—it sounds like Bryan Adams and it’s in that style and it’s from around that time but I’m pretty sure it’s not him. I don’t know—I’ve put too much thought into this and I don’t really care enough about it to just look it up online.

I can remember all of these stupid little details about that day, yet I don’t remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. Every tiny bit of minutiae from that period sticks out. I don’t know…it’s not like I was intentionally more cognizant or anything like that. But it was a big day.

I got to work at Happy’s a few minutes before 9 a.m., when my shift started. Happy’s, for those of you not from the St. Louis area, is a regional fast food restaurant. Burgers, chicken, fries—nothing really exceptional about the place, just your standard-issue source for lowly priced and mediocre tasting food. I had started working there when I was nineteen, in 2003, and had gotten to a point of such experience and expertise that I was able to effectively set my own hours and work in the position I wanted to work. As I had done for a few years, I worked as drive-thru order taker from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. I won’t lie—when I enrolled at Washington University after high school, I didn’t exactly envision working in fast food a decade later. But it wasn’t bad, really. For some people, maybe working at Happy’s would feel degrading. Some people view success as how much money they make or what kind of high-rise office they’re working in and I couldn’t have bought into that phony upward-mobility nonsense less. As far as I could see it, I was living the dream.

The morning was unusually slow, which suited me just fine. There was a toy race car from the kid’s meals in the back booth and I just kind of drove it along the tiling. I didn’t want to have to take morning orders. If you haven’t worked in fast food, you probably were not aware of this, but a lot of people have an inability to distinguish between fairly simple foodstuffs. Like, it had not occurred to me that people did not know the difference between biscuits and muffins, but they do not. Probably my tenth or so customer that morning pulled up in an excruciatingly loud black pickup, one which combined loud engine roars and a slightly louder radio.

Hello, welcome to Happy’s, may I take your order?

I couldn’t decipher a word of the response. Loud engine noises and occasional sounds resembling human voices made the white noise slightly louder.

Sir, could you please…

WHAT? was the loud response that I received. Finally, I understood something.

I just, unfortunately I can’t hear what you’re saying and you’re going to need to turn off the engine to your…

Before I was able to finish my sentence, the driver pulled around to the window. Mercifully, I was now able to hear him. He was a large man wearing a gray tank top, sporting a six o’clock shadow and reeking of the smell of cigarettes.

I tried to ask for his order but he immediately started it. Yeah, can I get two bacon and sausage muffins. But instead of the muffins, can I get them with biscuits?

Sure, no problem, I said, Two bacon and sausage biscuits, did you want anything else?

No, no, I don’t want that. I want the bacon and sausage muffins, the ones that are $1.49, just with the biscuits instead. It shouldn’t be any extra.

It’s not, sir, they’re two separate menu items and they’re both $1.49.

Look, kid, I don’t want to argue with you, I just want the bacon and sausage muffin sandwich, two of them, but without muffins and with the biscuits. For $1.49 each.

As I usually did, I eventually quit caring to try to teach customers a lesson and instead settled for the fact that this guy would have the exact same conversation the next time he came through the line, totally independent of any assistance I could provide. Okay, no problem, anything else for you?

One medium coffee, please.

Okay, one medium coffee, do you want any cream or sugar?

Yes, I’ll take two creamers on the side and two packets of Splenda.

Okay, two cream and…we actually don’t have Splenda, we have Sweet and Low, is that okay?

The customer was immediately befuddled. Sweet and Low, is that the same thing as Splenda?

I mean, they’re both artificial sweeteners, just different brands. I think it’s like a Coke/Pepsi thing where some people really care but most people just take whatever’s available.

What do you do? When you drink coffee, do you use either?

I don’t know, sir, I drink coffee black.

Oh sweet mother of…okay, that’s fine, just give me two Sweet and Low packets. And that’ll be all.

That was about par for the course. I was twenty-eight years old and the bulk of my day job consisted of explaining to grown men that there are multiple brands of artificial sweeteners on the market. It was easy and it gave me the money I needed but the idea of merely being a guy working at Happy’s would have depressed me relentlessly if it weren’t for the fact that I was truly passionate about my so-called hobby.

I had started Cemented Minds my freshman year of college. It wasn’t really that complicated—none of us were really dying to start a band, but once we started, we enjoyed it too much to give it up easily. It all started in my freshman dorm at WUSTL. Near the end of my time in high school, I had started to get really into classic guitar-driven alternative rock—The Smiths, R.E.M., Husker Du. I liked a lot of other bands in alternative rock of that era that were more keyboard based—Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, and the like, but they weren’t quite as magic to me. I would listen to Johnny Marr play and I was absolutely mystified by how it sounded. I remember hearing Blue Monday by New Order for the first time at Vintage Vinyl when I was in high school and thinking I wanted to listen to the song again. I heard This Charming Man not too long after and I wanted to change everything about my life.

I didn’t know anybody at Washington University whenever I first enrolled there—most of my high school ended up going to community college or one of the state universities. It was Labor Day weekend, though, and I didn’t feel like going home. I grew up in Valley Park, which wasn’t more than half an hour away from campus, but I’d put up with four years of high school, working hard so I could get away from my parents. I wasn’t going to abandon that dream after a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, pretty much everybody else in my dorm went home. Even the kids that weren’t from anywhere near St. Louis, and there were a lot of them, tagged along with local kids and stayed at their parents’ homes for a couple of nights. It was totally illogical and backwards to me, but regardless, they were sitting around their houses, doing nothing and being bored, and I was sitting in a lounge strumming along on a cheap acoustic guitar I had bought a few months prior.

I was a complete novice—I had never played an instrument before and until a few months earlier, I had never particularly tried to discern among different instruments in a song, but I was trying to learn the guitar riff to Submission by the Sex Pistols. From what I had gathered, learning Steve Jones riffs was a nice gateway to more complex guitar parts. Just a few chords, nothing too crazy going on in terms of speed or anything, and I liked the song, so I just hammered away. I had a rough version of it down pretty quickly—within half an hour or so, you would be able to identify the riff if you knew what to look for—but I wanted to hit it perfectly.

As I played in what I assumed was an empty or near-empty dormitory, a man came from behind me and started using his hands to drum along to my riffing. I kept playing and he kept drumming; he even continued while transitioning into sitting on a sofa. Just to mess with him, I abruptly stopped, and he continued his drumming while grinning at me.

Sex Pistols fan? I asked.

Oh was that the Sex Pistols? he asked.

Yeah, I’m just trying to figure out this…riff. Hi, my name’s Mike. Mike Coverelli.

We kept talking and I learned that this man’s name was Dan Carney, and he also was a freshman who lived in the dorms, two floors above me. His music tastes were quite a bit more mainstream than mine were, but he had played percussion in his high school band and said he always wanted to be in a non-orchestra, rock-type band. Truth be told, Dan wasn’t a great rock drummer when Cemented Minds started, which as far as I’m concerned was when we got our original lineup together, though he was certainly more musically proficient than I was. But he had the passion. I don’t know that he necessarily had the most drive to improve as a musician, but Dan always seemed to be having fun, which was contagious to us and it was contagious to anyone who watched us play.

Dan, being as he was from Indianapolis, had even fewer local connections than I did, but he did say that his roommate, who was from St. Louis, might be interested in playing with us, as he played guitar. Whenever he introduced me to his roommate, Tim Murphy, I thought he was the absolute straightest arrow in the world. He looked like some sort of Leave it to Beaver idea of what an upstanding young lad ought to look like. I imagined this guy being like the adults who were outraged by the Beatles’ hair lengths when they were on Ed Sullivan. It always amused me that people saw those guys in 1964 and thought their hair was just, like, appallingly long. They must have lost their minds by the time Sgt. Pepper came out.

But anyway, Tim plugs in his electric guitar into a tiny amplifier and turns the volume down to a reasonably low volume, but he starts shredding like he’s Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. But it was still disciplined and had a warm tonality to it. That’s what separates a flashy guitarist from a great one—he could tear off a solo but he could also play the perfect rhythm guitar on demand. The guy was so obviously better than Dan or I was musically that it almost embarrassed me to ask him if he wanted to play with us. He didn’t make any kind of long-term commitments—at this point, I was thinking jam session rather than lifelong musical plan, anyway. But he did agree to play with us.

I wish so badly that we had recorded some of the initial recordings with the three of us, which we performed in an empty academic hall that Tim had access to use through his part-time janitorial job on campus, because I would laugh so hard at how absolutely dreadful it had to sound to a neutral observer. I mean, I was part of it and even I thought it was bad. It was just undisciplined, pointless, go-nowhere noise. I was essentially playing rhythm guitar, just going with whatever twee little riff came into my head and really not deviating too terribly much from that the whole time. And by the whole time, I mean like fifteen minutes because we didn’t have a clue when the song was going to end. It would have probably sounded more listenable if we had contained it to four or five minutes, but then I would have felt bad that we had discipline for time but not for being good at playing music. Dan would just bang the bejesus out of the drums like he was Animal from the Muppets and Tim was playing way above either of our heads with his soloing. It was perversely fantastic.

While our music was, on the whole, terrible, none of us individually were playing poorly. I was writing bad riffs but I was playing them all right. Tim had the skill; he just didn’t have the wherewithal to know where to go with it. Dan actually sounded pretty good but what he was doing was totally out of place for what was around him. I insisted that we needed to try performing actual songs. They didn’t have to be songs we wrote, but they had to be songs that would give us some kind of structure. Tim insisted, correctly, that we needed a bassist. I had absolutely no feel for the instrument, and Tim was too good of a guitarist to relegate from his instrument of strength. We didn’t know anybody off-hand who could play the bass so we hung a sign in our dorm inquiring for a bassist. We even had the single most ridiculous tagline known to man to try to entice the right person.

WANTED: Bassist for yet-to-be-named rock band. Virtuosity not needed. Willingness to put up with lack of virtuosity preferred. Inquire at Room #209.

It took five days before somebody showed up at my dorm room. When somebody did finally show, it was this tall, skinny kid with longer hair who actually looked like the sort of dirty hippie guy you associate with a college rock band. He introduced himself as Sam Brown and he asked if he needed to audition to join the band. I asked him if he had a bass in his dorm, and he said that he did.

Good enough for me, I said. If the guy owned a bass, he was good enough. I mean, owning a guitar was basically my qualification for being in the band.

So a few days later, we started to play as a four-piece band. I was on rhythm guitar, Tim Murphy was on lead guitar, Dan Carney was on drums, and Sam Brown was on bass. None of us had any songwriting experience, so we tried to cover songs that we all knew. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many songs that we all knew well enough to even reasonably fake our way through, but we found enough to at least work around a structure.

I became the de facto lead singer, in spite of my limited vocal range, because I was the only one of us who could sing with even a remote sense of conviction while also playing an instrument. Thank God I worked out that niche early—if the band had grasped just how much better of a guitarist Tim was, I wasn’t going to be long for the band.

But of course, I eventually improved dramatically, as did every member of the band, and we eventually became a tolerable product. Before August 10th of 2012, there were genuine concerns over whether or not we would ever go beyond being considered tolerable and turn into the kind of band that people were actually genuinely excited to hear perform.

My shift at Happy’s was scheduled to end at 5 p.m., as it always was, and I’d play the Cemented Minds gig at Stafford’s at eight. I would have enough time to go home and change and then head straight out. Stafford’s was our regular weekend location in those days—we didn’t play it every single weekend but it was certainly the venue we played the most.

This had been the case for almost a decade—a lot of the bars in the University City Loop were either eschewing live music altogether or were trying to go for Wilco style country-rock groups. And while we would play the occasional country-influenced tune, we were at our core an alternative rock group. So we played Stafford’s, which was located closer to the more affluent Central West End neighborhood. It was a bit of a culture shock for me personally—I had grown up in what was very much a working class environment and, in spite of going to an elite private school, none of the other guys in the band were exactly aristocrats. But we built a following.

Once 5 p.m. hit and I was set to leave Happy’s, I walked to the front of the restaurant and tried to seek out whoever was going to take my order-taking headset. I didn’t care who took it; I didn’t have the slightest regard for how the rest of their night went. I don’t want to sound like a prick about it, but my interest in what happened with Happy’s ended with my shift. And that was on a good day. I usually didn’t care what happened even if I was on the clock.

A young girl, certainly younger than I was, wearing a manager’s name tag approached me as I headed for the door. Oh, hi, you must be Mike. I’m Amanda. You’re working back booth, right?

Was, I said as I hurried to the door, rushing out before she could guilt me into hanging around any longer.

I drove home, took a quick shower, and put on my clothes for the gig—blue jeans, a t-shirt, and some tennis shoes. There was not, nor was there ever, a uniform for Cemented Minds, and my goal was always to feel comfortable while performing. It never made any sense to me to do some sort of costuming like Peter Gabriel on stage or even dressing up in a suit or something. Wear what you