For a minute there I lost myself…

Wow.  Wow.  Phoenix Saga came really close to completely falling apart tonight.  I thought I was only afraid of a few minor things, but this… I’m actually shaking.  I could tell both Joe and Joey were red-eyed and on the edge of losing it, and I was only on the phone.  I actually have to remind myself to breathe.  I mean it started out simple enough.  Joey calls me up and says "Hey!  Big trouble in Little China…." and at first… I thought everything was normal, but there was something about the way he said it that made my chuckle fall a little flat.  He tells me that Joe is booked to go out of town to Colorado on Spring Break weekend with the Sons of Korah (his other band).  I had a short conversation about not knowing what to do or say about this that I can’t remember.  Probably because I was so stunned at what I was hearing.

That really didn’t even sink in what that meant until I got Joe on the phone.  Actually I was about to call him, but he called me.  We greeted eachother and I could hear the strain in his voice as he said "We gotta talk."  I knew right then that this single phone call was going to spell out the life or the death of my band.  The band I’ve worked so hard for nearly 3 years now, and that has opened up so many creative avenues for me was hinging entirely upon both what I said to Joe and how he decided to handle this.  It may not seem so stark to you just reading this, and apparently it didn’t seem that way to Joe for a while, because he was scrambling trying to come up with a compromise.

As he explained it to me, he had told Cory about 2 months ago that he was free to travel on that week (which is South by Southwest week) and that it would be the best time here for them to go and the best time there to arrive in Colorado.  It had completely slipped his mind though that Phoenix Saga had prior obligations to the AIA and to the Heart of Texas Music Festival (both of which occur that week parallel to SXSW) and that we also had an application in to SXSW to play, though our status is still pending.  He said the Sons of Korah stood to make at least $1000 there and Colorado has been a place he’s been pining to go back to for a long time now, and that he was leaning towards going to Colorado.  I’ll admit that’s a very very tempting offer, and had Phoenix Saga had the opportunity to make that much I’d want to pounce on it and not negotiate… but that’s the thing.  That’s the trick right there.  No room for negotiation, and he’s essentially having to choose between The Sons of Korah or Phoenix Saga.  Either he goes, or he stays.

I’d like to say that I’m an epic negotiator and that what I said convinced him to stay, but it’s more likely that I was too scared to say too much, and yet too freaked out to push him.  I’m sure another reason he wanted to go to Colorado was to get away from HERE.  From all the shit going on at home.  His brother dating the girl he’s always had his heart set on right in front of him day after day with absolutely no regard to his feelings.  None.  There’s that… and the money and the notoriety for his band… and he’s probably a little homesick for the place.  In fact that’s why he shut himself off for all that week.  The relationship between Satomi and David just got to him and he exploded about it.  It’s ruining his emotions, and I know exactly where he’s been because I’ve been there before.  And so has Gabe.  Back in El Paso, when I was still crushed by Shoshanna dating this other guy instead of me, Gabe was a sort of kindred spirit because he was in the same situation.  I wrote that song about Shoshanna, but I dedicated it to Gabe and he’s the first one to ever hear me play it.  And now… Just Right has been hitting home with Joe about Satomi.

I always wanted to write songs that people could relate to, and I wrote that song as a sort of therapy for myself.  Joe is a musician too, and I told him that the way that musicians deal with things is they play music.  They pour all their emotions into it.  Even drummers.  Drummers most of all because they have somethign to really hit the crap out of.  And all this isolation and not playing music (neither with us nor the Sons of Korah) wasn’t doing him any good.  I told him he needed to play drums as his therapy.  Naturally, he agreed and said he hasn’t been helping himself because he’s been so mixed up.  But he said he’s really starting to relate to Just Right.  And it burns.  It fucking burns.

This was the hardest conversation of my life, because if Joe went to Colorado like he wanted to, Phoenix Saga would be missing one of the single largest opportunities we’ve ever had to get noticed.  Every word I said made my throat squeeze tighter and I was trying not to panic by removing my emotions.  I naturally pace when I’m talking on the phone, but I was all over the room like a squirrel on speed.  What the hell was I going to do?  In addition to all that, all that Phoenix Saga has done, including put this album out would have been wasted effort.  I just wasn’t ready to take that sort of let down and I thought about it and said it as neutrally as I could.  I said "I don’t like this idea.  I really don’t like this idea."  That’s all I could say.  If I exploded Joe would have probably broken down because I know he’s not an assertive person.  That’s part of the problem in the first place.  He’s a tender guy and I consider him a close friend, so there’s no way I could hurt him.  I said "Whatever you decide, I know you’ll do the best thing.  The best thing for you."  I probably said it more than once, but the point is I couldn’t think of anything else to say.  It was heartbreaking.

I had to tell him I feel like we’re drifting apart.  We used to hang out all the time and play guitar hero or go out to shows and gigs to see our friends play, and we’d hang out as just us.  For the past few months and especially when David and Satomi started dating, that’s when Joe started shrinking away from us.  I told him I didn’t want that to happen, and he said that it was his fault and it was his emotions that were pushing him away.  Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he simply couldn’t let Phoenix Saga down like that, and he brought up something I knew I could never have said to him, and that was a long time ago, when Joe first joined with the Sons of Korah, Joey said there was going to come a time when he’d have to choose between these two bands, and Joe said he’d choose Phoenix Saga, without a doubt.  I could never have brought that up myself because that would have been guilt-tripping him into staying and I wanted him to decide on his own.

He did decide to stay, and it was a really big fucking wakeup call to me and to Joey, that we need to get our asses in gear if we want our band to survive.  It could just as easily have died with a simple "no."  Shit.  I don’t ever want to have to do this again.  I hated losing Brian and we all still miss him.  I know we’d take him back in aninstant, but somehow we stuck together as a band when he left.  Without Joe, Phoenix Saga would shatter like ancient pottery.  Our drummer almost quit, and he’s just made an impossible decision.  Wow… I’m gonna go to bed.