Echoes

A short story
by James Papoutsis

I tracked down Johnny and the Echoes. To see the band you had to find them. That was the trick, because they weren't playing clubs anymore, or bars, or anything like that. I pulled into a provincial park partly on a tip from a message board, but partly on a hunch. The message repeated rumors of a show in northern B.C., and there were lots of rumors, but something about this one felt right. So hard to sort through the noise on those boards. Strange random chatter at three in the morning. Speculation about where they would strike next. Electronic signs, often leading nowhere.

I had a connection to the band, from when I used to play, so that’s why I drove west three days from Ontario. But I wanted to know why others still followed them. Why was there a pack of loyal kids, several hundred at least, that followed an obscure Canadian new-wave band? What did it mean to them? I was over thirty, and I remembered the promise of the Eighties. Some of these kids hadn’t even been born when the band’s first, and only, album came out. The exact date of the release is a subject of some speculation, and no one knows for sure because it’s not even known which record company released the album.

Polar Dog Records had it listed in their registry, with a release date of 1982, but no one at the record company could confirm or deny this when I called. It was conspicuously missing from their back catalog, and when pressed, the PR agent had to admit that Polar Dog may or may not have ever distributed a record by Johnny and the Echoes. There was no one around from those days to substantiate the claim either way.

When I looked at the back of the LP, one of an alleged five hundred that had been made, there was a faded black sticker where the name of the record company should have been. Peeling back the sticker, I discovered that there was nothing printed underneath. Other fans had figured that out too. Someone who went by the handle of Blue London on the chat board claimed that this was an intentional move on the part of the band—that they had used some kind of slow-burning glue to adhere the label, and that this had eventually eaten away at the printed words beneath it. The story sounded like the mythologizing bullshit of some hard-core fans, but it kept with the band’s hit-and-run spirit. I wasn’t sure what to believe. All I remember was peeling back that sticker, discovering nothing, and realizing that I had to find the truth.

The provincial park was eighty kilometers outside Ocean Falls in the hills that rose on the B.C. coast to eventually become the mountains. There were signs of life, near a lake, and I steered my old Honda Civic down the slightly muddy path to where a group of busses had converged. A guy in combat fatigues directed traffic. “Park to the side. There’s more coming.”

An odd collection of people had gathered. It was not your typical dead-head spin-off set. There were some tie-dyes, yes, but also some rave-kids, a couple guys in overalls, some bikers, and one bunch that could have stepped out of a J. Crew catalog. Not your typical music fans. Not your typical anything.

When I got out of the car, the guy in combat fatigues came up to me.

“You see that?” He pointed to a bus with a small satellite dish on it. “They’re going to go all wireless, you know. Get the word out.” We were pretty isolated. If the linkup didn’t go, one of the bikers was going to make the run about twenty kilometers down the highway to where the cell phones started working. We were in a kind of electronic wilderness, a hole burnt into the cat’s cradle of fiber-optic lines that stretched across the continent. And there were just a few hundred of us in this valley well below the radar screen. Below the level of electronic chatter.

A couple punks asked a hippie girl if we were really in the right place.

“Yeah, can’t you feel it, man?”

The punk grunted in return.

I wasn’t sure exactly why I had pulled off the highway at that exact spot. The tip had been ambiguous. Somewhere north of Ocean Falls was all it had said. Maybe when you get far enough away from the networks with their invisible microwave signals, maybe somewhere outside of that your sixth sense kicks in again. Some kind of lost instinct buried deep inside.

We waited another twenty minutes for the bus to try and get a connection before the biker left. There were only a couple hours of daylight remaining. The band always struck at night.

We drank gin and ate slightly burnt hotdogs. I didn’t even exchange names with anyone, ask them what they did for a living, or any of that. Which was fine with me. Nothing I did now was as interesting as when I played. I did some freelance writing for a local paper. They hadn’t been interested in the article I pitched them called “Whatever happened to Johnny and the Echoes?” but I decided to follow it anyway. I realized it didn’t matter if no article came of this. I just wanted to be here. Get away from the thing I called living. Everything here took place outside of that world. There was no need for pretenses. All we talked about was the band.

“Have any of you heard the missing studio sessions?”

“What about the Toronto show? The one in the abandoned subway tunnel. Anyone hear about that?”

“I have fifteen minutes of video from Medicine Hat,” one person offered. “But it’s a bit blurry.”

I didn’t offer up the one thing that connected me to the band. There had been a time, before they went underground, when it wasn’t that hard to find them. I had played the same festival once and had briefly crossed paths with Johnny himself. This figure in an astronaut-suit costume had come up to me after my set, said he liked how I handled the keyboard. I thanked him, looking at my reflection in his mirrored visor. When he pulled it back, I recognized the face of course.

“Jesus, I didn’t know it was you.”

He had stood silently for a moment.

“I always wondered,” I continued, not so sure of what to say, “how do you get your Korg to make that synth-drone sound?”

He nodded. “People ask me that.”

“If it’s a secret, then . . .”

“It’s no secret. You just have to tweak it. Get into its electronic guts and push the sound. You really have to push it. Keep on the outside. You know what I mean?”

“Well . . .”

“I think you know what I mean,” he interrupted. “I can see that you do.”

His sound was like nothing else I had heard. “But how do you . . .”

He put a hand up. “Listen. The key is keeping the sound on the outer part of the edge. You know what a sound wave looks like?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Think about that line as it drops off, the way it looks, the way it sounds. That’s where you have to keep it. You have to keep it right on the edge, like it’s gonna slip over any minute.” He seemed to be looking at something far off, but there was nothing there. “I can’t describe it, but you’ll know it when you hear it. Just keep pushing. Just keep going harder.” We were both silent for a moment. Then he asked what the plans were for my band, and I gave him the usual talk about trying to land a record deal and get some tour dates in the States.

He shook his head. “We’re all going to have to go underground one day. Right now you’ve got your finger on it, don’t you? You can feel this new-world pulse. You can feel everything going digital.”

He was right. It was the indescribable quality of the Eighties. Feeling that we were on the cusp of something big. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I can.”

“You can lose that just as easily.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I only got it later. The Echoes went underground long before the scene died, and years later, stuck in a straight job, I wondered how it had all come apart. I had drifted from one thing to another. Worked in a Canadian Tire in Burlington. Had two kids and a dog with my ex. She wouldn’t have understood why I had to come out to things like this.

The B.C. sky turned to copper. A bloody egg of a sun dipped below the horizon. Only a few minutes left until real-dark. Already a couple stars out. The biker returned after making a few calls to people close to their computers. A marker had been set up on the highway and a few more people trickled in, but we weren’t much more than that initial few hundred when a light when up on the lake. Far out, maybe on a barge, maybe on another shore, a dim blue light illuminated something. Then we heard the familiar deep bass synth sounds.

Whaahhh.

Whaahhh.

A cheer went up, and we heard the beginnings of a song. No one could identify it. A new one, then. We were watching something being born here. It was mostly keyboards. I closed my eyes to try and feel the notes coming over the lake. Tried to remember every note. I heard a drumming, a medium tempo, and a bass guitar backing the keyboard. Someone had a camcorder pointed at the source of the sound. The song went on forever. A brief flicker of something hopeful. The sound of a time on the edge of an electronic frontier, of the new built on the ruins of the old, before a long dark curtain had fallen. The melody repeated. Got stuck in my head. I could play it. Dust off the keyboard and play this. I think I saw the sound, felt the sine wave, saw where the edge was now.

And then it was over. The light dimmed. A moment went by. We heard the voice, echoing over the dark lake. “That’s the last decent song I can come up with. You should see most the shit that I’ve done lately.” It took a moment to register that that was Johnny. He never addressed the audience. “Thank you all for coming. I’m afraid that this is it. Tell everyone else that I’m pulling the plug. There will be no more shows.”

The sound of an amplified instrument hitting the floor followed, then a stranger sound. He must have tossed the keyboard in the water. It gave a brief, digital gurgle before cutting out.

“Nostalgia should be left in the dustbin of the past,” Johnny said. “It’s time to make it new.” Then the microphone hit the water, another gurgle before cutting out.

The blue lights dropped out entirely. A few flickers of flashlights, then nothing.

We listened for some sound in the thick B.C. air but nothing came.

“Is that really it?” someone said. “I mean, is that it?”

A few people showed up, too late, and we huddled in a group to watch the recording, to figure out if he’d really meant it.

“It’s bullshit man,” someone said. “Theatrics. They’re gonna surface again.”

The video had caught a thin blue light on the lake, a pinprick in the middle of a LCD screen. The recording didn’t measure up to what I’d seen. Something lost in the transfer. The quality of liveness. The feeling that anything can happen. Tape wasn’t about possibility. It was about replaying the past. Maybe that’s why Johnny didn’t want to do this anymore. He’d turn into a tape loop sooner or later. I thought back to the sound, the way I’d felt its edge.

The chatter kept going, and the campfires burned late into the night as Johnny’s little tribe swapped stories and emails. I still wondered what had brought us all here, what had made this loose connection of people gather in the dark and try to be part of something larger. I didn’t know, and as dawn approached, the only thing I was sure of was that the whole thing really was over.

I crawled back into my Honda Civic and started the slow drive back to the motel. In my last view of the lake I thought I could see a faintly glowing light. I wondered whether it was the first sign of morning or some residue of the band. The last glowing ember of some long-faded fire.

I left B.C. the next day, driving east across the mountains, the rhythm of the road beneath me. I thought of Johnny’s sound. The edge and how he got there. I’d break out the keyboard when I got home. Open it up. Dive into its electronic guts and make something new. I’d finally heard the echoes for real. Finally got what it all meant.

Copyright 2007 by James Papoutsis