Free The Scar Boys by Len Vlahos

that night, but Johnny had been falling steadily in my eyes for a while. Our relationship was breaking down ever so slowly. This, however, was a whole new low. In one short car ride, it felt like Johnny had gone from pedestal to poser. Don’t get me wrong. He was still Johnny the leader, I was still Harry the follower, and he was still my best friend. But something had changed.
    “But Harry,” you might be asking yourself, “if Johnny was such a jerk, why did you keep hanging around him?”
    Well, no offense, but if that’s what you’re wondering then maybe you haven’t been paying close enough attention. Before I met Johnny, I didn’t really know why I was alive. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic or to suggest that I was suicidal—I wasn’t—but do the math.
    Friends? None.
    Looks? None.
    Athletic ability? None
    Academic success? None.
    Prospects? None.
    Not to overstate it or anything, but in a lot of ways Johnny saved me. He was Vinnie Barbarino and I was Horshack. It was going to take something a lot bigger than this to finally blow us apart. But there I go getting ahead of myself again.
    To me, Richie, and Cheyenne, the tour would be the start of an adventure. We would be Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin heading out of the Shire. It wouldn’t be the same for Johnny. He’d have one last party with the band and then head off to school. For him, the ride would end once and for all in August. I tried to convince myself otherwise, or at the very least I let myself believe that the tour would change Johnny’s mind and make him see that this, the Scar Boys, was what we were all meant to do for the rest of our lives.
    And in a way, that’s exactly what happened.

WE WANT THE AIRWAVES
    (written by Joey Ramone, and performed by the Ramones)
    We had only a few months to pull a tour together, and our first order of business was to cut a record.
    Since before Cheyenne joined the Scar Boys, we’d been hanging around the Mad Platter, a small, eight-track recording studio in Yonkers run by twin brothers, Dan and Don McAllister. Dan was Grizzly Adams—broad shoulders, thick red beard, a Zen-like confidence, and to us the very personification of wisdom. Don was the opposite—thin and twitchy, unable to locate his center.
    The two had been the rhythm section for a modestly successful sixties garage band called the Pepper Mint, and had used the money they’d earned to found the Platter. With a hardwired soft spot for nurturing local bands, the twins let us barter for studio time. We painted ceilings, put up drywall, even helped finish the wood floors in thehallway. It was as much an education in carpentry and home repair as it was in sound engineering.
    Over the years we’d recorded five songs at the Mad Platter, but the music was unproduced and amateurish—on tape we
sounded
like a bunch of kids from the ’burbs. We needed something better to press onto the vinyl that was to become the calling card for our tour.
    When we approached the twins about recording a single, Dan (Grizzly Adams) apologized that there could be no barter this time. Bills at the Platter were mounting, and we were going to have to pay the rack rate of thirty dollars an hour. To do it right, he said, to lay down basic tracks, to do overdubs, to mix, remix, and remix again, to make it
great
, we would need as much time as ten hours per song. “Add in the cost of the tape, the artwork, and getting the singles pressed and shipped,” Dan told us, “and you’re looking at fifteen hundred dollars or more, soup to nuts.”
    We’d earned close to three thousand dollars playing gigs, most of which had been earmarked for transportation. But we had little choice. There was no sense in trying to book a tour without a record. We’d just have to find a less expensive ride.
    The studio sessions at the Platter were everything we’d hoped they’d be. We recorded two songs: an anthem of sorts we’d been using to close our live set called “Assholes Like