Free Wild Licks by Cecilia Tan Page A

also been told that those avoiding the paparazzi prefer them because photos that do not show your face are less desirable to photographers.
    In my case the dark glasses were purely practical. Los Angeles is very nearly a desert and the sun shines as wretchedly bright as in the Sahara. Especially when one has spent most of the previous night on a glorious, whiskey-fueled songwriting binge. The five of us had played until nearly four a.m. before grabbing a few hours of sleep before a morning photo shoot. I didn’t regret the night’s activities one bit, but I did ever so slightly regret how bloodshot my eyes were.
    I, at least, didn’t scream like a schoolgirl when the stylist put the drops in my eyes, unlike Axel. Chino, not to be outdone, put on a full horror-movie act, complete with dropping to his knees and clawing at his face in agony. I held in a smile as the poor assistant stylist, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, stood beside him with her hands fluttering, a look of pure terror on her face.
    Chino laughed, hopped up, and took a bow, the rest of us applauding and the stylist breathing a sigh of relief. I think he’d convinced her she’d accidentally put acid in his eyes. Which was what it felt like, but no.
    Photo shoots are a test of both physical and mental endurance. The band would rather play a three-hour show in West Texas with no air-conditioning than do a photo shoot.
    But they are a necessary brick in the path of success.
    This one thankfully did not take all day. The photographer had just two hours with us before she had to move on to her next gig, which suited us fine. We changed clothes only once and needed hair touched up once. Doable. At least this shoot took place inside a studio and not somewhere ridiculous like the “LA River” (the giant concrete drainage ditch you always see in movies). Our previous one had taken place there, the Santa Ana winds had been blowing, and we ended up blanketed with wildfire smoke and ash.
    A much more pleasurable task was that afterward we signed autographs for a few fans who had found out where we’d be—and there were nearly always a few, no matter where we went. A group of about a half dozen were patiently clustered on the sidewalk outside the building and we spent several minutes autographing things and taking selfies with them.
    One of the women there was the zaftig blonde, Aurora, whose day I made by asking, “Aurora, have you e-mailed that photo yet?”
    “I did! I did!” Her eyes, her face, her entire body lit up with euphoria. “Did you not get it?”
    “Just checking. I had you send it to our management office but I haven’t checked with them yet. I will inquire.”
    “Let me know if you need me to send it again! In fact, here, just to be sure, I’ll e-mail it again now.” She bent her head to her phone and I took the moment to study the faces of the other girls, looking for the mystery girl, “Excrucia.” None of them were redheads and my memory of her face was as dim as the light in the room had been. In fact, my brain seemed to be conflating her and Gwen Hamilton, since the face I now pictured was Gwen with heavy black eyeliner.
    We arrived at the rehearsal studio by midafternoon. Basic Records was pushing us to deliver the next album, but I was insisting we not go into the recording studio with a producer again until we had a better handle on the material to choose from. They had wanted to put an album into the pipeline before we went on the road, but given how disastrously the recording sessions had gone, we’d only managed to fully finish two songs. Now that the tour was over, we needed to buckle down and get back to work.
    Between what we had in inventory and what I’d written while we were on the road, I think we had close to forty potential songs to work with, which sounds like a surplus but trust me, once a producer like Max Martin or Larkin Johns starts ripping your music to shreds, sometimes you have very little left by