FIC: Radio Friendly 1 of 10 (Blake/Chris, PG-13) [COMPLETE]
Author: Clio
Title: Radio Friendly Part 1 of 10: Come to Where the Flavor Is
Pairing: Blake/Chris (American Idol)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In which Blake Lewis gets a new songwriting partner.
Length: 2300 words
Disclaimer: People sort of own themselves, don't they? Which means this is a work of fiction.
Notes: Radio Friendly is an AU set in 1962, when New York was the center of pop music and the Brill Building was where it all happened, when a group of talented songwriters and producers crafted perfect pop hits for artists whose every move was controlled by their label. Pictures and songs will be used along the way to take you back to yesteryear-and for those who'd like more info, see the additional author's note at the bottom.
You're reading this story because lillijulianne was so enthusiastic and allysonsedai insisted that it see the light of day, were willing to keep reading even when I sent three chapters in one weekend, and were instrumental in the flow, in pointing out what it needed and what it didn't, and holding my hand through the entire thing. Thank you, ladies!
Chapter 1: Come to Where the Flavor Is | Chapter 2: Where Particular People Congregate | Chapter 3: This Is the One They'll Have to Beat | Chapter 4: You've Come a Long Way, Baby | Chapter 5: Alive with Pleasure | Chapter 6: It's What's Upfront That Counts | Chapter 7: We'd Rather Fight Than Switch | Missing Scene 1: Ryan and Simon | Chapter 8: So Round So Firm So Fully Packed | Missing Scene 2: Chris and Blake | Chapter 9: Instead of a Sweet | Additional Scene: One Big Circle | Chapter 10: I'd Walk a Mile
February 19, 1962
"Good morning Mr. Lewis!"
"Pasha, Pasha," Blake Lewis replied, "how many times do I have to tell you that there is nothing good about mornings?" His small frame was slumped against the counter of the coffee stand in the Brill Building lobby, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
" 'Nother one of them three night weekends, sir?" Pasha asked as he handed over the Post and a strong cup of Russian Caravan tea. "Bet you had a different girl every night, ah?"
Blake grinned. "In a manner of speaking. But you know how it is, Pasha; you can't fool me."
"It depends on whether they think I'm a spy," the young man answered in his thick Russian accent.
"Better if they don't?" Blake asked, setting two quarters on the counter.
Pasha leaned in conspiratorially. "Better if they do," he replied, winking.
Blake winked back, laughing, then headed to the 14th floor. Checking his watch, he thought it safer to walk through reception and risk running into an aspiring-or worse, rejected-singer than go in the back door next to his boss's office.
Luckily the chairs were empty. A blonde receptionist sat behind an imposing desk, wearing a headset like an operator. "Good morning, Syco Records," she said sweetly into the phone with a plummy British accent. She looked up and saw Blake walking toward the door behind her. "I'm sorry, he's in a meeting just now. Can I take a message?" As she spoke, she quickly rolled her chair sideways, stretching out one long leg to block him from getting through the door. "Right, I'll let him know. Thank you."
"C'mon, Cat," Blake said. "I'm late as it is."
"Mr. Cowell has been looking for you all morning."
"Is he growling?"
"Like a bear."
Blake grimaced. "All right, I got it. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200."
Cat pulled her leg back.
As Blake walked past her he said, "Don't think you can push me around just because you're a foot taller than me."
"Tell it to the Army, Blake," she replied.
Blake walked quickly down the narrow hall, slurping the rest of his tea and chucking the styrofoam cup into the trash in an unused office. He straightened his jacket and tie, smoothed down his hair, put on his most winsome smile, and entered Cowell's office.
"Mister Lewis," Cowell said. "Thank you so much for joining us this morning."
Blake just shrugged, doing his best to appear charming.
"I'd like you to meet a new songwriter we've just hired, Chris Richardson. Richardson, this is Blake Lewis."
The man who had been sitting in one of the guest chairs, back to Blake and therefore unnoticed by him, stood and turned toward him, hand extended. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lewis," he said in a soft southern drawl.
"Please, call me Blake," he replied, returning the other man's firm grip, though only his manners kept him from gaping.
Richardson looked to be a little younger than Blake and judging from his physique and haircut, freshly out of the service. He was also one of the most handsome men Blake had ever seen- and Blake Lewis had seen a great many handsome men.
Then Richardson smiled, and Blake knew he was the most handsome man he'd ever seen, and all he could think was, shit.
Leave it to Cowell to make it better and worse at the same time. "I want you two to work as a team."
Blake tore his eyes away from Richardson's clear green ones. "What?"
"You know I believe in your talent, Lewis," Cowell said, "or you wouldn't still be here. But mid-list hits won't pay your salary and you're far too ambitious to be satisfied writing filler tracks for LPs."
Blake looked down, played with a frayed edge of one of the guest chairs. He couldn't argue with Cowell, but that didn't mean he wanted to hear it from his often arrogant British boss in front of the most handsome man he'd ever seen.
"Richardson here," Cowell went on, "has an excellent sense of pop song construction, a good ear for a hook, and interesting lyrics."
Well, Blake thought, if he's such a genius what does he need me for?
"But his songs are, well, a bit boring. There's no spark, no shiny bits to hide the machinery. Friendly, but not particularly memorable."
Blake looked at the kid, who winced, and he couldn't blame him. Cowell was a bit much, in more ways than one, but he was always direct, always fair, and worst of all, always right.
"So you see, you two will balance each other perfectly. I expect hits from you immediately. Right, off you go. Lewis will give you the lay of the land."
"Thank you, sir," Richardson was saying to Cowell. "You won't regret it."
Cowell looked up, the ghost of a smile on his face. "Of course I won't. You two are going to make me rich." He turned to his mail, which was about as much of a dismissal as he ever gave.
Blake walked out into the hall, Richardson beside him. "You'll get used to him," Blake said. "And he'll make you a better songwriter."
A head of short curly hair poked out of one of the offices. "Seventeen!" he said in a whisper-shout. "What did Cowell want?" Then, seeing Richardson, he added in a normal voice, "Oooh, who's your boyfriend?"
Blake turned to Richardson. "This is Chris Sligh," he said, pointing at the other man. "He's talented, arrogant and funny as hell. Sligh, this is Chris Richardson, my writing partner as of today."
Sligh let out a low whistle. "No more lone wolf for our golden boy? Welcome to the big time, Richardson," he said, shaking hands.
"I'd say call me Chris," Richardson said, "but you're Chris, too."
"Nah, even my wife calls me Sligh, and she is a Sligh. Phil! Come meet the new kid!"
"What?" asked a tall bald man emerging from the office. "Hi! I'm Phil Stacey."
"Chris here is Seventeen's new partner," Sligh said.
"Well!" Phil said. "We should all have lunch then!"
"Sure," Blake said, moving down the hall to his own office before Phil and Sligh could start in on the teasing. With the morning he was having, he didn't think he could handle it with the good humor he usually had-or wanted to display in front of Handsome Chris, as he was already calling him in his head.
Chris scurried after him. "Nice to meet you," he said to the others.
"This is it," Blake said, unlocking the door and hitting the light. The small windowless room was dominated by a stand-up piano and bench. An extra chair and the top of the piano were covered with staff paper and a guitar was propped up in the corner.
"So," Blake said. "I guess we can start with you playing me whatever you sent to Simon and we'll see where that takes us." He cleared off the chair and curled into it, cradling the guitar in his lap.
"Aren't you going to close the door?" Chris asked.
"Nah. Everyone else in the building is going to come check you out anyway."
Sure enough, it took only a few minutes before they were visited by a husband and wife team, Kelly Clarkson and Chris Daughtry, who also went by his last name. Another writing team, Brandon Rogers and Tamyra Gray, were cousins who'd been making music together since they were little. Elliott Yamin was an assistant producer, while Taylor Hicks was an A&R man, looking for new artists for the label. They pulled Cat out of the office and had lunch at a Jewish diner around the corner, to give Chris a real welcome to New York.
After lunch Chris said, "So, Syco is integrated," referring to Brandon and Tamyra.
"Is that a problem?" Blake asked.
"I just got out of the navy. I wasn't allowed to have a problem with it. It's just unusual."
"Well, we are," Blake said.
Chris cleared his throat, and reached for another of his songs. Before he played it, he said, "Why do they keep calling you 'Seventeen'?"
"Um, it's the highest one of my songs has gone on the charts," Blake said, tuning the guitar in his lap.
"Why don't they have nicknames?"
"They've all had number ones."
Chris winced in sympathy. "We'll change that."
"You that sure of yourself?" Blake asked, looking up.
"Aren't you?"
Blake grinned. "Of course."
Chris looked down at the piano. "What was that song that went to 17?"
"'She Loves the Way.'"
"'She Loves the Way'? By Ace Young?" Chris asked.
"Yeah."
"That was a great song!"
"Yeah?" Blake asked, suddenly thinking maybe this kid was all right, in addition to being devastatingly handsome.
"Yeah, I really dig that song. It's not really pop, but-"
"What do you mean, not really pop?"
"Well, it's got a great hook and it's certainly memorable, but I can't tell where it's going. It sort of meanders."
"I don't like structure. It's limiting."
"But that's what pop is. Pop is like mac and cheese: you know what you're going to get. You're hoping for a little surprise, but not enough of one that it doesn't satisfy your craving for mac and cheese. If people want to listen to music that meanders, frankly, they'll listen to jazz."
"Yes, but I listen to jazz and I also listen to pop."
"Then write jazzy pop. Right now you're writing poppy jazz that no one wants."
"And you?" Blake asked, wondering if this kid really thought he had all the answers.
"Apparently I'm writing boring pop that no one wants," he replied, shrugging with a casual self-deprecation that made Blake decide he liked him again. "Well, here's another one." Chris started up on the piano, playing a bright peppy little song.
"Any words?" Blake asked.
"Nah, just melody," Chris replied. "I was thinking about the beach when I wrote it but there are plenty of beach songs."
"The hook-it's catchy but you need to change it up. Here." Chris slid over and Blake plopped next to him on the piano bench. He played the verse again, but this time modulated the transition, playing a bridge section in a different, minor key that sounded wistful. "The end of summer, maybe?" he asked, smiling at Chris, then bringing it back to the happy chorus.
"That's so much better," Chris said. "I could write words to that. It's-"
"Defiant," Blake said. "Hopeful in spite of, well, whatever 'it' is."
"Yeah. I can relate."
"I think most people can. Here," Blake said, sorting through the staff paper on top of the piano. "This is just a bunch of ideas strung together. It isn't really a song yet." Blake was a little nervous-he'd never played anything so unfinished in front of anyone else, but maybe he'd get used to it. He tried not to notice the way they were squashed against each other on the bench, or that Chris had turned slightly, putting his hand on the wall behind Blake, or how intensely Chris stared at him through those green eyes.
Chris grabbed one of the pencils from the ledge. "May I?"
"Sure," Blake replied.
Chris started writing on the paper, making lines and arrows. "If we move these eight bars here, I think they'll transition better into this next bit than what you've got, and then you can move that bit after, and this section we should take out because it belongs in some other song, but it's really good so we should keep it someplace. Can you follow that?"
"Yeah," Blake said, and played it again as Chris suggested, and there it was, a song. An unfinished song-it still needed some work-but at least it was a song. "How did you do that?"
"I dunno, I've just always been able to see structure. I was really good at math and puzzles as a kid." He rose up slightly, looking through the messy pile on top of the piano. "Let's try this one."
And so they went on, that day and the next, going through a backlog of half-baked ideas, shaping each into a nearly finished song or, as Chris put it, "selling it for parts." By the end of the week they had five solid tunes and several more that just needed some work. For the first time in a while, Blake was looking forward to the Tuesday pitch meeting with Cowell's team of producers.
"So," Blake asked Friday as they walked out of the building, "that place you're staying have a curfew?"
"Naw," Chris replied. "It's not the Y. An Army buddy of Dad's, he lives out in Astoria, has an apartment over his garage. My own entrance and all."
"Wanna hear some real music tonight?" Blake reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his pack of Luckies.
"You bet," Chris said, taking the offered cigarette. "Where and when?"
"Meet me back here, oh, 9:30," Blake said. "We can catch the second set and then go to the after hours club."
"What I'm wearing is good?" Chris asked. "I don't wanna look like a square."
Blake smiled, looking at Chris in his dark suit and skinny tie. He looked great, of course, but Blake wasn't sure it was entirely possible for Chris to not look like a square. "You're fine."
"All righty," Chris replied, grinning around his cigarette. "See you!"
They waved and headed in opposite directions along Broadway. As Blake walked to the IRT, he was really glad that he had a dinner date in the Village, really glad that Jack was a sure thing, because he really needed a quick fuck to burn off his lust for his straight-as-an-arrow writing partner, lest he make a complete ass of himself later.
He just really doubted that it would work.
Chapter 2: Where Particular People Congregate. Includes music!
Notes: The Brill Building still exists, on the corner of 49th St and Broadway, just above Times Square, and had labels, publishing companies and recording studios. Syco really is the name of Simon's record label, which is now part of Sony/BMG, so that's his joke, not mine. In the early 60s, people were still smoking like chimneys, and Chris and Blake, being in the music business, would be no exception. Greenwich Village, where Blake lives, is the gay neighborhood (they didn't start moving north to Chelsea until much later). And at the time, the NYC subway was referred to by line, rather than the letters and numbers we know now, so Blake's hopping on the now-1 to the Village, which was the IRT.
Title: Radio Friendly Part 1 of 10: Come to Where the Flavor Is
Pairing: Blake/Chris (American Idol)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In which Blake Lewis gets a new songwriting partner.
Length: 2300 words
Disclaimer: People sort of own themselves, don't they? Which means this is a work of fiction.
Notes: Radio Friendly is an AU set in 1962, when New York was the center of pop music and the Brill Building was where it all happened, when a group of talented songwriters and producers crafted perfect pop hits for artists whose every move was controlled by their label. Pictures and songs will be used along the way to take you back to yesteryear-and for those who'd like more info, see the additional author's note at the bottom.
You're reading this story because lillijulianne was so enthusiastic and allysonsedai insisted that it see the light of day, were willing to keep reading even when I sent three chapters in one weekend, and were instrumental in the flow, in pointing out what it needed and what it didn't, and holding my hand through the entire thing. Thank you, ladies!
Chapter 1: Come to Where the Flavor Is | Chapter 2: Where Particular People Congregate | Chapter 3: This Is the One They'll Have to Beat | Chapter 4: You've Come a Long Way, Baby | Chapter 5: Alive with Pleasure | Chapter 6: It's What's Upfront That Counts | Chapter 7: We'd Rather Fight Than Switch | Missing Scene 1: Ryan and Simon | Chapter 8: So Round So Firm So Fully Packed | Missing Scene 2: Chris and Blake | Chapter 9: Instead of a Sweet | Additional Scene: One Big Circle | Chapter 10: I'd Walk a Mile
February 19, 1962
"Good morning Mr. Lewis!"
"Pasha, Pasha," Blake Lewis replied, "how many times do I have to tell you that there is nothing good about mornings?" His small frame was slumped against the counter of the coffee stand in the Brill Building lobby, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
" 'Nother one of them three night weekends, sir?" Pasha asked as he handed over the Post and a strong cup of Russian Caravan tea. "Bet you had a different girl every night, ah?"
Blake grinned. "In a manner of speaking. But you know how it is, Pasha; you can't fool me."
"It depends on whether they think I'm a spy," the young man answered in his thick Russian accent.
"Better if they don't?" Blake asked, setting two quarters on the counter.
Pasha leaned in conspiratorially. "Better if they do," he replied, winking.
Blake winked back, laughing, then headed to the 14th floor. Checking his watch, he thought it safer to walk through reception and risk running into an aspiring-or worse, rejected-singer than go in the back door next to his boss's office.
Luckily the chairs were empty. A blonde receptionist sat behind an imposing desk, wearing a headset like an operator. "Good morning, Syco Records," she said sweetly into the phone with a plummy British accent. She looked up and saw Blake walking toward the door behind her. "I'm sorry, he's in a meeting just now. Can I take a message?" As she spoke, she quickly rolled her chair sideways, stretching out one long leg to block him from getting through the door. "Right, I'll let him know. Thank you."
"C'mon, Cat," Blake said. "I'm late as it is."
"Mr. Cowell has been looking for you all morning."
"Is he growling?"
"Like a bear."
Blake grimaced. "All right, I got it. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200."
Cat pulled her leg back.
As Blake walked past her he said, "Don't think you can push me around just because you're a foot taller than me."
"Tell it to the Army, Blake," she replied.
Blake walked quickly down the narrow hall, slurping the rest of his tea and chucking the styrofoam cup into the trash in an unused office. He straightened his jacket and tie, smoothed down his hair, put on his most winsome smile, and entered Cowell's office.
"Mister Lewis," Cowell said. "Thank you so much for joining us this morning."
Blake just shrugged, doing his best to appear charming.
"I'd like you to meet a new songwriter we've just hired, Chris Richardson. Richardson, this is Blake Lewis."
The man who had been sitting in one of the guest chairs, back to Blake and therefore unnoticed by him, stood and turned toward him, hand extended. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lewis," he said in a soft southern drawl.
"Please, call me Blake," he replied, returning the other man's firm grip, though only his manners kept him from gaping.
Richardson looked to be a little younger than Blake and judging from his physique and haircut, freshly out of the service. He was also one of the most handsome men Blake had ever seen- and Blake Lewis had seen a great many handsome men.
Then Richardson smiled, and Blake knew he was the most handsome man he'd ever seen, and all he could think was, shit.
Leave it to Cowell to make it better and worse at the same time. "I want you two to work as a team."
Blake tore his eyes away from Richardson's clear green ones. "What?"
"You know I believe in your talent, Lewis," Cowell said, "or you wouldn't still be here. But mid-list hits won't pay your salary and you're far too ambitious to be satisfied writing filler tracks for LPs."
Blake looked down, played with a frayed edge of one of the guest chairs. He couldn't argue with Cowell, but that didn't mean he wanted to hear it from his often arrogant British boss in front of the most handsome man he'd ever seen.
"Richardson here," Cowell went on, "has an excellent sense of pop song construction, a good ear for a hook, and interesting lyrics."
Well, Blake thought, if he's such a genius what does he need me for?
"But his songs are, well, a bit boring. There's no spark, no shiny bits to hide the machinery. Friendly, but not particularly memorable."
Blake looked at the kid, who winced, and he couldn't blame him. Cowell was a bit much, in more ways than one, but he was always direct, always fair, and worst of all, always right.
"So you see, you two will balance each other perfectly. I expect hits from you immediately. Right, off you go. Lewis will give you the lay of the land."
"Thank you, sir," Richardson was saying to Cowell. "You won't regret it."
Cowell looked up, the ghost of a smile on his face. "Of course I won't. You two are going to make me rich." He turned to his mail, which was about as much of a dismissal as he ever gave.
Blake walked out into the hall, Richardson beside him. "You'll get used to him," Blake said. "And he'll make you a better songwriter."
A head of short curly hair poked out of one of the offices. "Seventeen!" he said in a whisper-shout. "What did Cowell want?" Then, seeing Richardson, he added in a normal voice, "Oooh, who's your boyfriend?"
Blake turned to Richardson. "This is Chris Sligh," he said, pointing at the other man. "He's talented, arrogant and funny as hell. Sligh, this is Chris Richardson, my writing partner as of today."
Sligh let out a low whistle. "No more lone wolf for our golden boy? Welcome to the big time, Richardson," he said, shaking hands.
"I'd say call me Chris," Richardson said, "but you're Chris, too."
"Nah, even my wife calls me Sligh, and she is a Sligh. Phil! Come meet the new kid!"
"What?" asked a tall bald man emerging from the office. "Hi! I'm Phil Stacey."
"Chris here is Seventeen's new partner," Sligh said.
"Well!" Phil said. "We should all have lunch then!"
"Sure," Blake said, moving down the hall to his own office before Phil and Sligh could start in on the teasing. With the morning he was having, he didn't think he could handle it with the good humor he usually had-or wanted to display in front of Handsome Chris, as he was already calling him in his head.
Chris scurried after him. "Nice to meet you," he said to the others.
"This is it," Blake said, unlocking the door and hitting the light. The small windowless room was dominated by a stand-up piano and bench. An extra chair and the top of the piano were covered with staff paper and a guitar was propped up in the corner.
"So," Blake said. "I guess we can start with you playing me whatever you sent to Simon and we'll see where that takes us." He cleared off the chair and curled into it, cradling the guitar in his lap.
"Aren't you going to close the door?" Chris asked.
"Nah. Everyone else in the building is going to come check you out anyway."
Sure enough, it took only a few minutes before they were visited by a husband and wife team, Kelly Clarkson and Chris Daughtry, who also went by his last name. Another writing team, Brandon Rogers and Tamyra Gray, were cousins who'd been making music together since they were little. Elliott Yamin was an assistant producer, while Taylor Hicks was an A&R man, looking for new artists for the label. They pulled Cat out of the office and had lunch at a Jewish diner around the corner, to give Chris a real welcome to New York.
After lunch Chris said, "So, Syco is integrated," referring to Brandon and Tamyra.
"Is that a problem?" Blake asked.
"I just got out of the navy. I wasn't allowed to have a problem with it. It's just unusual."
"Well, we are," Blake said.
Chris cleared his throat, and reached for another of his songs. Before he played it, he said, "Why do they keep calling you 'Seventeen'?"
"Um, it's the highest one of my songs has gone on the charts," Blake said, tuning the guitar in his lap.
"Why don't they have nicknames?"
"They've all had number ones."
Chris winced in sympathy. "We'll change that."
"You that sure of yourself?" Blake asked, looking up.
"Aren't you?"
Blake grinned. "Of course."
Chris looked down at the piano. "What was that song that went to 17?"
"'She Loves the Way.'"
"'She Loves the Way'? By Ace Young?" Chris asked.
"Yeah."
"That was a great song!"
"Yeah?" Blake asked, suddenly thinking maybe this kid was all right, in addition to being devastatingly handsome.
"Yeah, I really dig that song. It's not really pop, but-"
"What do you mean, not really pop?"
"Well, it's got a great hook and it's certainly memorable, but I can't tell where it's going. It sort of meanders."
"I don't like structure. It's limiting."
"But that's what pop is. Pop is like mac and cheese: you know what you're going to get. You're hoping for a little surprise, but not enough of one that it doesn't satisfy your craving for mac and cheese. If people want to listen to music that meanders, frankly, they'll listen to jazz."
"Yes, but I listen to jazz and I also listen to pop."
"Then write jazzy pop. Right now you're writing poppy jazz that no one wants."
"And you?" Blake asked, wondering if this kid really thought he had all the answers.
"Apparently I'm writing boring pop that no one wants," he replied, shrugging with a casual self-deprecation that made Blake decide he liked him again. "Well, here's another one." Chris started up on the piano, playing a bright peppy little song.
"Any words?" Blake asked.
"Nah, just melody," Chris replied. "I was thinking about the beach when I wrote it but there are plenty of beach songs."
"The hook-it's catchy but you need to change it up. Here." Chris slid over and Blake plopped next to him on the piano bench. He played the verse again, but this time modulated the transition, playing a bridge section in a different, minor key that sounded wistful. "The end of summer, maybe?" he asked, smiling at Chris, then bringing it back to the happy chorus.
"That's so much better," Chris said. "I could write words to that. It's-"
"Defiant," Blake said. "Hopeful in spite of, well, whatever 'it' is."
"Yeah. I can relate."
"I think most people can. Here," Blake said, sorting through the staff paper on top of the piano. "This is just a bunch of ideas strung together. It isn't really a song yet." Blake was a little nervous-he'd never played anything so unfinished in front of anyone else, but maybe he'd get used to it. He tried not to notice the way they were squashed against each other on the bench, or that Chris had turned slightly, putting his hand on the wall behind Blake, or how intensely Chris stared at him through those green eyes.
Chris grabbed one of the pencils from the ledge. "May I?"
"Sure," Blake replied.
Chris started writing on the paper, making lines and arrows. "If we move these eight bars here, I think they'll transition better into this next bit than what you've got, and then you can move that bit after, and this section we should take out because it belongs in some other song, but it's really good so we should keep it someplace. Can you follow that?"
"Yeah," Blake said, and played it again as Chris suggested, and there it was, a song. An unfinished song-it still needed some work-but at least it was a song. "How did you do that?"
"I dunno, I've just always been able to see structure. I was really good at math and puzzles as a kid." He rose up slightly, looking through the messy pile on top of the piano. "Let's try this one."
And so they went on, that day and the next, going through a backlog of half-baked ideas, shaping each into a nearly finished song or, as Chris put it, "selling it for parts." By the end of the week they had five solid tunes and several more that just needed some work. For the first time in a while, Blake was looking forward to the Tuesday pitch meeting with Cowell's team of producers.
"So," Blake asked Friday as they walked out of the building, "that place you're staying have a curfew?"
"Naw," Chris replied. "It's not the Y. An Army buddy of Dad's, he lives out in Astoria, has an apartment over his garage. My own entrance and all."
"Wanna hear some real music tonight?" Blake reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his pack of Luckies.
"You bet," Chris said, taking the offered cigarette. "Where and when?"
"Meet me back here, oh, 9:30," Blake said. "We can catch the second set and then go to the after hours club."
"What I'm wearing is good?" Chris asked. "I don't wanna look like a square."
Blake smiled, looking at Chris in his dark suit and skinny tie. He looked great, of course, but Blake wasn't sure it was entirely possible for Chris to not look like a square. "You're fine."
"All righty," Chris replied, grinning around his cigarette. "See you!"
They waved and headed in opposite directions along Broadway. As Blake walked to the IRT, he was really glad that he had a dinner date in the Village, really glad that Jack was a sure thing, because he really needed a quick fuck to burn off his lust for his straight-as-an-arrow writing partner, lest he make a complete ass of himself later.
He just really doubted that it would work.
Chapter 2: Where Particular People Congregate. Includes music!
Notes: The Brill Building still exists, on the corner of 49th St and Broadway, just above Times Square, and had labels, publishing companies and recording studios. Syco really is the name of Simon's record label, which is now part of Sony/BMG, so that's his joke, not mine. In the early 60s, people were still smoking like chimneys, and Chris and Blake, being in the music business, would be no exception. Greenwich Village, where Blake lives, is the gay neighborhood (they didn't start moving north to Chelsea until much later). And at the time, the NYC subway was referred to by line, rather than the letters and numbers we know now, so Blake's hopping on the now-1 to the Village, which was the IRT.