The following is a passage from an autobiographical work I am currently composing, under the working title of My Secret Life. In this section, I recall how Lana Becomes a Man, the band I was in during the mid-90s, finally achieved success, which proved to be both a blessing and a curse, with a song now lost to history, entitled “Empress of the Hour.”
When early April of 1994 struck, and Kurt Cobain’s death was in the news, I again began to feel overwhelmed by the same vexing, intrusive thoughts.
One night I heard a melody in my head; I arose at almost 3 am, turned on the lamp next to my bed, grabbed my notebook and pen, and scribbled down a bunch of words and phrases that took the form of a hastily-conceived verse. When viewed in the full light of day, of course, it wasn’t much more than gobbledygook, with only the faintest traces of intelligibility. But there was one phrase which kept repeating in my head: “Empress of the hour.”
That phrase was first uttered in the 1980 movie Flash Gordon, one of the most exciting cinematic experiences of my boyhood. For a child of nine, the movie had all of the thrills that I could have asked for, and more. The sets and costumes were often over-the-top, much of the dialogue was cheesy, and many of the special effects didn't hold up well over time, to say the least, but none of that changes the ecstasy that I, and so many other boys my age, felt upon watching it. In one scene, Ming the Merciless (Max Von Sydow) is forcing Flash’s girlfriend Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) to marry him in a garish public spectacle. The officiator asks Ming, “Do you Ming, take Dale Arden to be your empress of the hour?” Ming dryly responds, “Of the hour, yes.”
The line, “empress of the hour,” stuck with me through the years, being both metaphorically evocative and semi-alliterative. At one time, I had the notion of writing a song in which the speaker tells his one-night stand that, while they may have had a swell time together in the sheets, it was now time to part. “You were my empress of the hour, but the hour’s gone late,” he informs her; a grandly phrased statement which communicates a quite unceremoniously sleazy sentiment.
But in April of 1994, with the collective spirit of Gen-X youth of America darkened under the shadow of the shotgun which took Kurt Cobain’s life, I began thinking of this line in an entirely different context. Was not the time that Laura and I had but an “hour,” metaphorically speaking?
For a day or so, as Cobain’s “suicide” was a relentless topic of national conversation, I sat in my room, taking the fragments of my hasty, half-asleep, late-night scribblings and attempting to fashion them into a coherent set of lyrics which fit with the melody I had heard in my dream.
A few days later, I came to Jason, Chris, and Matt with the lyrics and my ideas for the music. As per usual, the song which eventually emerged only partly resembled how I “heard” it in my head. It was quite a departure from my ironically “macho” songs like “Look” and “Body”; in fact, it flirted with being sappily sentimental, which is a quality that I have always hated in music. Still, in spite of my own mixed feelings about the song, my bandmates all felt that it was eminently worthwhile, and we soon added it to our rotation of live songs.
At a show at the Dark Horse Tavern in the Virginia-Highlands neighborhood of Atlanta, we debuted “Empress of the Hour” as our final number before a singularly unenthusiastic, mediocre-sized crowd. The response to the song was generally tepid, but that had been the case during the entirety of our set. As we were in the process of packing up our instruments and moving them into Jason’s dilapidated but roomy station wagon, a man stepped forward and asked, in a tone of some urgency, “Who wrote that last song?”
Presently I found myself at the bar in conversation with this man, a stout, balding fellow with a working-class British accent who said he was an executive with a major label, which he declined to name.
“Sometimes I poke me head in and see the local talent when I’m in town,” he explained. On this tepid Tuesday in Atlanta, he had made the rounds. Before he dropped in to the Dark Horse Tavern to see the end of our set, he had visited the Masquerade, and the Red Light Café, where the bands he’d heard had left him cold.
“Then I walked down here (the music area in the Dark Horse is downstairs from the location of the main bar area), into this dank basement, and I heard you lot, and you gave me a start,” he said, grinning mysteriously.
Although he could tell we were somewhat “unpolished,” he said, that in fact, added our appeal. We were a motley crew (unlike Motley Crue, who ironically weren’t motley at all), a profusion of different fashions, body-types, and personalities.
“You got your drummer, standing up, smilin’, looking like something out of a bleedin’ preppy clothing catalog, but bangin’ on them drums like they owe him money,” he said, referring to Chris. “Your guitarist in a skirt (Jason, though heterosexual, sometimes cross-dressed at shows, which was actually a more innocent gesture in the 90s than it would be today), but playin’ that six-string like bloody nobody’s business. Your bassist, with his long hair, just bobbin’ his head around, all happy-go-lucky-like. Then there’s you!” Here he began laughing again. “Tall as a giant, skinny as fook, morose and surly. I loooved how snappish you got with the crowd, mate,” he said, laughing. “Made me feel like I was back in London in ’77, watchin’ Johnny Rotten and the Pistols!”
But, he added, for all that he enjoyed about our set, he wasn’t totally sold until he heard our final tune.
“It’s got something,” he muttered, growing suddenly ruminative. “It sounds like… “
He paused, wrinkled his face, deep in thought. Finally he managed: “It sounds like a song that’s not supposed to exist, but which has somehow fought its way into being.”
I nodded solemnly.
“It has the makings of a hit. I can just tell,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it’s better than your other songs. It’s just got that unique quality. It will grab people by the heart. It’s relatable, but also mysterious…”
During all of our conversation, I doubted that this guy really was who he’d claimed to be. Still, he was a colorful character, so I heard him out. When we lurched out of the bar together at closing time, he told me that his name was Billy Sickle, and he handed me his card.
“I’m starting my own label, Sickle Records,” he said. “And I think you guys would make a great fit.”
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The next day, I recounted my encounter with Billy to the rest of the band. They were as dubious as I was, but soon enough we all found out that he was exactly who he claimed to be.
It didn’t even take long. Within days, Billy met with all of us; a short time later, his emissaries drew up a contract. Jason asked his dad’s lawyer friend to look it all over, to ensure that it was legit; he gave it a thumb’s up, then passed it on to a colleague who likewise found no hidden provisos within the fine print.
Billy wanted to put out our debut album, but he insisted that we first record “Empress of the Hour” in his newly-constructed studio in Los Angeles. He told us that “Empress” should be our priority, and that all else would fall into place for us after we released it as a single. We complied, in awe of the circumstance in which we found ourselves.
Billy put us all up at the swanky Beverly Hills Hotel, and every day, sent a limo to pick us up and take us to the newly-constructed Sickle Studios, which was located close by.
To Chris, Jason, and Matt, it didn’t feel real. I, however, was unable to share totally in the rapture. Part of me wondered if the organization had pulled some strings to make things happen for us. But if so, what could have been their motive? They didn’t just prosper one of their own unless it managed to further their agenda in some way. I began to wonder if “Empress of the Hour” had sprung into being in my mind due to some kind of “thought seeding” process, the sort of experimentation that organizational elites knew how to orchestrate better than anyone.
We spent two weeks recording the single. Billy, to his credit, didn’t insist on everything being done his way; in fact, having learned that Chris and especially Jason had had some experience with sound mixing, albeit on a much smaller scale, he deferred often to their ideas. I, knowing nothing about such things, stuck to my vocals, and Matt stuck to playing his bass.
When we performed live, it wasn’t as big a deal if one of us played a stray note or a singer was slightly off-key, but in the studio it is much more of a priority to make sure the recording is flawless. Being anything but a trained singer, I struggled a lot; at one point, I was even ready to let Chris or Jason do my vocals, but Billy insisted that it needed to come from me.
“Those lyrics mean something to you, don’t they?” he asked me frankly. “Something quite personal?”
I nodded. “You wouldn’t even believe me if I told you the actual backstory,” I said.
“Think about that girl, whoever it is you’ve written this song about, and dedicate it to her,” he advised. “Don’t worry so much whether or not you’re in tune or not. Let the listener feel what you’re feeling. The rest will follow!”
His words had a calming effect on me. I no longer felt as self-conscious, or worried that I was holding everybody up. I thought of Laura, and how she’d vanished from the realm of being. Had any man ever known such agony before?
I brought that agony with me into the studio and barely even remember singing the vocals; It was as though I had managed to step out of myself, much like I had in that crazy daycare center in West Germany so many years prior. Afterwards, I heard my bandmates applauding from the control room, and Billy exultantly shouted, “Nailed it, mate!
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“Empress of the Hour” proved to be the “song of the summer” in 1994. In no time, as if defying gravity, it raced up the charts, and catapulted Lana Becomes A Man into sudden stardom.
Over the next two months, at Billy’s recommendation, we put together an EP, which in addition to “Empress” also contained studio versions of “Look,” “Body,” “Reset,” and two of Chris’s songs, “A Woman Grows a Heart for Every Man,” and “If I Were a Bird.”
For the title of the album, we decided to go with Empress of the Millennium. Not only did this title make reference to the single, it also pointed to the coming turn of the millennium, which was getting to be a hot topic in pop culture circles as the 1990s rolled on.
For the cover, the art department of Sickle Studios had us pose, stone-faced, in front of a moody, sepia-toned backdrop. Superimposed just over our heads was a ghostly picture of a beautiful, Japanese-looking woman, her face painted white, in royal finery (she was the “empress,” who, it was pictorially implied, was our faithful Muse).
I truly wish I could say that the overnight fame we enjoyed didn’t go to our heads. Unfortunately, I can make no such claim, least of all for myself….
(to be continued)
See also: “Confessions of a Crisis Actor”
Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, and Muze, as well as the recently-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.