Justin Bieber (6 page)

To play metal or even the 1980s hair band stuff like Journey and Twisted Sister, you’ve gotta know the so-called power chords, and Dad taught me a few tricks there, too. He showed me how to play barré chords, which is when you lay your index finger flat across all the strings at once, which moves the chords up a little on the neck of the guitar. You’re essentially playing the same chords, but changing the key, so you can play the song in whatever range fits your voice. If you know the basic form of five or six barré chords, you can play pretty much any song in the universe. Grab the lyrics off the Web, listen to the changes and progressions five or six times, and there you go. You’re Green Day. In your room, that is.

I was Metallica and Matchbox 20 in my room at night, but at school by day I was just me. Nobody at school knew anything about this part of my life. I was a hockey kid like all my friends, and I liked it that way. I was already a little odd because Jeanne Sauvé Catholic School was a French immersion school. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You’re immersed in French. They don’t speak English at all. The idea is that you learn to speak French while you’re learning to add and subtract and all the other things you’d be learning at a regular school.

I had a lot of friends at my French school, but, when I was seven or eight, I started playing house league hockey with a bunch of guys who went to regular English-speaking public school. I didn’t need them to think I was a music geek in addition to being a French geek. (Of course, now I’m really glad that I speak French, because, let’s face it, girls dig it when a guy speaks French. They call it the language of love, and that ain’t no coincidence. Plus, I love my French fans!
Très jolie!
)

My best friends – from that day to this – were my hockey mates, especially Chaz Somers and Ryan Butler, and, man, did we have fun back then!

We weren’t bad kids at all, but we were kinda out of control at times. We’d go down in the basement at Grandpa and Grandma’s
house to watch TV and end up playing kickball with the couch pillows or battling a soccer ball back and forth or practically strangling each other with professional wrestling moves. We never destroyed anything major, but there were a few small casualties. A couple of lamps were sacrificed. And, among Grandpa’s hunting trophies, there’s a stuffed fox that mysteriously ended up missing a leg.

“You guys know anything about this?” he asked.

We all looked at him as innocent as could be. “No. No, sir. That wasn’t us.”

Once we sneaked out and went bike-riding at two o’clock in the morning, and the cops picked us up and took us home. My mom came unglued about that, and I was grounded for a few weeks, but that gave me time to work on my barré chords and a couple good guitar riffs and learn some new songs.

We call Ryan “Butsy” which probably isn’t Ryan’s favorite thing, but sorry, dude, if you got “butt” in your name, how are people not going to jump on that? Butts are funny to nine-year-olds. In fact, butts are funny to everybody. There’s some stuff that’s beyond your control, like your name. Other stuff – such as volunteering the information that you sometimes stand in front of the bathroom mirror pretending to be Michael Jackson and singing “Rockin’ Robin” into a blow-dryer – that’s something you can and probably should keep to yourself.

Not that I ever did that... much.

Okay, I did, but, in my own defense, “Rockin’ Robin” is a classic, and I was just messing around. I wasn’t rehearsing or anything. At least I didn’t think about it that way. I didn’t dream of becoming a rock star back then. I dreamed of becoming a hockey star...

J
amaica Craft, our amazing choreographer, got her start out on the street. Never took formal dance lessons. She just danced the way she felt like dancing, and people were into it. Some pretty big people. She started dancing professionally about ten years ago, and, a few years later, stars started coming to her, asking, “Can you make up this breakdown for me?” Genius. Everything Jamaica does looks like dancing. Even when she’s just standing around talking, her crazy lime-green fingernails look like they’re dancing. If you ask her how she does it, she shrugs and says, “Just listen to the record. It’ll tell you what to do.”

The day I met Jamaica, she fractured her foot. She wasn’t even sure how it happened. She was literally just standing there having a conversation with Scooter and, wham, she was out for twelve weeks. Standing on the set of the touring show, she preps me to rehearse the flying trick (sorry to spoil the surprise) along with Nick and Mike, two of the backup dancers.

“Dancers are athletes,” Jamaica reminds us. “We don’t get pampered like athletes. You ain’t got no masseuse down in here. You won’t be getting any spa treatment after the show. But we can get hurt like athletes get hurt. You’ve got to take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.”

Fully aware of that, we’ve been rehearsing this show twelve hours a day. There are a lot of safety precautions we have to take. The choreography involves my flipping upside down in a harness
about thirty feet in the air. I’ve been trying to get comfortable with both the dance choreography and the staging – where to be on the stage, and what I’m doing when I get to that part of the stage. A lot of hard work goes with performing. My set is seventy-five minutes long, and it’s not easy. I work hard on endurance training, but I’m still hella tired by the end of the show. I go everywhere in a matter of seventy-five minutes. Never a dull moment. We rehearse every transition so the audience is never bored for one second. There are more than five-hundred people working to make sure the show goes perfect.

Nick, Mike and I get into our flying harnesses. Jamaica smacks each one of us on the butt and says, “Kill it.” The music comes up on the sound board. I’m on my way up, up, up until I’m only about ten feet below the follow-spot rigs. High enough that I don’t want to look down. Something doesn’t feel right. When I go to do the flip, the harness isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

“Hey, you guys? Hey! Somebody?”

The music’s too loud. No one can hear me.

“Guys! Something’s messed up here!”

Nick and Mike are doing their thing, feet in the air, not even looking at me. I make a broad gesture, hoping somebody will get the idea that it means Down! Now! The music stops.

“Everything okay up there?” says Jamaica.

“No. I am about to die. Get me down.”

My heart’s still pounding after my feet are on the floor. Holy crap! That sucked a little. That could have ended badly. Mom is hustling across the arena with a very Mom-mode look on her face.

“What’s wrong? Was there a malfunction with the safety harness?”

“He’s okay,” Jamaica calls. She puts her hand on the back of my neck. “You’re okay. It was hooked up solid. You weren’t going to fall. Just part of it got tangled on the mike pack, so it was sitting kind of not quite right.”

“Okay.” I want to be cool, but I tell her I need to step off and take five.

“We can be fine with that,” she says calmly, unhooking the harness. “Dance is supposed to get your pulse racing, but-”